Garden Math

The soil here is some of the easiest to dig in my gardening experience. Seventeen 2-ft holes went pretty quickly. My husband gets most of the credit.

A² + B² = C². Remember that formula for finding the hypotenuse (long side) of a right triangle from a long ago math class? My husband and I were using this formula to lay out my new garden space this weekend.

I love math. I love the preciseness, and the idea that underlying what appears to be the chaos of the natural world there is this framework of concrete mathematics explaining it all. It was my favorite subject in elementary school. But alas, math has never been a strong subject for me. If I work at it, I can get the correct answer, and more importantly, even understand why (I even got through college calculus with an A), but a week later, it is all forgotten.

Done!

My husband is similar, and we tend to come at the same math problems from slightly different directions. While dragging around a 100 ft tape measure and measuring the diagonal of the garden square for about the 5th time, I laughed and said that if we could add them together, we might have one functioning math brain between us. But we got it done. 70 ft x 70 ft (which makes the c in the c² number about 98.9 ft by the way) of garden space, fenced to keep the deer out.

Now if only we could get enough dry weather to allow me to work with the soil. It’s been the third wettest March on record, and nothing but more rain predicted this week until Friday. Arggggg!

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we’re what seems like miles away from planting any early season seeds, but it should happen, rain or not, within the next week!