That something is this: you can be regenerative, rather than extractive, in how you grow food.

The funny thing is it doesn't sound all that radical when I write it down like this. Just common sense really. After all, I’m sure most of us have visited places where the soil has been improved and deepened through a gardener’s love (and a lot of compost) over time.

However, I want to pause on this for a moment, because in our modern capitalist way of doing things it runs quite counter to the way things are normally done. The aim of a capitalist economy is to extract as much value as we possibly can from something, so that we can make as much profit as possible. There is little incentive to put money back in, except that which is used to help the enterprise itself grow. (Before you point this out, I realise there are heaps of organisations and enterprises that don’t put profit above all else - but they don’t tend to be the richest and most powerful. So, it’s not that you can’t survive in a capitalist system if you want to be caring and regenerative, but it is true that the most caring and regenerative of businesses aren’t running on huge profit margins. But I digress.)

In modern agriculture we hear about soil degradation, erosion, mining of the soil. There are claims that the world has only 60 years of harvests (or good topsoil) left. But the modelling used to make such assertions assumes that growing food is necessarily an extractive and depleting activity. Yet, as many home gardeners know, growing food does not have to be extractive - we can grow the soil and food at the same time.

I know that back gardening is really small scale. Some would argue it is impossible to do what gardeners do at a large scale, though regenerative agriculture practitioners would disagree. Either way, on a personal level it's incredibly good for our souls to know that sometimes our human actions can be regenerative and healing to nature, and not exploitative or always bad.

Sometimes it even happens quite unintentionally! Nature does this already. If it weren't for the amazing ability of plants to harvest the sun’s energy, turn it into biomass which in turn is used by microbes to build soil and fertility over time, there would be no complex life at all on this brilliant and beautiful planet. But with a little bit of strategic planning and intervention, we gardeners can even help grow soil depth and fertility faster than it would naturally.

So, how do we do that?

1. Composting and amending

No surprises here, but composting kitchen scraps, clippings, leaves, small prunings and so on is a pretty common practice for avid food gardeners like us. When we first created this new vegetable bed, we looked around for whatever we could to start to build up organic matter. I remember adding heaps of autumn leaves to the newly made bed - we have a Chinese elm in the front garden which has small leaves that break down quite quickly and I used barrow loads of them. I didn't even bother composting them first - I just mixed them in with some of the remaining clay, a bit of compost, and periodically some horse poo. We are fortunate to live close to the Cook horse paddocks. Every now and then a large pile of horse manure is dumped at the side of the car park. Rather than letting this nutrient rich stuff go to waste dispersing its nutrients over the car park where they are not needed or wanted, we take a few barrow loads home and add to vegetable beds as needed. More recently I got a big pile of fresh chippings (basically whatever an arborist mulches after cutting down trees) which were liberally distributed overf the whole garden, including this bed. So over a few years, the bed has benefited from adding a fair bit of extra stuff that was otherwise going to waste. However, this process involved bringing things from off site into our garden, so if you were being picky, you could certainly argue that this isn't a case of 'growing' the soil, but rather building it with external inputs. Thinking about this more systemically, its a case of moving nutrients (organic matter in this case) from one location to another, not growing organic matter in place. But we can also grow the soil in place as well - as described in the next section.

2. Growing fertility in place

Healthy soil is alive. The natural lifecycles of plants gradually creates soil - think of deciduous trees dropping their leaves each autumn, or countless generations of annual plants living and dying, all of which provides food for all sorts of life which, over time, decays, digests and converts organic matter into humus. This is why the soil beneath old-growth forests can be fantastic. Interestingly, there are plenty of soil microbes which also feed on sugars that are provided by the roots of plants - this means that soils stay healthiest when plants are grown in the soil year round - you can remind yourself of this the next time you worry about having too many weeds in a spot, those weeds might be unsightly, but they are keeping your soil healthy.

Perennial plants are great for feeding the soil, as they live for many years, but in an annual vegetable bed they aren’t practical. Instead we have regularly planted nitrogen-fixing species into the beds - nitrogen fixers (also called legumes) harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere to boost their growth. As such, they are often some of the first species to recolonise cleared or damaged land. Once these nitrogen fixing plants die, they provide nitrogen-rich biomass to rot down and increase the overall nitrogen levels in the soil for the next plants to grow there.

So, in our little vegetable bed we have aimed to grow legumes regularly - climbing and dwarf beans in summer, and broad beans or peas in the winter. Here in Canberra you can’t really get better than the humble broad bean. While we eat the beans, the remainder of the plant is excellent as a source of bulk organic matter - it grows quite big and those stems are pretty sturdy. When the plants are finished, we tend to chop the plants at the base (leaving the roots intact within the soil, where they break down gradually, creating little tunnels that help rain soak in more easily). We then chop up the spent plants, and drop these chopped pieces over the ground, to rot down in place.

Part of the approach with cutting plants off at the base, rather than pulling them out, is to reduce tillage of the soil. Traditional tilling disrupts soil structure and harms beneficial organisms. No-till gardening, on the other hand, promotes the natural processes within the soil. By leaving the soil undisturbed, you allow earthworms, microbes, and other beneficial creatures to thrive. This method encourages the formation of healthy soil aggregates and improves overall soil fertility. With vegetable gardening there is always some need for tillage when swapping out one crop for the next and to reduce weeds around your crop, but our general approach is to minimise this and cut spent plants back at the base, leaving their roots to rot in the ground, rather than pulling them out wherever possible.

Our vegetable bed has therefore benefited from two main approaches which has resulted in a good layer of rich soil in this spot over several years. In nature, it's believed that a few cm of topsoil takes about 1000 years to grow. Clearly in our bed, by adding in extra material, through plant selection and chopping spent plants up to help them break down faster, we have speeded up this process quite a lot. However, there is one more aspect to growing soil and fertility that I believe has been very helpful for us, and it is often overlooked.

​That is the role of water.

3. Speeding up the process

​Our back garden is on a natural slope. All slopes shed some water in rain, and the heavier the rain, the more runoff there will be. This is why land on slopes is drier than land at the bottoms of valleys. Water also carries nutrients, which is also why the flat bottoms of valleys are also usually more fertile than the steeper land surrounding them.

To counter the effects of the slope, when we made our garden beds, we tried to make them as level as possible, and this bed was no exception. The edge of the bed you see in the picture above is particularly pronounced because it forms a level terrace above it.

When you make your vegetable beds level, it is much easier to water them with a hose, and rain will mostly soak in.

However there is more. Immediately upslope of this particular bed is a paved sitting area, which is slightly sloped so that water sheds off this area and into the garden bed. The paved area is about twice the size of the vegetable bed - if all the rain that falls on the paving ends up in the bed, this is the effect of tripling the annual rainfall on that particular bed. In addition, the downslope side of the bed is part of a swale system we have in the back garden that harvests driveway runoff and tank overflow, so this also creates additional moisture in the area.

Why is having water so important?

It speeds things up in the soil - more moisture allows for more efficient breakdown of plant matter into compost. (If you've ever suffered with a too-dry compost heap you will know what I mean - dry compost just sits there, it takes ages to break down!) Earthworms prefer a cool, moist habitat, so we are creating conditions for them to thrive in. Moist soil also helps our vegetables to grow bigger and faster, thereby creating more biomass to add back to the soil at the end of the season than would be produced in a drier garden.

So, adding water into the equation is the effect of supercharging the natural soil creation process.

The benefits of growing soil extend beyond the garden. Healthy moist soil captures and retains carbon, helping mitigate climate change. Organic rich soil also holds onto water better, like a big sponge. Plants grown in rich, healthy soil are more resilient to pests and diseases, resulting in better yields for you.

Returning to my initial point about being regenerative, perhaps the most useful thing about soil is that it's a really helpful test to see how things are going. If your vegetable beds sink down and lose volume year after year, then this would suggest depletion is occurring. That is, more is being extracted from the garden than is growing or being put back in. On the other hand, if you find your soil getting richer, deeper, and more fertile with each passing season, then you are experiencing first hand what regeneration looks like. Woo hoo - that experience is good for both soil and soul!

Growing soil is a journey, not a destination. It requires patience, observation, and a willingness to learn from nature. Sometimes it only takes a few small tweaks to set your garden from a state of degradation into one of regeneration. Remember, Cally's always available to provide advice and guidance if you feel you need a bit of help getting things started. That's what our garden consultation service is for!

As you nurture your soil, you'll find a deeper connection to your garden and a greater appreciation for the intricate web of life beneath your feet. So, the next time you admire your flourishing garden, remember that its true success starts with the soil—and you are the steward of its growth.

And, if you find your soil is indeed growing, pause and reflect on the fact that you are already helping to heal and regenerate the land. Go you!

Happy gardening!

If you like the idea of hosting your own garden share or crop swap, here are a few pointers that helped us!

What to swap/share
At ours we suggested three categories:

1. Fresh edible garden produce - e.g. herbs, veg, fruit, eggs
2. Preserved produce - e.g. jam, pickles, ferments, dried goods
3. Plant related - e.g. seeds, seedlings, tubestock, plants, cuttings, flowers

One thing thats usually discouraged from a crop swap is any produce that will spoil. In a community park there's no refrigeration, so things like meat, fish or dairy are a bit risky.

How to get the word out
We wrote up a little flyer with instructions on date, location and what to bring and distributed it around the neighbourhood. With only 100 flyers printed, we did focus on those houses where it looked like the occupants were interested in gardening! 

