[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone and say the sunshine, good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you are listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly case good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschitz. All of us, well, many of us are backyard gardeners, and it's planting season. Backyard gardens are not immune from the impacts of violent and unpredictable weather or the longer term effects of climate change. My guest today on sustainability now is Kim Stoddart, editor of amateur gardening and author of the Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden, how to grow Food in a changing Climate. In 2022, Stoddart was the winner of the Beth Chadow Environmental Award given by the Garden Media Guild in the United Kingdom. She lives in gardens in west Wales where weather conditions are not always optimal. Kind of like California. Kim Stodder, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Thank you, Ronnie. It's great to be here.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: So I've been doing some research on you, and you describe yourself as a gardening journalist and author with a strong background in social enterprise and ethical business. I'm wondering if you could deconstruct that for us, who you are, what your background is, what sort of activities you're engaged in?
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Absolutely. It's funny sometimes to describe exactly what I do because I've done quite a few things over the years, but I used to run PR companies in the southeast of England and I used to write in the media about ethical business and social enterprise. And I sold those 14 years ago to move to the western side of Wales, which is where I currently reside. And part of the move was to focus my love of gardening into my career. So I began channeling all my entrepreneurial energy into writing and talking and doing with regards to gardening. So since then, I started writing for the Guardian. I tried to garden entirely for free back in 2013 for the Guardian to see if it was possible garden in a less consumeristic laden way. And I have done various different projects, helping set up growing projects around Wales with garden organic. I've edited the organic Way magazine and I run courses for the RHS, Royal Horticultural Society and lots of others. And I've written the books and I currently edit amateur gardening magazine, which is the world's oldest gardening magazine, which celebrates its 140th anniversary this May.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Well, congratulations on that.
Just to follow that up, what does amateur gardening cover that's a really good question.
[00:03:38] Speaker C: I've loved the magazine for a long time and I've written for the magazine previously over the years, and it really is a magazine for the people. It covers every area of gardening relevant to the home gardener.
The idea of amateur is very much about custodians of our own individual allotments, windowsill boxes, gardens. It just means not professional, as in don't run a horticulture business. But with me at the helm, we're very much focused on sustainability for the future. It's about helping to build resilience, and we're also looking at trying to create content for as many people as we can to help people through the years, months and years ahead.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Does it have a staff or do you publish pieces written by the gardeners themselves?
[00:04:34] Speaker C: It's a mixture. We have a lot of celebrity gardeners writing for the magazine. They've written for the magazine for a long time. So the likes of the delightful Bob Flowerdew, who's BBC radio for Question Time gardeners question Time and Swiven bank being TV presented as well. And we have people like John Negus, who's a bit of a legend in the gardening world in the UK. And then we also have lots of other writers as well that are really expert in their fields and very relevant to what we're looking to do. So obviously, I write about climate change resilience building, but we have, again, trying to keep it really fresh with lots of different voices and we do definitely have a space for gardeners, home gardeners, to profile what they're doing. Oh, the Beth Chateau gardens we have as well. So that's, again, a well known name and the National Garden scheme. Lots of voices like that. So there's not quite enough space for me to do everything that I want, but I'm determined to keep it fresh with lots of new ideas to help people.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: I mean, I suppose the garden is an english invention, more or less. Not the vegetable garden necessarily, but ornamental and visual garden.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: Yeah, it can be. I mean, again, it's the idea of the garden. We're trying to make that something that's more transient. So it could be, for example, I know, it could be a front space, so it could be an area outside the front, it could be a home plant section, window sill growing, it could be a community allotment as well. So we ask our readers what they'd like to see and we try and make it as relevant as possible, but it is more geared towards, obviously, UK audience as compared to the book, which is a global audience. So although I did talk at the Northwest Flower and Garden show recently, I did a lot of talks there in Seattle, and it was really interesting how much interest there was actually in amateur gardening magazine and what it represents.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: You mentioned getting into writing about gardening, but I imagine it took a few years to actually crack the barrier.
I can't imagine. You approached the Guardian sort of out of the blue and they said, sure. So I was just curious how that happened.
