Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Guardian Gardening expert Kim Stoddart escaped climate change in the South East of England by moving to a frigid Welsh hilltop – then discovered her tomatoes wouldn’t grow.
Why climate-change gardening means breaking all the rules
Kim Stoddart
Sat 4 Dec 2021 22.00 AEDTEarly in 2010, I moved from a home with a small, tidy back garden in Brighton to a wild smallholding more than 200 metres above sea level in Llandysul in Wales. Concerns about the climate crisis were at the heart of my move: I was living at sea level, near an underground river, and worried about flooding. But more than anything, I longed to live somewhere I could be self-sufficient.
After considering the options – Spain (extreme heat) and New Zealand (attractive but too far away) – I decided on Wales. Water shortages were unlikely, I thought, and property and land were affordable. So I left behind my old life to turn my passion for organic homegrown food into a full-time career – writing, running courses, making public speaking.
Gardening in this part of west Wales is very different from gardening in Brighton – the land is more suited to livestock than crops, and it has been a steep learning curve. No casual outdoor growing of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and chillies in this cooler, wetter climate. No protection from the strong winds, no respite from the relentless rain (and, in 2018, a drought). And no fruit trees so high above sea level in a wind-ravaged spot, or so I was told. As a result, I had to adapt all my gardening techniques.
…
I don’t use fertiliser for hungry Mediterranean fruits like tomatoes (which I grow in a polytunnel) because it makes them needy for more, and stops their roots seeking out natural resilience through symbiotic relationships with underground fungi. Instead make your own compost from leaf mould, and boost it with comfrey, nettles, seaweed, chicken poo and borage.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/04/why-climate-change-gardening-means-breaking-all-the-rules
Polytunnels are cheap plastic greenhouses (see the top of this post). But the cheap plastic Polythene is produced from ethylene, a petroleum product.
To be fair Kim seems a pretty decent person, her social enterprise group Garden Organic “… help teachers and school professionals to develop gardening projects that teach children where their food comes from, develop their scientific and environmental awareness and encourage them to eat more fruit and vegetables.”.
But a Guardian gardening expert expressing surprise that Mediterranean vegetables refuse to grow on a Welsh hilltop, without lots of help from our friend plastic – what was she expecting? Did she really think global warming had already made Northern Welsh hills a suitable location for warm climate vegetables?
Don’t get me wrong, I have fond memories of Wales, lots of friendly people in Cardiff and Swansea who made me feel a welcome part of their community. But even the south of Wales is really cold and wet for much of the year, let alone some hilltop in North Wales.
The BBC predicted in 2005 that Britain would have a Mediterranean climate by 2050. But I’m guessing people hoping to grow Mediterranean climate vegetables on the hills of chilly Northern Wales will have to wait a lot longer than 2050, before they can ditch their Greenhouses.
Correction (EW): Mediterranean climate vegetables – as Tom Halla points out, tomatoes and eggplants are not originally from the Mediterranean.
“Did she really think global warming had already made Northern Welsh hills a suitable location for warm climate vegetables?”
No, she didn’t. That’s because she moved to Llandysul, which is located in South-West Wales.
Not even sure about the hills, either. “Llandysul lies in south Ceredigion in the valley of the River Teifi”. (Wikipedia)
Diolch yn fawr.
It reminds me of the student a niece of mine met in Cambridge. She thought she had come to the north of England. That’s southerners for you.
Any appropriately culturally attuned immigrant would, of course, move to Wales to mine coal. The nerve of these wokes.
Another twit, buts heads with the real world.
Hope she got permission before taking the seaweed unless it was growing below high tide mark. Bet she didn’t. Townies. Twll din bob Sais.
I sea what you did there.
She broke The Primary Rule for ‘moving’ or emigration, migration or whatever you wanna call it
If me you anybody goes to a ‘new place’ with the idea of living there, the first thing you do is take a look around and see what ‘survives‘ there.
i.e. What plants critters herbs flowers weeds whatever etc are growing and flourishing.
If you then take it upon yourself to eat those things during your stay, then you yourself will ‘survive’ in that new place.
Its that simple. Do we see now where she went wrong?
PS: She did have the right idea though. She got close.
The Very Best Tomatoes do indeed grow on the sides of mountains but, not especially *any* old mountain
Tomatoes love to grow on the sides of recently extinct or even, still-active, volcanoes.
Mmmm. Why’s that then?
