Be Cool, Share Gardens.
Recently checking in on a few Patch-Matched garden sharers, I’ve been really sad to hear how the recent weather has quashed your gardening efforts and I share your frustrations.
With hosepipe bans spreading across the country, I understand the difficulties so many of you have been experiencing, having been a keen allotment keeper myself.
If there is any advice I can give people, just please don’t despair. Stay out of the midday sun and remember a garden is a long-term project that needs love all year round. The best thing you can do is to be sun sensible and stay safe.
There is no doubt however, that our climate has gotten more extreme and is predicted to continue getting worse year on year.
The latest HOT TIP🔥: Regeneration ♻️
The biggest phrase on gardeners’ and agriculturalists’ lips at the moment is regeneration and regenerative practices to help combat climate change.
As not to be all doom and gloom, there are of course things we can put into practice on a small scale in gardens and by focusing on increasing biodiversity, we can do this by adding to soil structure with composted materials helping all the small animals in the soil thive and embarking on "no-till"/ no-dig methods to retain moisture and enourage healthy root growth, thus improving our resilience to climate change.
No-Dig celebrity Charles Dowding, who I was lucky enough to interview in Lockdown, received a rapturous rockstar’s applause at the Groundswell festival, modestly admitted
“I bet you’re all wondering what a gardener like me is doing at an agricultural festival. But there’s a lot that huge industrial farms can learn from med sized market gardeners, like me and there’s a lot that newbies and smale scale home gardeners can learn too, with the no-dig/no till technique.”
Other practical things you can do when the heat is less debilitating it’s to
Install guttering and water collection systems wherever you can and save these sources for when needed. You’ll often find free offcuts of guttering on freecycle.com
Water at the base of plants, not over the leaves and out of the height of the sun, early in the mornings or at dusk to prevent evaporation in the day.
Upcycle old textiles like old sheets to use as shade cloth to protect fruiting trees and plants.
Thinking about and implementing regenerative practices where possible means that soil health improves, the need for chemical fertilisers is reduced and the amount of produce we can grow increases when soil harbours fewer pests and diseases. These problems often happen when plants suffer drought stress! But there is hope in becoming more resilient against the effects of climate change, namely the extreme weather we’re experiencing.
As Advolly Richmond said in our chat about garden history, the future of garden and landscape design will have to factor in climate change. Therefore, using fertilisers to
"boost plant growth where plants don’t grow as they would in their native climates, and using weedkillers and pesticides to keep our gardens under control; bending the design of gardens to our will, won’t be so much an unsustainable practice but a very dangerous practice at that”.
Whether you’ve got a garden you don’t use, or don’t have a garden, we can all be part of the change in reducing carbon and helping to regenerate soil that to boost the health of our environment.
What can you do if you don’t have a garden?
Sign up to share a garden
Compost at home. It means less weight carried around by municipal lorries, means less fuel used and less carbon in the atmosphere.
Grow salad - stop traffic!
If 280 people grew lettuce crops = we’d take 1 lorry off the road. Ok, I’ll explain 👩🏻🌾🥬🥬🥬✋🙅🏽♀️🚛…
One of the most wasted foods commercially grown are soft-leaved veggies.
Looking at a large food producers website:
36 Romaine Lettuce heads fit into a carton for transportation
56 cartons fit in a pallet
A 7.5 tonne Truck – with a payload up to 2300kg – 6 metres – can carry 10 pallet spaces or 20160 lettuces
According to food foundation.org 554g of an adult’s daily diet should come from fruit and veg. That’s approximately the weight of a single head of Romaine lettuce. 🥬
For a family of 2.4 children, that’s a requirement of 72 lettuces a month.
If 1 small garden can grow 25 lettuces per month for at least 3 months of the year, that meets that family requirement and leaves a few leaves for your pet rabbit.
Thinking about those 20160 lettuces out on the road. If households require the equivalent of 72 lettuces a month per home, it would take 280 people to grow lettuces, that’d be 1 lorry off the road.
🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬 🥬🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🥬🥬 🙅🏽♀️🚛
In one of the UK’s smallest towns, on the Scottish borders which has a population of just over 100,000 (106,100), that’s only 1 in every 378.92 people.
Ok so not everyone likes lettuce. But if you can grow lettuce then you can grow anything.
Saving Money with Garden Sharing
Loughborough University estimates that a family needs to spend £2.82 each on veg per week to meet nutritional standards. Considering the current rate of inflation, if households have to double their expenditure, an average-sized household would need to find an additional £3.80, which is the equivalent of 20% of their weekly fuel bill.
Going back to our friend the lettuce at £1.30 per pack Just think of all that green gold. Growing your own means, you’ll be able to grow at least £100 worth of just lettuce alone.
What can you do if you have a garden.
Again, compost at home. It means less weight carried around by council lorries, less fuel used, less carbon in the atmosphere.
Share your garden, let a neighbour compost in your garden too. They’ll be aiding to the organic matter, boosting your soil health which will improve your garden.
Don’t dig, tilling the garden releases carbon, breaks up and damages the intricate soil food network
Refrain from using chemicals eg pesticides/ weed killers/ fertilisers. Check out our friend Jessi Wong’s lesson on eutrophication if you want to learn more
Honestly, everyone from small farms to McDonald’s is getting involved in regenerative agriculture. Dan Cox, a 39-year-old chef turned farmer, like many believes, food is “only as good as the soil in which it is grown” and on the sustainability of the current status quo: he says
“Everyone’s talking about sustainability, but why would you sustain something that’s wrong? Sustainable isn’t a thing, it’s about regeneration.”
Ok, so regenerative farming seems a huge leap from garden-sharing, but it’s another way that we can reconnect with others and with what we eat when food wastage is a huge issue.
If you’ve ever been guilty of binning a bag of bad bagged salad, I promise you, you’ll never let anything waste and wilt in the fridge again when you’ve put every ounce of care and love into growing your lettuces.