[00:06:59] Speaker C: I sort of did, actually, if I'm honest, because I did a series of downshifter articles for the Guardian. This was shortly after moving to western Wales, and because I've written for the national press previously, because I used to be a commentator on ethical, business and social enterprise. So I've published things before for the CBI, I've done all sorts of work in that field. So I did know some of the Guardian journalists already. So because of what I've done previously, they were really keen on the idea. So I did, actually. It was very soon after moving here, but I've gardened for a long time and gardening for me was about. It was about emotional regulation, doing a very busy, quite stressful but enjoyable job running PR companies. So it was my downtime to connect with my back garden, which was a patio space outside concrete area in Brighton, and just to grow some food, to grow some flowers. So it made me more efficient at my job. And that has really, I think, informed the work that I do now that actually, I think everybody would benefit from having the opportunity to grow something in some way, to grow themselves.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: One of the things that you mentioned, you're involved in designing community gardens and I'm just curious what that might entail for whom, how big, what is grown.
[00:08:32] Speaker C: Well, this is local to me, so it's local to me in western Wales and have done a community climate change resilient garden, which is. So just to explain what that is, it's a business centre. It's called Craven in Welsh. And the remit was to create a space that was very low maintenance, that would look really pretty for the businesses based at the centre, but also we wanted to grow food to use for the local food bank, to put food on the table, to encourage people to learn skills to grow food, but also to have access to lots of pick and come again produce that they could actually take while they were coming to get the food bank boxes. So that was the remit for that particular.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: It in terms of productivity of food, how did that go?
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Well, it was a bit of a brownfield site, relatively recently, and often you get with new building projects, the soil quality is really challenged when you try and create a garden. So that was the biggest challenge to begin with. So I had to work on soil improvement first and foremost. So that was done through the addition, as you can imagine, of lots of soil improvement materials, like compost. But I also added in a lot of soil and plants from my own gardens, which are very rich with my heroza fungi. I also used, because when we first started planting out, there was a drought here in the UK early last year, so we then had to use. I used lots of local materials. There's lots of stone, lots of stone from the building site. So we used a lot of that to help keep water in the soil. And I used a lot of plants, like herbs, flowering herbs, to very quickly attract pollinating insects, to help with some of the crops that were being grown. So the likes of thyme, likes of oregano, they incredibly useful to help attract pollinators in, because we needed to get growing very quickly to have those sort of crops for people to harvest.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: I have to just make a note that having lived in London several times, it's hard to imagine a drought in the.
[00:11:00] Speaker C: It's. I mean, I live in, say, western Wales, which is very much known for its rain, so it's not an area that you would associate with dry conditions, but the private. Because it's a homestead where I live, I've got 2.3 acres of land, and I do courses here as well. And I have a private well, so it's a private water supply. And since 2018, it's been running dry during the summer, during periods of drought. And back in, it was two years ago, year before last, we were actually down to ten gallons of water a day, which isn't enough for the house, let alone to water the plants. So these techniques that I've been teaching around water resilience, how to build more resilient plants, water use, have been tested to the absolute limit, and it's been amazing what you can do.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: So what are weather conditions like? Do you say west Wales or western Wales?
[00:12:02] Speaker C: It is western, yeah, because I saw you saying that.
I just like to call it the wild west of Wales.
I live very high up, it's 750 foot above sea level in a very beautiful, very high, very remote spot. So it's just to get out of the way that I call it. But, yeah, I think geographically, that is correct to call it that. So the conditions are obviously very different to California. So although you've had an awful lot of rain you've had very wet winters last couple of years, but we do have much milder conditions. Generally there's been fairly robust seasonality, but that's all shifting with climate change. So there are a lot of common threads globally, which is that it's just extremes of weather. As the planet warms, you're not quite sure exactly what you're going to get. So when you get something, it tends to be more extreme. And we've got the El Nino effect as well, which is also exacerbating some of these climate warming effects.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: You get snow, do we do?