I also posted about it on our local Buy Nothing group, as well as the Canberra Homesteaders group - both of these are Facebook groups that I (Cally) am a member of. In addition we texted the details to any of our friends in the area that we know would be interested. With only 2 weeks' notice, we weren't expecting it to be huge - and to be honest I was pleased to keep it to a manageable size, especially as we were newbies to the whole thing.

Facilities
One of the big questions is where to hold an in-person garden share or crop swap. We are fortunate to live very close to a neighbourhood park. This allowed us to provide the location of the event in all of our invitations, without having to share our actual street address (like most people, I'm not super keen to publish our address onto Facebook!). However, being so close to the park meant that if anyone needed an emergency toilet visit, we were able to oblige. We also invited people wander through our garden for inspiration if they wanted to - Jeremy took a few tours around explaining everything we've been growing and what our goals are.

So, if you live near an underutilised urban space (there are a great many in Canberra!) then maybe a garden share is just the event to bring some life back into it! It gets communities together, builds relationships and connections, and gets people out doors and using our parks - which is, of course, what they were designed for!

On the other hand, if you just want to invite your friends and close neighbours, then there's no reason to not invite them over to your own home or garden. No need to make these events too big - a large number of small events is probably more effective than a few big events where you don't really get much chance to chat with fellow gardeners!

How to run it
We just let people bring things and lay them out on tables or on the ground. We broadly grouped similar items together - produce all went onto a rug (plus a couple of wheelbarrows contained pumpkins) while the plants were grouped together, mostly on the grass.

It's an honesty system - we didn't give out tokens or weigh anything - it was much more relaxed and casual than that. Once enough people had arrived, we gave a very quick welcome and shared some basic instructions - to the effect that we share what we can, and only take what we need. At the end, any unclaimed items were taken back by those who had provided them.

Would we do it again?
Absolutely! We had so much positive feedback - lots of participants were keen to do it again! So, we plan to run more of them - probably from spring through to autumn each year! Sometimes a gardening life can be quite isolating and solitary, so I very much enjoyed the excuse to catch up with friends and meet new people as well.

In fact, while avoiding garden and food waste is a brilliant outcome from a garden share, its other main function is to bring people together. With everyone being so busy, under pressure at work, racing around getting kids to various activities, it can be easy to never meet people in your local area. Events like our little garden share help to change that, so that we can forge connections and friendships in our neighbourhoods. 

I can't wait to get to know more keen gardeners in our area - what about you?

Do you think you might give a garden share a go in your neighbourhood too?

First up - some context:
​
​The term 'pesticide' covers any chemical that kills anything deemed as a pest. In this post I mostly refer to a class of pesticides called insecticides - chemicals specifically designed to kill insects.

From the mid 20th century onwards, a major transformation in agriculture spread around the world that aimed to significantly increase global food production to feed a rapidly growing population. It's often referred to as the Green Revolution, and it involved widespread adoption of modern farming techniques and technologies, including the use of high-yielding crop varieties, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides. The Green Revolution is widely believed to have staved off famines in many parts of the world, particularly in India, (although this narrative has also been contested). It also led to greater mechanization of farming, which included the use of tractors and other modern equipment. While the Green Revolution contributed to increased food production, concerns have been raised about the environmental impact of chemicals used and the sustainability of its resource and energy-intensive practices.

Many of the initial insecticides used during the Green Revolution and beyond were found to be toxic to a range of animals, and they persisted in the environment for a long time. They also accumulated in the bodies of animals, including humans. In fact, even today, long after these chemicals have mostly been banned worldwide, some people still have residues of DDT in their bodies.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring raised awareness about the environmental and health risks associated with the indiscriminate use of chemicals. The book's popularity and impact led to increased scrutiny and subsequent bans or restrictions on several (now notorious) insecticides, including: DDT, Heptachlor, Dieldrin, Aldrin, Chlordane and Endrin, in most countries around the world.

Today in Australia you won't find any of those chemicals still in use, although if you live in an older home it is possible that your foundations were treated with Dieldrin or Aldrin for termite control. It's something to consider if you choose to use soil close to your home to grow vegetables - it's worth getting a soil test done if that's your plan, because it's known they can persist in the environment for a very long time.

Since the 1990s, a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids (neonics for short) have been widely adopted, in part because they were considered safer for humans and other mammals than the older generations of insecticides outlined above. They were also considered more effective than older chemicals as well, to which some species were becoming resistant.

Insect declines and the rise of neonics

It's interesting to note that the catastrophic declines in flying insect populations that have been recorded over the past 30 years coincide with the worldwide adoption of neonics. As I noted in my previous post, scientists think flying insect populations around the world have declined by a whopping 75% over that time frame.

(Just a little clarification - this means the total numbers have reduced, it doesn't mean we have lost 75% of flying insect species. While some insect species will have undoubtedly gone extinct in that time, the statistic means that the total numbers of most flying insect species have declined markedly. So there are still native bees, butterflies, bogong moths and ladybugs - but most of these are in significantly lower numbers than they used to be. Apologies if I laboured that point to death - I just know that statistics can be a bit brain-numbing.)

Anyone who knows something about statistics will immediately point out that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. Perhaps it's just an unfortunate coincidence? As noted in my previous post, research suggests many different causes, but pesticide use is certainly up there as an identified major culprit. There have been a number of studies that point to the role of neonics in the decline of non-target insect populations, particularly bees.

This shouldn't be all that surprising when we learn how neonics work. Neonics are systemic - meaning they transfer throughout treated plants (pollen, nectar, fluids, plant cells - even when just the seeds are treated). These qualities make them highly effective, but dangerous to non-target species, like bees and other flying insects. For example, when canola (also called oil-seed rape) is grown from seed treated with a neonic, the pollen in the flowers also contains small amounts of the neonic. So, when wild bees forage on canola pollen and nectar they get a dose of neonics - and repeated exposure increases the amount of neonic in their bodies. Neonics are also environmentally persistent - that means they don't break down quickly and can accumulate in plant tissue and soils. 

In recent years several neonics have been banned in Europe because of their possible role in bee colony collapse disorder, where whole hives of bees just suddenly drop dead. In worse news, it may be that neonics aren't as safe for humans as previously thought, with a range of possible harmful effects from dietary exposure detailed in this research article. All classes of neonics, along with a few older generation pesticides banned elsewhere, remain approved for use in Australia.

You might be surprised to find just how prevalent neonics are here. Here's a long list of all the products on the Australian market that contain neonicotinoids. It's huge! They're not just used in products for agricultural crops, but also a range of products you might buy yourself for your garden, or your pet. As someone generally disposed to avoiding heavy duty chemicals I was a bit disappointed to realise that a range of flea/tick treatments for pets contain neonics, and I may well have used one of them myself on our dogs in the past without knowing.

While neonics are readily available online, I do have some good news if you're worried about them. Since 2018, Australian hardware store Bunnings hasn't stocked any product containing neonics, nor will accept any seedlings treated with neonics. So, while the shelves may be laden with various purveyors of death to insects (largely synthetic pyrethroids - much less environmentally persistent but still lethal to flying insects in the short term) you won't accidentally buy neonics.

Unfortunately, it's not just insecticides that are harmful to insects. It turns out that another pesticide, the world's most commonly used herbicide, glyphosate (known by tradenames like Roundup and Zero) may also damage a range of insects, including bees. If the poor critters escape one chemical they might be done in by another.

What can we do?

If like me, you are pretty horrified by the idea that three quarters of the populations of flying insects may have already disappeared from this planet, and would like to avoid losing the remainder, then please do read on.

I think it's helpful to consider how to approach this from two perspectives: how we can act societally and collectively, and what we can do as individuals. I hope to provide a range of ideas for each, and my suggestion would be to explore just one or two that interest you, so you don't get overwhelmed. 

Collective action

Calling for bans on the most dangerous chemicals
Being a devoutly chemical-free gardener will have little effect if everyone around you, and the majority of farms, still spray chemicals left, right and centre. Collective action is usually needed for for broader societal and legislative change. It was a public campaIgn that led to Bunnings no longer stocking any neonics, so public campaigning is effective.

• If the idea of Australia still allowing neonics that are banned in other countries is concerning to you, you might like to add your voice to a campaign to ask legislators to ban them, such as this Eko campaign, or this petition here.

Understanding the problem as one of design
While focus on single chemicals is a good start, this doesn't address systemic issues - and we permaculture people are always banging on about systems! Many farmers (and some home gardeners) feel they need to use chemicals to get any crops at all because of the armies of whitefly, aphids, blackfly that arrive to devour their plants.

This gets to the heart of the problem - why are there so many 'pests'? Broad-scale industrial agriculture, where single crops occupy large swathes of the landscape, is extremely vulnerable to pest problems and actually contributes to their increase. It's like designing the perfect lunch banquet for them and then being surprised that they turn up to eat it. Big fields of single crops (monocultures - which are needed for mechanical harvesting), create the conditions for the proliferation of pests. Enter the wide use of insecticides to control the number of these insect herbivores.

Ironically, despite years of spraying, many so-called pest species seem to still be quite abundant, while we have seen the populations of their flying cousins drop dramatically. Why is this? As noted above, neonics and other pesticides are lethal to a wide range of species, not just the target pest. So, repeated spraying has the unintended consequence of knocking out the flying insects as well - many of which are also the natural predators of those little herbivores that threaten harvests (for example, lacewings, dragonflies, ladybugs, parasitic wasps). But here's the issue - predators tend to breed more slowly than their prey, so ironically, any regular spraying regime for pests is likely to kill off their predators more effectively than it kills the pests themselves.