Easy, tomatoes, being Nightshades, are VERY hungry plants
Soooooo…
At which point The Collective Groan goes up – peta is back on the subject of soil erosion
“She broke The Primary Rule for ‘moving’ or emigration, migration or whatever you wanna call it”
I learned this helpful hint a long ago: the “i” in immigration can be thought of as someone or some group coming more-or-less permanently into a given location to live . . .the “e” in emigration can be thought of thought of as someone or some group exiting a given location to live elsewhere.
Hence, any immigrant was necessarily, in the very recent past, an emigrant.
Yup, tomatoes need to be fed to death, feed with every watering, rotate location every year or do lots of soil amendments.
Also like lots of sun and heat.
Wales seems like unlikely candidate without lots of “positive externalities”, ie heat and light from fossil fuels.
“making public speaking”
Does that phrase have any meaning?
“Concerns about the climate crisis were at the heart of my move: I was living at sea level, near an underground river, and worried about flooding. But more than anything, I longed to live somewhere I could be self-sufficient.”
To be fair Kim seems to be a traumatized person.
No one is self-sufficient on a wind-swept Welsh hilltop. Kalahari bushmen are self-sufficient. Living dirt-poor on a backbreaking farm and burning wood to survive the winter is self-sufficient.
Kim has been scared to death by the doom mongers. She hasn’t the education or perspicacity or perhaps the personality to see through them. So she lives in angst-ridden delusion with the inner life of a modern flagellant, and earns her livelihood writing about penitence-through-action for the like-traumatized.
‘the land is more suited to livestock ‘
Odd that because Moonbat who lives in the area as told us the only reason it’s sheep not crops is because the farmers are stupid and evil. Don’t tell me he was talking total BS!….. again
Self sufficient?
Did she purchase 20 plus acres?
She no longer shops for main groceries every few days?
Little quarter acre garden plots are dilettante efforts that only put a few fresh vegetables on the table for a few weeks of the year.
Winter squash and classic cabbage will provide vegetables longer than a few weeks, provided one has a large cooler to store vegetables and keep them cold.
To process and store other vegetables requires abundant fossil fuels.
One year, I and a girlfriend processed enough tomatoes during hot and humid August weeks, that wallpaper started peeling off the walls in the kitchen.
Even freezing vegetables requires some processing, blanching vegetables before packaging and immediately freezing them.
If “Guardian Gardening expert Kim Stoddart” isn’t writing about how much time she is spending processing vegetables, she is nowhere near self sufficient or even dependent upon her garden for putting vegetables on the table.
Fertilizer is fertilizer. No amount of pretending changes her soil amendments into a holy class of fertilizer.
Instead, from the description, it also appears to be a dilettante effort too. Leaves do not become mulch overnight or even over months.
yes, she could be filling one of those plastic drums used for composting, but that is a miniscule amount of mulch that suffices for small gardens.
Then there is the problem regarding how she is feeding the trees?
Leaves composting over a year or two return nutrients to the soil that trees used to grow those leaves.
Farm yards require tons of of mulch in place of fertilizer. Tons of leaves and plant debris that must be forked over several times a year. Tons of fun starting at one end of a mulch pile and forking it over a yard or so, from one end to the other, then forking it back into position.
“chicken poo“?
Is she is raising a few birds for fresh eggs?
Or is she raising dozens of chickens to put chicken on the table several days a week?
Cleaning out a couple handfuls of “chicken poo” hardly assaults the nose or eyes. Cleaning out the poo from sixty to a hundred chickens from the chicken roost burns unprotected noses and other delicate membranes, and will do so until the “poo” is rendered safe by rain, weather and time.
Rabbit poo also works extremely well too. And one gets more poo from one meat rabbit than a number of chickens. Like piles of chicken poo, rabbit excrement needs weather and aging to soften it’s harshness.
Movieland images highlight families practicing husbandry where a designated family member catches a chicken or two for dinner…
Chickens raised for eggs and chickens raised for meat gain weight and reach peak performance at different ages.
Egg layers will start laying eggs at early maturity and lay up to 300plus eggs a year. Reaching that egg laying consistency during their second year.
Meat chickens nowadays are harvested within weeks to a maximum couple of months. Meat chickens put on weight at incredible rates. After a certain age, they may gain more fat, but generally they work the muscles toughening the bird.
