The craft of a small garden
A digital garden stays alive on one condition: that touching it is cheap. The moment "fix that sentence" means clone, branch, edit, commit, push, wait for CI, the sentence stays broken. This garden's answer is to make the reading surface and the writing surface the same surface — editing, block by block.
§1Small notes, linked densely
A garden note earns its keep by being small enough to finish and linked well enough to be found. Prefer five linked notes to one sprawling page; let wikilinks carry the structure instead of a table of contents. Dead links are part of the method — each one is a note you owe yourself.
§2Pruning
Old notes rot in two ways: they become wrong, or they become orphans. Wrongness is the easy case — edit the offending block where you see it, and the journal remembers what it used to say (revision history has the details). Orphans need pruning: link them in, merge them down, or delete them without guilt. A garden is judged by what it keeps alive, not by what it has accumulated.
§3Let the tools carry the ceremony
Commits, history, backups — the ceremony is real, but it shouldn't be yours. With autocommit on, saves become git commits on their own; imports arrive from the inbox on their own; even translations are one click in AI assist — this garden's eighteen editions say how far that goes. What's left for you is the only part that was ever interesting: having something to say.