To explain: in a balanced ecosystem, there must always be more prey than predators. If things ever reverse, everything goes extinct pretty fast - all the prey get eaten and then the predators starve. So it's a kind of natural law that the lower down you are in the food pyramid, the faster you're likely to breed.

After spraying, the few remaining herbivorous (pest) insects breed quickly and so recover their populations much faster than the predatory insects that keep them in check. Ironically, rapid breeding cycles also means that resistance to certain chemicals can develop surprisingly quickly in a population. There are already several pest species that are developing resistance to neonics.

Meanwhile, the slower breeding predators, (as well as all sorts of other insects with longer breeding cycles, like bees) would have their populations effectively knocked out through regular crop spraying. With fewer and fewer insects in the surrounding environment to control pest numbers, the next season farmers are basically locked into doing the same thing again and again. 

In case you're wondering why this issue is relevant to the home gardener as well, consider that agriculture now occupies almost half of all habitable land on this planet. That's a big enough footprint to cause all sorts of disturbances in surrounding ecosystems that will overlap into suburbs and cities. Home gardeners too, who have been encouraged to use sprays to manage pests over many decades, will have also been inadvertently contributing to pest abundance and flying insect declines in much the same way as industrial agriculture, but on a much smaller scale.

To sum up, from an ecological systems perspective, it seems that the problem is that the whole design of modern industrial agriculture favours the proliferation of so-called pest species in the first place. So long as there are vast monocultures, we are creating smorgasbord conditions for herbivorous insects. Banning individual pesticides might improve things somewhat, but as long as a system is reliant on chemical control, then chemicals will still have to be used. Even though they don't persist in the environment for as long as neonics, organic and greener alternatives like synthetic pyrethroids are still lethal to bees and other flying insects if you spray them as well - they are still a form of chemical control. So the design is part of the problem. Insecticides were developed as a solution to a design problem, but ironically also exacerbate the very problem they are designed to fix.

Doing things differently

While chemicals continue to be widely used, there are changes afoot in agriculture. Pesticides are  expensive so farmers have an incentive to look for cheaper ways to grow things, especially when the negative consequences of chemical use have become obvious. Added to this is the sobering fact that the main victims of agricultural chemical use are farm workers themselves. Research suggests that worldwide, around 740 thousand cases of accidental acute pesticide poisoning occur every year in agricultural workers. So let's not assume that farmers are 'the enemy' here.

One high tech alternative to insecticides that is already gaining popularity is called 'integrated pest management.' A pest species is managed by a range of techniques including plant resistance, use of other plants, and/or with a biological control, like another insect or sometimes a bacteria or fungus that keeps pest numbers down naturally. Insecticides are only used as a last resort. Integrated pest management isn't the same as organics, but it certainly reduces the amount of chemicals needed. I think it's also important to realise it marks a mindset shift towards working more collaboratively with natural systems and processes, rather than purely exploitatively. 

Beyond, and in addition to this, there are now many individual farmers exploring different ways to grow food that not only reduce or eliminate chemicals but also specifically aim to restore ecosystem health - and that includes increasing biodiversity (and more flying insects). Organics have already gone fairly mainstream, but these new techniques often go further than that by creating feedback loops of increasing fertility and focusing on landscape and ecological regeneration, not just sustainability. 

Terms like regenerative agriculture and agro-ecology have been coined to describe these shifts in agriculture as it becomes more apparent that industrial agriculture may well be unsustainable in the longer term. Collective organisations are evolving to represent these farmers which are working to change the culture around how we grow food, to change value systems and expectations about what agriculture is, and how it can function in the landscape. 

• If regenerative agriculture and agro-ecology are new ideas to you, then check out Charlie Massy's book Call of the Reed Warbler which takes you on a trip to all sorts of farms around Australia and the world exploring how they are regenerating their landscapes. Massy's farm is on the Monaro so he's also a local.
• For a shorter, and even more local, exploration, I very much enjoyed Sam Vincent's book My Father and Other Animals. Both books show that farming can be done differently and still be economically viable, though it often takes some sort of crisis before people are willing to try a new approach. (Note: links take you to Dymocks - not an affiliate link. I'd prefer to direct you to a local business and not give Jeff Bezos any more money)
• If you enjoyed these books, then tell your friends and slowly this knowledge will begin to ripple through our community. Community expectations about agriculture are important. Farmers are people too. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.

Changing the Paradigm

While there are lots of promising directions within agriculture, there are still enormous quantities of chemicals being poured on agricultural land and flying insect numbers continue to decline. A large proportion of the world's food supply is grown with industrial agriculture, and alternative, more sustainable practices are still in the minority in developed countries like Australia. It is no small feat to turn the industrial agriculture behemoth around and try things differently.

It's challenging because we are dealing with multiple systems, from the structure of agriculture itself to market capitalism to our own attitudes to insects and our perceived right as humans to exploit nature for our own ends. It's also extremely daunting to begin to know what to do as a concerned citizen, especially in something so fraught as food production, where mistaken policy can quite literally result in starvation, as the dire situation in Sri Lanka attests. 

Systems thinking luminary Donella Meadows gave us lots to think about in relation to system change, and  one of the most powerful ways for change to occur is through something called a 'paradigm shift.' She defines a paradigm as:

"The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works."

So when our deepest held beliefs and values shift, then so do things that are important to us. When this ripples through a complex system like a society, its goals, rules, structures and practices change to reflect that shift in paradigm.

Before this gets way too abstract, let me explain why I have a peculiar optimism about agriculture. To my mind, experiments in regenerative agriculture and the like do represent a paradigm shift. The shift isn't just one of practice, to me it reflects a growing consciousness about working with - not against - nature. The concept of regeneration goes way beyond just sustainability in that it suggests that humanity can collaborate with natural processes to actively revitalise landscapes, increase biodiversity (including of our flying insect friends) and create feedback loops of increasing fertility - not simply keep things as they are.

Permaculture (as one of many forms of regenerative activity) offers quite a dramatic paradigm shift from conventional thinking in its 'earth care, people care, fair share' ethics. I still remember when, during my permaculture design course, it dawned on me that through good design, and a healthy dose of humility towards nature, I could actually do something 'good' rather than limiting my imagination to ways of being a bit less environmentally 'bad'. Consider how liberating it is to imagine having a positive ecological footprint, rather than minimising your current (bad) ecological footprint? It's not easy mind you, when we are all trapped in a system of exploitation and extraction - of both the natural world and in many cases each other as well - but it is possible.

At the same time, regenerative agricultural experiments are reflective of broader trends in society. Environmental concern has been growing for decades and the increasingly obvious effects of climate change are opening people's eyes further to the reality that we are part of nature and everything we do to nature we do to ourselves. Rising social inequality and the cost of living crisis is leading many to challenge capitalist notions of success and question what it means to live a good life. There is huge interest in minimalist and intentional living. There are even some quite prominent voices challenging the most hallowed goal of modern capitalism - infinite economic growth. There is clearly a very big social yearning to feel more connected to nature, and live a meaningful life that rejects at least the worst excesses of corporate greed. If there wasn't, Avatar wouldn't be the biggest movie of all time. Isn't it funny, how I started by talking about insect declines and pesticides, and now here I am talking about changes in social consciousness! But, when we see the world through a systems lens, when we understand that the relationships between things are just as important as the things themselves, then everything is connected! And my point in mentioning all of this is that I think there is a paradigm shift already underway across society. As I see it, the move to regenerative practices in agriculture is just one component of a broader societal shift that says something like: "we are doing too much damage to our beautiful world, yet we are trapped, working longer hours to pay ever rising costs, in a system of environmental and social exploitation. How can we live better, more meaningful lives that don't harm nature and each other?"

In our ever-changing social worlds, our job is not to doubt whether there is a paradigm shift underway. There always are shifts. Our job is to push the shift towards working with, not against, nature, as fast as we can. The clock is against us - species extinctions and climate change threaten to overwhelm us before we get there. Our job is to champion regenerative ways of doing things as loudly as we can.

Back to what we can do

• If you're inspired by these new forms of agriculture, then you might want to join or support organisations like The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, and Soils for Life who advocate for more ethical and environmental practices that support farmers and consumers. The more funding they can get, the louder their voices will become.
• Perhaps you want to start a petition or campaign to get major supermarkets to challenge their conventional suppliers to radically reduce their pesticide use over a period of say, 5 years - perhaps through integrated pest management? Clearly that campaign needs a creative person
• A quick Google search shows that agronomists - those people who provide advice to farmers - are all very keen to emphasise their sustainability credentials. How do we collectively lobby them to ensure they aren't just greenwashing?
• Can we advocate to update horticulture courses around the world that have taken a very pro- chemical approach in the past?
• Start a group on social media to generate interest in a local insect - perhaps Christmas beetles here in Canberra? You might share sightings or insect counts. Or tell your neighbours not to kill curl grubs in the garden. If you're a local, you could join the Canberra Nature Map citizen science project or join ACT for Bees.

A final word on chemical agriculture. There is a lot of debate about whether regenerative practices can ever fully replace industrial agriculture. Some say that regenerative agriculture will only ever be 'niche' and for wealthy consumers who can afford to pay higher prices for high end produce.

My own take is that we will never know if we don't experiment and try, and farmers who are trying things differently should be congratulated and supported for their efforts and experimentation. One thing seems clear to me - so long as big agriculture continues to damage its surrounding ecosystems and destroy its own soils, it will eventually bring about its own destruction anyway, so we need to try things differently to have any hope of getting out of this predicament. 

Individual action
Now we get to the part that's usually covered in conventional gardening blogs - what can you do in your own life/garden?

