Musings
Water Worries, Adaptation & ‘Go to Where the Puck is Going’
Around the world, the weather is getting warmer, drier and more uncertain. These are conditions as food growers and eaters we must adapt to. For food growers, including home gardeners, most importantly, this means thinking about water and how to make due with less water. Here is a link to a hard-hitting article about the water crisis in Western Canada.
One of the best books on the topic of growing food in difficult environmental circumstances, is Gary Paul Nabhan’s Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land. In this book, Nabhan has gathered stories of farmers who grow food in hot and arid climates and shares some of the strategies they have developed. These are stories of adaptation and resilience by farmers in the Gobi Desert, the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan (see image), the Omani Highlands in the Arabian Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert in North America. Their stories demonstrate that growing food in a hotter, drier, more unpredictable environment can be done, but actions must be taken, we (our collective society) can’t sit back. Nabhan wants us to learn from these farmers and improvise a plan of action for our own situations. He writes:
In essence, all of us must learn to plan for uncertainty in the food system. While that expression, plan for uncertainty, may seem paradoxical, we should remember the advice that Canadian Walter Gretzky once offered his son Wayne, who went on to become the highest-scoring hockey player in history, “Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”.
As my friend Bill DeBuys, author of A Great Aridness, has reminded me, what works as a guiding principle for ice hockey players might serve just as well in an arena with little or no ice, that is, the arena of food production under increasingly desert-like conditions.
As an exercise in ‘going to where the puck is going’, Nabhan asks us to think about a series of climate change related questions. He writes: “Here then are the questions you must ask yourself as a food producer and eater as we begin to imagine ways to redesign our foodscapes.” His questions are good practice for thinking about how we will grow food in the future. We have included five of his questions and our answers:
1.”What conditions will you face as you produce food in the future [we are thinking about the food we grow in our home gardens]–conditions that may be altogether unlike those you have dealt with in the past?”
The short list: Heat waves, low precipitation, unpredictable weather, and unusual insect and pest manifestations.
2. “What five words describe the values that you want to see embedded in your foodscape, and manifested in your harvest?”
Nutrient-Dense, Flavourful, Low-Input, Resilient, Polyculture*
*a mixture of different growth forms (e.g. trees to herbs) and varieties sharing the growing space
3.“If you are successful in adapting your food production, distribution and processing practices to make them more climate-friendly and resilient, what will your successes look like [again, we are scaling our answers to our home gardens] ?”
If we have been successful:
Healthy Soil: To achieve our goals, we need to focus on the health of our soil. To constantly build up our soil with natural resources–composted materials, leaves, grass clippings, natural minerals, compost tea.
Resilient Seed Collection: A seed collection that focuses on plant varieties that thrive under low-irrigation and low-input conditions. In particular, varieties that have been tested for decades, and even centuries. They have seen it all before.
Nutrient-Dense Food: To continue to grow and eat nutrient-dense food. To eat as much as we can from our gardens. To use the summer months to feast on food from our gardens to build up our body’s ‘nutrient reserves’ for winter. We become healthier because of it. Our garden foodscape will look something like this: Leafy Greens (‘Powerhouse Foods’); Tomatoes (‘Wonder Fruit’); Medicinal Herbs (Essential for Home Remedies); Gooseberries/Ground Cherries (The Joy of Growing Fruit From Seed); and Flowers and Plants for Pollinators and Beneficial Insects. Homegrown veggies are not a luxury. As pointed out by the University of California Master Gardener Program of Sonoma County (see our section on Drought Tolerant tomatoes), homegrown tomatoes (and we will extend that to other veggies) take less water than growing and transporting those veggies from elsewhere.
Water-Wise: We must have a wise relationship with water and think about how to use water in a way that shows good judgement. There are many water-wise adaptations we already use and will continue to expand on, for instance, installing as many rain barrels as we can, loading up on mulch, growing plant varieties adapted to low-irrigation, hand watering and spot watering to reduce water waste, watering in the morning, to name a few of the ways we will continue to be careful (full of care) with water.
‘Understand Our Plants’: This means paying attention to our plants and to what nature is telling us. We like how Peter Chan explains this concept in his book about Chinese gardening practices:
“In China, the farmers and gardeners say–Understand your plants. This means we must understand how the plants go on with their lives, how they carry on their life cycles, how they grow, mature and produce flowers and fruits and seeds. Because each plant has its own character, its own time, its own needs.”
This is similar to what Gary Paul Nabhan means when he writes: “We must remember or relearn how nature works to reduce stress in plants, animals or ecosystems.” Yes, reducing the stress is what it is all about.
4.“What old behaviors, technologies, and practices might you have to give up or suspend to get to where you want to be?”
The number one thing that will change is having less access to water. Less water has a cascading effect. It means less room for sloppy/lazy gardening. We will have to choose our plant varieties wisely. We will have to feed our soil. We will have to reduce the stress on our plants. And constantly think about how best to use the space we have, to maximize our shade, wind-blocks, sun and warmth.
5.“How will your life–and the lives embedded in your food-producing land–be richer and healthier if you choose to make these changes?”
Interestingly, we see some positives. Our lives can be richer and healthier, because we will make it a priority to grow good, nutrient-dense food close to home. Our bodies will benefit and our soil will benefit. Zooming out, growing some of our own food helps reduce our carbon footprint. And in our own small way our gardens help mitigate climate change by adding green biomass to the planet. And we become part of an alternate food network that adds resilience to our entire food system.
Answering these questions has been good practice. It has challenged us to think about our goals and behaviours, and think about how our growing practices need to adapt to the environmental challenges that are coming. This is an ongoing process, and we will continue to think about these questions and our answers. We end off with one last thought from Gary Paul Nabhan. He reminds us that we are not facing these challenges in a vacuum, rather we can learn from the strategies of farmers and others in hot and dry lands, and share our knowledge:
“In this way we are fortunate. We are not beginning at the 11th hour with a disarmingly blank slate. There are many ways to adapt to drought, heat and wilder, less predictable ecological oscillations; we can successfully adapt because they have, in fact, already been “field-tested” by nature’s diverse organisms and ecosystems and by myriad human cultures.”
Let’s work together as we go to where the puck is going.
Photo caption 1: The Pamir agricultural landscape. In the foreground is a special place for the threshing and cleaning of cereal grains in the village of Jomarj-i-Bolo, Afghan Darvaz. Across the river, in Tajikistan, the beginning of the valley of Vanch. Photo credit: Theodore Kaye. https://journals.openedition.org/ethnoecologie/970
Photo caption 2: Team Canada jersey worn by Wayne Gretzky during the 1998 Winter Olympics. By Orlandkurtenbach – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9545483