How do we save the planet? By planting rocks in our gardens to “prevent global warming?” Isn’t that murder?
Or by planting rhubarb?
The second garden is mine, across the road from the firs, which is the global warming it is trying to invent. It is amazing what a country addicted to oil will think of next. Actually, we don’t save the planet. We ask it to save us. Then we listen. I planted this salad one day between snow storms a month ago.
Categories: Agriculture, Ethics, Gaia, vegetable gardening, Water
Okanagan Okanogan 
Not sure what you are saying … Surely gravel landscaping is an attempt to prevent the water-wastefulness and chemical pollution of traditional lawns. If the landscape fabric were removed at some later point, could the productivity of the soil return? Never thought about that – people consider gravel (ie landscape rock) as a permanent solution.
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Hi,
the gravel replaces traditional lawn, yes, but a productive garden on trickle, with the added responsibility to look after the earth, would also support birds and insects, including wild bees that have nowhere else to go, and xeriscaping would also be an option, which would have the same effect, with little or zero water. The real problem is that gravel landscaping is very expensive, encourages the thought that the earth is dead, creates a desert where there was none, kills birds and bees and other insects, and bolsters the idea that in the Okanagan global warming from atmospheric carbon is the active principle of climate change, when gravel lawns, human population and water management systems (and settlement patterns) are the active principle. At Head of the Lake there is a golf course to pick up the environmental slack, but most areas don’t have that luxury, and when one considers that the golf course (and the farms to the north) reduces the environmental productivity by, what, I dunno, at least 80%, in an area that should be feeding the entire north of the lake, perhaps the problem is just shifted sideways. There is a lot of pollution associated with golf courses, and almost no regulation. I don’t know about the Spallumcheen course, though. As for returning land from gravel landscaping, I’ve done a lot of that. It sometimes takes a lot of inputs to return the dead soil to health, as soil is not a mineral product but a living environment. Still, it can be done. My point had more to do with caring for the earth by fitting in with it and taking responsibility. My yard, for instance, reclaimed from ground cloth, is an oasis for birds and bees in a neighbourhood without any, below a grassland (weed) hill that deteriorates annually. I believe we all have an ethical responsibility to maintain life in the greatest possible complexity. Does that make more sense?
Best,
Harold
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