• No surprises here but I am going to strongly encourage you to not use chemicals! That covers chemicals for your garden but you might also want to go easy on the indoors and surface bug spray too. This also includes so called more eco-friendly pest control and synthetic pyrethroids too, these are still really deadly to non-target insects if you spray them by mistake.

 

• Are a few tiny insects really that scary? I'd encourage you to challenge some of the thoughts you have about insects. Culturally we struggle with 'creepy crawlies'. Our 11 year old daughter is especially freaked out by spiders, grubs and caterpillars. She has never touched a worm - despite my best efforts as a keen gardener and long time fan of earthworms. All this to say I get it. I like spiders in principle, but I still get the heebie-jeebies if I'm close to a huntsman! (Ironically I'm much better with redbacks - go figure!) Fast-moving insects in the corner of our vision trigger an instant jump-out-of-the-way reflex in most people, and that's an evolved survival mechanism. Some critters are biters, some are poisonous. I'm not going to say I'm a fan of mosquitoes, because I'm not, but I do recognise they are part of ecosystems. I will encourage you to wear light-coloured cotton or linen clothes with long sleeves and pants in warm summer evenings instead of slathering yourself in insect repellant, and if you do want to use it, go for a bit of citronella instead of the industrial chemicals. And I am speaking from experience - I am of that blood group that mosquitoes particularly love... My point is that we are going to have to make our peace with insects if we are to live in a functioning environment and begin to reverse the extinction processes that are already well underway. Insects underpin the terrestrial food chain - that means everything else depends on them. This means accepting their presence even if we don't like them all, but also observing and understanding that an overpopulation of anything is an indication of ecosystem unbalance, either locally or more broadly. Our job is to observe and see if there are patterns that help explain why certain populations are blooming while others are not.

If you are a food or ornamental gardener, and have been reliant on chemicals to help you out, I don't mean to leave you stuck. We do live in a disrupted ecosystem, so insect pests will often invade, so here are some alternatives to using chemicals:
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• Managing bigger bugs - snails, slugs and caterpillars: 
• If you have chickens, pick them off and feed them to the girls. If you find those big maggoty grubs in the soil that are curled up into a C-shape (curl grubs), please leave them be. Many are the larvae of the Christmas beetle as well as lots of other native scarab beetles. They don't cause as much trouble as people once thought, and many of them actually eat decaying wood matter and not plant roots at all. In fact, since putting a lot of mulch around I have seen an increase in these grubs in our garden, suggesting that whatever species we have around - it could be one or many, I don't know - are probably helping to break down organic matter and improve the soil. The best way to tell if there is a problem is if any plants look really sad. If everything is healthy, then no problem, even if you find lots when you dig a hole.

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​When I was a kid, back in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, I remember heaps of bugs that got stuck on the headlights and windscreen after car trips. I used to get flies in my eyes when I went on bike rides (not fun), or accidentally get one stuck in my mouth while excitedly running about - the joys of childhood! Today, even with the ever present pesky mosquito on summer evenings, and the many blowflies that mysteriously appear inside our house every day, Canberra feels a lot less insect-y than my childhood did. Even since I arrived in Canberra in 2006, it seems like those pretty Christmas beetles have dwindled in recent years.

I thought I'd ask some locals to see if their experience matched mine. So, I put a question onto the Canberra Noticeboard Group on Facebook. Over the following day I got over 100 answers - clearly an engaging topic! Although more anecdotal rather than statistical, the replies are interesting in how much they mirror what scientists have found around the world. While a few people reported not seeing a difference, a large majority of respondents said they had noticed marked declines in Christmas beetles, coffee beetles, bogong moths, ladybugs, dragonflies, butterflies, cicadas, spit fires (saw fly larvae), and even large blowflies. 

What is going on?

The Insect Apocalypse 
In a 2017 study, flying insect populations in Germany were found to have declined by over 75% in just 27 years. Similar declines were then observed in other parts of the world. A 2019 synthesis study found that insect declines were very likely to be a worldwide trend, and suggested that if these trends continue, up to 40% of insect species may become extinct in coming decades. As I read over these points I've just written, I think it's worthwhile pausing for a moment. There's so much awful environmental news out there that I often read things like this in a state of grey numbness. Perhaps you do too? I feel my stomach tighten a little as I add this knowledge to the pile of grim statistics I already know, but I don't really feel it. Because, to be honest, I can't fully allow myself to feel the tragedy of what that means - it's too overwhelming. I know insects are only one part of the massive biodiversity losses we are facing - and that awful statistics like these can be told about a great many species, including those that are far cuddlier and cuter than insects. But I still want to pause, perhaps just long enough for us both to sit with this knowledge for a few more uncomfortable moments. Research tells us we are in danger of losing almost half of all flying insects in coming decades. What does that even mean? I find I can't quite get my head around that - it's both really easy - and really hard - to imagine. I'm not that old - I will probably still be alive to see if that prediction comes true. I hope it doesn't. I hope that what share in this series of blog posts can be my contribution - no matter how tiny - to that prediction not coming true.

When I sit in the garden and look at the bees and hoverflies on my spring blooms, it seems impossible that half of them could be gone in a few decades. And yet, somehow it also feels quieter than I would like. I can already feel that there is a lack, that perhaps there should be more variety, more species, more diversity. I can only see honeybees (from my neighbour's hives) and a few hoverflies. Oh and some blowflies. It's still early in the season, perhaps the others will join as the weather warms. I will keep watching, and hoping.

Birds in crisis
As flying insect populations decline, many insect-eating bird populations around the world are falling in tandem with the decline of their prey. A 2019 study in Science found that bird populations in North America had dropped by almost a third since 1970 - that is, there are approximately 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970. Three billion. That's another of those mind-numbing statistics that's almost too crushing to imagine if you think about it for too long. I find myself able to consider the full implications of what I know about the silent retreat of the natural world for only a few seconds at a time. It's almost impossibly sad. 

If the above two points weren't harrowing enough, I'm sorry to have to tell you that the decline of flying insects directly affects us too. We need flying insects to guarantee our own food supply.

What it will do to us
Many flying insects are pollinators. Everyone has heard of the valuable role of honey bees as pollinators, but actually all sorts of other bees are also vital, as well as wasps, butterflies, and moths. Even the humble blowfly does a bit of pollinating, though perhaps more by accident than design. Pollinators are essential for the plants they pollinate. Many fruits, vegetables, and nuts are insect-pollinated - about one-third of total global food production relies on insect pollination. That means, a decline in pollinators threatens our ability to grow food. In parts of China apple and pear crops have been hand pollinated since the 1980s because of pollinator declines, due to habitat loss and pesticide use. You probably won't be surprised to read that hand pollinating is labour-intensive and less efficient than insect pollination. It's not a great Plan B.

Why is it happening?
The reasons for the declines are numerous. While insecticides and habitat loss are well known causes, there are some other reasons that might surprise you. I know some of them surprised me. Below I briefly describe some of the key reasons for insect declines.

Note: because there is so much to know - and importantly, so much that we can do - I have decided to write a separate blog post for each of the issues below. My aim is to provide you with more detailed and strategic information on what we can do than the usual platitudes you see in gardening blogs. While pollinator-friendly gardens are a pleasant little step forward, we will need to be a lot more strategic and broad thinking, as individuals and societies, to reverse the insect apocalypse.

1. Pesticide use: Not surprisingly, the widespread use of pesticides is a major contributor. The term pesticide covers any chemical that kills anything deemed as a pest - that includes insects (insecticides), plants (herbicides), bacteria (bactericides), fungi (fungicides), even rodents (rodenticides). Basically, if there's a form of life that can be viewed as a pest, it seems that a chemist somewhere has invented a chemical form of death for them. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Is this really a mark of our progress as a species - that we are getting more and more efficient at stealth killing?

While there has been a fair amount of press on the role of certain insecticides - called neonics - in the collapse of bee populations, I was surprised to learn that other pesticides, even those not targeting insects, can also cause problems. In the post following this one, I will explain what pesticides are doing, and try to give you some bigger picture and meaningful ideas for approaching this issue, individually and collectively.

2. Habitat Loss: Habitat loss is caused by land clearing for both agriculture and urban expansion. Here's a sobering statistic - did you know that almost half of all habitable land on this planet is used for agriculture or urban areas? (In this context, habitable refers to land that isn't completely barren or covered in glaciers.) The remaining land includes previously cleared areas and plantations as well as virgin forests, so these are by no means untouched. In the words of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES - basically the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC) about three quarters of the total land area of the planet has been significantly altered by humanity in some way.

It should not be surprising then to learn that insect declines have already been so large, when so much habitat has been disrupted. In my upcoming post on this issue I will go beyond generalist advice like 'plant a few more flowers and we'll do our bit for the bees.' Even at this level of individual action I think there are more strategic ways to do this, as well as some cultural questions to ask ourselves. In addition I will have some thoughts about how we might address things systemically.

3. Cars and roads: This one was quite surprising to me. I recently heard an interview with Paul Donald, the author of a very interesting new book called Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It. In the interview he pointed to a kind of collective blindness in our society where, because we all drive, we tend to overlook the obvious impacts of driving. I realised that I too have mostly overlooked this, having grown up around cars and seeing them as completely 'normal.'

While vehicles directly kill countless insects - as the bugs found on windscreens will attest - the building of roads also fragments and destroys their habitats. As such, it extends the issue of habitat destruction outlined above. Roads act as barriers, preventing insects from accessing essential breeding and foraging areas, and creating tiny islands of lower resilience habitat between them. If that wasn't bad enough, the ozone created from car exhausts in cities also happens to be an effective insecticide itself. No wonder dense cities aren't full of insects. In my upcoming post on this issue, I'll give you some understanding of why small islands of habitat are generally less resilient than larger ones, and give you a fun exercise to do with your kids (or anyone really) to explore your neigbourhood from the perspective of a small bee. 