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Not as much as you've had recently.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Well, you have to understand, right, I'm on the coast and here it snows once in a blue moon and maybe above 2000ft, and it doesn't get cold. Climate zones vary an awful lot across California, but I'm more interested in the coastal area, which is much closer to where you are.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: Well, the thing with the work that I've been doing over the years and the book that was published previously, the Climate Change Garden, which was published by Cool Springs Press last year, but Sally Morgan, the co author, and I did an original version of that back in 2018 for gardeners. But you see, a lot's happened since then. And with all the on the ground training that I do, what I've realized is that it's really important for people to learn a sort of inner resilience to help them cope with the challenges with the changing climate. So the ideas contained in both books are global anyway, so we're looking at the how to deal with different scenarios. But also in the new book that's just come out, it's very much about how to build that inner ability to work around the challenge at the hand, but to grow in a localized way. So, like you say, in California, it's depending on where you are, there are many different microclimates, so it's not a one size fits all approach anyway. And it's really important to reach out and connect with the locality, the challenges at hand, to actually figure out how to deal with those. So it's about the self as much as the savvy solutions.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschis. My guest today is Kim Stoddart, who lives in western Wales at 700ft above sea level. She is the author of the Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden, how to grow Food in a changing climate. And we've been doing a comparison of climate in Wales and California, particularly the California coast. Let's talk about the book. Can you give us a 62nd summary and maybe tell us how you came to write it?
[00:15:35] Speaker C: Absolutely.
It's very much channeling the work that I've been doing over the years to help people cope with the changing extreme weather through climate change. So this is focused on vegetable growing, but it's giving people the tools from a logistical perspective, but also the well being tools to help them cope, because we are living through such stressful times. So this is being described by some reviewers as a friendly guide. It's like having a friend in a book that can help you feel hope for the future and the knowledge that you can grow in a way that will build resilience, that it will be okay if we work with person, plate and planet.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: So you did this previous book with Sally Morgan on the climate change garden. What's the difference between the two?
[00:16:25] Speaker C: The climate change garden is looking at the garden overall. So there's content in there about the flower garden, shrubs and so forth. And this book has more of a well being focus, but it's focused on vegetable growing.
It's focused on the putting food on the table, but it's also very much about money saving, and it's about time saving as well. So it's about making it easier for the gardener with the way that they garden, which has been very much about making the natural world center stage. So learning from the natural world, learning from your own growing space, and having the ability to tune into that. I've done a lot of work over the years with people that have some kind of mental health challenge, and it could be depression, it could be confidence building. It could be also autistic spectrum disorder. My youngest son's autistic. So it's a subject I feel extremely passionately about. And I have learned through the work I've done with various different groups how important it is to have emotional regulation in order to find that space where ideas flow. But this relates to everybody. So, actually, since the pandemic, I've been using a lot of these teaching techniques with everyone, because in order to tap into your prefrontal cortex and the ability to do the executive decision making, which means to problem solve, you need to be in a state of emotional regulation in order to do that. If you're quite fight or flight and running around with exacting to do lists, it's very difficult to think in such a problem solving capacity.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that's actually an interesting sort of notion that in a garden, you are to some degree in control. Right. I mean, you can order it, you can manage it. Of course, you can't always cope with the things that might come in or undermine. Like, for instance, in my backyard, we have lots of gophers, right.
It's difficult to keep things going because the gophers love roots.
But by the same token, we have ways of managing that. We put trees and plants in baskets, which usually works.
But this idea of, especially in the face of climate change, this idea that here is something that you can control.
And ideally it's also an action that you can take which is not dependent on major changes in what you do and how you live. I mean, I've been thinking about this, but at the same time, that gives a sense, I suppose, of emotional regulation. Right. That here is something where you can make decisions. Absolutely. And you can decide. When you're working on community gardens, do you ever work with groups of people aside from this business, this building, but literally community gardens?
[00:19:46] Speaker C: Absolutely. I've done work with people that are using a local food bank. And I think it's important with the work I do in the media to be really hands on with people as well. Within the. I can't do too much of it, but I do something at least once every couple of weeks. And I'm actually running a project at the moment near to me where I'm working with. It's a residential home for older people, and they say what they think.
