by Thomas Stone
Let’s not reinvent the wheel. I have heard this admonishment to save time, effort, and energy by sticking with what works or at least seems to work, and I have often repeated it to my students and others. Today, I offer a public retraction for (most of) the times I have made this statement!
I have seriously underestimated the value in reinventing the wheel—value from deeper knowing, from reexamining why we do something in the first place, and from better understanding the time invested in a project. Many of us have just finished our spring planting, so I will argue that we should occasionally reinvent the wheel in the garden, but I think these arguments are sound for rethinking any pattern, behavior, or process and I’m encouraging myself to find other places in life to rethink what I’m doing.
First, a qualification. By encouraging us to reinvent the wheel for ourselves, I am not suggesting that we completely ignore the wisdom of our elders or our own experience. In my garden, I draw heavily from farmer writers like Eliot Coleman and Will Bonsall, the observation of and advice from many farmers here in central Maine, my childhood spent in the garden and working on various farms, and previous gardens that my wife and I have nurtured. All of these people and experiences are bound up in the garden in my yard, and of course we should not ignore them; we should respect and cherish them for the experience they provide.
However, no one has ever existed in the time and place that you do right now, and so no one has ever encountered the exact conditions you have right now (and not just soil or environmental conditions, but economic and social ones too). I am suggesting, then, that we begin wherever we are at and not be afraid to try something new or different. This especially applies if the conventional wisdom says it has already been done and don’t bother—“they” have never encountered your exact conditions and “they” just might be wrong. Obviously, I am not recommending we take something that works and completely throw it out either (unless it needs to be). Nor should we jump from experiment to experiment without reflection.
Reinventing the wheel is one way that we can move from knowledge to knowing, where “knowledge is what we hold out there—the arm’s-length facts, the wealth of information, the fruits of scientific knowledge production—and knowing is what happens when the distance is gone, when we let the knowledge in.” Knowledge is cerebral whereas knowing starts from action, from experience, from getting your hands dirty. For example, I grew tomatoes in wire cages on bare soil for years; add a little homemade compost each spring and the method seemed to work well without need for revision. I visited a local farm maybe ten years ago, and saw that they didn’t use cages and heavily mulched all of their field tomatoes with leaves (all ~3000 plants just laid over in the leaves, something “they” will almost always tell you not to do). Seeing this, I decided to reinvent the wheel by adopting this mulching technique in a portion of my tomato patch.
Knowledge is stating that mulch helps retain moisture, reduces weed pressure, and provides a suitable habitat for microbes, mycorrhizae, and their larger friends.
Knowing begins when you feel the damp soil under the leaves in August, even though it hasn’t rained in weeks, and realize how the dry, cracking leaves are protecting the top layer of soil.
Knowing begins when you feel worms and the occasional blue spotted salamander crawling around in that damp soil.
Knowing begins when you realize that you haven’t had to weed the tomatoes all summer, even if they are planted in last year’s lawn.
Knowing begins when you discover in June that you didn’t shred enough leaves last October and won’t have enough to mulch this year’s crop. With knowing, something changes in you and it’s a change that sticks. The intimacy of knowing is deeply connected with experience and I agree with Paul Kingsnorth, “Experience changes you. Nothing else changes you.” I am convinced that you can teach anything in the garden, and by extension, you can learn anything there, including how to move from knowledge to knowing (both of which are important, with each reinforcing the other).
Reinventing the wheel also challenges us to reconsider why we do something the way we do.
We all have patterns and behaviors in the garden—and in life. It is healthy to occasionally question just where these came from and whether they are consistent with how we want to garden; taking a different approach naturally leads us to directly confront this question. First, we establish what operating guidelines or ethics we want to follow in the garden. The six principles of regenerative agriculture? Leopold’s land ethic? Your local organic certification guidelines? An annual pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer plan? Next, take an ingrained pattern—say, growing tomatoes in wire cages on bare soil—and ask how well that conforms to the principles we’re trying to follow (or, as in the case of my tomatoes, we see a different technique and that prompts us to revisit these bigger principles). After seeing the tomatoes mulched with leaves and talking to the farmer, I realized that, while I had gardened as organically as I knew—no pesticides or herbicides, occasional cover cropping, occasional soil tests, some organic seeds and some conventional—I was not doing enough to build healthy soil in my garden. I was good at sustaining, but I really wanted to be restoring. Trying a new tomato mulching technique (one that I continue to this day, though I am experimenting with a little hay mulch this year) led me to revisit some deep principles about how I wanted to garden, which is intimately connected to what I value.
Perhaps the most damning criticism of reinventing the wheel is that it wastes time. In our culture, we equate time with money; have a multitude of devices, processes, and people (such as those who grocery shop for others) with the express purpose of saving us time; reward those who can maximize production in a minimum amount of time; and we often hear of children’s days filled with scheduled activities, leaving little or no time for unstructured, unsupervised, outside playtime. I think it is fair to say that mainstream society generally views wasting time as a mortal sin (though strangely enough, video games have escaped this designation). Some on the fringes resist worshiping at the altar of time saving—Trey Anastasio implores “come waste your time with me”–and unfortunately gardening, or even knowing or caring where your food comes from, seems to be a fringe activity nowadays. I’m hopeful that any gardener reading this, maybe already comfortable being a bit out of the ordinary, will be willing to invest their time reinventing some wheel in their garden, even with an unknown result.
Trying something with a dubious outcome is not simply wasting time. Instead, we are making an intentional effort to “take the time that needs to be taken.” Time to learn and know more deeply. Time to rethink why we’re doing something in a particular way, or at all. This is time well spent, even if the practical results end up being a failure. With the tomatoes, I had to collect and shred the leaves in October for the subsequent summer, and then simply spread them under the tomatoes (not enough the first year as it turned out). Even if this mulching technique had not worked as well as it did, the time spent trying it would not have been wasted—I would have learned something from the experience, and that alone makes the experiment worthwhile. This time, though, it worked! I created healthier soil, more tomatoes, less weeds, no watering, and something unexpected: the mulching does take some time up front, but I found that the work saved yielded a net gain of time.
So, to all those who I have advised to not reinvent the wheel in some way, I apologize. I should have encouraged you to reinvent the wheel and learn, truly learn, by experience. I have tried to take my own advice and reinvent the wheel in the garden more frequently—taking some method that seems to be working well enough and trying something else (I’ve noticed that many things superficially work quite well, but not so much upon a closer look). Some experiments, like mulching the tomatoes and beans with leaves, have been a success by any measure. Others, like mulching my zucchini with hay, were failures (the cucumber beetles appreciated the home I made for them though). Each time, I have moved a little more from knowledge to knowing and have thought more deeply about why I’m doing something. This has taken me time–time that I consider well spent no matter if the result was a success or failure. I think this is something to consider in the garden, and in life.
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Photo credit: Brands and People, Unsplash
Thomas Stone is a physics professor at Husson University where he has also chaired the campus’ sustainability committee and directed the campus garden since 2015 but is currently on hiatus. Besides physics, he teaches courses related to gardening, sustainability, and energy. His publishing experience is all academic and has recently focused on local sustainability issues. He resides in Veazie, Maine with his wife, two children, dog, cat, and five chickens.