When presenting his basic premise, Klingaman referred to his 80-20 rule for sustainable gardening: 80% of the garden should be plants that can take care of themselves for the most part, leaving the other 20% for your pet plants that are higher maintenance.
I couldn't help but think that if one had a garden well established with those 80% plants, one could take a year off of gardening altogether. Maybe one could spend a year traveling and reading instead of being a servant to one's garden. Hmmmm.
Back when I taught management and quality classes, we called that the Pareto Principle. For example 80% of problems come from 20% of customers, 80% of profit comes from 20% of products, and 80% of productivity comes from 20% of your time at work. And, in economics, 80% of property is owned by 20% of the people.
So!
If 80% of my garden is supposed to be relatively work free, only 20% of my garden should be demanding large blocks of my time.
I think I'm doing something wrong.
4 comments:
Your post was humorous. I am also a gardener and a business professional. If find that business concepts can't really applied to gardening. My high maintenance comes from controlling weeds and I'm pretty sure that it takes up more than 20% of my gardening time.
If you add together weeding, hose dragging, seed starting and bug stalking, you are up to 3 hours a day.
Planting, dividing, deadheading, planning and seed starting are additional.
No wonder gardening is mostly for the retired!
Sounds like an interesting talk. I aspire to have an 80% garden, but I can't say that it honestly works out that way -at least not june-sept.
Klingaman's talk opened a window for me because I often complain about too much work June to Sept as the fruit comes in, the vegetables over produce and the bugs multiply.
But then, every August I have a similar conversations with myself and hubby. In the spring everything seems possible again after a winter rest.
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