It keeps me on my toes. So we're doing lots of. It's small space, container planting. So flowers with some edibles mixed in. So it's very much about. It's important for people to garden, to grow food in a way that works for them. So I think so often you see pictures and you see on social media, you see TV programs where gardens can look really pristine. And like you said, so often it's this idea that we have to treat a garden almost like another room in the house, almost start hoovering it and polishing it.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it's sort of like house beautiful, right. People compare where they live. In our backyard, we have what we call the thicket, which is an area which is pretty overgrown, but the birds like it and occasionally small mammals wander in and out.
It's not a matter of absolute control. Right. But it's also trying to kind of live, I guess, in cooperation with.
[00:21:36] Speaker C: It's got to be aesthetically appealing. So you don't want to have a space that is so overgrown that it's not appealing. You don't want to go near it. It's too much. But you can create flourishes, you can work with the natural world, and you can do it in a way that works for you. I mean, I do something called polyculture. I call it free planting, but it's known as polyculture in permaculture circles, and where you don't block plant with vegetables. So the idea being in a crop rotation system, you do that not to drain the soil of nutrients and to avoid a buildup of pests and disease, but by allowing more space between, say, two tomato plants than having them side by side, it makes it harder for things like blight to spread, and it also makes it much harder for pests to proliferate as well. I experimented purely to see if it was something that would help, because it used to make my head real, looking at exacting crop rotation plans, because I've got a 2.3 acre site and my gardens, I've got many gardens within a garden, and it used to really hurt my head thinking about what I had to plant organically to follow something else. Also, I got blight in my tomato plants, which was devastating.
I started in a small way and I realized how fantastic this method is. So there's lots of different things you can do that work well for you if you're a market gardener. So if you are making your living selling vegetables in a market, obviously that's not going to work, that you have to go hunting for your carrots in between other crops. But if you're growing food for yourself, it works perfectly well. And there's many, many different ways to grow a carrot, depending on where you live.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: So the idea here is that you're not entirely random, but you plant vegetable plants sort of scattered around the garden. Right. Interplant absolutely different crops.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: I do.
There's some rules with this, which are that I would allow roughly about 6ft between plants of the same family.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Just roughly.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: And you don't want to drain the soil of nutrients and you want to avoid the build up of pests and disease. But I will then plant other plants in and around. I mean, legumes and brassica do like peas and beans. The legumes and the brassicas, like the cabbages, do work rather well together, because if you leave the nitrogen fixing peas and beans in the ground, when they're finished producing in a no till system, cut them off, then you will get those later nitrogen fixing properties for your brassica. And you can turn some of brassica semiperennial, so you can actually grow them on for a number of years by just cutting them back. So they conserve their energy. There's all sorts of things you can do that aren't in the traditional gardening book, but the way to do that is to experiment and see what works in your own individual area.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: You have 2.3 acres in gardens, or that's your homestead altogether.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: That's the homestead overall. So the gardens are about a third of an acre, roughly. And then I also have a forest garden area, which is in one of the fields, and I have a container garden area and I have lots of other little areas around the homestead.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: So let's go back to the earlier years.
Okay.
Obviously, climate change has become a really big issue over the last ten years in terms of everyday sort of things in the newspapers and the like. Right? How did you. What sorts of things did you encounter that you identified as having to do with climate change when you were gardening?
Just to expand. Obviously, we've got these periodic storms which are dropping when they come through. They drop enormous quantities of water, which I think wasn't the case 40 years ago. But what do I know? But what in the UK, when you were in Brighton, I guess, what did you encounter that sort of convinced you that climate change was impacting your garden?
[00:26:23] Speaker C: I read a great deal around the food system, around something called the transition town movement in the UK, and this idea that how resilient are our food systems? How resilient is the climate? There's lots of different things that were happening, and I was linked in with different groups through the work that I was doing, because one of the businesses that I ran was a social enterprise, which had an environmental focus, so helped smaller businesses with an environmental focus to get their products out there. So it was a community interest company, which is a former social enterprise. So I felt very passionately about this and I just read about what the changes were likely to be on the ground. I didn't actually feel the on the ground challenges at the time in Brighton back then. That was 14 years ago. So we've been quite lucky in many countries in the west that we haven't actually experienced a lot of these changes until quite recently. So when I first started talking about this, I'd give examples and there are a few examples, but now it's just a moving beast that there are just examples every week, almost, in terms of how it's changing. But I read things like James Lovelock, I read about. I mean, there have been climatic changes throughout history previously, but this was something that was going to start impacting on us quite dramatically in the very near future. So I just enjoy reading I like understanding about things, so I just got slightly obsessed with the subject and read about it a great deal. So that really informed my desire to want to do this for a living and to help people build resilience.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: In one of your books or articles, you talked about flooding. At one point was that in Brighton.
