Active undisturbing

Whatever gardening validates active undisturbing: deliberately letting it be. Over the past five years, I have been developing my style of Whatever Gardening, not in a curated style of gardening but relinquishing overall control for a blend of allowing and purposeful intervention, making way for the regeneration of a place into a rich habitat. Step by step, my backyard habitat changes and develops. I can track my steps over and around all this growth, sometimes intervening but always considering when I should be stepping aside.

Whatever webs: all small actions count

My interest in home gardening and multispecies interactions aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15: Life on Earth, particularly protecting, restoring and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, halting and reversing land degradation and biodiversity loss. Rattan Lal from Ohio State University promotes practicing home gardening and urban agriculture (HGUA) as important strategies towards the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (2020). The roles of home gardening and urban agriculture have been underrated: in food security and providing ecosystem services such as microclimate, plant biodiversity, water quality and reduction of run-off as well as human health. HGUA can reduce […]

Whatever Gardening in my Scratch Patch

I am not really a gardener. I’m a sort of gardener, a ‘whatever’ gardener. I simply don’t have the time and energy to do much. Nevertheless, when I had a house built on a small block of grassed clay soil, I decided to try. After decades of shrivelling any plant I was supposed to care for, I was starting from scratch in more ways than one. My aims in developing my scratch patch were to improve the soil and sequester carbon on a small scale, creating a habitat to feed myself and others, including other species. These intentions completely ignored […]