Planning for peak oil

Planning for peak oil

Growing your own food could be the answer to the coming oil crisis. Photograph: net_efekt/Flickr/Some rights reserved

I am feeling a little apocalyptic. I have been to a talk, hosted by my local organic gardening group, about 'feeding ourselves in post-peak oil Britain'. I am now pondering how to raise the cash for a small bothy off of the north coast of Scotland, a trailer full of tinned Spam and a couple of shotguns.

Long before we run out of oil, says Inez Aponte, from Transition Bristol, who gave the talk, we are going to reach 'peak oil', the point where oil production goes into terminal decline. From this point on (generally accepted to be by 2020, although many believe it is coming much sooner, or that it has recently been reached) oil becomes increasingly hard to find and expensive.

We are utterly dependent on oil for everything, including our food. The tractors that plough the fields, the fertilisers that prop up the soils, the aeroplanes and lorries that deliver it to the supermarkets, all will become unsustainably expensive to run in the not too distant future. Food riots and hungry, marauding mobs become a distinct possibility. Removing yourself from that system and finding a more sustainable alternative seems like a good way to go, and that is what Transition Bristol and other similar groups are hoping to do, on a grand scale. They are talking to councils about putting land aside for local food production, setting up community growing projects, and generally trying to wean us off our dependence on oil and make Britain more self-sufficient. It has been done in Cuba (watch this brilliant film to see how), and the Transition groups think it can be done here.

So what has this got to do with your garden? One of the organisations that Inez talked about was GeoFutures, a Bath-based company that has been mapping the cities of the south west to find out how much land each would need to be self-sufficient in food. Have a look. It is a huge area, and their calculations are based on the amount of farmland and gardens that could potentially be used for food production. That's right, gardens.

Whether you have already ploughed yours up Good Life-style, or it is chock full of tender exotics with not a berry or root to be found, it's in the frame for food production. And perhaps this is as it should be. We are determinedly individualistic about what we put in our gardens, but perhaps we have a duty to think of the common good here. Maybe we have a social responsibility to grow our own food if we can.

I hadn't really planned on planting much food in my garden, if I'm honest. I have a peach tree, a vine, and I always grow a few herbs and Mediterranean vegetables in pots each summer. That's it. But I'm changing my mind. I can't fit in raised beds and rows of cabbages and potatoes, but I'm now wondering what I can slip in. The obvious choice seems to be trained fruit trees, and small nut trees such as hazels, and I have just bought myself a copy of Joy Larkcom's Creative Vegetable Gardening, to see how she has done it. Perhaps when the mobs are bashing at the door with their pitchforks, demanding potatoes and the key to the allotments, a nice border won't seem so important.

But until then I want your ideas. How do you fit edibles into a garden planted for looks? Do we have a responsibility to do so? Or will you stick resolutely to your current garden design as the ship goes down?