With the price – and the cost – of oil overshadowing global politics, the need to break our gardens’ dependence on it is more urgent than ever.
Imagine it: drops of black, oily rain pattering down onto your greenhouse roof, congealing, blocking out the sun. Outdoors, your plants coated in the same foul-smelling, hellish precipitation. The air choking, every sooty breath making you cough and splutter. Eyes burning, stinging, watering with tears of every sadness known.
That’s what gardeners in our war-torn zones frequently experience, especially those living near to oil storage and refining facilities set ablaze during global military conflicts. Images of the sun being blocked out by black clouds of burning oil seem unreal, unimaginable. Yet there will be gardeners – everyday folk, just like you and me, growing crops and flowers like we do – wondering how their cherished plots, let alone their lives, will ever recover.
Burning oil releases a cocktail of soot, heavy metals, sulphur compounds and carcinogenic hydrocarbons, contaminating the air, water and soil, sometimes for decades, long after wars have ended. Pollution entering soil and water damages vital ecosystems on which life depends; it can be taken up by food crops, rendering them hazardous and inedible. Gardeners and horticultural growers face the same ecological disaster. Oil fires release carbon dioxide and methane, which make climate breakdown worse, and black carbon, which darkens snow and ice, speeding its melting. Oil’s pall turns day to night. Imagine.
Thinking about gardeners caught up in military conflicts hit home hard recently during my ‘black’ day in the garden, unearthing my own oil-based problem. Mercifully it wasn’t raining from the skies – but it was hiding in the soil.
When I began carving my earth- and climate-friendly garden from a bracken-riddled hillside 20 years ago, I reached for every bit of low-work-with-big-benefits help I could get. Deep, weed-smothering mulches were major players, helping me clear large, flat areas. Down went the sheets of cardboard and on went the mulch of spoiled hay, straw, bracken and whatever else I could get. It worked a treat – I didn’t break my back digging, the cardboard soon became humus, and cleared ground lay waiting for the next steps.
I deployed everything available to clear wild, weedy ground. One material I had to hand was ‘ground cover’ or ‘weed control’ fabric, made from woven polyester. You lay this over weedy ground, cover it with stone chippings, bark or wood chips, then cut holes and plant through them. It blocks off light to any weeds and, being porous, lets water and air pass through. Useful, convenient, cheap and unrottable (allegedly), it is made from – you guessed it – oil; basically, it’s plastic.
My garden-making enthusiasm persuaded my hesitancy that it would be fine to use it, temporarily, and that one day I’d peel it back to reveal clear soil begging to be planted, then roll the fabric up ready for recycling. Two decades on, that day finally arrived. It was a dark one.
Over the years the fabric disappeared from view, falling leaves adding to the original top layer of mulch. I forgot it was there. In time it became enmeshed in the ground, folded into red ants’ nests, burrowed under by voles and embroidered with couch. Extracting it was a soul-destroying nightmare. There was no neat peeling it back and rolling it up ready for recycling (it can’t be recycled anyway, because by that stage it’s dirty). It tore into perished fragments, unweaving itself, scattering its black, shiny strands into the soil.
We didn’t know what we do now about microplastic pollution 20 years ago, so it was a painful moment; I can pick out the obvious big bits as rain reveals them, but I’ll always know the micros (let alone the nanoplastics) are still there, lost forever, responsible for who knows what. I felt for gardeners everywhere caught up in war, and for their poisoned soil, although my despair pales when compared to theirs. My soil will still safely grow stuff; theirs may not be so willing.
My day got brighter. A part-used roll of hemp fibre, overlooked in the loft, came to the rescue, replacing the polluting plastic as the base layer of another deep mulch. Hemp is one of the available plant fibres – together with coir, hessian and jute – that can be used for garden mulching. Sheep’s wool mulch also works, adding nutrients to the soil as it decomposes.
They’re renewable, rot away to nothing, lock up some carbon, don’t require processing or refining, and are unlikely to trigger environmentally disastrous, world-economy-rocking wars. No one – except gardeners who’ve clubbed together to buy them on a big, money-saving roll – is going to fight over them. They’re not going to pollute your soil – they’re going to enrich it. Search ‘natural ground cover fabric’ and have a mooch (do study the small print, checking they are pure fibres/wool and not backed or woven with plastic or synthetic recycled materials).
Some fossil fuel is going to be burnt getting them to you (unless delivery is by electric vehicle), but given what you can achieve by quickly clearing ground, especially to grow food – or to simply jump-start your garden-making – this is an imperfect but realistic trade-off. Done mindfully, gardening gives far more than it takes from our living world. It makes our increasingly dizzying human world a better place.
Oil’s dark fingers still reach into every corner of our gardening lives; oil is needed for pots, planters, labels, watering cans, footwear, fleece (worn and protective), hoses, shading, packaging, polytunnels, plastic mini greenhouses, pesticides, weedkillers, ground cover fabric and so much else. The list is endless and it’s hard to break our addiction – but break it we must.
Plastic-free and therefore oil-free gardening isn’t always straightforward and is often more expensive, but we have to give it a shot: for the soil, for all of our living world, for our shared chaotic climate, but most of all for our fellow gardeners enduring the sticky, oily patter of black rain.
Words and images © John Walker; Black rain: DepositPhotos
Find John on X @earthFgardener