Gardening in a changing climate
Gardens facing the challenge
Commercial growers
changing times mean changing business
Britain’s commercial nurseries have been investing in research to help them use less energy and water, through the Horticultural Development Council. It collects a compulsory levy from all but the smallest nurseries for its work.
One example is Double H Nurseries in Hampshire, one of the largest of the UK’s remaining pot-plant growers, which takes part in trials of energy-saving techniques. It has cut the amount of gas it uses for glasshouse heating by 20 percent, thanks to strategies such as the use of thermal screens to prevent the loss of heat at night; and by allowing temperatures to fall below the crop’s optimum at certain times.
Some nurseries are pioneering their own innovative ways of cutting the amount of fossil fuel they burn. Cheshire tomato grower Philip Pearson is investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in an anaerobic digester that converts waste tomato leaves into methane, for heating and power generation, and carbon dioxide that he uses to boost crop growth. ‘We’re cutting our carbon footprint by not burning fossil fuel, by not sending all that waste to a dump, and by not composting it, which would release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,’ he says.
Meanwhile, tree and shrub growers are working out how to capture more of the rain that falls on their crops, and how to recycle it. Wyevale Nursery in Herefordshire is one of the UK’s largest. ‘Lack of water was the biggest limit to growing more plants,’ said Steve Reed, Technical Director. Water is now collected from all glasshouse roofs, and 3ha (7.4 acres) of new beds for container-grown shrubs channels drained and collected water into a reservoir for treatment and reuse. ‘We can now recycle about 20 million litres (4.4 million gallons) a year,’ says Steve.
One of the country’s oldest garden centres, Ayletts of St Albans, Hertfordshire, became the first to be awarded the British Standard (BS8555) for its environmental management, and was one of the first to take part in the Horticulture Trades Association’s environmental management scheme.
‘The scheme has helped us find lots of things that we’ve been able to do to reduce our impact on the environment,’ says Aylett’s director, Adam Wigglesworth. ‘Some of them sound trivial on their own, but that’s the point: we all have to do a lot of small things that add up to make a big difference.’
At Aylett that starts with recycling everything from light bulbs and batteries to vast amounts of cardboard and plastic packaging, which are compressed using special balers, so more can be transported at a time. ‘We’ve reduced the amount of waste sent to landfill by 25 percent in the first year,’ says Adam.
The company has reviewed and improved all the heating and insulation in its glasshouses - it is one of the few garden centres to have retained a nursery to grow some of its bedding and pot plants - and has made big savings in fuel use as a result. ‘We have also been able to reduce heating temperatures at certain points in the crop-growing cycle, and better planning means we are moving crops around to make best use of the heated areas, emptying other areas and turning off the heat.’
Aylett has also saved a lot of water, says Adam, by fitting more efficient irrigation sprinklers that give more even coverage. ‘Now we’re looking to capture and store water from our roofs and outdoor plant areas.’
Gardeners are already starting to ask about how far plants are being transported to the garden centre so Adam wants to source more stock as locally as possible, ‘Though the true origins of plants are not always easy to trace, we know all the bedding is locally grown,’ he says.