GARDENING FOCUS: CLIMATE CHANGE


THE CLIMATE CHANGE CHALLENGE


In this month’s Gardening Focus column, Graham Paskett asks if we need to rethink our gardening plans in the light of global warming?


it all seems strangely out of sync. There I was, raking over seedbeds in readiness for spring, but amidst primulas and even violets in flower – and these are 2023s blooms.


O Disaster zone


I have never seen the dessert and cooking apple trees so fully loaded and the ground beneath the wild crab apples is covered in layers of rotting fruit. I am writing this in early November and, as recently as two weeks ago, I commented to a friend that we had very few caterpillars on the broccoli and cabbages. Wrong! This week they are smothered – why so late? It must have been the hot summer that caused the cabbage white butterflies to lay their eggs later than usual. Last year I grew almost Guinness Book of Records sized butternut squash. This season’s crop is smaller than average. I harvested our last picking of runner beans only last week when, according to my old gardening diaries, these are usually finished by mid-September. The veg cage – with one notable exception – looks terrific with excellent stands of cordon Negra, spinach beet, purple sprouting, cabbages and kale. But the Brussels sprouts are a disaster zone. Talk about being vertically challenged, these won’t make a foot high. It will


“It must have been the hot summer that caused the cabbage white butterflies to lay their eggs later than usual.”


32 DIY WEEK NOVEMBER 2022


other food sources and is likely to impact on some mammals’ ability to survive the winter – if we have one.


And that, of course, is the whole point of what I’m writing about. We humans too have body clocks that are determined to varying degrees by the seasons. We are geared to


be a trip to the local greengrocer for Christmas dinner veg at our house. What has caused this? The leeks are terrific but desperately need a good hard frost to encourage sugars to form and strengthen the stems by blocking out unwanted growth. As I say, this is being written in early November in rural Staffordshire – allegedly the coldest county in England due, no doubt, to its distance from sea in all directions. But, as yet, we have not had the faintest whiff of a frost. Yet our son who lives in sunny Sussex has had several. It is an increasingly confused weather pattern.


Late onset of winter One of the wild mammal protection societies has come out with a warning that the very late onset of winter is affecting trees, plants and


enjoying a windy, wet autumn with some frosts, followed by winter with some very cold weather and, hopefully, a manageable amount of snow for the children. On the heels of this we look forward to sunny spring with some March winds and then warmth followed by the traditional two hot days and a thunderstorm we know as a British summer. This is what we know and are attuned to, as are the flowers, vegetables and trees. I fear no longer. The gardens and our wildlife are all telling us that we are going to have to rethink our entire approach to the weather and what we are going to do to ensure that our gardens can cope with these changes.


October 23 is the anniversary date of the Battle of Edgehill, the first battle of the English Civil Wars, and fought in 1642 on the Warwickshire/


ver the past couple of weekends, I have been putting my garden to bed for its annual winter rest but, looking round,


Oxfordshire border. I was at school in Warwickshire and each October 23 we went out to the battlefield – escorted by staff of course, on a ghost hunt. To mark this, I plant my first broad beans on or around that October date. As I was doing it this year, I was amazed to see tall broad beans in full flower, obviously, self- setters from the summer. It will be fascinating to see if these surprising newcomers to my garden make it into 2023. Personally, I doubt it. But it does serve to illustrate my point, how are we going to garden effectively amidst our rapidly changing weather patterns?


Over to you… For future columns I plan to ask some leading garden experts to give me five things they will be doing to cope with these unprecedented challenges and I’ll share them with you. These will hopefully cover fruit, vegetables, flowers and shrubs, trees and, of course, our traditional British garden lawn. Happy Gardening!


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