[00:28:23] Speaker C: It was here in western Wales, and it was. I don't remember the exact year, it was either 2014 or 2015, but it was material, shall we say, when I was writing for the Guardian, because that's one upside of when you're in the media writing about things. So my gardens flooded very badly and then all the crops in the ground were ruined. It was underwater for weeks on end, really. And because of where I live, because there are farmers in surrounding the own surrounding fields, there was risk of basically pollution, effectively from some of the chemicals that might be used. So agricultural runoff effectively. But if your garden is underground for a number of weeks, there is a threat anyway from all sorts of things like pathogens. So it's quite tricky to deal with. So I had start again. So this really got me on a journey of research and discovery, looking at what people did around the world, what people have done previously to cope with flooding and how to help. And the other factor with this is that it really brought home dramatically the reason why no till is a really viable approach. Because part of the reason why my gardens flooded is because a farmer's field at the back of my gardens, which had been used for livestock grazing previously, were plowed. They were plowed, they were turned over. Therefore the grass was previously enabling that field to hold and retain an awful lot more water than it could then do when the field was plowed and there was a lot of rain. So the rainwater just came Channing through into my garden as a result of that. So it was a very stark example of how working with soil structures, improving the natural resilience in the ground, is incredibly important part of the mix when it comes to helping with flooding.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that sounds a lot like what happened nearby to small farms. They were underwater for weeks.
Their neighbors drained onto the farms along with all of the pesticides.
When you're gardening in farming country, I suppose that's one of the risks that you face, is that your neighbors may not be doing the same thing that you're doing.
You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschitz. My guest today is Kim Stoddart, who is a climate resilient gardener in western Wales and has just published a book about it called the Climate Change resilient Vegetable garden. We've just been talking about water events.
So you've had too much water at times and then you've had too little water at times. Right. Which again, I think is a common problem around here in California.
What are the best approaches to gardening with limited water supplies? Let me introduce a caveat to that. All right. We have a Mediterranean climate, and I don't think Wales does, which is to say that rainy season and dry season.
So if your water supplies are limited and you had, what, ten gallons a day, what happened to your garden?
Did you maintain it during that period? How did you do it?
[00:32:04] Speaker C: I did, absolutely. And I've also got hoop tunnels as well, which you can imagine can be more challenged with a period of drought as well because they can get extremely hot inside.
So there's a combination of different factors that help. So if you are watering, I mean, an obvious one start with is it's watering at the right time of day. So it's watering when temperatures are cooler, earlier or later, as much as you can. But it's also watering more deeply, because a lot of the time when people water, they can water, obviously avoid watering the leaves, but you want to try and get the water to permeate deeper into the ground and to keep it there for longer. So that's really key. And a lot of the time, gardening can be very stressful. When there's a period of drought, there's lots of toing and froing that's supposed to be done with watering plants. But the more you can build the natural resilience below ground in the soil, that also helps. That helps massively. So no till is very key. Using soil improvers, mulches can be used to help keep water in if you're using containers, if it's in the ground. So if you're watering, then you can apply, for example, if you have some leaf mold, if you have even some cardboard, or even if you do something called chop and drop, which is if you have some leaves from another plant, they can be used on the ground around a water hungry plant to help keep the water in. So I also use a lot of ground cover plants because I do this polyculture, this free planting. I use lots of filler plants, which actually help to cast shade and afford protection. So there's lots of different ways of doing it around crops that you like to grow, but the likes of lettuce, things like nasturtium, there's all sorts of examples where you can try and create these plants that aren't very heavy in terms of nutrient usage, but they can protect other plants. You can also, with things like tomatoes, you can do some really interesting things. You can actually root the stem of the tomato so that it actually is rooted in a few places, rather than just one, which will enable it to get food and water from further afield. So this worked fantastically well in my polytunnels, and my tomatoes thrived. I also have an awful lot of my heroes are fungi in the soil. And what is amazing is that because my gardens have been tested to the absolute limit. Sorry, I should say hoop tunnel. In the hoop tunnels, then the soil is full of my heroes, or fungi, because the plants have had to grow in extreme conditions. So this has come to the aid of my plants. But I also do choose certain varieties, knowing that this is an issue. So, for example, with cucumbers, I will grow crystal lemon cucumber, and I will grow some of the varieties that lend themselves well to a really low maintenance approach and a low water approach when it comes to growing.
