Natural "Planning" Example

I've  been working hard to improve our garden over the past few years, and I'm trying hard to apply some of the concepts I've been enumerating on this blog. How does "natural planning" work? In addition to the manual labor I've done and the building projects I've done, I spend a lot of time looking at the garden without really thinking about it verbally. Then eventually, maybe in days or weeks, I get what amounts to a "revelation".

For example, I've spent many days thinking about why the best area of the garden and the best plant was the result of random circumstances. Very often the converse is true as well--the least well performing parts of the garden took the most planning and labor. For example, over the past few years I've tried to grow corn--each season was pretty disappointing. Last year weather caused problems (too cool and rainy), the prior year, the garden soil was just not good enough. This year, it looks like the corn might do well---although the weather is starting to turn overly rainy and wet now.

Gardening or farming is an attempt to move some fairly large area of land out of a stable equilibrium condition--ideally to a new equilibrium that favors food crop plants or trees. I'm trying to do that gradually and consistently, so all year round the garden is growing something, even in the depths of winter, some living root is in the ground. Eventually, in the new equilibrium, the food plants and cover crops will completely out compete the weeds. (mainly due to mycrorrhizal fungi)

The reason the non-plan/"random" volunteer plants do so well is they're basically self-selecting or "finding" ideal growing conditions. Generally our plans--like prepping an area for corn--are an attempt to "optimize" some scenario, even though we have partial, incomplete or wrong information. For example, if you add a bunch of manure to some part of the garden, the assumption is the soil is "the best" for a given plant, while in reality, maybe small patches, or a some specific mix of plants in a small patch is 100x better than the newly prepared area with a monoculture. That will always be the case, because the potential combinations are infinite in even a small area, and the winning combination might be selected by weather conditions which are totally random and unknowable.

The "technique" then would be to set the stage for that self selection to happen each season and go with the flow. The Fukuoka Seed Ball is one example of that. An intermediate technique between random, nature selected planting of crops, and traditional methods is companion planting, or even just mixing up plants in beds--for example, mixing corn and beans, or potatoes, celery, tomatoes, all in some bed.