Sun and Soil are the Great Demanagerializers

Demanagerialize your life

You must demanagerialize yourself

Insufficient are words in a book on a shelf

You must demanagerialize your home

It is not enough to have the words in a tome.

You must demanagerialize in deed

This is my saying, this is my rede

Demanagerialization begins at home. You can walk yourself and your children through any number of screeds against managerialism (and you probably should) but none of it will take if the way you live is abstract, universalized, proceduralized, and virtualized.

The quickest route to demanagerialize is home production, whether its making your own sauerkraut or making your own stories.

And of all the various forms of home production, growing is the best of all. Get outside. Sun and soil.

In this transmission, we run you through several demanagerialization episodes from the early summer and remind you of another great use for these days of sun.

The Experts were Wrong

Gardens are a great cure to managerialism, the delusion of expertise. You can preach expertise literacy all you want, there is no substitute for having your kid read some book that mentions a gardening technique, try it out, and discover it doesn't work for you. Or do something the instructions on the seed package say can't be done but you do it anyway.

Expertise is real, but it is no substitute for experience.

Supposedly you aren't supposed to transplant squash plants, so the experts and the instructions say, but we tried it this year anyway and mostly succeeded. All it took was a lot of work.

We used cardboard boxes so we could put the whole shebang directly into the soil without having to pull the plant out of its container. We sliced some holes in the cardboard when we replanted and then watered frequently and heavily for the first while, both to help the plants deal with the shock but also to keep the cardboard soft for root penetration.

We just threw them into trash ground , completely unimproved, along with some extra beans we had, and they are doing well.

You aren’t in Control

Gardens are a great cure to managerialism, the delusion that you are in control.

Here are a number of buckets with plants, all dying. We did this a couple of years ago, to great success. They extended our season significantly because we could move them inside on frosty nights, and a few of them we put in a greenhouse and were eating tomatoes and basil all winter long.

This year “all our pomp is one with Nineveh and Tyre.”

You aren’t in Control — Abundant Blessings Happen

Gardens are a great cure to managerialism, the delusion that all success and failure is meritocratic and predicated on what you deserve.

This year for no particular reason all our apple trees are massively overloaded with fruit. We have thinned them and got 6 gallons of apples. We originally steamed them for the chickens but they smelled so good we are now making apple sauce.

You can deal with the Unexpected

Gardens are a great cure to managerialism, the delusion that outside-context problems should be paralyzing because you don’t have a procedure to deal with them. A whining dog got put outside on too long a leash and ended up girdling or snapping a number of trees. We wailed. And then started calling people and poking around on youtube. Three of the five damaged trees appear to be thriving.

The other two are dead. This is life.

Gardens are a great reason to be out in the sun and the summer sky. Tomatoes come and go, but the great truth of the seasons remains. This is a good time to remind you of the power of Swimming Pool Tribalism.