climate change Archives - Eastbourne ECO Action Network

growing food in a changing climate: a community garden view

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.

section of garden where flooding is most severe

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.

a diagram of a traditional French drain

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.

growing food in a changing climate: a community centre view

Eastbourne Food Partnership’s community engagement stall.

At a recent community fair at the Langney Community Centre, at which the Eastbourne Food Partnership ran a community engagement stall with regards to the new community garden being developed outside the centre, I chatted with Martin Hills, the gardener employed part-time by the centre to help design and develop the community garden on land owned by Eastbourne Borough Council. Martin is a qualified permaculture designer and is applying his knowledge of permaculture design principles to help design the community garden, which is about 0.75 acres in size. As he says in his garden plan: “The aim is for a thriving, self-sustaining ecosystem that meets the needs of its inhabitants – including human. To this end, it will be a place where people want to be, a place of beauty, a place that appeals to all the senses, a place where some human food can be grown, a place to play, a place to sit and quietly reflect, a place to connect with Nature”.

Martin Hills with his community garden design.

Martin standing in front of the community garden.

As the garden design incorporates vegetable beds already partly prepared, and an orchard already under development, as well as a forest garden that would contain plants that can be foraged, I asked Martin about how the food growing systems in the garden would cope with the extreme weather events now more frequently occurring as climate change accelerates. He replied that the key is diversity of planting and designing in resilience to the garden. The greater the diversity of food crops and plants grown within the garden, the more likely that there would be some crops in any year that would survive extreme weather events, even if other crops failed in that year, something that would have to be expected and accepted to some extent as climate change progresses. Increasing the chance of survivability would be made possible by the extensive use of no-dig methods, deep-rooting plants (especially perennials), and cover-mulching (with compost and humus produced on-site) to protect the stability and quality of the soil as well as ensuring enough drainage to prevent the soil from either drying out too much or becoming too wet. The site is on a slope, and elevated above the Eastbourne floodplain, so it does not suffer the kind of extensive flooding during extreme rainfall events that, for example, some of the allotments sites in the lower part of town do.

Google satellite image of Langney community garden.

The addition of forest gardening principles within the garden also helps as it increases biological sustainability and plant diversity, attracts pollinators and other beneficial wildlife, helps keep pests and diseases under control, and provides leaf litter, leading to increased nutrient resistance and drought resistance (particularly useful given that Eastbourne is in a water-stressed area and increasingly severe droughts are a feature of climate change in the south east of England). This helps to ensure the garden can flourish without large amounts of watering. The other useful feature of forest gardens is that they also allow for continual food output without annual tilling, pesticides, fertilisers, or other high inputs of chemicals or energy. Another good example of how a forest garden works can be seen at the Pevensey & Westham Community Forest Garden, a very short distance away from Langney.

Martin standing next to the copper beech tree in the community garden.

The community garden already has an abundance of mature trees around the edges, including a magnificent copper beech tree providing valuable cool shade. There are also some new tree saplings planted by Treebourne, which will provide valuable shade along the side of the garden next to the road. Trees help protect young crops by providing wind-shelter against winter storms and cooling shade during summer heatwaves, invaluable as the UK now experiences warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers.

Martin explained that, as the community garden develops, whatever surplus food is produced by it will be directed to the foodbank and community larder hosted by the Langney Community Centre each week, helping to ensure that there is a regular, fresh supply of healthy organic fruit, nuts, and vegetables to supplement surplus food brought in from elsewhere. This will help to build local food security and food resilience in Langney, one of the relatively more deprived areas of Eastbourne, and this is so important given that national and international food supply chains are increasingly coming under stress due to the impacts of climate change.

Martin at the edge of the circular lawn.

The creation of a large, circular lawn in the centre of the garden would facilitate outdoor community gatherings as well as workshops to educate local people about matters such as foraging, crop processing, plant identification, etc. The Langney Community Centre is keen to facilitate this education, as evidenced by the explanatory signs in the Edible Garden already developed on a small patch of land immediately in front of the centre and maintained by a keen band of volunteers.

Martin’s top tip for growers is to avoid digging the soil as much as possible, as digging disturbs the soil life that is essential for good plant growth and efficient drainage.

growing food in a changing climate: an allotment view

Pevensey Bay is a low-lying coastal community in East Sussex, next-door to the large resort town of Eastbourne. The shingle bank along Pevensey Bay’s seafront provides protection from the strong storm surges that often come its way, especially in winter. But the village also experiences flooding inland, as several drainage channels run through it, helping to drain the large water catchment area known as the Pevensey Levels, a freshwater wetland renowned for its wildlife. Because the village is more or less at the level of the high-water mark, the water in the drainage channels can sometimes only be released out to sea when the ebb tide falls below the level of the water in those channels, which can be very full in periods of intense rainfall, periods which will become ever more frequent and intense as anthropogenic climate change accelerates. This can lead to the channels overflowing their banks at times.

flooding in winter of 2023-24

To explore this phenomenon further, following on from my previous investigation on climate change impacts on local food growing, in collaboration with the Eastbourne Food Partnership, I paid a visit in June 2024 to some allotments at Pevensey Bay owned by Pevensey Parish Council, situated off Waverley Gardens. These allotments are next to the Salt Haven, one of the main drainage channels running through the village, and therefore had a history of flooding incidents. From my conversations with some of the allotment holders on site, it was clear that many of the allotments there are flooded at least once every year, but that the winter of 2023-24 was the worst in living memory for flooding, as there were about 4 or 5 very severe flooding incidents. Not all the site gets flooded, as about half the allotments are on higher ground as much of the site slopes gently upwards from the Salt Haven. But all those allotments that back directly onto the haven do flood every year.

