Peter Ellis wrote:I see a number of posts on permies where people are looking for "the best" , the least for the most and that sort of thing.
It seems to me that there can be a problem with paralysis by analysis with this concept.
My thought is that rather than maximum returns, minimum inputs, "the best" solutions, we ought to be thinking in terms of incremental improvements.
Rather than holding off until someone tells us The Best way, shouldn't we be doing something, to the best we know right now, and looking for incremental improvements?
Peter your post seems to be aiming at the perils of min-maxing our knowledge and approaches, but I see several comments that are focused on the related "perfect is the enemy of the good" min-maxing mentality when applied to limited resources. "I can't plant
apple trees because
permaculture received wisdom is that I should dig a
swale in my spot first, and I can't afford the heavy equipment work this year ." Or "I can't afford nursery trees and I don't want to plant anything but the very best cultivar for my situation, even though I could get a bunch of bare
root trees from the department of forestry."
This resonates strongly with me because before I ever started planting things, I spent a lot of years with an internet gaming hobby. That hobby is riddled with min-maxers, who insist that you can't do a certain thing as character-class X because it would be seven percent more efficient to do it with character-class Y, even though we don't actually have one of those handy and ready to go. Or in a spaceship game, insisting that ten people wait twenty minutes for one person to put different guns on his spaceship because the guns currently on there are 12% weaker than the "best" ones. It used to drive me nuts! I despise that sort of min-maxing. "Do what you can with what you have" is how I was raised.
Back to planting trees: as a resource-constrained individual, I *firmly* believe that it's better to do what I can with what I have, than to do nothing while waiting for more resources that may or may not ever be forthcoming. For instance, this year I had a big container garden, due to limited in-ground planting locations that are within reach of my garden hose and defensible from contracted mowing that's not safely under my control. Many times the soil I had available was just raw mineral dirt, not potting soil; and I had no ready sources for
compost, I had limited mulch, I had no budget to buy in more of these, and no reason to think that would change any time soon. So I did the best I could with what I had, borrowing soil and organic material from around the property with shovel and machete and rake and wheelbarrow and bare hands when and as I could. Much of what I planted did not thrive, or grew only modestly. But I got some perennials started, I ate some veggies, and now as I am emptying the "dead" pots I'm finding that even the worst mineral soils that I used are now much improved by the organic root masses that grew even under plants that didn't produce much of a crop. So next year will be better. (The comfrey I started from seed this year will help too.) Is it a slow and painful way to bootstrap up a garden from not very much? I guess you could say so. But IMO it beats waiting around until I can spend several thousand bucks on earthworks, amendments, fencing, and other things I would need to do everything efficiently, rapidly, properly protected, and with perfectly-selected inputs.
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