4. Light Pollution: Have you ever noticed moths and other bugs flocking to lights after dark, flying round and round and at the lights until they collapse from exhaustion? It stands to reason that the more light pollution there is, the more disruption to nocturnal insects. Light pollution from urban areas disrupts the natural behaviors of nocturnal insects, including their breeding, navigation, and foraging. This leads to decreased populations in well-lit regions and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, light pollution is a major issue for insects. It's also got quite a lot of solutions too, and so in my upcoming post on this I'll take you through some of the ways the situation for our poor nocturnal flying insects can be improved.

​5. Climate Change: You knew I was going to have to mention it somewhere! But it's placed last for a couple of reasons. Firstly, climate change already gets a lot of press, so it probably doesn't need me to repeat a lot of it. Secondly, it can be tempting to blame everything on climate change, which is disempowering, because as you can see from the above points, there are many factors that are causing the decline in insect numbers. Even if there was no climate change insects would be in trouble. And we can do something about these, even as climate change relentlessly progresses and we pray that the world's leaders will get their acts together. That said, like my other posts, my intention is to explore what we can do both individually and collectively in relation to climate change and insect decline.

So - are you ready to embark on learning something about this frightening insect decline and what you can do about it? If so, I invite you to read my next blog about the role of pesticides and some thoughts from a systems perspective about what we can do about it, personally, culturally and societally.

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What happens to water in our gardens today

In order to help us think about the value of water harvesting, here's a quick thought experiment:

Imagine your property before it was turned into a suburban lot. It was probably originally grassy woodland, though it may have more recently been grazing land. Provided that you're not on much of a slope, most of the rain that landed on your plot would have soaked into the soil - especially if there was a good variety plants growing on it (plant roots create tiny access ways for rain to more deeply penetrate the soil). On the other hand, if you live on quite a steep slope, there was probably some runoff during heavy rain, which in turn would have influenced what plants could grow there.

Fast forward to today, and have a look at where the rainfall goes on your property now. If you have a suburban property here in Canberra, it probably contains a house, a driveway, paths, maybe a garage and a shed or two in the garden. You might even have a second property or granny flat. Together these make up the hard surfaces in your garden - and if you look, you will find that they are nearly all connected to drains that lead into the storm water system. For many older properties with large gardens, the amount of hard surface is around 25% to 35% of the total land area, while in higher density suburbs, the hard surfaces might take up 75% or more of the total area. So, even if you have installed rainwater tanks, there is probably plenty of other infrastructure that still diverts runoff straight into the storm drain system.

What this means is that your garden now sheds anywhere between 25% and 75% of the rain that would have once naturally been taken up in that land. Year after year, this means that your land will be drier than it once was (unless you do a lot of supplementary watering). While structures certainly prevent evaporation, if you still have large trees in your garden that pre-date the building of your house (as we do), those trees may now be existing on less water than they once had access to. Now that summer temperatures are on the rise, and with that, higher evaporation, this situation places many street and garden trees under increasing stress, just when their cooling shade will be needed most.

​Many new suburbs now take water-sensitive design into account, so that runoff from hard surfaces and roadways is directed into planted bio-swales and rain gardens. But what about existing suburbs that were designed to shed water as quickly as possible into the storm drain system? Is there much we can do, beyond installing rain tanks? And if there is, can we ensure that we do it safely and don't accidentally flood our gardens or house foundations?

Thankfully the answer to the above questions is a resounding yes. The video below shows a simple design we have used to harvest water off our driveway and divert it into adjacent garden beds. Our approach is an example of passive water harvesting in that there is no mechanical element (like pumps or water treatment) - all the water flows directly into the garden where it soaks away into the ground. In this situation, we are using the soil as our water storage - it's amazing how much water it will take and it's also cheaper than a tank!

As the video shows, a bit of simple retrofitting can help direct runoff at ground level into nearby garden beds, though for a gravity-fed system like ours you will need to check that your slope is right for it. There are usually relatively simple solutions for increasing passive water capture in most people's gardens and this is something I always explore as part of a garden consultation or design service.

Water harvesting as a resilience strategy for both dry and wet weather
It's fairly obvious that in a drying climate it makes sense to harvest as much water as possible when it does rain, but did you know that the act of harvesting water in your garden can also alleviate problems associated with too much rain as well?

Basically, the more water we can keep on our land, the less water goes into the storm drain system when it does rain. While one or two gardens won't make much difference, if a large number of us implemented water harvesting, this will take a lot of pressure off the storm drain system during extreme heavy rain events.

And you guessed it, even if Canberra does get some very arid seasons, those climate models tell us to expect more extreme rainfall events, especially associated with summer and autumn thunderstorms. This is because a warmer atmosphere holds more water, increasing the likelihood of sudden, severe rainfall. Like they get in the tropics. So while every year may be different, we can expect the rain to come down pretty hard when it does rain - again, making it challenging to manage when it does come.

Remember the year the ANU flooded in that major thunderstorm? That’s the sort of weather event that could happen more. If we can all direct at least some of our storm runoff into our garden, there's less chance of downstream flooding.

A quick caveat: a critical part of any water harvesting approach is to ensure that it can safely seep into your garden in a controlled manner. A key component of any design is to make sure that any water flowing directly into your garden and soil are slowed down first - fast flowing water erodes landscapes, while slow moving water tends to soak in. So all approaches to directing water into your garden in permaculture strongly emphasise ways to slow water down and let it soak in gently. And once any water harvesting system is full, it is best practice to make sure any overflows do go back into the storm drain system - making use of this system as a useful emergency overflow once your garden is full, rather than it being the first port of call for any water shedding off hard surfaces in your garden.

So to summarise, water harvesting in our gardens actually gives us two benefits:

1. Storing water in your garden (both in tanks and directly in the ground) gives your plants a free drink and makes the garden more resilient to periods of dry weather.
2. Reducing the amount of water going into the storm drain system means less chance of downstream flooding in low lying areas (e.g. at the ANU).

I hope that was a useful little foray into the wonderful world of water harvesting! There is plenty to know and there are of course myriad ways to effectively store water in your garden. But I'll save the nitty gritty of specific techniques for another post. As we implement more and more of these in our own garden, we also hope to provide some workshops on water harvesting in the future to explain the theory and see it in practice as well!

Wishing you all the best this winter and hope you are enjoying the much-needed rain as much as we are!
Cally

Step 1: The first thing we do is chop up as much as we can of the previous crop. To minimise soil disturbance you can actually just cut the last crop off at the base (instead of pulling it up) so that, as the plant breaks down, the decaying roots open up spaces in the soil for the next crop. This 100 litre pot contained purple climbing beans and a zucchini. This technique is called 'chop and drop' - we are returning some of the nutrients that the previous plant used up back into the bed. (Unfortunately the zucchini was completely covered in powdery mildew so that went into the compost to avoid having too many fungal spores around for the next round of seeds.)

​Step 2: water well to help this layer break down. 

Step 3: Add some of your preferred fertiliser. As well as bagged products, you can use manure, your own compost tea or worm castings/liquid here if you prefer. We added some organic pellets and blood and bone because the soil in our beds was fairly depleted when we started so it still needs some amendments to get things growing. Then water this in well too.

Step 4: add some fine soil or potting mix for planting into - the seeds would struggle if you planted them straight onto the prunings.

Step 5: Ensure this layer of soil is nice and wet, then sprinkle on the seeds and, very gently mist them to make sure the seeds are good and wet.

Step 6: Now we need to cover the seeds - we used a very light sprinkling of coarse sand (because we have a lot of it at the moment) but you can use fine seed raising mix, or sieved good quality garden soil or compost if you have it. To ensure everything is nice and wet we do another misting with the hose. Then we use a bit of old netting to protect the seeds from birds and to create a milder microclimate for the seeds to germinate in (it's getting chilly out there now so the net should also provide a degree of frost protection).

And the seeds we planted were coriander seeds! Coriander is an excellent winter crop because they seem to cope fine with frost, and the cold weather slows down its growth so it doesn't just rush off to set seed (bolt) like it does in hot weather. We tend to use coriander as a winter herb and basil in the same bed in summer. Now that it's May it's getting a bit cold to sow coriander (germination will be very slow) but you can still plant broad beans, peas and snowpeas, and Mesclun salad mix during May and June.

When we woke on New Year’s morning, the light was a soft orange and everything sounded muffled and quiet in the blanket of smoke. Granted, New Year’s Day is always quiet, but even the birds seemed a lot quieter than usual. Keeping up to date with the latest news on the South Coast and East Gippsland fires on the ABC I found myself feeling a mixture of grief, numb horror and apprehension as to where the fires will spread to next. I also found myself wondering whether all the birds had died from smoke inhalation overnight. And what about all the insects and lizards and countless other critters I see in the garden - how had they fared? 

I didn’t stay long outdoors in the garden but I was heartened to hear that some birds at least were indeed still chirping and warbling in the trees. The little skinks were still dashing about in the undergrowth. The lemon balm was covered in bees. Even the neighbour’s old chickens were still crowing and waiting to be fed. The baby corn and beans are still bursting out of the ground, even if their new leaves are getting burned by the hot winds. But they are still growing, that irrepressible life force still pushing them upwards into the smoky air. 

