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.

And The Rain Came Down

 It certainly did. Just a couple of days after we had had a heatwave with maximum temperatures of around 39° C we had steady, soaking rain accompanied by thunder and lightning for all of yesterday. There was so much rain in fact that we received the total March average rainfall in one day. Given our dry climate this is a very good thing as long as there isn't major damage and there wasn't this time. We're not always that lucky, though. We've had some severe storms in March - one about ten years ago came with huge hail which battered cars, wrecking body work and smashing windscreens, and damaged thousands of homes leaving many without power for up to a week. 

The forecast for today is a possible shower or storm but for now the skies are clear so I've taken the opportunity to put the sheets in to wash in hopes they'll dry before the rain returns. If it comes to the worst I'll finish drying them in the dryer but like most folk here, unless they live in an apartment without access to a clothesline, I dry my washing on an outside line. I wonder if this will change soon since blocks are getting smaller and smaller and without an outdoor space this will be impossible. While I understand the reason this is happening - a city can't expand outwards forever - it does seem somewhat irresponsible in a time when we should be cutting energy using. Back in the day all apartment buildings here with a communal laundry used to have to provide an external clothesline. Doesn't seem to be the case now, sadly.

For the rest of the week it looks as if there'll be more rain and cooler temperatures so there's that to look forward to. I've just been out to check and I think the sprinklers can stay off tomorrow - our rostered watering day - and if the forecast is right it may even stay damp enough to skip watering on our next rostered day (which is Saturday). Any water saving is desirable here where our climate has changed significantly and we now get far less rain than we used to even twenty years ago. 

It's oddly cool given we're currently in Bunuru, which, according to the local Noongar people's seasons, is usually the hottest time of the year. Bunuru roughly covers February and March which are generally very hot but the seasons seem to be slipping somewhat with everything now starting two to three weeks later than it used to be so we may yet be in for hotter days before we move into Djeran around the start of April.. 

Windy Days and Consequences

I live not far from the coast close to the top of a hill and my house is oriented pretty much to the north. This means there's only with only a small part in full sun at any time of the day. The front where the afternoon sun would otherwise beat down on the front of the house is shaded by a huge and very lovely marri tree. And I'm used to windy days. They are part of what makes summer living here so pleasant.  We get the cool easterlies from inland in the summer - well, they're cool in the early mornings until the land heats up by mid morning and then the The Doctor - the sea breeze - arrives around midday or a little later and cools it down again.

Sounds great and usually it is but this year is not quite the same. I mentioned a while back that we've already hit 40° C several times and, while this is not unheard of, it is more common in February, not December and early January. Then there's the wind - and recently it hasn't been our friend. 

Early in the evening of New Year's Day quite suddenly after a warmish humid day the wind decided it was tired of gentle breezes and sent us a blast of furious and hot easterly gusts which have only just started to ease a little. The gusts were so strong they blew down the shade cloth covers over my veggies, tore small branches off my neighbour's trees while each gust rattled the windows making sleep difficult and the sea breeze? Forget it. 

While all this wind has been exhausting there are other consequences. We've had bushfires in several outer suburbs with mass evacuations required while several are raging out of control a bit further up the coast to the north of the city. We have bushfires every summer, some years worse than others - a couple of years ago a whole town was destroyed - so fires aren't unexpected and fortunately so far at least they are nothing like the scale of those that wreaked havoc on the east coast last summer. Folk there are slowly rebuilding their lives with many still living in caravans and sheds - and for those in the mountains it was a long, cold winter. However, it's only the start of the bushfire seasons so we can't afford to get complacent and the fierce winds are making any fire control difficult to impossible. 

The truth is the British who came here as colonists made some bad mistakes as far as farming and other land use was concerned. While fire has always been present here - most of the continent is hot and dry and always has been - the indigenous people those colonists supplanted had had something like 60,000 years of living with and managing it. Instead the newcomers disrupted systems that had sustained many generations and tried to transplant European land management to an alien and completely different landscape. It was successful for a time - Australia was supplying large amounts of meat, wheat and wool to the world market for more than a hundred years - but now the consequences of that form of agriculture and the logging of our old growth forests are showing in salinity, dust storms and out of control bushfires.

How we are going to deal with these problems I don't know - successive governments have shown little ability to grapple effectively with them - but we certainly need to. It's probably too late to go back to the indigenous systems but we certainly need to do something. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not. It will bring more damaging fires and other consequences. We ignore it at our peril.

Climate Emergency

I don't belong to Extinction Rebellion but I do share their fears for the planet. I have grandchildren and I want them to be able to live happy, healthy and productive lives on a world that provides for them and every other creature here. We cannot keep acting as if everything is going to be fine as climate change ramps up. Last week a temperature of 38° C (100.4 °F) was reported in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk which is situated within the Arctic Circle. If this is confirmed - it still has to be checked although there seems no reason to doubt it - the planet and every living thing on it is in grave danger.
This is quite frankly terrifying and is an example of why I asked a family member who is involved with Extinction Rebellion for this poster. It's on my bins so on rubbish collection days it is visible to anyone coming along my street. We've all been understandably somewhat distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic but we cannot afford to ignore the other equally urgent emergency we face in climate change. It's not going away unless we act now.

