Crisis Gardens

(My photo from a Sainsbury’s 20 February 2023)

A friend is currently living at Fair Isle, Scotland. It’s a tiny island, beautiful, and at the mercy of the weather for supplies. In winter, the island lives on non-perishables. She yearns for fresh food.

Right now we don’t have as much of that in mainland Britain as she remembers.

Today’s photo is from the nearest Sainsbury’s, which seems to be doing better at keeping produce in stock than some other stores. Normally this photo would show broccoli, leeks, bell peppers, sweet peppers, kale, cabbage, and so on. For our visit this week it had depleted stocks of sweetcorn, mushrooms, cucumbers and a few small peppers. Everything else was missing. The fruit aisle looked better. The store spread out what it had there to keep the aisle from looking about 1/3 stocked.

The sparse produce section doesn’t bother us. We can adapt. But it does cast a different light on gardening at home.

Growing Food Here

My wife and I want to do better with our back garden this year. We were already planning, buying seeds and starting a few seeds in a propagator before this week’s grocery shopping.

Before Brexit, the UK produced about half the food it eats. Over the past three years that has fallen to maybe one third of what we eat. We’ve plowed some crops under because we don’t have enough farm labor to harvest them. Sometimes farmers decide not to plant at all because, between rising costs and falling labor availability, they can’t see how they could get to a profitable harvest. Over the past year, bird flu decimated egg production, chicken farming and our wild bird populations. Don’t take my word for any of this. There are plenty of news articles about the plight of British agriculture, including yesterday’s in the Guardian.

The climate here is generally good for growing things. In the few years since we moved into this house, we have been gradually changing our place to be more friendly to pollinators and produce a little food for us to eat. We keep making mistakes, which lead to adjustments. A garden is never finished. It is ever-changing.

Gardening at home was a key part of the civilian effort to get Britain through World War II. Back then, people had Victory Gardens. I’m not sure what to call the new push for home gardens now. As a placeholder, today I’m calling them Crisis Gardens. Does anyone have a better idea for a name?

Our Garden at Home

Spring is springing. We aren’t just excited about crocuses blooming in the front flower bed. We are immensely excited about buds and even a few tiny leaves on the dwarf fruit trees we planted in front less than a year ago.

We have two lurchers, dogs that are part greyhound. They need space to play. They tear up the back lawn, so we can’t just dig up ground and turn it into a conventional vegetable garden. One of the dogs is a boy who of course needs to pee on everything, so anything we want to eat has to be protected from him.

When the first lockdown hit in 2020, we were awaiting bids to get the main transformation done, based on a design from neighbor Sue who is a gardening fanatic. We did most of it ourselves. Some subscribers have asked before for details about our project to transform the back garden from just grass and a muddy slope with high clay content at the bottom of two retaining walls. It’s now more interesting and productive, even for the dogs. This has taken some problem-solving and a lot of work.

Spring is when it all begins to come alive for a lovely summer. I’ll start showing you how it got this way, a little at a time, interspersed with posts about other topics. Maybe it will give you ideas that you can use.