But also, it's very much about trying to boost the soil, growing plants that are better suited, but also trying to protect the soil from the glare of the sun. So using materials that you have to hand to keep the water in as much as you can.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: So you've mentioned no till a couple of times, and there's some research around here that suggests, at least for farms in California with the Mediterranean climate, no till may not be the best way to actually farm. But when you were starting the garden, did you do any tilling initially when you were amending it and the like?
[00:36:11] Speaker C: I did, absolutely. I did that classic thing of going from a small garden to a larger garden space and wanting to be a good gardener. So I got a rotivator. So I got a rotivator and I churned the soil over and I used it probably once or twice.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: So we call them rototillers.
Sorry, rototillers. Same thing.
And how deep did you go?
[00:36:41] Speaker C: I probably went about half a foot down. I would say six inches. Yeah, six inches. And the thing with that is that it quickly became apparent from doing this that I was not just churning up the weeds, I was churning the life that was in the soil. So the most visible, that obviously being the humble earthworm. So I realized that it was slightly devastating, the soil. And the classic thing with no till is that a lot of people get this when they get a new plot and they feel they have to turn the soil over, and then what they're actually doing is they're bringing lots of weed seeds that might have been dormant below ground to the surface, and they get really disheartened because suddenly a lot of weeds start germinating. So that happened to me as well.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Here's a tip. We have a farmer nearby, and I don't know if he's patented this method, but what he does is he tries to grow several weed crops and he cuts them down before they flower.
[00:37:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: So the idea is that eventually you deplete the supply of seeds, dormant seeds in the soil.
Of course, unless you go too deep, you're tilling too deeply, in which case, yes, that's a problem.
[00:38:04] Speaker C: Even with the no till approach, with courses that I've run, you've got people that are following that process and they feel they have to stick almost exactly to the let that they can't dig at all, they can't till at all in any way, shape or form. And I do sometimes till a bit, if it makes sense.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: How exactly do you do tilling in your garden or not tilling, or when do you dig and turn over the soil or not?
[00:38:37] Speaker C: Well, I use a predominantly no till system, but at times, if I feel that I need to turn the soil over, I will. So if the soil got extremely compacted for some reason, I would need to aeriate it slightly. And I think a lot of the time with systems, people feel they need to follow it exactly. So it's like, for example, if you look at a system of instructions on the back of a seed packet, which is plant to a certain depth an exactly same time of year. And actually, with climate change, it's important to work around what makes sense and to try and build that innate ability within all of us to problem solve, if we can, around what we think we should do. So if you feel that you should till a bit, then try tilling a bit, maybe try tilling and then not tilling, and then compare the two and see what works best for you. So it's really, really important in whatever you do to feel that it's the right thing and to really own it, not to feel that you're following very exacting instructions. In life, there are instructions and rules for a reason, but in the garden, with the challenges that we're facing with climate change, it is a space where actually you can do things slightly differently. It's a safe space.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: You mentioned earlier the mycorrhizal fungi. I hope I have pronounced that right. Not the same as in british English.
Were they there before you started gardening? Did you do something to introduce them into your garden.
And I say this because I think a lot of gardeners don't know about it. And it seems to be much more important in terms of supporting plants and communities than I think people realize. So what did you do?