And here is the point of this post: Nature doesn’t give up when the going gets tough. Nature may be being massively stressed and damaged in all sorts of ways right now, but it won’t just lay down and die politely. It keeps on going, fighting, breathing, living, even in tiny pockets where everything seems lost. The life forms around us all have a very strong will to live. And for me that is an inspiring, even hopeful, thought to hold onto as the country braces itself for the next few days of heat and likely further fire disasters. I am not trying to minimise the horrible devastation being wrought to humans or to Nature, or to suggest that our fellow beings don’t need our help - they clearly do. What I am saying is that for me at least, Nature is offering a clear lesson in not giving up or succumbing to despair about the state of things right now.

With the scale of the devastation being wrought in these fires, and the various dire warnings in the media about tipping points, feedback loops and the apocalyptic dry, hot and burning future to follow, it’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed and despairing about what is happening to our environment. Over this year I have spent a good deal of time reading books and reports about species extinctions and the threat of catastrophic climate change and, to be perfectly frank, this knowledge is really terrifying. It’s not something that is easy to absorb and reconcile into your daily life. If you read the Guardian or the ABC news you have probably come across similar information. It is often very hard to know what to do with this knowledge, especially when these issues are so global and it can seem that the things we do as individuals are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But yet, many of the environmental problems facing us today are fundamentally ‘tragedy of the commons’ issues - that is, although our individual impacts are tiny, when large populations all do the same things, then our combined impact is huge. Those impacts could be from anything that we humans do: how much we drive, what we buy, how we choose to holiday, what fuels we use, what we eat, and so on. 

This is important because it means that although it seems that what we do individually is negligible, if all of us (or even a substantial number of us) did things differently, the effects would actually be enormous. I’m not trying to suggest that we don’t need political leadership on global environmental issues when we clearly do. But, it can be heartening and empowering to realise that everything that you do is important too.

What form that action takes is up to you, but if you have a garden or verge in Canberra, here is one simple thing you could do right now if you aren’t already: give it some water. Put out a little saucer of water with some pebbles in it to give insects a drink too. Take a tour outside (don’t forget to wear a mask if you need to) and see what plants are struggling right now. I have seen the normally hardy shrub, viburnum tinus, nearly dead in gardens at the moment. Its pretty little flowers are great bee forage in late winter. Maybe check your neighbour’s garden too, especially if they are away. There are also street trees under significant stress and large trees provide an enormous amount of habitat for little creatures, not to mention moderating high temperatures - let’s not lose them if we don’t have to.

The beans and pumpkins died down back in June, but there are still little pockets of last season’s productivity in the garden - the mint has found a safe haven beneath other plants, meaning we can still harvest fresh mint even in winter. One of our warrigal greens plants (which is a frost tender species) managed to survive the winter, thanks to being protected under another plant and in a raised bed.

The data is already showing that Canberra’s climate, like most places around the world, is warming up. If you have been out and about in your garden you may have already started noticing changes over the seasons. Remember that amazing heatwave back in January? We had 4 days of 40 degrees centigrade - breaking all previous records for January.

So it seems sensible to share what we understand about likely changes to the climate here in Canberra and what this means for you and your garden, and how you can best prepare for what is coming.

There’s actually quite a lot to know about this subject so I will write this as a series of articles focusing on one element of Canberra’s climate system at a time, to help you think about ways to make your garden as resilient as possible to what is ahead.

While the weather is still cool, I figured a good place to start was to look at frost patterns, given that this is familiar and relevant to us right now.

A few years ago the ACT and NSW governments funded research to see what changes could be expected in the climate of Canberra and surrounds if the world were to continue on its business as usual trajectory and not limit emissions of greenhouse gases. You can find the report here.

What I hope to do with this series of articles is translate this big and very general picture of the future into something tangible, garden-focused and practical for you. Climate change is often portrayed in terms of sea level rise as if that was the only impact, when in fact pretty much all locations in the world will experience a range of different impacts. One of the things the study looked at was changes to the amount of frosty nights.

​The low down is that we’re looking at potentially major reductions in frost days over the next 50 years and beyond.

Currently, Canberra gets between 70 and 90 cold nights every year (cold is defined as below 2 degrees centigrade). By 2030 this could be down to 67 cold nights, and, under a worst case scenario (where global emissions continued to rise unabated), by 2070 Canberra could be experiencing as few as 27 nights below 2 degrees. That would be a massive shift in Canberra’s climate in only 50 years - with all sorts of implications for summer heatwaves, rainfall patterns, storms and changes in insect populations and so on, but, as noted above, I will be considering each of these in detail in their own separate posts. Here I my focus is on winter, including changes to frost, and the implications of this.

A reduction to 27 cold nights could mean Canberra’s winter temperatures in 2070 will be rather similar to winter in outer-suburban Melbourne today. Ok, so 2070 is a long way off. I will be, let’s see, oh my, 97!! (So there’s a good chance I won’t be hanging out in Canberra’s balmy winters then.) But, our now 7-year-old daughter will be a mere spring chicken of 58. I expect she will be interested in what’s in store for her by then.

On first glance, the idea of having warmer winters in Canberra sounds pretty good - after all, it can get uncomfortably cold here. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.

Changes to frost patterns in Canberra: the good and the bad, and what to do about it.

Longer growing season
A reduction in the total number of frost days will likely mean a growing season that gradually gets longer each year. This means that over time we might be able to plant out our summer vegetables earlier and continue harvesting squash and zucchini later. If you’re into growing your own food, as we are, then I can only encourage you to take advantage of this situation. Plants that require relatively long growing seasons, like capsicum and watermelons, will become more viable here than they currently are.

You might recall the Canberra gardening lore that you wait until after the Melbourne cup to plant out your tomatoes, and make sure you get your broad beans in before ANZAC day? Already, by last year, we had planted out our tomatoes in the middle of October (crossing our fingers there wouldn’t be a sudden, late frost) and that proved a very successful strategy - we got a total yield of about 70kg of tomatoes which is enough to last our family all year (fresh tomatoes in summer and autumn, bottled passata for winter stews and soups). While there will always be year-to-year variation, expect that in the coming decades the last frost date will eventually be in September (or even late August), and the first frost dates will continue to move from April through to May and possibly later.

Greater solar radiation in winter
You might also have noticed that there have been a greater number of sunny, bright days over the past few winters than previously - a result of static high pressure systems sitting over Canberra. The modelling I referred to earlier also suggests that there will be a reduction in rainfall over winter.

Any reduction in cloudy or rainy days can also be used to your advantage. If you have the means, consider putting in a window in any north facing wall of your of your house where it is practical and viable to do so.

We have north facing windows in our living areas (one of the reasons we bought our current house). On a sunny winter day we can usually turn any heating off by mid-morning and keep it off until around 3.30pm, because the heat from the sun is so strong. It’s way better than any heater - I think I read somewhere that sunlight gives you something like 3000 Watts of heating per square metre. And of course, it’s lovely to stand in.

Unfortunately, we have those 1960s aluminium sliding windows that leak heat terribly, so as soon as the sun goes, the heat just escapes back out. We do our best with thick curtains to trap at least some of the indoor air in the evenings and are saving our pennies so that one day we can replace the windows with double or triple glazed ones that will keep us a lot warmer. One permaculture principle is to ‘catch and store energy’ - we’ve gotten as far as catching the solar energy, the next step is to work on ways to store it! Oh and in case you’re wondering, there is very little you can do to retrofit aluminium sliding windows - I have looked into this. I even sticky-taped some of them shut one winter to stop the draughts but that just means we have funny marks all around the edges of the windows now…

Of course, if you have the roof space and it's affordable for you, putting on PV panels is a no-brainer, and a greater number of sunny winter days means you will capture more solar energy at the time of year when total energy demand is greatest, which is a win-win. Also consider converting your heating to reverse-cycle air conditioning to enable it to run on your solar powered electricity. Even without generous feed-in-tariffs, solar PV systems pay themselves off in only a few years.

Before leaving the subject of capturing solar energy - I wanted to share another idea. We all know that not a lot of food growing happens outdoors in the winter months in Canberra: growth slows or even stops. An increase in sunny winter days means that if you do have good sun inside your house, you can grow a range of sprouts and microgreens all winter long, just with the light from the sun. We’ve just successfully experimented with kale and pea shoots - both delicious and they didn’t get too leggy at all. A greater amount of sunny days means more direct sunlight on indoor plants that may need it. Similarly, you can start off your summer crops from seed indoors from late August, ready for transplanting in October or November. I started many of our tomatoes from seed last year using this method and just a bit of space on the window sills.

Marginal species may become more successful
Citrus trees are quite marginal in Canberra's climate - yet there's a lemon tree in loads of back yards here, demonstrating that it's perfectly possible to grow plants that are not officially supposed to thrive here. While cold hardy varieties of lemon, lime, mandarin and cumquats have been staples here, if you have the right conditions in your garden, you might even want to try expanding into grapefruits and oranges too as winters get milder. Other marginal species, such as avocados, may become more tenable here too - I know a few people who are growing avocados though success rates vary. However, there's a caveat in there - we need to be very careful about where we plant these species, to take advantage of warmer microclimates and places in our gardens that get less severe frosts (there's more detail on some techniques you can try in the following section). 

Intermittent severe frosts and rapid thawing
While the absolute number of frosty nights may decrease, the quality of the remaining frosty nights is also important to consider. With high pressure systems giving us a great many sunny and dry winter days, the flip side of this is that clear skies at night can mean quite severe frosts. So while the number of frosty nights might go down, we may still get some particularly savage frosts when they do occur.