2020 is

about to throw us another curve with a storm described as a once in a decade expected later today - and already the winds are very strong. We went around trying to check everything was as secure and safe as it can be but since it's only a couple of weeks since the last doozy things are already pretty well secured. We mostly get strong storm fronts like this in winter - it's been unusual to have them hit in May until recently and even then they've usually not been so severe as this. But, hey, all those climate change deniers and sceptics don't seem to have noticed how things are different these days and are still trying to convince us it's not really happening and if it is we don't really have to worry because it's a natural cycle.

I, though, am quite sure it's happening at an alarming rate and frankly, I'm scared, and in particular I'm scared about the future my grandchildren will inherit. So I got this.

I'm not a part of Extinction Rebellion - they're a worldwide group of climate change activists - but I know folk who are and, while I don't always agree with their methods, I certainly share their frustration at how our governments at all levels seems oblivious and/or uninterested in acting on what the science tells us is an obvious calamity bearing down on all of us. 

So I'm putting their signs on our garbage bins in the hope that a visible message out on the side of the road at least once a week will spread awareness a little more.

Summer - Or Why I Believe Climate Change Is Real

It's summer. It's hot. You're probably thinking something along the lines of 'Well what do you expect' and I understand that. The thing about summer in south western Australia is that when we say hot we mean over 35 degrees Celsius with 38 degrees not uncommon. It starts in December and continues into March. I know there are many places which are hotter - north western Australia for example where I used to go for work - but that doesn't make up for the enervating effect of day after day of grinding heat. Yes, many of us have air conditioners but they only work indoors so every time we have to make a dash from say the front door to the letter box the heat blasts us. It's like opening a door to a furnace or a very hot oven. The gardens shrivel as the leaves burn to crisps and, if you have a vegetable garden as I do, you spend a considerable amount of time daily in the late afternoon or early evening hand-watering the thirstiest vegies because we have permanent water restrictions for most of the year.

If there's one thing that convinces me that climate change is real it is how our weather has changed. Actually I don't mind dry heat. I was born in a heat-wave and it seems to have preset my thermostat to be able to cope with higher temperatures than many can but humidity is another thing entirely. There was a time when our summers were hot and dry and our winters were short but wet and we had only a handful of hot, humid days, usually in February. It's different these days. Our summers are increasingly humid without any lessening of the heat and we are getting a lower rainfall in the winter. We've always had occasional droughts but now we continually struggle to fill our dams - they are more often half empty than half full.

The way I garden has had to adapt to these changes and I now have very different criteria for plant selection with drought tolerant and native species being favoured with the exception of the vegie patch. There I put up shadecloth shelters to protect exotics like lettuce but even that's not always enough. After today's heat much of the chive bed looks like it's a layer of straw and even hardy plants like flat leaf parsley have had tender bits seared to white. I'm not ready to give up on the pleasure of fresh food from my own garden but it gets harder every year so I will enjoy it while I can.

My Country.

Australia can be a hard land. Much of the continent is desert and nearly all those enticing looking lakes on the map are dry saltpans, hence names like Lake Disappointment. Droughts and water shortages are the norm with only a relatively small portion of land where grazing is lush or water intensive cropping is possible. Many of our trees are high in volatile oils so when a fire breaks out it spreads with terrifying speed. While most of us get just enough rain, in the tropics the volume can be enormous and so can the devastation.

The climate of Australia is changing. I can see this in my own little corner of Western Australia. Less rain in winter - our rainfall comes largely in that three month period - and more humidity in summer for starters. Australia's population continues to grow and the areas that can supply our needs shrink. The irrigation areas along the Murray-Darling basin we have relied on so heavily are suffering acute water shortages and elsewhere crops are having to be modified to cope with the changes.

There is a poem by Dorothea Mackellar, My Country, which is taught in our schools. It’s also been set to music. The words sum up Australia and Australians so eloquently I don’t know why it wasn’t made our national anthem. They stir me every time I hear them, tapping in as they do to the reality of this continent. Mackellar wrote it while she was in England and compares the soft, lush green of that land with the harshness of the countryside where she lived in Australia. She knew the dangers of the Australian landscape – but like her countrymen and women, forgave them. We know we live where vicious bushfires threaten life and property every summer, where floods can come without warning, where years can go by with barely enough rain to sustain life. We do what we can to survive all these natural disasters because Australia is also a bountiful country. In the good times she gives us enough to live well and if the price is the bad times when we have to struggle, that’s the way it is.

But, having said that, there is no reason why we shouldn’t improve our use of what we have. We need to start finding and implementing solutions, learning from other dry land cultures and creating innovative ways to care for our land and ourselves. We have the ability. Now we have to act. Even without climate change we have known for many years that these problems exist. Dorothea Mackellar was writing about them in 1908. We need to start to deal with them.

To read the poem and find out more about this gifted poet go to the Dorothea Mackellar website.