I don’t want to derail the topic.Maybe it should be a different topic? How to deal with gardening despite ADHD? We have quite a lot of growers with issues like, social anxiety, slightly autistic. Your outspokenness could help others.
I couldn’t agree more Lee. Freedom in farming for the win!
We in ‘we should’ was referring to me and Thomas, we spoke of the ideal gardening methods, very short: covercropping, crimping in spring, direct seeding. If we can have a landrace that will grow reasonable results we can feed the world low input. It’s idealism.
Not everybody fits the picture of living rural, lots of land etc. I’d love people in cities to be busy with plant breeding more, because on a balcony or windowsill one has more time left to fiddle with making deliberate crosses.
Sorry for the "should"s.
It was more relative to my spatial and historical context… I have the opportunity to cultivate and breed on a relatively large scale so the greenhouse thing with today about 1400 transplants becomes a burden, and if I wanted to cover my 1500 square meter garden (i.e. 16000square feet) I would need about 3 times that. So about 1 cubic meter of medium + organic inputs, one of which being dried blood for the Nitrogen… That is one reason I am converting nearly all my cucurbits to direct seeding: I don’t mind if I have losses. And it’s gonna be heavy handed selection.
Still i will allways use a summer greenhouse, and make other compromises, notably with plastic tarps from time to time, tilling or ploughing the soil once in a while, if necessary, and I will allways do some transplants… but just trying to reduce quantites, as it is such a burden, necessity to coddle them all the time, buy stuff, and as I believe it is contradictory to my local adaptation will: my dream is direct seeding. If I have a small place to garden, and if I needed each fruit from every plant I would not do what I am doing. Because it is big, I can handle accidents, and low to very low yielding at first stages of breeding.
As you see, it was quite specific, and I understand your points.
It was more relative to my spatial and historical context… I have the opportunity to cultivate and breed on a relatively large scale so the greenhouse thing with today about 1400 transplants becomes a burden, and if I wanted to cover my 1500 square meter garden (i.e. 16000square feet) I would need about 3 times that.
Yes! In another thread there was an observation that where space is a primary constraint, it dramatically changes the calculation for a lot of other things. Seed starting, spacing, inputs etc end up looking a lot different on average for urban gardeners than for those with more land.
For comparison, I have access to ~ 1/10th as much garden space as you and a good chunk of it is dedicated to perennial and pollinator plants. My gardens are considered absurdly huge by local standards in my community yet still very much in the realm where space is the most significant limiting factor in the percentage of our own consumption we are able to produce and what types of breeding projects I can tackle.
I spoke of social anxiety, i got a bit of that, i suspect i am on the autistic spectrum as well, but my slight ADHD balances it out in a nice way, funnily enough. Without it i guess i’d be a recluse in the woods. Nothing wrong with that either, but you wouldn’t read my ramblings!
Have a good day and take care of us!
I’m on the AuDHD spectrum - very heavy on the ADHD, just enough autism to keep my wildest self destructive impulses in check
For many years I used anxiety as a productivity crutch - if I piled enough pressure and deadlines on I could overcome my usual distractedness and inability to focus with anxiety. It enabled me to achieve some impressive things, but in the long run that becomes very unhealthy. I am now slowly trying to learn how to motivate myself without anxiety.
In terms of gardening, my rollercoaster brain seems to present as my garden being very ambitious but chronically being a lot more chaotic and messy than my autistic side would like (much like the rest of my life)
My “planning” seems to involve a lot of research and scribbles, but never properly mapping out how many plants I need, wildly overplanting and then just plopping things down wherever I can and liberally sprinkling extra annual flower and herb seeds in between.
My impulsive, distracted ADHD also led to a lot of collecting every new seed pack variety, only to forget and misplace labels so I could rarely be sure which unique new variety was which. Embracing landracing takes the pressure off of trying to keep track of what’s what to a huge extent, and makes hoarding seed packets less appealing.
I start everything I can indoors under lights as I find it a lot easier to remember what I have planted and care for it this way. Out of sight, out of mind. This leads to a lot of tracking soil around my house, because Im a messy chaos demon.
In general, I think that gardening has been great for both ADHD and autistic tendencies - a neverending series of individually short tasks, time to be present/mindful and fresh air/exercise all have benefits.
I’m probably AuDHD, too. I haven’t yet been tested, but basically all my closest friends are either ADHD or on the autism spectrum or both, and I completely relate to their life experiences, which seems like a giant hint.
ADHD runs strongly in my family – three of my five siblings have been diagnosed with it – and three of my children have autism. So that would certainly make sense.
Assuming I have both, I’m probably balanced evenly between them, which is why it isn’t obvious to people outside me. But there is a very large difference between having a personality that’s more or less consistent all the time and having two wildly different and opposite ways of doing everything.
That is one reason I am converting nearly all my cucurbits to direct seeding: I don’t mind if I have losses. And it’s gonna be heavy handed selection.
