As you will know if you’re a regular reader, I’m an advocate of ocean farming. The big challenge for growing ‘sea vegetables’ is getting it to scale and proving it can make a significant contribution. But what about the other end of the scale – having a go yourself, on a DIY basis?
I wouldn’t know where to start with such a thing, and not just because my home is about as far inland as you can get in England. But maritime gardens are a real thing in Denmark. It started in 2011 in a harbour called Ebeltoft and the idea spread. Several places now have societies organising areas of the coast that local people can use to produce mussels and seaweed.
Sea garden societies work in a similar fashion to allotment societies on land. The local authority sets aside some space, and those interested in using it organise themselves to manage it. There’s a modest subscription – it costs 500 krone, or £58, to join Keterminde Maritime Haver, the largest of the associations. (Their brochure says you can be a member whether you live in the area or not, just in case anyone wants to sea-garden vicariously.)
One big difference from land allotments is that you don’t get your own individual patch. They tried that, and too many people got it wrong. It’s not like they teach seaweed cultivation in school, even in Denmark. It worked better when people worked together and learned from each other, with work divided across the community. Sub-groups in the allotment society take responsibility for things like boat maintenance, event organising, and teams specialising in growing mussels or seaweed. In short, it’s more like a community garden at sea than allotments per se.
Sea gardening has revived an underused harbour area in Keterminde, and ocean farming is regenerative – mussels clean the water and seaweed improves biodiversity. “Divers tell us that it looks very nice under the allotment,” says the chairman of the association. “There is good growth in the seaweed on the seabed and anchors. They see many fish too. It’s in contrast to the seabed outside the allotment, which is just sand.”
Ocean farming is a really useful thing to be doing, and an organisation called Havhøst has formed to encourage more Danish communities to set up sea gardens, especially in towns and cities.
This isn’t unique to Denmark. There’s a community seaweed garden in Oban, Scotland. There are community owned seaweed farms on the Scottish islands of Iona and Mull.
Sea gardening in Denmark has been a story because it’s new, and the Guardian covered it last year. I suspect that there plenty of places where marine gardens are well established and the internet isn’t aware of it. The Pacific Sea Garden collective has been documenting some of them, such as ancient Japanese fish traps. Looking a bit like dry-stone walls on the beach, these were designed to catch fish as the tide went out, and families used to have their own. Various North American indigenous communities had sea gardening traditions too. By documenting some of these, the collective hopes to both preserve the traditions where they endure, and revive them where they have declined.
I hope they succeed, and engage more communities in hands-on stewardship of the marine environment. And I hope to see ocean farming on a large scale too.
The Earthbound Report 