Harvest at six weeks is where the fryers come from. Harvesting around eight weeks brings us roasters. Harvesting older birds brings us stew birds.
Which is why people harvest the kind of bird they desire all at once and then freeze the birds for future use.
What is missing from Kim Stoddart’s fanciful life is what happens when disease rears it’s ugly form. Is she keeping in contact with agriculture departments? What will she do when a bird infected with avian-flu dies on her property?
Some asides:
A brother of mine called me a couple of decades ago. He knew that I fly fish and tie flies for fishing; he offered me feathers from chickens he was then harvesting.
I declined. Feathers from 6 week old chickens are of little use for tying flies.
Like egg layers, best quality and consistent production comes when the bird is fully mature at 2 plus years.
Even then, the chickens need good genetics to grow quality feathers.
Back in the 1980s, I attended a presentation on growing orchids in a greenhouse in Canada.
The presenter pointed to the rivulets of water running down the greenhouse exterior and remarked that they were water because of ground up dollar bills.
And he was running a full double pane glass greenhouse.
Keeping Stoddart’s plastic film garden cover warm to lengthen the growing season will require a lot of fossil fuel warming.
It wouldn’t hurt Stoddart to boost the CO₂ levels in her little plastic garden cover for better tastier yields.
I have been using 6 mil greenhouse plastic for the last 5 winters. The material is fantastic, and the results are simply a bit amazing. The greenhouse allows me to grow a citrus tree and other plants right through the winter. Temps in this area will drop into the 20sF and occasionally into the teens. My Rangpur lime is now 11 years old. If I didn’t top it every fall, then the tree would be around 30 feet tall by now.
The dwarf peach also sits under the cover. It blooms and fruits almost one month earlier than my neighbor’s dwarf peach which sits outside. I used to start garden plants in the winter inside under fluorescent grow lights. Now I start my garden in the greenhouse around January.
Amazing what people will come to believe. I have a garden here in calgary but i understand its a hobby that allows me to grow some things to eat in the fall, to try new and different things just to see how it goes and how it tastes, true first world problem.
My latest fave is french red fingerling potatoes, they can beautifully. but i cannot feed myself or my family from my garden year round and to be successful requires inputs.
I feel sorry for her, falling for the latest millenial end of the world fad
Here is some reality for the kelp crowd who seem to prefer trendy pop science to the real thing and are in the rubber boot brigade with the snowflake organic gardeners.
Actuality: Most primary fertilizers rely first on the % of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, shorthand NPK. Kelp contains little.
“The highest reported Kelp product NPK was Kelp powder. The Colorado State Extensions website reports the NPK at 1 – 0 – 4. [5] A variety of sources state the NPK of the other product as negligible. Often kelp products are mixed with fish products to give them an NPK.”
Kelp is too low on the scale to register anything useful.
Actuality: So, people claim exotic contents like a host of minor and trace elements. No cigar, sorry, all plants have these otherwise they would not exist. More exotics like Abscisic acid are quoted as a bonus for seaweed as a fertilizer or growth agents, but all higher plants contain this chemical and many others like the gibberellins that can add to growth rates and yields when synthesized or extracted from other sources and applied as a supplement.
If you really search the literature, there is next to nothing in kelp or seaweed that materially assists the growth of common modern food crops. Rumours abound, hard tests are hard to find.
p.s I spent my first postgrad decade working on plant nutrition and little else, starting at CSIRO, so I am not without understanding. Geoff S
(2021) “Potential use of Ascophyllum nodosum as a biostimulant for improving the growth performance of Vigna acontifolia…” (free full text available on-line) used an extract of 25% seaweed at zero and different concentrations on India’s popularly edible “moth bean” (you can buy the small moth bean at international India food markets). Among the experimental data WUWT lay science readers can easily grasp at least Figure 3 graphs of root length, number of leaves and leaf area after 30 days treatment with no and various amounts of seaweed (extract).
Authors do point out prior research indicating that crude seaweed is less effective than seaweed extracts for plant growth. And this cited report also shows there is not a clear lineal benefit to all plant parameters always when more % of seaweed extract is used. [The different contextual results at different extract usage levels is tied, in part, to how ratios of different plant phyto-hormones affect different plant parts. Not the subject of this comment.]
Section 2.4 discusses root nodulation (desirable in growing beans) summarizing seaweed extract induced clusters with large nodules and the control (no seaweed) had single nodules that were smaller. See Fig. 4 photo “II” of a month old root segment forming clusters of nodules at one example of seaweed extract concentration.
gringo,
yes, I’ve read the Indian lit, not impressed. Reads like justification for what they are doing.
