CULTIVATION
I grew up in an era where my grandparents dug the soil. They tended their back garden allotment regularly, grew almost all of their own vegetables and knew their garden intimately. They weren’t unusual in the eighties, every other older couple of the “dig for victory” era who were lucky enough to have a back garden or an allotment tended the ground this way. Do you know what there was back in the eighties too? Fucking THOUSANDS of insects! And that was in suburban England! I remember it! I would spend literally hours watching crawling things, collecting crawling things, waking in the morning to birdsong, buzzing and traffic noise. May-bugs (cockchafers) would emerge from the gardens of the shit bits of Cheltenham like small bombers and hoon about clumsily into panel fences and cars. Sunday men all over the UK scrubbed dead insects off the front of their cars.
So, what went wrong? At a guess it wasn’t the practice of human animals turning over the soil, it was the unregulated growth of industrial production, the pushing of industrial farming and the pushing of herbicide and insecticide use in farming and for sale in garden centres. Also the increase of massive intensive farms, roads and factories leading to habitat decimation and loss of hedgerows, meadows and woodlands. In my early childhood I lived at the edges of the city sprawl and watched the development of large housing estates and industrial units rise up from the scrappy meadows along the river Chelt. I didn’t know it then, I was watching the beginning of the end of biodiversity.
On moving to Ireland as a kid I was in my element with the amount of freedom and countryside, though noticed straight away the comparative lack of wildlife. The cottage my parents rented in rural Ireland was situated at the end of a long boreen and was completely surrounded by intensive forestry, a monoculture completely devoid of life, bar a few mossy clearings and rocky edges with some spiders living in them. On the whole though, Ireland was already a bit of a green desert. The difference was I guess, I was now living in farmed countryside and forestry, not the diverse pocket landscapes (I believe the trendy term is mosaic habitat) of suburban England, at that time made up of brownfield sites awating development (unsprayed/untouched/meadow/scrub/old farmland), allotments full of old people gardening “old skool” and individual gardens that ranged from rubbish tips, scrap metal storage and Begonia bliss, to just, unmown squares of “can’t be arsed/can’t afford a lawnmower”. Back gardens were bigger back then.
So, where am I going with this? I think I’m trying to explore the narrative at the moment of “turning the soil is akin to destroying the earth”. I realise the whole point of “not disturbing the soil” is more about carbon integrity and soil structure and living biome preservation, that working soil is just part of the conversation on ecological death. My own approach to developing a garden (on my own place) is to flip the sod and from that point on selectively weed and allow a ground cover of natives. I don’t strip the turf, I allow it to naturally break down due to light deprivation (by flipping it). I don’t turn and turn the soil, the “destruction” I cause is probably less than that created by foraging pigs, the hooves of cattle or ponies and guess what! I’m an animal on the planet too, I just have a tool. I fail to see how this approach is ruinous!
Even if every person with a back garden turned their sod once, compared to say, the land-owner down the road who has removed all hedges to create massive swathes of intensive green desert grazing which is fertilised with chemical fertiliser on a regular basis and glyphosated off every two/three years and resown so he can squeeze maximum milk production out of his 400 strong herd, to be powdered and shipped to China? Or the other lads who grow oilseed rape/potatoes and glyphosate the tops off “for easier harvest” and then leave their fields bare for motnhs at a time to let the entirely dead soil wash away; or say, the land-owners wilfully ignoring rampant Cherry Laurel/Rhododendron growth eradicating all native habitat on their watch, yet still expect government subsidies for “unusable land”, normally those same land-owners allowing millions of hectares of monoculture spruce plantation to also completely eradicate all native habitat, including local soil structures, (as well as the insecticide/herbicide use to get it established) AND get paid a yearly amount to encourage them! Is wood really a sustainable building material if that is the pay-off!? Has anyone bothered to look at that? (another blog post perhaps).
I’m sorry, I REFUSE to be guilt-tripped about my gardening practice while this shit is going on unchallenged and even actively supported by the government and ALL legislation. As gardeners, of course we can do things in a better and a worse way. I think the most effective thing we can collectively do is stop with the fucking sprays and artificial fertilisers! After that, just do your best to invite as many natives in as possible and allow a bit of chaos!
Ends.
