Gardening In A Time Of Climate Change

 This summer has been - well, odd. While we've had our share of hot spells with temperatures 40° C or close to it - and this is typical - what has been different is the humidity. It has been crushing and whether this is because we're not used it I don't know. We mostly have dry heat here which is tiring but liveable with a little help from the air conditioner from time to time. This year's humidity has been made even more difficult because by far the majority of those of us who have air conditioners have evaporative ones and they usually work well. This summer? Not so much. The humidity has meant that using an air conditioner for the most part has been pointless. We're lucky in that our house is very well insulated and shaded from the afternoon sun by a huge marri tree in our front yard which at least cools things somewhat - as long as we keep the house closed up. We haven't even bothered to do more than turn the air conditioner on once to make sure it was working. 

It's not only in the house that the humidity has had an effect. The garden, too, has suffered, particularly the veggie garden. The cucurbits - zucchinis, cucumbers, melons and pumpkins - have all been under attack by powdery mildew to the point that we've had very few fruit from any of them. Zucchinis are, of course, notoriously susceptible to this mildew but we usually have an abundant crop that is still producing up to the beginning of autumn before they succumb. Not so this year. While the plants have struggled on they stopped producing about a month ago. The cucumbers, too, which usually produce so much I supply my neighbours up to the end of March, also died nearly a month ago. It's not only the cucurbit family either. The other plants that have survived aren't flowering which means no harvest. Apart from the semi tropical snake beans, my total bean harvest this summer was five pods, the capsicums have barely flowered and the tomatoes turned up their toes weeks ago. Just to add another annoyance the sweet corn and grapes were wiped out by the corellas.

To say this is disappointing is an understatement. We're used to going out and picking what we need pretty much year round and we really notice the difference of not having access to such fresh supplies. This is not to say that we don't have access to good quality fruit and vegetables here. We certainly do but even if you buy from the markets the produce is of necessity not as fresh as that from your own garden.

So is this climate change in action and the way life is going to be as that accelerates? Maybe but whether it is or not what we can't ignore is that the climate here has already changed. Over the past fifty years our annual rainfall has decreased by around 20% with the dams we always relied on for our water supply close to dry and having been so for some years. Perth now relies on dwindling ground water and desalination. At the same time the average temperature has risen by about 1° C and we're having more intense and frequent hot spells. 

This report put out by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture shows all this and more. Scary, isn't it, and while this is happening there still seems little political will to act. I'm hoping that our recent State election - although the result hasn't yet been declared it's already obvious that the ALP have won with a huge majority - will embolden the state government to make some serious steps to deal with climate change as far as a state can do so. What the federal government does is a quite separate thing, of course, and for that we can only wait and hope they, too, act and sooner rather than later.