[00:40:40] Speaker C: It's absolutely fascinating. Well, it's one of those things where I didn't notice it. I didn't notice any in the soil when I first moved here 14 years ago, I think it moved in. So I think the regenerative practices that I was using do use have encouraged it, because nature will find a way. If you create space for natural world. It's amazing how quickly it can move in with gusto and from an everything perspective, a resilience perspective. We are just really at the proverbial tip of the iceberg in terms of our knowledge about the World wide web beneath our feet and how plants can have. They can form symbiotic relationships with fungi, with other plants. If you take a forest, trees will be interconnected through fungi, potentially weaving it all together. They can send messages to each other through their roots. There are so many things that we don't really understand about this. It's a fascinating, fascinating area of research and discovery. And there's lots of links historically with fungi and plants. And the way that the Microsoft, sorry, I'm pronouncing it slightly differently, the fungi can actually effectively enable plants to extend their roots so they can find food and water from further afield. And there's a lot of research being done now into if you give your plants in the soil lots of fertilizer and if you give them lots of water, they can become naturally more not, sorry, naturally they can become lazier and more reliant on your help. Whereas if you give them a little bit of tough love, they can potentially dig a little bit deeper with their roots to help tap into this natural resilience that is potentially below our feet, below the ground.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: Interesting.
What do you do for pest control?
[00:42:50] Speaker C: I garden organically. So my approach to dealing with pests has really evolved over the years. I used to panic at the sight of an earwig. I used to have to think about certain pests and spiders. I'd say I was slightly scared of them moving from the city, from Brighton, but actually I've realized that everything has its place. If you have as much biodiversity as you can, then a pest can become food for something else. This won't happen overnight. If you have a lot of slugs eating your lettuces, you need to act.
But where are the slugs coming from. Can you use system like mixed planting? Can you look at creating space for more of the natural predators to move in? I mean, the humble ladybug, for example, its immature version, the larvae can eat hundreds, even thousands of aphids. So anything fast moving, so many different creatures can actually provide a lot of benefit. And actually, with climate change, with our changing climate, a greater risk of pests and disease is a real threat, because certain pests can, they love the wet weather, they love periods of heat, and they can breed more, they can overwinter, and you've got also issues like migratory pests moving in. So the more that you can build natural resilience, the better that will be overall. And then it becomes more of an eaten, be eaten world. But also plants that are challenged by the extreme weather, flitting from one element to another can be weakened. So it is a big issue, but the more that you can try and create some sort of balance, the better that will be.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: Do you plant anything to enhance biodiversity and I guess, natural pest control?
[00:44:58] Speaker C: I do, yes, absolutely. I will plant so that there's food for pollinators all year round, as much as possible as required. So winter flowers here in the UK, for example, that's more relevant to our climate, but there's certain things you can grow that will attract those creatures that you really want to have around. So in the case of the lovely ladybug as well, things like fennel, they absolutely love fennel. So there's lots of plants that can be useful. But also further to that, as a general rule, if you can allow some of your crops to actually complete more of their natural cycle by growing on and flowering, that will also be great for biodiversity. So say, for example, if you have a lettuce, you pick your lovely lettuce, but I tend to go for the pick and come again leaves. So I don't go for the varieties of lettuce that the ball headed varieties, I go for pick and come again leaves, and then you can leave those two to grow up and flower and set seed the likes of your coriander. There's lots of different things you can do this with, and it is amazing for those beneficial creatures that you want to attract in, and you can also save your own seed. And by saving your own seed, you can do things like you can plant breed, which means you can choose to save seed from the plants that have demonstrated some resilience against, example, drought, that will help with the seed that you're saving for future use.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: Well, we're coming close to the end of our time together. I'm wondering if you could list maybe the five most important practices that support climate resiliency in a vegetable garden.
[00:46:55] Speaker C: Absolutely.
The main five, off top of my head would have to be the soil. First and foremost, make the soil the best it can be. So try and work with that. Boost natural systems below ground and improve the soil's ability to hold and retain water. So that is absolutely crucial. And then natural pest control we've just spoken about. But that is really important. So going chemical and pesticide free is really, really helpful with allowing the natural world in to lend a helping hand the natural systems. I'm amazed time after time with the way that that can work, but it's also trying to create a space when your garden is truly alive and a more enjoyable place in which to be. Thirdly, I would following on from that, recommend polyculture, which is one of the best things I've ever done, which is to not plant sort of rigidly in blocks. You can still have rows in a mixed planting system, but you just have more space between the plants. But in doing so, if something doesn't work, it's also hidden. So because you've got lots of different crops altogether, but also it's just so much better because it's much harder for a pest to find what they're looking for.
