A tools workshop
Plain notes for planning a planting year, nothing more.
This page holds notes on quiet tools for planning what grows and when. Each tool answers one small question about timing, spacing, or rest. We keep the work slow and plain, favoring paper sketches and short scripts over anything flashy. The workshop behind this, Western Orbit, treats a planting year as a set of small, answerable problems.
After a tool settles, we write down what it does and how it behaves across a season. We read that writing back later, against what actually happened in the ground. Where the notes and the season disagree, we adjust the tool rather than the notes.
A finished tool is built from plain files, short scripts, and a running text log. No hidden layers, no locked formats. Anyone with the files can read what a tool does and change it later. The log records what changed and why, in short lines anyone can follow.
Every tool starts with a single question a grower actually asks: when to sow, how far apart, what follows what. We do not bundle unrelated tasks together. A tool that answers one plain question stays useful longer than one that tries to do everything at once.
We draw the shape of a tool on paper before touching anything else. Boxes, arrows, a rough sequence of steps. Once the sketch holds together, we build the plainest working version we can. Nothing decorative gets added until the plain version has proven itself in use.
SketchesNothing is written until the whole job fits on one sheet, including what can go wrong. Two tools that do nearly the same thing are merged before either one grows. The first version is the plainest thing that could work, and it usually stays. The sheet with the plan is kept, and the tool is checked against it a season later.
StockOld versions are kept in a folder of their own, so nothing has to be remembered. Data lives in files with plain names, in folders a stranger could find a way around. Each script is short enough to read in one sitting, and is read that way once a year. A tool is a few files and a page of notes, and it is copied whole when it moves.
WindowWork happens in the mornings, before the room warms up and the light moves. A second machine under the bench does the slow jobs overnight. The door stays shut for the noise, and the window open for the air. The room is small and quiet, shelves of folders on one wall and nothing on the other.