fruit trees next to Salt Haven

The main impact of the flooding is that growing vegetables is pretty much impossible in winter on the areas that do flood, but it was noticeable that there were many large, mature fruit trees and bushes on the areas that experienced flooding every year, and that they seemed to be flourishing, with plenty of fruit developing on them, which seemed to indicate a high degree of tolerance to the flooding than if vegetables were planted, perhaps indicating how the allotment holders had adapted to such flooding by earmarking those areas just for fruit growing. Certainly the allotment holders I spoke to were phlegmatic about the flooding situation, accepted that only fruit trees were capable of surviving the flooding and just planned most of their vegetable growing higher up on the slope above the flooding level. But they reported that because there had been so much rain over the previous winter, the whole site was so waterlogged that most vegetable planting had to be significantly delayed until May, shortening the growing season quite considerably. The difficulties for growers on the site is reflected in the fact that the rental charges for the allotments are much lower than on other allotments in the area, especially in Eastbourne. However, it was clear from my site visit that, once planting had finally got under way, the productivity of the site appeared to be high, with most allotment plots demonstrating a healthy abundance and growth of crops.

pipe outlet that exacerbates allotment flooding

One allotment holder was keen to show me a drainage pipe outlet that was below the haven bank as it apparently aids the flooding of the site by allowing the water to flow easily onto the site well before the haven breaks it banks, leading to a much more rapid and more frequent flooding of the site than perhaps should be the case. It appears that there is no tide flap (or the tide flap is damaged or malfunctioning) on the haven side of the pipe to shut off the flow when the water level in the haven rises above the level of the pipe. I heard that there are probably several other similar pipes on site within the bank undergrowth with the same or similar issues, which has been raised by some allotment holders with the local Environment Agency staff to no avail apparently.

view of Salt Haven from allotments bank

It does raise the possibility of whether a survey could be done at some point (perhaps by the Blue Heart Project or an organisation funded by it?) to investigate what kind of pipe drainage does actually exist along the Salt Haven and how it affects water levels both within the haven and beyond its banks. Such a survey would presumably involve extensive clearing of the undergrowth along the bank to check where the pipes are and what condition they are in. But it would perhaps generate valuable data about how the haven actually functions in a critical stretch of it before it reaches the sea, and also create more accurate data about how fluvial flooding impacts Pevensey Bay generally, as many of the gardens elsewhere in the village also experience flooding from the drainage channels.

growing food in a changing climate: a forest garden view

The impacts of climate change are becoming ever clearer and more damaging as the years go by. One of the most significant impacts is on the way we grow food. As climate scientists predicted, UK winters are becoming warmer and wetter, and last winter was no exception, resulting in significant crop losses for UK farmers. It also resulted in greater difficulties for local growers in the Eastbourne area, such as smallholders, allotment holders, community gardens, etc, especially as intense rainfall events led to flooding issues on many growing spaces, followed by weeks of very sodden ground that made any work very challenging. The need for growers to adapt to a rapidly changing climate is becoming ever more acute.

in response, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network has begun a collaboration with the Eastbourne Food Partnership, supported by the Blue Heart project, to survey the ways in which local growers are responding to the challenges of growing food despite the impacts of climate change and investigate how such growers can be better supported in their climate adaptation efforts.

One such local growing project is the Pevensey & Westham Community Forest Garden, which has been running for the last 8 years, planting many fruit and nut trees and bushes on land that had fallen out of active management for many years, becoming an unkempt and overgrown scrub and woodland in the process. The volunteers that run the forest garden report that they have not experienced any significant drop in fruit and nut production even during intense heatwaves or periods of intense rainfall, primarily because:

the site is very well-drained, being in the Pevensey Levels where the extensive network of deep and wide drainage channels is carefully monitored to ensure water levels in the channels are kept at stable levels with no flooding onto adjacent land (the Langney Sewer runs alongside the forest garden but has never flooded onto it).
the site is protected by shading from an extensive tree canopy that keeps the forest garden cool enough during heatwaves, reduces water evaporation from the soil and ground cover, and protects young plants against strong winds during winter storms.

community orchard site next to Pevensey Castle

The forest garden volunteers point out that, by contrast, a community orchard they have been developing in the last few years on an exposed site next to Pevensey Castle, a short distance away from the forest garden, did suffer a big drop in fruit production in 2022 during the intense summer heatwave that resulted in the UK reaching a temperature of 40 degrees C for the first time ever. The relative lack of tree cover for the orchard, compared to the forest garden, meant that the young fruit trees did not have enough shade, putting them under great stress.

rainwater butts at side of forest garden tool shed

However, the main issue for the forest garden is the lack of any mains water on site, which means that in intense heatwaves and periods of prolonged drought there is no supply of water readily available for any watering needs. This has necessitated the volunteers setting up many water butts and rainwater cisterns on site to capture and store as much rainwater as possible. Rainwater conservation is sure to become ever more important for all growers and gardeners as time goes by, especially as fresh water is generally becoming an ever more scare, and more costly, resource in the water-stressed south-east of England.

Forest gardening is therefore one way in which food growing can be adapted to changing climate conditions. But other local food growing enterprises and communities will be visited over the course of the next few months to discover how they try and cope with the challenges of climate change and what kinds of help they may need to cope better.