Comment and Review

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Charles Dowding - The Natural No Dig Way.

Organic Gardening – the natural no dig way.
Charles Dowding
Green Books
£10.95

I’m always saying that composting is the most important thing that all of us can do; full stop – or period - as they say in the States. Charles’s book really underlines why. He is a no dig gardener like me, and the only problem with being a no dig grower is getting your hands on enough material, especially in the first stages of setting up a no dig system. In fact it was largely this great lust for compost that drove me to investigate setting up a community composting project in the first place.
Like all proper organic gardeners and growers Charles has a deep understanding of soils. If you can try and understand soils and treat them with respect then everything else in gardening flows from that understanding.
Charles recommends spreading 50mm a year on top of your beds – I think this is about two inches in old money.  The great thing about just mulching on the surface is that you do not have to worry about nitrogen robbery, which is endlessly and pointlessly discussed by the diggers on Gardeners Question time, this is because the materials are only very gradually incorporated into the soil by worms.

So Chapter one of ‘Organic Gardening’ is ‘the art of not digging’ and Charles asks what are digging and rotovating supposed to do?
• Loosen the soil – so that roots can more easily travel through
• Incorporate composts and manures
• Remove/bury weeds to clean the soil
• Create a tilth for sowing
Well if your soil is really so hard that plant roots cannot penetrate then something is deeply wrong with your soil.  It’s very common in new build gardens where the soil is compacted and there is all kinds of builders rubble left and sometimes the top soil has been removed. The remedy is – lots of organic matter; so if you provide that for your soil, then the worms will be happy and they will aerate the soil for you and do all your digging – naturally.
Worms of course also incorporate material and Charles refers to another famous Charles (Darwin) and the only book of Darwin’s that I possess ‘The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms with observations on their habits’ 1882 (snappy title eh! – unfortunately my copy is dated 1883 so I missed out on the first edition) Darwin spent far more time studying worms than he did working on natural selection and he thought that his book on worms would be far more significant – wise man! So in a nutshell – look after your soil and you will have happy worms which will in turn look after your soil.

Ah but what about those weeds! The answer as Charles tells us is – Don’t let them grow in the first place. The mantra when I was a student at Henry Doubleday’s Research Association – (now Garden Organic) was ‘Hoe Hoe Hoe!’  It’s simple – no plants growing means no plants seeding and the maxim one year’s seeding is seven years weeding was never truer.  Winter weeding is crucial. The groundsel is just about to flower on my allotment – I must get on top of it now! As Charles says a stitch in time saves 99. Of course applying compost as a mulch means that hoeing is dead easy – your hoe will go through like knife in soft butter and if your compost wasn’t hot enough to kill the weeds then the regular hoeing will sort them out.
And that brings us to the final point – tilth. Digging and rotovating to provide a tilth also compacts the soil and knock a lot of air out – whereas no diggers can just get straight on their soil and sow – no problem. Charles Dowding has also written a great book on salad production a must have for all keen gardeners – buy them both and look at the website
www.charlesdowding.co.uk

Comment- The Power of Community

The Power of Community is a thought provoking film of how Cuba has restructured all food production after losing it's oil supply. See review below.
Here are a few thoughts from Alan and Dawn (The Big Red Sofa) on the subject. With the danger of our oil and gas supplies being limited by the suppliers, maybe we should be doing something now?

As we started to discuss the other day there is a lot of stuff we should be converting into the third dimension.  I believe we need to set a select group of people, real people from as many diverse sections of the community as possible, to work together to research, establish, implement and monitor a series of indicators of our developing sustainability as individuals and as a collective community.  This should not be aimed at the folk who already subscribe to such an ethos, either knowingly or subconsciously but to everyone who has an impact on the town.  This includes locals and visitors but also people who work here, who supply us (with whatever) and so on.

 

None of the above is new or even innovative.  What it needs is to get done [sorry about the rubbish English] so we have a chance of maintaining a reasonable lifestyle for ourselves and for those who come after us.  We have the chance, and we should grab the chance, to set an example here in Chagford, for our own community and for other people in the world.  We keep following and that is good if the example is appropriate.  We have the resources and the expertise here to be leaders, not just followers, all we need is an appropriate degree of co-ordination, not just within or between the existing groups but across the board in terms of the different groups that make up the community at large.

 

Rant over....for now!

 

Alan

 

Sorry, going to add a bit to Alan's comments. Whilst I agree with what Alan has written, I think the crucial element is being missed. Cuba has made these incredible changes because it has been forced to do so. Who knows we soon may face finding out the hard way but until then we still sit in our ivory tower. I believe that until people really disconnect with consumer dependence (and we as a family are nowhere near this) nothing real will happen. How do we achieve this unless we are forced into it? That is the question for me, and so I don't have an obvious answer but happy to keep trying!

