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: 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.