Being on the curve indicates that your garden is being used in such a balanced way that you can't improve the yield of one product without hurting the other, showing the trade-off between the two goods.
Even though this was a simplified version of Pareto efficiency and the PPF, the workings can be extrapolated to markets and industries with competing resources to understand where the optimal share of resources lies. For example, economies may apply Pareto logic to decide on the distribution split of water available in a country between manufacturing and agriculture. Under the assumption of perfect competition and where all goods and services are tradeable in competitive markets with zero transaction costs, all markets in an economy will tend toward Pareto efficiency. A practical example of this is the allocation of water resources in Israel, which employs advanced water management technologies and policies to distribute water between agricultural, industrial, and residential uses. By using technologies like drip irrigation and water recycling, the utility of its limited water supply is maximised, ensuring that the allocation of this resource is managed in a way that no further reallocation would improve the situation of one sector without harming another, thus aiming for a Pareto efficient outcome.
Alternative approaches to efficiency
As described in the introduction, Pareto efficiency is not the only way of thinking about efficiency, and there are several definitions for it depending on the context and who the benefactor of these efficiency gains are. In Principles of Economics 2e, Stephen A. Greenlaw, Timothy Taylor, and David Shapiro briefly explain the difference between the three main types of efficiency: productive, allocative, and Pareto: