Logic For Gardeners? (part1)

A big part of gardening involves reasoning through problems - and when it comes to reasoning, you really can't beat logic.

When I was a boy my mother bought a piano with the intention of having my sister take piano lessons. We didn’t have a lot of money, so it was an old, banged up piano, and it was desperately out of tune. One day, a man came to our house and he tuned that piano. I remember watching him work, and was fascinated to see how each key activated a hammer that hit a wire to make a distinct sound - and how carefully he paid attention to each of those sounds. When he was done, he sat down and played. I was mesmerized. Somehow, in a few hours, he had transformed that awful noise-machine into a thing of beauty, and I sat in wonder listening to him. I also think it was the first time I had ever heard good jazz - so it was a feast for the ears.

Years later, in my early twenties, I took a university course in basic logic. In that university course, I had a very similar experience to the one I had as a boy watching that piano-tuner; except the piano was my brain. To put it simply - I learned how to distinguish a well-reasoned argument from a poorly-reasoned argument, and as a result, gained the capacity for a quality of thought that I previously did not consider possible. It was a profound, transformative experience that changed my life. It was though I had been given the tools to arrange all the noise in my head into a kind of “music” that resulted in a better capacity to communicate with others, and to understand the world.

I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Spock try his hand at botany on the original Star Trek series - but I think he’d be a great gardener because of his impeccable logic.

Why am I writing about music and logic in a gardening column? Because there are many things that can go wrong when gardening - and they usually leave us with problems to solve. A crop fails, and then we ask whether it was planted too early or too late; or if it was given too little or too much water; or was it killed by a disease or pests; or was something wrong with the soil; and so on. A big part of being a successful gardener involves problem solving, and problem solving is an exercise in reasoning with logic.

There are two things I learned in that logic class that I think all gardeners should understand. The first is the distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning, and the second is the elements of causality.