The question is really, why seaweed? You cannot doubt it has attracted a cult following, plus some fairly large companies with big advertising budgets. Here in Australia we have Seasol, with copious ads along the lines of “Everybody knows how Seasol benefits your plants” or similar words.
Well, everybody does know this. I wrote an article 15 years ago regarding some of the inconsistencies and doubtful assumptions about kelp. It still has most major criticism unanswered. Just because it is trendy. Just because old=style farmers by the sea used to drag it onto fields, maybe because they were desperate to do something to make more food. Not much science then. Geoff S
Let me get this straight in my mind: two botanists, a plant breeding geneticist,
a biochemist, a seed science technologist, a biotechnology biologist, a microbiology botanist and a French institute physicist recently collaborate then publish data from their controlled experiments performed using a form of seaweed without altering N-P-K have their complete report available for free public reading. While someone who “wrote an article 15 years ago” proposes to the general WUWT audience that they question “why seaweed.”
Each case, no matter what the subject context, presents the same issue for certain WUWT commentators: proving they are the smartest in the forum.
For anyone still following this post I’ll add an explanation of how the cited data chart of leaf area specifically indicates the relevance of seaweed cytokinin phyto-hormone content. Figure 3 shows that on average (and range bars) of 0.1 seaweed extract gives notably greater leaf area than 0.0 seaweed extract (or the other doses); applied to roots was better than leaf dosing.
As the % ratio of cytokinin phyto-hormone increases the zones of dividing cells are influenced and expansion increases. This expansion dynamic is for rapidly growing leaves and not old leaves.
Charted leaf area data is for 30 day old leaves. The best leaf assimilation rate of minerals, water and carbon occurs in 22-24 day old leaves.
About 70% of leaf cell division occurs after the leaf lamina open and that leaf’s expansion is only 4%, or less, at that point; cytokinin phyto-hormone is required for cells cycle progression to mitosis. The point is that the number of cells in a leaf is what influences how big the leaf can get (consider that bonsai plant leaves have normal size leaf cells, their leaves are small because the number of cells in a leaf is low).
Leaf area is relevant to plants because it is what comprises their canopy for light irradiance exposure. Early closing of the leaf canopy shades the ground limiting nutrient competitive weeds’ access to light, as well as providing better soil surface conditions relative to soil moisture content retention.
Now, a comment o9n underground rivers.
Fairy tales are replete with stories and myths and illustrations of whole communities living underground by the sides of placed streams, as it it was a real countryside except that rock replaces the sky overhead.
What people poetically call “underground rivers” are no more than occasional locations, usually in limestone country, where groundwaters have produced caves that do not reach the surface. When Nature has linked some groundwater flow into and out of these caves, people can call the underground rivers except that has not much purpose. They happen, they are rare, seldom more than a few hundred meters long, seldom with significant flow or additional flood threat. There might be a few that are bigger than average and do take part in flooding, but once this is known, the option exists to relocate, problem solved.
People who have not studied Geology (I have) seldom have a correct concept of what lies, hidden from sight, below the surface of land everywhere and anywhere. It needs drilling and mining to get the main picture.
So, you romantics, please stop telling fairy stories about flood threats from underground rivers. Geoff S
Geoff,
The author used to live in Brighton, a coastal town on the edge of the chalk hills of the South Downs. The existence of dry chalk valleys with underground streams that come to the surface in winter is prevalent in the chalk areas of southern England, as the name of the River Winterborne in Dorset shows.
A friend who lives in Wiltshire experienced significant rising water table groundwater flooding of the basement in his village home alongside a chalk stream during 2012. While the author’s use of the term “underground river” can be disputed, the historic reality of Winterbornes and the damage they can cause to property cannot be gainsaid.
Does she realise that when she moved from Brighton to her remote Welsh hilltop, she moved out of a substantial Urban Heat Island?
One of the things these “self-sufficient” folks seem to forget is that the crops grown in England through the years were never the abundance that we can buy in any supermarket. When I lived in BC Canada, the crops we could grow were potatoes, rutabagas, carrots, cabbage, etc. No tomatoes, peppers, or egg plant. I applaud here zeal but wonder at her practicality. A person who lives in Wales is not going to have the same diet without the supermarket.