Martin Hähnel

Seedling notes

I use the word "seedling" in some of my posts, but I do not explain it anywhere. Well now I do. This is how Maggie Appleton describes "seedlings" as regards to Digital Gardens:

In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the open internet. You post ideas while they’re still “seedlings,” and tend them regularly until they’re fully grown, respectable opinions. ... Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how “done” they are, and how much effort you’ve invested in them.

This could be with a simple categorisation system. I personally use an overly horticultural metaphor:

  • 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
  • 🌿 Budding for work I’ve cleaned up and clarified
  • 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).

I also include the dates I planted and last tended a post so people get a sense of how long I’ve been growing it.

The word is not used only by her anymore.[1] As an example, Obsidian.rocks has very practical or performative (show, not tell) way of getting the idea of a "seedling" across:

Planting a seedling

In Obsidian, create a note. It can be about anything, but since you are currently reading an article about digital gardening, I would suggest you make it about that. Take one of your takeaways from this article, and create a “seedling”. It might look something like this:

Digital Gardening is not about perfection

Unlike blogs, notes in your digital garden are meant to grow and change over time, they are not meant to be perfect.

That’s a good start! Of course there are no links just yet, but we can change that easily enough. If this was my seedling, I would immediately want to link “Digital garden” to its own note. In Obsidian, all we have to do is add square brackets and that will create a link:

Digital Gardening is not about perfection

Unlike blogs, notes in your [[digital garden]] are meant to grow and change over time, they are not meant to be perfect.

Then you can click the link to create a new note, and write your thoughts on digital gardens in this “parent note”:

[…]

And just like that, we have a very small seed that is ready to grow into a digital garden!

You'll notice that this is less about public posts communicating to the reader and more about defining a starting point of a note. I personally use seedling more in this later sense. It will also help potential readers understand any seedling posts in this blog as being unfinished, but it is more about helping me as the writer.

P.S.: Of course, as a the writer of this blog, I am also one of its readers. This is where the distinction I tried to make here breaks down somewhat.

  1. I'm not 100% sure that she was the first to use it, but she was definitely the first that I ever hear it from. ↩︎