Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: Vegetable Gardening for Engineers

33 points jrcplus 4 days ago 6 comments

emidoots 41 minutes ago | parent

The brain asks:

> I am currently exhibiting overwhelming stress from deeply technical work being part of my every day life, and feel I am missing the 'nature' element of life. What should I do?

The brain responds:

> Gardening! A wonderfully complex system that will just 'live' without me! A delightful escape!

The brain asks:

> Yes, gardening! But how? There are so many variables! What are the parameters? Where is the specification outlining the success criteria? What defines a living organic system?

emidoots 40 minutes ago | parent

Sometimes, life is better as a complex, chaotic and misunderstood system that just happens to work out OK or not.

contingencies 38 minutes ago | parent

Hehe. I recently donated a whole bunch of plants to a school. It was amazing to me how naïve the principal and staff were about plants. I had to explain that, no, no 'ground preparation' was necessary (in fact it was probably harmful) and yes, these plants would be fine once stuck in a hole without any attention: in fact they had evolved for millions of years to live right here!

Standard veggie gardening has very low ROI. Basically you need land (hyper expensive in cities), time, patience, and when you do get a crop it's in peak season and ~free at the shops. That's not to discount the experience or the cleanliness or the taste benefits of organic home grown veg: but from an engineering standpoint, you're better off not bothering. Hydroponics are a completely different beast. We're all lucky our society is no longer agrarian in nature. Hunter gatherers lived far better lives than agrarian peasantry.

mirpetri 28 minutes ago | parent

Gardening is expensive. Good I stopped at plants and didn't go for chickens. Every year is different. First you fight the snails on the strawberries. Then the aphids on peppers and roses (this is each year). Next the mold attacks the tomatoes. And if you don't have enough, the starling will eat your blueberries.

schiffern 11 minutes ago | parent

https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/img/te...

  >Crucially, there is a tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality. Higher temperatures can result in faster growth but also thinner stems, weaker roots, and less flavor.

Doing the calculus graphically, we should expect this "quality optimum" lies just uphill of the inflection point of the curve (between T_base and T_opt), yes?

gardnr 4 minutes ago | parent

When people discover that I work in tech they ask me what they should buy. I tell them that they should buy seeds.