Down and dirty dabbling, part 3

Why you might fail to grow anything ever, with inspirational photos from last year

In the quest to improve their properties and enjoy shade or home-grown fruit and nuts, many homeowners buy big trees, believing the larger the tree, the sooner it will mature. It doesn't always work this way, however. Years spent with roots in a pot or wrapped in burlap do not equal years spent in the ground. Large, nursery-grown trees have become accustomed to their lives of confinement with regular feedings and waterings, and they need an adjustment period after planting. Growth is often very slow in the first few years, and sometimes trees die for no well-explained reason.

Trees grown from seed or purchased as bare-root seedlings often shoot up and surpass the size of large, nursery-grown trees. The apple tree that came in a 15 gallon container might bear fruit sooner, but bare-root plants put in the ground at the same time will eventually catch up and may have greater long-term health. They are certainly much cheaper to purchase.

I'm not trying to convince anyone to avoid buying large trees in all cases. Sometimes they are the best choice or perhaps the only option. I’ve mentioned them because they remind me of the way many folks leap headlong into gardening their first year. Energy runs high in spring, especially if you suddenly have access to land, and many novices try to get a lot done at once, pouring lots of labor into planning, preparing, and planting, and then making large investments in tools and amendments. They buy the big tree, so to speak.

If you take this route, excitement and passion might sustain you through the implementation process. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to hedge your bets by starting out much smaller than you envision the garden to eventually be. Maybe just one bed, with plans to add another one next year, while continuing to maintain the rest of the yard as usual. In other words, buy the small tree. Starting slow and small might not feel right, but if you're serious about providing a significant portion of your own food, it is best to play long game.

Getting through the initial garden installation is just part of the work. Next comes maintenance. Balmy spring weather turns into sweaty summer, and the immediate gratification of buying stuff and implementing a cool plan has worn off. If you don't commit to at least a minimum of work on a regular basis, the nascent garden will languish. The outcome is wasted time and money.

Spring gardens go the way of New Year's resolutions: excited devotion for several weeks followed by nearly complete abandonment. While a large portion of pop psychology is of questionable use, the common explanation for why people don’t stick to their resolutions rings true and aligns with common sense. Resolutions fail because they are overly large goals (lose weight, exercise more, stop smoking) lacking daily, actionable steps. Breaking these huge goals into small chunks goes a long way toward making success more likely. Small daily actions, repeated over time, eventually turn into habits. Once you've got a habit established, you have a realistic shot at achieving your goal.

As the initial passion peters out and the work moves from the project phase into the maintenance phase, now is the time that habits must be established. Break the work down into small tasks, commit a certain amount of time each day, and voilà, you're golden. If only it were that simple! There's still a big problem and it is the fact that your day is already chock full of habits. The difficulty of changing habits is that they are habitual: those things you do rather than doing something else.

Something has to give, but luckily there is a way to make change as painless as possible. There really is one weird trick that can help you establish new habits and get more work done. I call it piggybacking, but this technique is more commonly referred to as habit stacking. The premise is simple: Take an existing habit and add on a new one, a task that is done in the same place immediately after the first.

Here's an example I'm proud of because not only was I able to link habits, I was also able to increase efficiency. On the farm there are maintenance tasks that must be completed every single day, or perhaps multiple times daily, things like feeding and watering the animals and cleaning horse stalls. Seasonal jobs are in this category also, such as keeping wood boxes stocked and kindling at the ready. These jobs have been built into daily routines out of sheer necessity. They can’t be ignored or animals would starve and humans would freeze. I do them because I don’t really have a choice, but that doesn't mean they are oppressive or unpleasant. They are so built into my life that I do them without much though and so they are fairly easy to keep up with.

One such task is manure removal. This entails hauling manure filled-buckets from the barn's lower level up the stairs to where a wheelbarrow awaits to whisk them away to a compost area. At some point I realized that by making a small detour to the chip pile on the way back, rather than simply returning the empty buckets as usual, I could fill them with wood chips for dumping in the mud holes behind the barn. Since I’d be going downstairs with empties anyway, only a small bit of extra exertion was added. Lately I've taken it to another level by dumping poop, picking up finished compost and delivering to a garden bed, then heading to the chip pile.

Before having the bright idea of never carrying an empty bucket, dealing with the mud represented a discrete project unconnected to other tasks. As such, it awaited my mental preparation and the setting aside of a chunk of time in an already busy schedule. It was perfect for procrastination. New habits and large projects such as this occupy similar mental real estate, that area consisting of things you truly intend to do as soon as you get the time. By hitching a new habit to an existing one, you can bypass the procrastination problem almost totally. Combining actions to actually reduce work (I still walk nearly the same distance while accomplishing three tasks) earns extra points.

There is still a big stumbling block: There needs to be an existing habit to latch onto. The habits don’t have to be connected in the way my manure-compost-chip loop is. The pre-existing habit could be anything, but it needs to be convenient to the new one in time and place. If you walk the dog every day after work, you can end the walk at the garden and do some weeding. If you sit and look outside while drinking coffee every morning, in good weather you can have your coffee near the garden instead, then immediately do some work on the beds. It's best to link to something you do every day to prevent the work in the garden from getting out of control.

It goes without saying that if you don’t enjoy gardening work you probably won't continue with it, and attempting this method will be in vain. But if your passion for the garden project has gotten you through the initial phase, and you just need to build consistency into your practice, this technique is for you. You can add on reward habits like drinking a beer after your work session if you like — my rewards are spring bulbs and perennial blooms — but you may discover that the work itself is the reward.