In the digital world, we schedule tasks with cronjobs—automated commands that run at fixed times or intervals. Backup databases every day at 03:00. Send log summaries every Friday. Prune old files once a month. Simple, efficient, dependable—until something changes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about carrots.
Not the vegetable, exactly, but what it means to schedule growth. To plan when something should begin, mature, and finish. To believe, even briefly, that systems, whether made of code or soil, will obey a calendar.
And of course, they don’t. Not perfectly.
Still, we try. Because the alternative, chaos, drift, total reactivity, feels worse. So we set reminders. We make charts. We build growing calendars, sowing timelines, and companion planting diagrams. We try to script growth like it’s just another cronjob.
The Illusion of Precision
In *nix systems, cronjobs are exact. Run this, at this time, under this condition. It’s one of the few areas in tech where you can still use absolutes and expect them to hold.
Gardens aren’t like that.
You can say “sow carrots in March,” but the soil might still be frozen. You can schedule watering every third day, but a single heavy rain will make that schedule worse than doing nothing at all. You can pre-program every task in a spreadsheet and still be caught out by a cold snap, a slug invasion, or just…life.
What we’re trying to do, really, is predict conditions, not trigger actions. And that’s where the whole metaphor breaks down.
Growth doesn’t run on cron. It runs on readiness.
The Case for Light Scheduling
Still, we schedule. Because some kind of structure is necessary.
I keep a light-touch system: repeatable reminders, seasonal blocks, and notes on “likely windows” rather than fixed dates. No alarms. No pop-ups. Just a quiet tick in the background.
- Check soil temperature in early spring.
- Harden off seedlings once night temps stay above 10°C.
- Sow succession crops every 3–4 weeks (weather permitting).
- Prune after fruiting, not before.
These aren’t commands. They’re cues. Prompts to look, test, feel, decide.
Think of it like event-based scheduling, you’re not telling the system what to do. You’re listening for the signal, then responding.
When Automation Helps, and When It Doesn’t
Some garden systems benefit from real automation. Timed watering during holidays. Reminders to rotate crops or flip compost. Journals that prompt review of last year’s mistakes.
But over-automating makes the garden brittle.
You start chasing graphs instead of growth. You respond to a sensor’s alert instead of checking the actual plant. You become a sysadmin to a lettuce bed—and not a very good one.
The best systems are semi-automated: enough to reduce friction, but not so much that you lose the loop. Just like in infrastructure, the moment you stop being involved, you lose context, and context is everything.
Growth Doesn’t Care About Your Schedule
Carrots don’t know it’s Tuesday. Tomatoes don’t care that your spreadsheet says “transplant week”. Calendars are for you, not for them.
And that’s humbling.
Because it means all this infrastructure, all the charts and scripts and data, can’t force the outcome. It can only support it. Growth, like recovery or trust or stability, doesn’t follow the clock. It follows conditions. And conditions are always changing.
So build your cronjobs. Make your notes. But expect to rewrite the plan.
Systems, Not Scripts
When I think about garden planning now, I don’t picture a task list. I picture a feedback system.
- Inputs: light, warmth, water, time.
- Outputs: growth, resilience, fruit.
- Signals: leaf curl, slow germination, pests.
- Response: adapt the system.
That’s not a script. It’s a loop.
And maybe that’s the real lesson here: not to stop scheduling, but to stop thinking that scheduling equals control.
Sometimes the best you can do is set the conditions, watch carefully, and respond when the system tells you it’s ready, and not when your calendar says it should be.
So yes, write the cronjob. But stay in the loop.
Because carrots don’t run on timestamps. And growth doesn’t care if you were ready.
It just happens, if you let it.
Part of my Garden Data & Automation series.