Psychedelic Garden Love

January 11, 2013

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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A huge ‘dome of heat’ over Australia has broken temperature records, and this heat has been so intense that the Bureau of Meteorology has been required to create new colours for their charts, which had previously been capped at 50 degrees. Deep red has now been superseded by deep purple. Bush fires have been raging across the country – a sign of a warming world, the impacts of which are destined only to intensify.

While urban areas are less prone to the risks of fire in such circumstances, my poor vegetable garden suffers terribly when we face extended periods of extreme heat. In my small corner of the world, this has called for some Psychedelic Garden Love, but alas, that’s not what you might think. Much less interesting, but still very important.

I’m talking about making garden shade cloth out of bright old sheets from the op-shop. Out of love for our garden, yesterday my partner sewed together many old sheets and attached ties, which we then strung up around our dear garden to protect it from the sun which has been scorching our veges. Without shade cloth in these temperatures, all our hard work would be frizzled away.

Shade cloth from a hardware store is very expensive, especially if you were to buy enough to cover an entire vegetable garden. Second-hand sheets, however, do the trick perfectly, and you can usually pick them up for a dollar or two. Sew them together to create shade cloth, and attach them to the fence, poles, house, etc with hooks.

This has become a necessary practice for us, and I suspect that increasingly people around the world are going to have to practice similar shading techniques in order to save their crops from the hot spells. The upside is that your garden assumes a psychedelic feel for a few days, as the bright sheets flap around in the wind in your backyard. It looks like a stoned hippy has parachuted into your backyard from outer space, or a hot air balloon has crash-landed.

Your neighbours will think you have lost your marbles, but your vegetables will love you for it.

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Samuel Alexander

Over the last ten years Dr Samuel Alexander has been a lecturer and researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ as part of the Master of Environment. He has also been a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and is currently co-Director of the Simplicity Institute. Alexander’s interdisciplinary research focuses on degrowth, permaculture, voluntary simplicity, ‘grassroots’ theories of transition, and the relationship between culture and political economy. His current research is exploring the aesthetics of degrowth and energy descent futures. His books include Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019, co-authored with Brendan Gleeson); Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future (2018, co-authored with Josh Floyd); Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth (2017); Just Enough is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics (2016); Deface the Currency: The Lost Dialogues of Diogenes (2016); Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015); Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015); and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013); he is also editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014). In 2016 he also released a documentary called A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity, co-produced with Jordan Osmond of Happen Films. Alexander blogs at www.simplicitycollective.com.