On the smallholding Hubster had finally stopped bemoaning the persistent rain just in time for an unseasonal storm to arrive. It’s been such a wet spring all the crops will be just slightly late going into the ground.
However, between the showers we’ve planted onions, broad beans, and potatoes. Whilst many other teachers are flying off on ‘cheeky little getaways’ over the Easter holiday we are using the time off from paid work to grow food. Planting & harvest are what the spring & summer school holidays were designed around. In our agricultural past children were needed to help bring in the harvest over the long, long days of summer. Now they just seem to use it as an excuse to have more screen time.
It’s not dirt
Just before the end of term it actually stopped raining long enough for the school gardening team to plant out our small crop of potatoes in our allotment. One Y7 young gardener proudly announced they had taken off the weird bits from the chitting potatoes in one of the trays. He’d taken off the growth shoots! We popped them in the ground anyway and will hope for the best come harvest time. He didn’t get the joke when I said I was going to keep my ‘eye’ on him.
As the digging went on, we made cross curricular links to the Battle of the Somme and sang ‘mud, mud glorious mud’. The clart was all encompassing. Accident prone Pupil H looked like the creature from the black lagoon by the end of the afternoon, but I think he was still smiling. The children keep referring to soil as dirt and so I keep correcting them. 6 inches of it and rain water means we can survive on earth. Yet it hardly gets a mention in the curriculum as I think I’ve mentioned before. For life on earth soil is more precious than gold… yet kids don’t see it as valuable as most of their food comes off a supermarket shelf. We really need to launch new campaign “Just Top Soil”.
When term starts, I must remember to take a pair of hubster’s old keks into schools for ‘Plant your pants’. It was such a success last year. When the children dug up the leftover plastic elastic after a couple of months it really helped them understand the soil is actually alive with microorganism activity!
Phytophthora infestans
Temperature increase = humidity increase = potato drowning = black spots in the tubers
The failure of the potato crop was the cause of the Great Famine in Ireland in 1845-49. The crop failures were caused by late blight, a bad microorganism that destroys both the leaves and the edible roots, or tubers, of the potato plant. Late blight is caused by the water mould Phytophthora infestans which grows and thrives in cool and wet weather conditions. The pathogen survives at an optimum temperature of between 18⁰ to 22⁰ and humidity of <90%. Generally, changes that increase humidity, such as excess rainfall, cold nights, and fog, trigger the outbreak of the late blight disease. Although most significant in Ireland, the famine caused population decline across Europe.
We’ve just had the wettest 18 months ever recorded in the UK. In some newspapers they’ve commented on the likely failure of crops but still no mention of the climate change behind it. The potato fields from Yorkshire to Suffolk have had almost 200% of the average rainfall recently. The fields are sodden. As each season becomes warmer and wetter here, we are at severe risk of serious failures in harvests but also might not be able to rely on imports from Europe where they are struggling with high temperatures and drought. Risotto rice crops are already failing in Italy and durum wheat, the 10th most cultivated cereal worldwide with production of about 38 million tons per year, has a decreased yield in warmer and drier climates so pasta will increase in price too. The climate change crisis is a carbohydrate crisis.
Our national dish is at risk – and it’s not just the fish
In the words of Samwise Gamgee “Po-tay-toes! Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew! Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish.” What’s the UK national dish without chips to go with our plastic infused fish? Tatties are a huge part of our diets providing ~7% of dietary energy intake of people in the UK. They are an important source of vitamin C and contain B group vitamins, potassium, iron, magnesium, and phytonutrients all of which make potatoes a great choice as part of a healthy diet. Yellow flesh and red-skinned potatoes are also high in antioxidant levels.
OMG! Imagine life with no chips, mash, or crisps. Us peasants may take to rioting in the streets to demand action but farmers, and the politicians largely responsible for leading us into this global disaster, will be helpless. Since the dawn of civilization and the development of agriculture, barring a few difficult years, Mother Nature has filled our cornucopia but then we went and ruined the status quo and put profit over planet. Let’s just hope the weather improves so our smallholding and school crops survive. Also, even if the issue of climate breakdown is a hot potato, we still need to keep talking about it.
Note to self: Maybe ask the HT to encourage children to sign up to additional swimming lessons. The Antarctic was 38.5oC warmer than usual last week and the Greenland ice cap is melting at a rate of 30 million tonnes an hour. Sea levels are climbing at an increasing rate and I’m not sure a pair of Wellington boots are going to be enough to keep their feet dry.
