So I don’t know how many of our international crew here realise, but the UK is crashing right now at a pretty alarming rate.
Food left to rot in the fields as we don’t have enough workers to pick it
Shortages of cement, timber, plastics, paint and a host of other building materials
Shortages of lorry drivers to deliver what goods there are
Shortages of chemicals for blood tests. GPs are rationing blood tests for their patients
Shortages of CO2 (ironically) means not enough dry ice for shipping food and hence further shortages
Empty shelves in many supermarkets, with rolling shortages across a wide range of food types
Natural gas shortages meaning many energy companies are on the brink of going out of business, and heating costs have skyrocketed over the last few months
The UK has the lowest capacity of natural gas storage in the EU, which makes the problem worse.
High heating costs expected to push a record number of families into food poverty and reliance on food banks
A record number (even without the point above) of families unable to afford food and relying on food banks. And the Gov is about to cut universal credit even further.
Brexit paperwork pushing many companies that relied on exporting goods to suffer huge loss of business, or collapse entirely
There was an article in the telegraph (not posting it here - filthy rag) that hinted the Gov is looking at a 3-day week this winter to curb business energy needs
The long descent seems to be here with a vengeance… And we’re right at the beginning. Who knows what this will look like in a couple years from now…
I hate to be echoing a favourite cat-call of Keith 264 at the time that Corbyn was cancelled, but… ‘I told you…’
Not that any of the eco-savvy people reading here need schooling on the realities of the Long Descent, I don’t suppose.
My neighbours are taking kindly right now to my demos of how to grow taters in untilled, lightly-mulched and occasionally-clipped sward. An art I first encountered when a member of Lawrence Hills’ ‘Henry Doubleday Research Association’ of innovative-volunteer organic gardeners, in the early '70s. There’s a widespread sense down here amongst the working-shlubs that tough times are coming, and maybe growing some at least of your own food could be a good idea.
HINT! HINT!
Taters in moderately-mulched sward are dead easy. Just about any bit of available ground will do, though if its fertility-level is suspected to be low, add a good mulch dressing of comfrey or nettles, which contribute plentiful soil-food. Needs to be done some weeks before laying out the seed tubers. And if you don’t try to kill out the resident wild volunteer plants in the sward, but let them jostle cheek by jowl with the potato haulms, just clipping back occasionally if they threaten to overwhelm and shade out the haulms, you should encounter near zero ‘pest’ problems, even with several years growing on the same plot. The plurality of species living in close proximity seems to balance everything out nicely.
Taters are a good beginners crop. Easy (as long as you NEVER till!) and a good result almost every time. And a filling and satisfying starchy vegetable on which you can survive almost on it’s own. Little else needed for good nutrition and a satisfied appetite. Potatoes created and for a long time sustained the plentiful population that formed the Irish diaspora after An Gorta Mor.
PS: Should have mentioned: After mulching - and compost scattering if you have any - let the wild volunteers grow, and just before planting, clip them all down short, and leave lying as extra mulch. Then part the mulch at about foot intervals, lay a seed-potato, or an eyed-chit thereof, directly on the soil surface, and re-cover lightly with mulch, thin enough to allow the growing plant to see the light through the gaps and aim for it. Clip back volunteers occasionally, as needed, to give the potato haulms a small advantage, but never attempt to ‘eradicate’ all plants but the potatoes; counter-productive. Walk on as little of the soil of your grow-patch as you can manage. Compaction is a no-no.
Ha… Taters… We were away unexpectedly for 5 weeks in July/August and the farmer who we rent from thought he’d spray the weeds around our house and thoughtfully sprayed our entire potato mound with glyphosate! A FARMER who can’t recognise a potato plant even though the mounds had a sprinkler above them and were right next to our wicking beds with all our other vegetables (admittedly he grows wheat, barley, oats, canola etc, not vegetables, but even so).