Do you remember there was a particularly cold week during last winter (July 2018) when we got a series of very cold nights? One of my friends, an avid cyclist, recounted how his bike computer recorded a temperature of minus 9 in a very foggy frost hollow on his way to work from Tuggeranong. Brrr!

Just a few weeks ago, at a garden consultation in Nicholls, I learned that those same cold nights were enough to kill a very healthy lemon tree in my client’s garden, which had been growing well since 2006. It was a Meyer lemon, widely regarded as the most cold-tolerant variety of lemon. What was intriguing was that a range of other, much younger, citrus plants, which were placed on the western side of a metal shed were unaffected. What was the reason why the lemon tree had died and these other younger trees had survived the same conditions? The amount of water going to the plants had been the same.

We puzzled over the situation and it seemed that the critical difference was that the trees beside the shed did not receive any sun until at least the middle of the day, while the (now departed) lemon had received sun all day, from the early morning onwards.

While there isn’t a whole lot of research on it, it seems that rapid thawing may exacerbate frost damage. There’s certainly plenty of anecdotal advice around suggesting that gradually thawing reduces damage to the plant tissue while rapid thawing (such as when a frosty leaf is hit by morning rays of sun) causes much more tissue damage and should be avoided.

We can conclude that the risks that frosts pose to marginal perennial plants in Canberra (which include pretty much all citrus trees), are therefore going to still be present as the climate warms. Indeed, more frequent clear skies may increase the risk of severe frost when it does occur - this recent ABC news article documents a severe frost in NSW caused by the current drought and clear skies.

Overall winters are likely to become warmer, with higher daytime average temperatures, but this may in turn help to reduce the number of foggy mornings, or lifting the fog earlier than it used to. (I’m sure I’ve noticed a reduction in foggy mornings over the years - I wonder whether anyone else has too?) This may increase the likelihood of rapid thawing of frost affected plants and hence make them more vulnerable to frost damage, in spite of a declining number of frosty nights overall.

This may be a passing situation towards less severe frosts in decades from now, but given that this is already an issue right now, here is a list of ideas for keeping citrus and other frost sensitive plants alive over winter that move beyond just using a bit of frost cloth:

1. Make use of thermal mass: even with the most severe frosts, there may be parts of your garden, closest to the house, that avoid the frost. If sunlight hits brick, rocks or concrete, it absorbs the heat and radiates that heat back out overnight, keeping the immediate area a little warmer than the surrounding garden. Placing your citrus trees in this environment will minimise the amount of frost they are exposed to overall. Ponds may also provide useful thermal mass, if they are close enough to buildings to not freeze over.
2. Use energy leaks: If your home is as badly insulated as ours is, then there is probably heat from inside the house leaking outside via doors, windows and cracks - strategically locating a potted lemon or lime near these could at least make use of this escaping energy, giving you some comfort that your energy bills are funding more than just your indoor comfort! But be aware that if you improve your energy efficiency, such as via gap sealing, putting in double glazing or wall insulation, you may need to relocate outdoor plants previously reliant on this escaping heat!
3. Use shading from large trees and other overhanging structures where appropriate: large evergreen trees or pergola roofs tend to act like umbrellas and trap a bubble of warmer air beneath them. Frost falls to the ground and will go around and over these structures (like rain over an umbrella). Plants beneath them are less affected by frost.
4. Try to ensure your plant is in a place that stays shaded at least all morning long in winter: that means west facing locations are good.
5. Use raised beds or planters: frost rolls downhill so it is always coldest at ground level, and on undulating ground, the bottom of any slope is where the frost develops in what are known as ‘frost hollows’. We have one warrigal greens plant that has survived the winter because it is in a raised planter and sheltered by another plant as well… go little plant! Not long now before it’s warm enough to start growing like crazy again!
6. Do as many of the above as possible: If you can do a combination, or even all of the above, you might find that you can get away with growing an increasingly wide range of warm climate and sub-tropical plants in Canberra. We are experimenting with avocado trees - currently we have 6 baby trees (which are highly vulnerable to frost) growing in pots, under the eaves of the house, on a raised deck, on the west side of the house, close to the back door (which leaks heat as it’s not well insulated yet), and we cover them with a fleece blanket when it’s a cold night - so if anywhere is going to keep them happy it’s there! (And now winter is officially over, I can report that all trees are still doing very well.)

​Winter drought
While I’ll reserve a full discussion of rainfall changes to a separate post, it’s helpful to note in passing that the climate models for the ACT do predict a shift in rainfall patterns over time so that Canberra’s winters will become drier than previously. Of course, this doesn’t mean every single year will be drier, but overall, the number of dry winters will increase relative to wet ones. You may have noticed that this winter seems quite dry - in fact, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, rainfall in the ACT for June and July 2019 has been well below average while temperatures have been higher than average. The winter we have just had may well be a taste of what will become the new normal in coming years.

In addition, with temperatures higher than normal and a lot of sunny days, there has been a lot of evaporation too - far more than usual for this time of year. I read somewhere that for every increase in temperature by 1 degree centigrade that means a 7% increase in evaporation. So, it’s no wonder that things are looking pretty dry out there right now - they are indeed very dry.

What this means for gardeners here in Canberra is that you may well have to start watering your plants from late winter onwards. We have begun watering our vegetable crops again. We grow a lot of produce in wicking beds, which although they are very water wise, still need to be watered every now and then. Rather soberingly, this year is the first where we have had to water our wicking beds over winter because there has not been enough rain to keep them moist, as in previous years.

There’s a much bigger conversation to be had about how to make your property as water resilient as possible, but I’ll reserve that for another post. For now, however, it’s something to be very aware of, and one consideration may be that mulching of soil in vegetable beds will need to happen earlier as the soil is already warm enough by the end of winter.
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Longer pest season
A longer growing season does also mean that some of our little garden friends are going to hang out a bit longer than they used to. Cabbage white moths/butterflies, for example, are still busy throughout April and into May and I’ve seen caterpillars still happily munching through June and even July.

In our garden we netted the brassicas with a fine net to keep these butterflies out so they could not lay eggs. This worked well until July when we discovered that the nets provided sufficient buffering to the cold that lots of aphids were having a great time sucking the sap out of the kale, thanks to the gentler microclimate under the nets.

Taking the nets off has seen a major reduction in aphids and the kale was recovering well until the weather warmed so much that the aphids are back anyway. But the butterflies are only just getting back to action. What this little example illustrates however, is the need to strike an ongoing balance between managing different garden pests - and as the winter gets shorter there may become a time when this little technique is no longer successful, and we will no longer be able to take advantage of so many frosts to rein in the numbers of pest species. Our aim is to garden without using any insecticides, because the beneficial species in the garden are more vulnerable to chemicals than the pests, so our strategy is to keep boosting habitat for predatory species, but we may need to get out there with a cloth every so often to wipe off some pest populations if we have to! And we may just give up on growing some plants and focus on more resilient ones (for example, our dwarf curly leaf kale seems to have been designed as perfect aphid habitat, while the purple sprouting broccoli next to it is almost completely bug free.

Reduction in chilling hours
Some trees need a certain amount of cold weather (called chilling hours) to go fully dormant, and facilitate good bud burst in spring. If there aren’t enough chilling hours, then the tree doesn’t flower properly and then doesn’t set as much (or any) fruit. It’s already becoming a problem in quite a few regions of Australia - according to the ABC cherry growers in SW Western Australia, for example, have been experiencing problems with cherry varieties not getting enough chill over the past decade, leading them to look for varieties with lower chill requirements or give up entirely.

And in South Australia, growers have been removing pistachios, apples and walnut trees because the summers have become too hot and winters insufficiently cold for the trees to produce properly.

What does all of this mean for Canberra, given that we currently have the coldest winter temperatures of all Australia’s major cities? While significant disruption to chill hours is not as imminent here as it is to growers in other parts of the country, it is still sensible to bear in mind when planning your next generations of trees. While 2070 seems a long way off, remember that plenty of fruit trees can live for a very long time. Apples, apricots, pomegranates, hazelnuts and walnuts can all live well into their 100s so if you are planning on establishing a tree that your grandchildren will harvest, it is advisable to consider how conditions might change over the course of their lifespan and plan accordingly. Here are two related strategies:

1. If you have the space, plant several varieties of each fruit tree type (e.g. different types of cherry, apple, plum, pear, peach etc). Different varieties have different chilling requirements - some need lower and some need higher numbers of chilling hours. With a variety, you can capitalise on high chill varieties that will likely produce well over the coming 10-20 years but you have some insurance with other, lower chill requirement varieties that will continue to produce decades after that.
2. Prioritise getting varieties with low or medium chill requirements that are known to do well in Canberra already - particularly if our are short of space. For example, among cherries, lapins has a much lower chill requirement than stella, and it is already successfully grown here. If you only have space to plant one cherry and it’s going to be there for your grandkids, maybe choose the lapins variety to be on the safe side… remember nurseries and online retailers will have information on the different chilling requirements of different fruit trees, so make use of their knowledge and advice when selecting varieties for the long term.

In summary, Canberra's winters are going to become warmer and shorter, and there will likely be a reduction in frosty nights. What we don't know is how much change will eventually occur: I’m sorry to tell you that even if the world were to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, there is enough energy already in the system to mean that the climate will continue warming for the next 20 years. And we know that the world has a long way to go to before it will wean itself off fossil fuels, so that means there is an as-yet-unknown amount of additional warming that is likely to occur. Hence why some adaptation is also necessary, and the reason for this article. 