Fourthly, I would say it's really important to try as much as you can to find some opportunity to just sit and be in your space, in your outside space, and try and connect with it and look and learn and tune into it and think for yourself about what you think needs to be done. Forget what other people are doing. Have that space, that emotional regulation to think about what you would like to see. For you, this is your well being space as much as anything. And a garden needs to be. I call it gardening for person, plate and planet. And in order to cope with extreme weather, to cope with all the things that are happening in the world, we need to nurture ourselves. So if you can try and create some space to be even partly at peace, forget all the stuff that's going on, that will help you in lots of different ways.
Last, but by no means least, because I haven't mentioned this yet, but actually low cost growing, low cost gardening is one of the best ways of building resilience in your space. So not feeling reliant on having to buy absolutely everything in will enable you to build some of these problem solving skills. So say for example, making your own compost, saving feed from your plants, taking something that would otherwise go to landfill, so something would otherwise be thrown out. It could be an old pot, it could be some wood from a building project, it could be anything you like, an old Wellington boot. And turning it into something useful is a way of reducing your impact on the planet and also getting creative. And it feels really very good. If I could also, because this is slightly six, if I could also just feed into that aside, working with others, bartering, swapping, exchanging little acts of kindness, reaching out to your community, also as part of number five, although I've really.
[00:50:34] Speaker B: Just given six, that's quite all right.
When I was reading through your book, I was struck by that what you write about, the advice you offer and all this are also generally applicable to farms, particularly small farms. And I was wondering, have you gotten any interest from farmers in your book, in the work that you've been doing?
[00:51:01] Speaker C: I do have farmers coming on courses that I run. So it's interesting you say that, because in the UK, a lot of farmers are looking to diversify with their income streams. So I do actually get a lot of farmers coming along and I do write. I have written for press in the UK, homesteading, small farmers press as well. So I'm familiar with a lot of the challenges.
So, yeah, absolutely. I'm really keen to encourage that.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: Also, what kinds of things do you teach them?
[00:51:36] Speaker C: I mean, if you're a market gardener, so that's obviously a different proposition altogether. But certainly in the UK, there used to be a history of a lot of farms would know it wasn't monoculture, it wasn't one type of livestock. They would keep lots of different types of animal and they would have a vegetable garden, they would have a vegetable garden, they would grow food to bring to the table as part of that proposition. So here farmers are looking to maybe set up a cafe and grow food to offer to the small restaurant, or they're looking to maybe get into horticulture and grow some plants to sell, say, for example, herb plants. So people are looking for different ways to feed into the work they're doing. But also it's good for the natural pest control to again, create some of these spaces. The more that we can diversify and create biodiversity, whether we're a homesteader, whether we're a back gardener, whatever scale we're doing it at, it does really help, not just to be focused on one thing.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: Is there anything that you'd like to mention that we might not have talked about?
[00:52:56] Speaker C: I can't think of anything. I think. Thank you. You've asked a really great array of questions. So I think just the well being side, I feel some people have said this is a bit of a self help guide, this book as well. So I think just again, that is such an important thing because people are struggling with all the things that we're dealing with right now. And if you're in a state of fight or flight, it's really hard to implement the on the ground solutions.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: Where can our listeners find your book and learn more about your work?
[00:53:30] Speaker C: I have a website which is Greenrocket courses, which is Deltco UK. I'm on Instagram, which is Kim art, and I'm on Twitter, which is now x as at badly behaved one, which is a play on the words because I'm being well behaved.
And also the book is widely available to buy from if you maybe go to the Quarto website, but it's widely available throughout the states.
[00:54:03] Speaker B: All right, well, listen, thank you very much, Kim, for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:54:08] Speaker C: My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been brilliant.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: You've been listening to Kim Stoddart, who is a climate resilient gardener in western Wales and author of the climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden, how to grow Food in a changing climate. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] slash SustainabilityNow, as well as Spotify, Google podcasts and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: You good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, you good plan.
