Gauteng Smallholder December 2015-January 2016 | Page 3
GAUTENG
COMMENT, by Pete Bower
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
V16 No12/V17 No1
Dec 2015/Jan 2016
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Vanessa Bower
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FRONT COVER
The Christmas turkey. We wish our
readers everything of the best over
the festive season.
Interconnectedness
T
he permaculturists get it. Prince Charles gets it. And a few of us
smallholders get it, too. And that's the realisation that everything,
but everything, on this little ball of slowly-cooling lava we call
Earth is interconnected.
As mankind's great and good meet this month in Paris, that beleagured City of Lights, to
discuss our environmental future at the COP21 summit on climate change, it's worth
reflecting on just how our actions ~ and inactions ~ affect what happens around us,
now and in the future.
And also to reflect on how big, and yet how small, the issue of environmental change,
degradation and management really is.
To make the issue manageable to somebody not seeking fame and glory on the political
world stage ~ most of us, in other words ~ let's look at our own environments, namely
our smallholdings.
You’ve heard of companion planting? That's a prime example of the interconnectedness of plants and insects, (and also a prime example of natural chemical engineering).
Plant a marigold in among your tomatoes and the natural pyrethrins in the marigold act
as a deterrent to the whiteflies and other bugs that you would otherwise need to zap
with chemical sprays if you wish to harvest unblemished fruit.
Encourage ladybirds into your vegetable patch and they will feast on the aphids that
suck the sap from the leaves and stems of your otherwise healthy plants, leaving them
weakened and therefore unable to provide you with fruit.
Even out in your fields, a hedgerow of bushes and trees along a boundary fence, apart
from providing shade and a windbreak for your animals, will provide a habitat for
birds, feeding grounds for bees, and a safe haven for small invertebrates, rodents and
mammals. These in turn, will feed on worms, grubs and other bugs, in turn providing
live food for magnificent owls and other birds of prey.
Conversely, when you decide to fell a tree that has been growing for decades, because
you wish to grade a new road, plough the field in which it grows or do anything similar
in the name of “progress”, be aware that you are destroying a habitat for creatures of
all sizes and varieties, many of which will simply die as a result. If you cut down
enough trees, like in destroying a forest in the name of progress, you risk driving entire
species to extinction.
Look at the sea: ultimately everything we do ends up there. The carbon dioxide and
sulphur dioxide we produce in our power stations and by forest burning and myriad
other industrial activities is absorbed into the sea, and changes into acid. The plastic
rubbish we produce when we buy packaged foodstuffs in supermarkets, and
cooldrinks in cafes, finishes up in the oceans, in the central Pacific and central Atlantic
forming huge (and I mean HUGE … many hundreds of kilometres across) floating
islands, slowly revolving at the epicentre of the ocean currents. Into this spaghetti of
industrial waste become entangled turtles, birds and other marine predators mistaking
the mess for food.
Even the acid mine drainage out of the old gold mines of the Witwatersrand, more
than 1 000km from the sea and about which so much has been written and not so
much done to prevent it, eventually finishes up in the ocean, simply flowing, like all
water does, downhill from stream to river, to bigger river and on out into the sea. Day
after day, slowly raising the pH (acidity) of the sea water to the extent that it can no
longer support marine life. \