While this may mean we are encouraged to try more marginal species in Canberra, there is still the chance of severe frost which means we need to have strategies in place to protect such marginal species from severe frosts when they do happen. Permaculture is about being creative and adaptive in a changing environment, so it's important to take advantage of opportunities like increasing winter solar gain and a longer growing season.

In the latter case, growing as much as you can is also really critical, because the more biomass and shade you have in your garden, the more you can moderate and manage the increasingly fierce summers we will also encounter (managing summer heat will be covered in detail in another post). Pests are also likely to become more of a problem over winter and some high chill requirement fruit trees, like some varieties of cherries and apples, may eventually not be tenable to grow here, depending on how much warming eventuates. However, planning ahead by selecting lower chill requirement varieties will buffer against this somewhat, at least for the next 50 or more years.

I realise that climate change is a difficult and challenging topic that gives rise to a lot of emotions, and I don’t want to end on a depressing note. I hope that by providing this information I can help you see we are not entirely helpless in facing an uncertain future, and the more knowledge and tools we have at our disposal, the better prepared we are to face it. What we do in our gardens is only a tiny element in a much bigger picture, and it's never going to compensate for not reducing emissions, yet it can be remarkably healing and empowering to feel that we can do something, and we are not just 'sitting ducks'. Whether you're an activist or a skeptic, we invite you to engage more fully with the natural world that begins at your back door, experience some of the wonder at the amazing dance of life on this planet, grow some of your own food, and begin the journey to learn how to effectively cooperate with Nature to the benefit of both ourselves and ecosystems more broadly.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles on changes to temperature, rainfall patterns, evaporation and bushfire risk and what you can do to adapt and manage risks.

Wishing you well in your journeys to productive and resilient gardens in these changing times.

​Regards,
Cally
Canberra Permaculture Design and Education
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You may have heard some scary news about insects lately. Articles with titles like Insectageddon and the Insect apocalypse have been in news sources, and it’s not good news. Research from several countries is showing that Insect populations, particularly flying insects, have fallen dramatically over the past 30 years, by as much as 70%. While there is uncertainty over whether these trends are global or only specific to the areas where data has been collected, and the time frame for the collapse of certain species, the overall trend across the globe is very worrying. Many flying insect populations are in trouble and overall diversity is declining.
 
An ongoing decline in flying insect populations is bad news for many reasons. You may have heard about the threats to bee populations and their role in pollinating many agricultural crops (without them we would have a lot less food), but the issue is much broader than this. Bees are not the only pollinators and specific pollinators have evolved their own ecological niches to pollinate specific plants - if the pollinator disappears, so does the plant (and vice versa). Flying insects are also an important basis to the food chain - as their populations decline, some species of birds that prey on them are also declining. The rapid rate of biodiversity loss in the world today is prompting a number of scientists to pronounce we are seeing the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event on earth.
 
But back to the insects: what has caused such a dramatic decline in their numbers over the past few decades? Research points to several interrelated factors: habitat destruction through land clearing for agriculture and urbanisation, use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture and in urban areas, climate change, and even the use of electric lighting at night outdoors. These are all human impacts.

The aim of my post here is to show you that it is perfectly possible to grow abundant food, without using insect-harming chemicals. Not even so-called 'organic' ones. In fact, it is possible to go further, and make a diverse and thriving habitat for a variety of creatures within the garden at the same time as producing enough food for ourselves. This is one of the basic underlying ideas within permaculture - we aim to feed ourselves well, while at the same time, farming or gardening in such a way as to help nature regenerate and increase in biological complexity and diversity. Imagine that - growing food and regenerating nature at the same time. That's a pretty big win-win - and it offers me great hope in these depressing times of so much bad environmental news, from extinctions to climate change to plastics. To reiterate the point, there does not have to be any trade-off between growing food for ourselves and providing for the other species that occupy this amazing planet. That we believe there necessarily is such a trade off is a strong cultural belief that pervades modern industrial societies, and is indicative of what author Charles Massy terms 'mechanical' thinking in his recent book on regenerative agriculture, Call of the Reed Warbler - a book I'm reading at the moment and all I can say is it's awesome!
 
Before I launch into describing our 7 principles, I'd like to clarify that our harvest has not been some measly moth-eaten crop, gleaned from the hungry mouths of myriad pests. I am talking about big, healthy bountiful crops. So much produce you are going to have to share your good fortune around (or learn how to make zucchini jerky). 300kg is a lot of food in 7 months. Our freezer and pantry are bursting! Going pesticide free does not mean impoverishment in any sense - quite the reverse. I hope you find the following information helpful.

There are some plants, which, no matter how healthy your garden is, are so nutritious and delicious that they are always going to be pest magnets. I am talking particularly about brassicas. These incredibly nutrient-dense plants have been selectively bred to be sweeter tasting than their pungent, bitter and mustard-flavoured wild ancestors, so they now offer great nutrition without the protections they used to have against insect attack. I like to think of them as like the insect version of chocolate bars - no wonder cabbage white moths/butterflies and aphids find them irresistible. 

In-ground brassicas planted late in the season when the weather is cool are also very vulnerable to slugs and snails. This year, we planted out some purple cauliflower seedlings into an in-ground vegetable bed and some others into one of our raised wicking beds. We planted them too late (early April) - the weather was growing too cold for them to grow fast enough to get out of the reach of slugs and snails ahead of winter, and in a few weeks the in-ground ones had disappeared. But the ones in the raised wicking bed are growing just fine - how can this be? Basically, the wicking bed, being intensively managed and above the ground is too high for snails and slugs to make the journey into the bed from the ground, and there are precious few hideouts within the bed itself for these creatures to reside. Sometimes exclusion is a very effective strategy.

Even while we were experiencing major rat problems last year, we found that we didn't get any damage in wicking beds made of old IBCs. Perhaps the plastic sides were just too slippery for rats to gain a foothold and climb into them, I'm not sure, but we will be using plenty more of them because they are so durable and practical, even if they're not the most beautiful garden beds in the world!

Apart from growing vulnerable crops in-above ground beds, our other strategy is to use fine netting to cover establishing brassicas. Winter and spring-harvested brassicas (we're currently growing Brussels sprouts, kale and purple sprouting broccoli) need to be sown in January and planted out in late February or March to grow enough before the cold weather sets in. However, in mid to late summer, the cabbage white butterflies are still happily flitting around the garden so we used fine netting to cover the newly transplanted brassicas so that the butterflies couldn't get in. We had some very fine fruit tree nets that we had finished using for the season, so we re-purposed them for this new task, which has worked well. (We use fine nets to protect ripening fruit and nuts on our establishing trees because it is safer for wildlife. Standard fruit tree netting, which has finger-sized holes, is apparently much more likely to trap bats, birds and snakes. Fine netting has the advantage of protecting from fruit fly too, as well as being practical for the winter brassicas!) 

As well as special netting for trees, I have also found that some inexpensive netting (the sort you would make a tutu from) that I bought years ago from a fabric store (for another purpose entirely) has also proven to be a really good exclusion net and its UV resistance is surprisingly good!

Note that fine netting does also create a milder micro-climate beneath the netting. This can be great for speeding up seedling growth. We noticed that the lettuces growing in our netted bed are considerably larger than those that are not, and on a frosty morning last week we found out why. The net on the covered bed was covered in frost while the plants below were not, while the exposed plants in the neighbouring bed were just cold. The effect was so pronounced in our bed of netted Brussels sprouts that in early July we found the summer weed fat hen (chenopodium album) growing happily in the bed, despite a few savage frosts!

However, the same phenomenon means that any little aphids that do find their way onto your brassicas beneath the nets will enjoy greater frost protection too. Now it is late winter, we have uncovered a couple of our kale beds to let the frosts take a greater toll on a few aphid populations that have taken up residence in the kale.

Spaghetti squash, like its cousins, pumpkins and zucchinis, is a very prolific plant which produces a lot of fruit and sprawls all over the place. But it has two big advantages over both zucchinis and pumpkins. First, it seems to self pollinate way better than either pumpkins and zucchinis - that is, male and female flowers occur at the same time. Have you ever been disappointed to see your little pumpkins wither and die because the plant didn't get its timing right - me too. Even with 3 Jap (Kent) pumpkin plants last year we only got 6 pumpkins - compared with about 25 spaghetti squash from the same number of plants!

The second advantage of spaghetti squash is that they offer more than one crop. The immature fruits look remarkably like small Lebanese zucchini and can be used just the same way as zucchini. The flavour is almost identical - so spaghetti squash produce two crops - a bit like having a zucchini and a pumpkin in the same plant! While zucchini are known to go nuts and provide a glut (which if not picked on time turn very quickly into marrows), with spaghetti squash any you miss just turn into regular mature squash.

Like pumpkins, spaghetti squash develop hard skins. This means they can be stored without refrigeration for many months, so you definitely don’t have to eat them all at once. It's not as sweet as pumpkin either, so doesn't overwhelm dishes - in fact it is a great alternative to starchy foods like rice, pasta and potatoes in your meal, and we find it surprisingly filling. The vegetable gets its name because, once cooked, the flesh can be separated into strands that look a little like spaghetti.

The easiest way to cook it is to cut a squash in half, remove the seeds and then place each half face down in a pan, and bake them about an hour in an oven (180 degrees C is fine). You can then scrape out the strands to make your own 'spaghetti', or turn the halves face up and stuff them with something tasty like bolognese or chili con carne, top with cheese and put back into the oven until the cheese is bubbling and browned. That's how we usually eat ours because they are so delicious like that (see picture below).

Unless you can provide a structure for it to climb over, it's best for bigger gardens as, the vines wander all over the place (similar to pumpkins).