Labs is where the network thinks in public: the instruments, the methods, and the questions a network of front yards makes it possible to ask. Warmer than a journal, stricter than a blog.
Paired sensors on converted and unconverted yards, read seasonally, published openly.
Early readings from a small set of paired yards. We publish the spread as well as the average, and we say when a season is too short to mean anything.
Compositionality as a working method: which species assemblies persist, which fall apart, and what the mile can predict.
The category theory lineage stays in the deep pages. Here we track assemblies in real yards and record which relationships carry them through a Houston summer.
Building on Roslund et al. (2020): what a daily soil contact practice does over a season, observed rather than assumed.
A small observational practice, not a clinical trial. We write down what stewards notice and hold it next to the published microbiome work.
The block keeps its own record. Methods for making that record trustworthy, portable, and owned by the people who made it.
The fifth revolution treated as an engineering problem: consent, provenance and portability designed in from the first row of data.
Four commitments hold every number we publish.
Every measurement carries its yard, its instrument, and its date.
Sensors and protocols documented so a neighbor could repeat them.
Peer-reviewed anchors or named observations; soft claims do not ship.
What we cannot yet say is written down next to what we can.
Every good practice for the residential yard looks through one lens. We stand on the shoulders of all of them. We have organised the lenses here in three groups, the wellness of the body first, because that is what a vitality yard is composed around.
Before Holon, the work was complex systems, the kind where interesting behaviour never lives in the components but always in the interactions between them. A spacecraft that passes every subsystem test fails in flight because two designers never spoke. A power grid that looks stable collapses under a frequency cascade nobody modelled. Category theory, requirements engineering, the discipline of making complex systems legible, these are what we spent our careers learning.
The residential yard is exactly this kind of object. The plant the horticulturist specified is exactly the plant the soil biology rejects. The rain garden the hydrologist sited is exactly where the dog runs. The heirloom tomato the kids want is exactly what the deer are waiting for. Each expert is right in their frame. The garden does not live in any single frame.
We are not better biologists, better ecologists, better horticulturists than the people we learn from. We are systems people, trained at MIT and in a decade of industrial practice, who happened to fall in love with the garden, and who saw that the garden had been waiting for our tools.
Most of the ideas under this practice, relational science, the philosophy of standing on the shoulders of giants, category theory as a language for the commons, the yard as a social object, the slow work of reweaving a block, are worked out essay by essay in our Deep Dives. If you want the long form, start there.
The 2022 book that seeded this thinking, kept in its original form. The lineage lives in the deep pages; the field data lives here.
We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience and analyze site usage. You can choose which cookies to allow.