There’s a common sentiment among programmers that they’d rather be… gardening, of all things.

Sounds funny if you can’t relate, but try sitting inside focusing on screens all day every day & soon you’ll be daydreaming about the backyard too.

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I bet a LOT of tech workers can relate to those tweets. Not that computer work isn’t rewarding in its own way, its just extremely one sided. The more productive the workday, the more I want to touch grass when its over.

For me, the intellectual challenge of writing code can be fun, like doing a puzzle. It makes me feel like I’m stretching the limits of my abilities and doing something most people couldn’t do. (Weather true or not it’s nice to feel that way). I love digging into a tough challenge while still uncertain how I’m going to resolve it. Then making random celebratory noises in a fit in victory when I finally figure it out & get the darn thing to do what I want it to do!

Having said that, there are days I want to toss my computer out the window too!

Occasionally I work my butt off, hit a wall, and turn in feeling as if I have literally wasted my entire day. (Then somehow 10 minutes into the following day I magically find a path forward, que the victory noise!)

Of course when I say ‘work my butt off’ its purely idiom. There’s no physical aspect to coding whatsoever. ‘I’m exhausted from not moving enough today’ is more accurate. This work is probably up there with smoking in terms of physical health effects.

Speaking of ‘no physical aspect’, the intangible & often inexplicable nature of the problems encountered along the way can be incredibly frustrating, like: limitations of the programming environment. Randomly intermittent bugs. My PC erring without an error code. (It doesn’t work & I don’t know why arrgggg!!)

My favorite bug ever: For some reason over a period of months any time I pressed ctrl+c there was a ~33% chance of my pc freezing for 10 seconds. Just long enough to interrupt a productive flow & make the task feel like mental interval training.

Sometimes the frustration of the day comes from trying to resolve non-tech problems with tech.

• ‘We can’t do it that way because we can’t count on cooperation from so-&-so’.
• ‘This code supports multiple established processes so we can’t make drastic changes.’
• ‘This process needs 100% uptime so we can’t build a bridge across this gap in one go. We’ll have to gradually engineer sequential micro-bridges all the way across without breaking even once. This project is (like the vagus nerve) too late to do it right!’

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~Get rich, log off, start farming then?

Jeremy Clarkson may not be American but he’s living the dream. Former host of British TV show Top Gear, he has enough money to do literally anything he wants to do for the rest of his life. He retired a few years ago, so what’s he up to nowadays?

Personally overseeing operations on Clarkson’s Farm. Which happens to be one of my favorite TV series of the moment.

Fighting uncooperative weather, obstinate farm animals, government regulations, Brexit, a conservative small town council, and his own ignorance… Literally every force is working against him and it’s makes for top tier entertainment to watch.

Pseudo-spoiler but at the end of the first season when everything is accounted for his total profit for the year is next to nothing. On the bright side he clearly loves what he’s doing.

Is farming satisfying work? Jeremy says yes. But a good way to make a living? Absolutely not.

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I wouldn’t necessarily want to give up computers altogether nor be a full time farmer.

Finding a happy medium is surely a more healthy & easily achievable goal than getting rich enough to quit everything.

Hobby gardening is a great option to compliment excessive computer time allowing you to enjoy the benefits of both worlds.

Gardening is 100% physical work. The outputs are tangible. Problems encountered are all straight forward. Basically the exact opposite of coding.

Best of all, in my opinion the effort to setup & maintain a garden is a benefit rather than a cost. Getting jacked & tan for free while eating well & making my yard the envy of passerby? Count me in. The gym is agonizingly boring.

Oddly enough, my picky-eating 6 year old will happily eat anything we manage to grow at home. Somehow her involvement in seeing the plants produce food first hand changes her perception of them. Tonight, she’ll fight me over each sliver of vegetable I ask her to consume. 4 months from now she’ll be eating organic cherry tomatoes right off the vine.

Corrugated Garden Box Build Instructions:

Start small with Step 1. Renovate the entire backyard!

Yea I started from behind on this one. My house sits on a hillside with roughly 40 feet of vertical difference between the top & bottom corners. The best available sun & open space for a garden is at the rear & lowest point. Which happened to be a pit of perpetual mud covered by an aggressive thorny bramble.

A sunny yet geographic armpit, eyesore, & potential safety hazard to my kids.

I’m not one who can ignore such a thing so last summer I built a dry stack staircase for better access, then a retaining wall, & finally backfilled the space to level it off. (Chipdrop for the win on cheap fill!)

So this year I got to start with a clean blank canvas.

Raised bed garden boxes cost significantly less to DIY than to purchase outright. This simple corrugated steel design keeps the moist soil out of contact with the wood so it will last a very long time.

Per Box:

• (1) 26″x96″ sheet corrugated galvanized steel (cut in half twice)
• (1) 2″x2″x96″ 90 deg steel flashing (cut into four 13″ lengths)
• (6) 2″x3″x96″ wood (cut two in half, cut four at 51″. The remaining four 45″ pieces will become vertical supports for climbing plants later)
• (4) 1″x3″x96″ wood (cut all at 52″, then cut both ends @45 degrees)
• (1) 48″ x48″ chicken wire (to keep burrowing creatures out)
• ~16 cubic feet soil
• Bird netting (if planting from seed)

Tin snips worked well for cutting the steel along the corrugate, but I had to use an angle grinder to cut across it. A cheap brad nailer held parts in place long enough to smash a galvanized steel nail in each corner & lock it together. (Long term the brads will rust into oblivion so you have to use a more substantial outdoor rated fastener.)

I spent probably ~$125 per box including soil but your results may vary wildly. I got everything at Lowes which is pretty much always a better deal than Home Despot where I’m at (I know what I spelled). The bagged soil costs between $2 & $10 per cubic foot depending on soil additives & brand. The lumber was a great deal at a couple bucks per 2×3 stud, but just 1 or 2 years ago that price would have been multiples higher.

I included a couple bonus pictures in there.

• A 55 gallon gutter mounted water barrel works great for saving water…Until it runs out & I have to wait a month for it to rain! (Still good enough to cosplay as a half assed homesteader.)
• Picked up a second hand trampoline from a neighbor for $30! As a kid I thought these things were super expensive because they were so fun, but even a brand new one goes for ~$300. Anyway the fun-to-cost ratio here is very high.
• The pocketed barrel is going on 8 years of use now. In its current home it makes for an ideal strawberry planter. (In this climate I’ve found the perennial berry fruits to be the easiest thing possible to grow: raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, bush cherries, strawberries)

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What Else is New?

*I finally settled on what printer to get next so I picked up a new Bambu Lab X1-C a couple weeks ago! This thing has an insane amount of capability & features. Its so easy to use its a total game changer. It’s almost a little discouraging actually because its good enough to discount my existing 3d printing knowledge. Basically any newbie with a big budget can skip the painful experience of lessons learned & jump straight to the end result of printing incredible stuff with ease. But if I’ve learned anything about buying tools: its better to splurge for the best ones possible.

*I’ve been vacillating between developing more mini art projects vs focusing on a single big one instead. I do not have time to do both! I have much so more to add to my High Leverage Crafting project but the comparatively smaller bets on art are easier to do & pay off sooner. This was a fun one I did recently: pen holder as kinetic sculpture.

* I found this nifty free program for giving my kid a resource (other than me) to check letter sounds. Just click on the letter to hear them pronounced.

*And finally I found the perfect visual metaphor for how it feels trying to get things done while being a parent. I def have to literally run sometimes in order to get things done. (plus this clip cracks me up every time)

*This was a bit of a longer post. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter one. 🙂