Some of us from the Eastbourne Eco Action Network team paid a visit to the Gather Community Garden at the Churchdale allotments in Eastbourne recently and had a chat with the team there about how they deal with some of the impacts of climate change on their site. The community garden is well-managed with a large team of volunteers busily looking after a wide variety of food crops, with much of the surplus distributed to foodbanks and community fridges across the town, helping to alleviate food insecurity locally through a steady supply of fresh, organic, nutritious fruit and vegetables.
What emerged from the chat was that the garden experiences growing problems from both the stronger winds and more intense rainfall events that climate change is bringing to the local area. The winds can now be so strong that the roofs of various wooden structures around the site may be blown off at times, or the structures themselves might be blown over, resulting in much maintenance work to repair and reinforce those structures. The wind effect is most pronounced on the side of the site most exposed to the wind because of a lack of trees on that side, but the opposite side of the site is bounded by a line of very tall trees, providing good wind protection on that side.
More significantly, the site experiences severe flooding at times, especially as the site is very much in the Eastbourne Levels, a low-lying area of town almost at sea-level and therefore difficult to drain fast enough during periods of intense rainfall. The solution that the garden is seeking is the insertion of a French drain alongside one side of the site, then linking that drain to a drainage ditch (the Horsey Sewer) just outside the entrance to the site. This ditch is part of a vast network of drainage ditches that help to drain the Eastbourne and Pevensey levels, which receive a huge volume of water from the many rivers and streams flowing into them throughout the water catchment area. Indeed, without this drainage network, the Eastbourne Levels would revert to becoming the marshland it once was centuries ago.
According to Wikipedia, “A French drain (also known by other names including trench drain, blind drain, rubble drain, and rock drain) is a trench filled with gravel or rock, or both, with or without a perforated pipe that redirects surface water and groundwater away from an area. The perforated pipe is called a weeping tile (also called a drain tile or perimeter tile). When the pipe is draining, it “weeps”, or exudes liquids. It was named during a time period when drainpipes were made from terracotta tiles. French drains are primarily used to prevent ground and surface water from penetrating or damaging building foundations and as an alternative to open ditches or storm sewers for streets and highways. Alternatively, French drains may be used to distribute water, such as a septic drain field at the outlet of a typical septic tank sewage treatment system. French drains are also used behind retaining walls to relieve ground water pressure”.
But the garden is waiting for permission from the Environment Agency for permission to connect the French drain to the drainage network, as the agency has the ultimate responsibility for the network and controls the water quality as well as maintaining the many pumps and sluice gates that regulate the flow of water through the network. This permission is essential before work on installing the drain can begin (assuming sufficient funds can be raised for this project).
Whilst we were at the garden, we talked to a volunteer about his work and discovered that one of the problems the site experiences in very hot summers is the soil drying out and becoming very hard, making it difficult to break up when preparing a new growing bed. There is plenty of mains water on site so watering the rowing beds is not an issue (apart from the labour involved!), so there is not an emphasis on having lots of rainwater butts on site like we saw on other sites like the forest garden in Pevensey, which lacks mains water. However, the volunteer did report that he would like to see a large water container sunk into the ground on site to store water so as to reduce the amount of walking from the mains water pipes outside site to the growing beds.