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Gardening and climate change
Fran Farmer wrote:
songbird wrote: Fran Farmer wrote: ... :-)) And less snow for water for the populace is only one of the signs you've written about...... I keep wondering if it will take famine conditions in the first world before some people finally manage to join the dots. i suspect there will be food riots and troubles in poorer countries again long before you see problems in the first world countries. Yup. the first world has the resources to ship foods around. Yup, and does do that now regardless. only when we get some rather unlikely multiple year droughts in several of the large grain growing regions in combination with wars which disrupt shipping would you see a large famine in the first world. Well Oz has certainly had the multiple year droughts in grain areas and I have a vague memory that Russia had too. Can't quite see the shipping disruption on the horizon. right, at the moment the risk isn't that high. multiple year droughts are not widespread and we had a good harvest last year. if this year is bad and next year is bad then you'll certainly see it in the news. at the moment i think we're on the edge and could be mostly ok, but it means making some changes. improving ground and surface water regulations, putting the land back into the hands of people instead of corporations, having more diversity and protection for wild spaces, funding restoration and replanting projects, increasing wetlands to help with flooding and droughts, improving irrigation and monitoring of ground water pumping. :-)) In short, I think you have joined me in my 'when pigs fly' view of the possibility of the dots being joined? i'm seeing some good signs here or there, but it isn't enough yet, so yeah. boycotting products from companies or people who poison is one immediate thing that i can do and that shifts at least some production towards more sustainable methods. growing my own food using sustainable methods is another. at least then i know some wild creatures have a home that isn't being poisoned. We have a wonderful garden for other creatures. Some I could do without liek the blasted rabbits and the snakes but the others are all well worth observing. For example; we spend a lot of time watching the antics of birds and the last time I bothered to aks Himself (who is very keen on birds) he had recorded seeing between 60 and 70 different birds types in our garden. We make sure we do our pruning to avoid nesting times and we keep many plants that are supposedly weeds because they give food or shelter for wildlife. We do fight about Queen Anne's Lace though. He always pulls it out when he notices it because he thinks it will go wild in his paddocks. I have finally mananged to stop him ripping out my verbasums now as I finally corrected his misidentification of them. yes, living as a cooperative between more than one person is a challenge. i lose garden spaces or plant diversity here when Ma decides to smother a garden or mows down some of my plants and it doesn't get replanted. right now i'm going to lose another garden this year, but pick up a few more next year or the year after. depends upon what i can get done. there's probably a few dozen rabbits around here and i surely don't need any more, but our main veggie gardens are fenced and don't get too many rabbits in them. the fence is more to keep the deer out than the other creatures. i have more damage from woodchucks that climb through the fence. i hope i've discouraged those enough this past year that we don't have them back this year. we'll see. the birds we have are not too damaging to veggie or my strawberry production, they get at some of the bushes that have berries, but we don't eat those berries so they are welcome to them. no major fruit trees growing either as of yet, so all birds are welcome here. if they eat a few of the strawberries i don't mind, there are enough, they make up for it in bugs they eat. i'm actually surprised by how well the gardens outside the fenced areas do, some do get raided at times, but i rarely lose an entire garden's production. planting multiple crops, some intermixed, etc. seems to keep them from finding everything. these sort of experiments continue as i get time for them. today i got a first look at the south drainage situation with the melting snow coming off quickly. the ground is still frozen and the water is coming across the surface. not too likely we'll have any flooding this spring as we don't have a lot of snow cover and the forecast isn't pointing at heavy rains yet. the nights are still mostly near or below freezing so that is actually a good thing as that will keep the trees from budding out too soon. i was worrying the other day that it was getting too warm too quickly again, but so far so good. queen-annes-lace is one of those weeds that will colonize our clay soil, but the cover is so poor that i don't really like them, instead i'm adding fennel which is much more edible and provides more shade. there's no danger of there being too little of the lace as it abounds along every roadside like the dandelion or chickory. i'm also adding short round carrots to the mix of plantings this season. they might work in our heavy soils. we'll see what happens... every season is a new adventure... songbird |
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