Plain tools for planning a planting year, nothing else.
This page holds notes for a practice that plans planting years with plain tools. The work moves from a written paragraph to a small working script, then back to paper when the season changes. Nothing here claims to be finished. It describes a method, a set of parts, and the room where they get made and kept.
The desk holds paper, a slow machine, and a window that shows weather rather than describes it. Tools are written at this desk, tested against the paper plan, then set aside until the next planting cycle asks for them again. Nothing here is arranged for visitors.
A working set is a folder of files: a plan, a script, a log. The plan states intent. The script carries it out. The log records what the script actually did, season by season, so a later reader can see where plan and result diverged, and why.
Each tool answers one planning question: when to sow, where to rotate, how much bed space a crop needs. The tools do not decide for anyone. They hold a plan steady across a season so it can be checked against what actually grows, and adjusted without losing the earlier reasoning.
A tool that plans one season is checked before it plans another. Assumptions about frost, spacing, and rotation are reread each cycle and changed where the ground disagrees. Old scripts are kept, not deleted, so a later version can be compared against what it replaced, plainly, under its own name: Thunder Layer.
Work starts on paper, as a paragraph describing what a season needs. The paragraph is cut into steps, the steps into a script. The script is read back against the paragraph until they agree. Nothing is built before the paper version is settled, so the code stays a plain translation, not a guess.
Nothing is written until the whole job fits on one sheet, including what can go wrong. The sheet with the plan is kept, and the tool is checked against it a season later. Each job is timed by hand before a tool is written for it, to see whether it is worth one. A tool that would need a manual is redrawn until it does not.
The spare parts are the old scripts, kept for the day a new job looks like an old one. Data lives in files with plain names, in folders a stranger could find a way around. A tool is a few files and a page of notes, and it is copied whole when it moves. Old versions are kept in a folder of their own, so nothing has to be remembered.
The kettle is nearer than the printer, which says how often each is used. The door stays shut for the noise, and the window open for the air. Work happens in the mornings, before the room warms up and the light moves. The room is small and quiet, shelves of folders on one wall and nothing on the other.