The High-Agency Gardeners (How To See Opportunities Where Others See Obstacles)
No one is at fault for holding onto things that seemed to work, but now we have accumulated enough evidence that we must change to thrive.
“You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”
That’s why you keep having the same setbacks and problems with your garden—snails, drought, plants withering away. You keep trying “new” solutions that are actually the same inefficient approaches that were, in the first place, the cause of your problems. It costs you another season watching your garden dreams turn into expensive compost. More money thrown at symptoms instead of causes. The slow erosion of your gardening spark until you start believing maybe you just “don’t have a green thumb.”
As Bill Mollison said, “problems are the solution” because they prompt you to change your mind.
In this edition, in 6 minutes or less:
#1 The Story of Two Neighbors.
#2 You’re at a crossroads.
#3 Radical Iteration by High-Agency Gardeners.
The Story of Two Neighbors.
Last year, Margherita and Steven both faced devastating snail problems that were destroying their lettuce and decimating their seedlings.
Margherita did what most gardeners do - she bought more pellets, installed copper barriers, hand-picked slugs at dawn. $300 and countless hours later, she’s still fighting the same battle.
Steven asked a completely different question: “What if I don’t have a snail problem… what if I have a duck deficiency problem?”
While Margherita was poisoning her soil with pellets, Steven introduced 3 ducks to his system. Those ducks didn’t just eliminate his snail problem - they turned it into an asset. The snails became free, high-protein duck food. The ducks’ waste became premium fertilizer. Their pond became a water feature that provided irrigation and humidity control for his greenhouse.
Steven transformed a $300 annual expense into a system that produces eggs, meat, fertilizer, pest control, and heating for his nursery - all while completely eliminating his original problem.
Margherita is still buying pellets. Steven is eating fresh eggs and planning his duck-powered aquaponics expansion.
The difference? Steven changed his mind before trying to change his garden.
This is what Buckminster Fuller called a Design Science Revolution. In gardening and backyard animal husbandry, they look like creative, efficient, practical systems that solve everyday problems while unlocking gains you didn’t even know were possible.
A design science is able to “produce so much performance per unit of resource invested as to take care of all human needs.”
Instead of fighting nature, you partner with it. Instead of buying inputs, you design systems that generate their own resources, including soil. Instead of treating symptoms, you create abundance from what others see as problems while benefiting the global environment.
Permaculture design is an iteration tool to discover gardening methods that work for you while benefiting the global environment.
Is it a bad idea to open your mind to new designs and systems that are products of rational iteration?
You’re at a crossroads.
You can continue down the familiar path - buying the same band-aid solutions, getting the same results, watching another season slip away with nothing but expensive lessons in what doesn’t work. That would be a failure to iterate, and we might even perish holding onto the relics of past methods.
Or you can change your ways. You are privileged to have the spark of gardening in you because it connects you with the real world and prompts you to interact with nature, which, as Bill Mollison believed, is the greatest mentor. You can choose the path of the systems thinker. The gardener who sees duck deficiencies instead of snail problems. Who turns pests into livestock feed and problems into profit centers. Who builds regenerative abundance while others struggle with expensive scarcity.
You can become the gardener who becomes so resourceful and creative that when people face “impossible” gardening challenges, they naturally think: “I should ask Reader - they always see opportunities where others see problems.” You can come up with the kind of radical reframe that makes people go “Holy shit, I never thought of it that way!”
You succeed when you enter a play state while producing what you planned for and building soil.
How would you show up differently in your gardening/life if your yield started reflecting your effort?
Radical Iteration by High-Agency Gardeners.
This will be an ongoing series where we solve common problems with radical iteration that transforms your biggest gardening frustration into your next breakthrough that you can implement right away.
Much of it will not be for you, and I encourage you to question what I say. In fact, I hope that you can design this out with me. If you apply permaculture gardening flywheels in your own projects, I’d love to see it. Take these ideas and build on them. If you like the design process, use it.
There are plenty of incredible gurus and models out there, like Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Buckminster Fuller. Bill Mollison, I believe, figured out and synthesized everything we need to create a sustainable (r)evolution that enables us to provide everything we need while taking care of the environment - that is not a proposal to go back to the agrarian age. Even if Bill Mollison did a perfect job and almost everything he talks about is applicable today, no one can solve your problems better than you. The most important note is that you must be able to shoulder the responsibility for your own life without relying on third parties, and be able to iterate, creating new flywheels for your situation or adapting existing ones supported by sound design tools.
While other gardeners are still buying expensive band-aids for the same recurring problems, you’ll be building neo-primitive systems that:
- Turn your “pest problems” into livestock feed (and protein for your family)
- Convert your “waste” into premium inputs that would cost hundreds at the garden center
- Transform your highest-maintenance areas into self-managing ecosystems that work while you sleep
- Stack multiple functions so every element serves 3-5 purposes simultaneously
- Build a legacy of soil and perennials that you can pass on to the next generation
You become the gardener others call when they’re stuck. The one with the creative solutions. The one who sees opportunities where others see obstacles.
You develop the kind of systems thinking that doesn’t just apply to gardening - it’s the mindset that spots inefficiencies everywhere and automatically starts designing elegant solutions.
Most importantly: You stop being a consumer of gardening products and start being a producer of abundance.Your garden becomes a generator of food, resources, and solutions instead of a drain on your time and wallet.
This isn’t about learning permaculture principles. This is about becoming the person who instinctively sees duck deficiencies instead of snail problems. Who designs abundance instead of managing scarcity. Who builds wealth instead of buying inputs. Who discovers that the most “impossible” problems often hide the most elegant solutions. A high agency gardener.
Ready to stop fighting your garden and start partnering with it?
The next letter reveals the flywheel to implement ducks in your backyard, which transforms having too many slugs into an asset.