 

Dawn

Review of Funny Weather.

Kate Evans www.cartoonkate.co.uk
Funny Weather - www.funnyweather.org 
at Bovey Climate Action

Kate gave a really entertaining talk at Riverside Mill in Bovey Tracey – she became the cartoon characters in her book and really brought it to life. The talk was one of the events put on by Bovey Climate Action who have plenty more coming up see their website on www.boveyclimateaction.org.uk

Climate Change science is extremely complicated but over 2,000 scientists that make up the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) are of one voice that the acceleration of climate change is down to our actions. Our actions have got us into this mess and it is only by our actions that we can hope to slow and hopefully reverse the affects.  The trouble is that most people are in complete denial, especially politicians.

Kate impressed on us the urgency to do something about it.  We must take things into our own hands and be the change we want to see.The talk ended with a quote from Gandhi.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, it is very important that you do it” 

The evening ended with a general discussion and I invited people from Bovey to visit Proper Job and will be arranging a visit soon – South Brent are also very intersted in visiting.
Nicky Scott
SD

Review of-The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil

From  - Thursday 18th September. Methodist Church, 8pm.Totnes

“People all over the world are starting to wake up!”

these words were ringing in my ears as I walked away from Roberto Perez’s talk in Totnes about how Cuba had managed to feed it’s entire population using mostly organic and permaculture methods. I had Steve Bell like visions in my head of people coming out of their zombie state and their eyes opening to the reality of a world where until very recently a £100 worth of capital could get you £8,000 worth of credit (I don’t know maybe you still can?) where we need 3 planets each to keep up with our consumer lifestyles.

Cuba had to find out the hard way.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually all imports, into Cuba ceased. Any ships landing in Cuba were barred from USA ports for 6 months (first offence and a year 2^nd offence.) Cuba had the most industrialised agriculture in Central America based on the old plantation crops of tobacco, coffee and sugar – all good nourishing crops! The land which had been cleared of forest was first given to the rich elite and later mostly appropriated by the state. This land is now being massively reforested and much of it returned to grow food crops. All the previous cash crops were heavily reliant on fuel, pesticides and chemical fertilisers – this was reduced at least tenfold virtually overnight.

Now Cuba had to come away from the cloud cuckoo land existence based on finite supplies of cheap oil and the chemical pesticides and fertilisers manufactured using oil. They entered a ‘Special period’ (we might call it a transition period) much like this country was faced when we went into World War 2. Food had to be carefully rationed and apportioned. Nutritionists worked out minimum daily requirements of food; every scrap of land was brought into cultivation.  All this and much more happened in World War 2 here – the dig for victory campaign, the creative use of food, the utilisation of wild foods. Many of us have heard or experienced directly the stories of rationing during the war and try to imagine what it must have been like to have only 4oz of butter each a week 4ozs of bacon, 3.5 ozs of cooked bacon or ham, 12ozs of sugar and 2 eggs. (I wonder what happened to the vegans?) Of course people started to grow their own food and collect from the natural environment.

In Cuba most people were living in an urban environment, in Havana today every spare scrap of land is a garden, roof tops, window boxes, demolition sites, everywhere there is food being grown and of course the transportation to the market is often measured in feet (well, metres I suppose)

Most people in Cuba were not at all used to growing food – they were basically plantation workers growing all those cash crops. They had to change everything it is a learning experience which is still continuing and they are still faced with enormous challenges.  They are still embargoed by the USA and that continues to make life extremely difficult for them as ideally they would trade in their ‘bio-region’ to exchange food that they cannot grow – potatoes, apples and other cooler climate crops. They have had to learn how to plough with oxen once more as tractor fuel is not only expensive but the tractors have compacted the soils so badly that many of them have to be painstakingly reconstructed by careful use of composts and worm casts.

But this is more like the world will have to be – the real world, not squandering it’s natural resources but using them carefully – not reliant on high tech fixes but using the technology where appropriate; a careful mixture of the old with the new. A photo voltaic system can power a radio, some lights maybe a small TV but not a plasma screen. Communities are more localised – Cuba now has 54 universities and the health system to rival anywhere in the world, without all the access to modern medicines – instead they grow their own medicinal plants and doctors have been trained by local healers.

Roberto said that the signs were promising – people all over the world are waking up and finding themselves in cloud cuckoo land and with the financial world being finally exposed for the house of cards that it is now is the time for us to start a compost heap, to pick up a hoe and start to cultivate some land; and this is the perfect time to start.  I always think that September – October is the time to start your growing year. Get your garlic planted, plan for those broad beans to over winter, and look at sowing all kinds of oriental salad crops, autumn onions. Get your ground covered and growing for the winter and then the spring start will just be a natural continuation.  Are we the ones in cloud cuckoo land? I don’t think so!

Nicky Scott

SD