Climate change can feel overwhelming, but the garden is a place where we can take practical, hopeful action. Garden writer and author Becky Searle explores how tending our soil and growing spaces can build resilience for both gardeners and the planet:
Building climate change resilience for the gardener
Climate change anxiety is rapidly becoming a pandemic of its own. As the storm of climate change gathers steadily overhead, it would be easy to get swallowed by the shadows. Gardening can offer a practical way to allay anxiety and help in the fight against climate change.
Some people respond to climate challenge by going on marches, others write books, some carry out important conservation work. Sometimes this can feel like our own capacity to contribute is insignificant. This feeling of helplessness translates into paralysis, which feeds back into anxiety.
Just like the bees in a hive or the ants in a nest, we all have a role to play, no matter how small, it is never insignificant. So, what can we do to build climate change resilience both in ourselves and in our gardens? Roll up your sleeves, let’s get to it.
Dig for Victory?
Nowadays the advice is a little different. Now, I implore you to “No-dig for Victory!”. No dig is a style of gardening that we talk about a lot here on the Dalefoot blog. It involves adding organic matter to the surface of your soils instead of digging it in. It respects the soil as an environment and as an ecosystem. Critically, no dig gardening builds the carbon content of your soils.
Carbon in your soil exists in the form of dead organic matter and the multitude of living things, such as earthworms, centipedes, beetles, springtails and microscopic life like fungi, bacteria, nematodes and protozoans. Despite looking like ‘dirt’, our soils are absolutely teeming with life, and the more life we have in them, the greater the carbon content. This means that just by encouraging life into our soils, we can create our own little carbon sinks, literally fighting climate change just from gardening. The best part is that the tiny lives in your soil will help you grow healthier plants, that also draw carbon down from the atmosphere using the most advanced anti-climate change technology on the planet (photosynthesis!).
Moreover, digging can release plumes of carbon into the atmosphere simply by exposing carbon molecules and tiny organisms to sunlight, which causes them to break down.
A word of caution though. It’s all very well applying a layer of compost to the surface of your soils and leaving them to their own devices, but what if the compost you’re using is negatively affecting the climate? For example, peat-based composts are much better left in peat bogs where they store carbon and other greenhouse gases, and slow the flow of flood waters, helping to build resilience against the effects of global climate change.
Intelligent design and planning
Building climate change resilience in our gardens should always include consideration towards building something that will last. Climate change will present us with challenges such as increased rainfall, frequent droughts and potentially larger temperature ranges. We need to make sure that our gardens can cope with these pressures because this will make our gardens last longer, and be more sustainable.
A healthy, happy and resilient garden will help nurture a more resilient gardener. Not to mention its ability to support the range of other things that depend on your garden for their homes and sustenance.
This may seem a complicated and potentially fraught task, and its ok to have a little trial and error, but simply taking the time to understand the conditions in your garden, and make good choices about the plants that will enjoy those conditions will save you time and money in the long run, and make your garden thrive.
Making sure that you grow healthy plants is also crucial to their success. Selecting a good quality compost, locally sourced seeds, and planting at the right time are all best practice to ensure your garden thrives.
You may also want to consider how to use the different conditions in your garden, and instead of trying to fight them as we are so often advised to do in gardening, lean into it. Let me give you some examples. If you have a shady spot, this might be great for a compost heap, or some lush shade-tolerant plants. A particularly damp area might be best used as a natural pond, or somewhere to plant trees such as Alder or Willow that will tolerate having wet feet, and possibly even soak up some of the excess.
Grow food
I talk about this all the time, but the system that produces food is, in places profoundly inefficient. We are governed by this system just as much as farmers and food manufacturers, because we need to eat. But we can make better choices such as buying local, eating organic and high-welfare foods. However, the best of the best is to produce our own. Especially if we are doing it with intelligent design and planning, and in a no-dig, soil positive way.
It is estimated by Michael Pollan in his book In Defence of Food that between 10 and 12 calories of fossil fuels are needed to get a single calorie of food onto our plates in the western world. The chemicals, machinery, transport, packaging and processing involved in food manufacture all contribute to this. However, with a simple packet of seeds and a pot of soil, or a small patch of earth, we can take back control of at least a small portion of what we eat.
The real lesson here is that even if you feel like what you’re doing isn’t big or important, doing something is always better than not doing something. Building our own health and mental wellbeing through getting time outdoors, getting our hands in the dirt and eating well is a simple, tangible way to build your own resilience.
Take Action
I bet you feel better already, don’t you? The simple action of doing something, or even just thinking about doing something can make us feel less helpless and less anxious. Getting outside and putting our energy into our gardens, producing food, cultivating healthy soil and intelligent design are all easy actions that help both us and our climate.
Gardening is an amazing form of mood-boosting therapy that helps connect us with the land and the seasons and make us feel more at one with the world. When we’re getting it right it can be a powerful act of selfcare, and of resistance against climate change.
Becky
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Becky Searle is a garden writer and author of Grow a New Garden; Plan, Design and Transform any Outdoor Space. She trained as an ecologist and specialises in soil health and ecosystem gardening. You can follow Becky online at @Sow_Much_More.