Not sure if anyone does wicking beds in the UK. They are a very popular method of growing veggies in our water scarce part of Australia as the water source is underneath the plants which hugely reduces evaporation from sprinkling (except for the potatoes that weren’t in a wicking bed!!). Pictures are of one of our wicking beds and our first broccoli and cauliflower harvest last year. Wine bottle for scale. Won’t be so good this year due to our unexpected absence but the wicking beds are keeping us in spinach, herbs and snow peas at the moment… Hopefully more things (beans, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, capsicums and strawberries) coming over the next few months before it gets too hot.
As well as all the above there’s the ‘chipageddon’ which has been a thing for months already. Part of my job role is procurement of IT and relatively commonplace laptops/desktop PCs for enterprise have ETAs of Q2 2022 yes that’s April 2022.
The gas supply issue is going to cause systemic shocks.
Good job the cops have been spending the summer gathering all that facial recognition data of mask refuseniks so that a nice steady supply of folk devils can be picked upon.
Cheers bwana. You were right, and you’ve been saying this since I’ve known you, which is a decent long time now! Actually it was you who first pointed me to the long descent and JM Greer in the first place.
Our allotment this year was ok, but the toms got nowhere really. Not enough sun, and somehow not enough rain either… although when it did rain it was too much and left a lot of plants in a sorry state. Growing food whilst the climate shifts like this is a complex business.
We were thinking of adding a wiki page to this site, where we can add resources for certain topics. We were thinking of doing one for ivermectin and other covid treatments, but reading your post makes me think we should add one for good no-till growing teks. We need to preserve what information we can as we slide downhill.
I’ll have a think. I could probably add some mushroom growing teks too.
We are looking at wicking actually. We have raised beds in our allotment and we are looking at efficient ways of irrigating them. I might message you about that. Or maybe we create that Wiki we were talking about.
Your story about the potatoes made me think of a story I heard here recently. It was during a webinar with Vandana Shiva, Helen Browning and others. Helen said that she recently read an article in Farmers Weekly here in the UK where a farmer had suddenly discovered that planting beans and clover in his fallow land would actually fix nitrogen in the soil and spare him the expense of buying nitrogen supplements to spread around!
A farmer. Just discovering that beans and clover fix nitrogen…
Jesus. Anyway. Small steps in the right direction are to be welcomed I guess!
A special section for survival-gardening info would be a very good practical response to the perennial question (with added suburban-bourgeois hand-wringing): “But what can I DO?” I vote for that. Britain is NOT self-sufficient in food; but it could be!
Small, inglorious things like cultivating your local face-to-face community network, developing practical skill in some perennially in-demand, do-it-at-home craft, such as guerrilla gardening in several peoples’ patches of available ground (like Jim Kovaleski - qv on YT), and becoming competent practical subsistence-horticulure growers (which takes several years practice to get good at!) are all examples of the eminently right approach. Everyone can do such things, right where you are now, and they are, quite genuinely, a highly-practical rehearsing of actually-effective responses to the global calamity.
Raised beds of the right kind, with plentiful mulch scarfed up from wherever you can glean it, will work wonders - of the low-back-breaking-labour kind. I have to post this link yet again, as it’s such a crucially-insightful, skilful approach for backyard permaculturists. Emilia’s elucidation of Masanobu Fukuoka’s chief insight - that soil-fertility comes FREE from the sky - is absolutely crucial to all hortis:
The current disaster of the - self-inflicted by human oligo-fools - scamdemic is a text-book example of the sort of repeating lurch-downs in life-quality and prosperity which JMGreer describes in his writings: The stair-stepdown pattern, being a slow, steady decline in the practical capabilities of hitech industrial society, punctuated by sudden lurch-downs at intervals, is his insight. When we ‘recover’ from the battering that the lockdowns have caused us, things will ease a bit; but we shall never be going back quite to the previous level of prosperity - or freedom - that we had before. Rinse and repeat, for the next century or two. The time to prepare is NOW!
even though the mounds had a sprinkler above them and were right next to our wicking beds with all our other vegetables (admittedly he grows wheat, barley, oats, canola etc, not vegetables, but even so).
