On Cape Cod, we’re seeing the effects of climate change in lots of ways. But there’s one change that caught the attention of Orleans agro-ecologist Peter Jensen. And that is the shift in how rainfall happens.
“We're in the middle of a drought,” Jensen says. “We're going to be in this drought no matter if we get a huge rain event tomorrow night [or not]. It'll help the immediate environment, but it'll be taken right back into the atmosphere by the lawn and the grasses and the trees and the shrubs that are actively growing and transpiring; it will not get to the aquifer.”
We’ve been in a drought now since 2024. And it’s likely we’re going to keep seeing these conditions because with climate change, the way rain arrives is different. Storms have become less frequent but more intense. And it’s hard for dry sandy soil to hold onto big influxes of water.
“My career earlier before COVID brought me home was across Africa, Asia, Latin America, teaching Peace Corps volunteers and UN aid workers and UNHCR aid workers and field staff in refugee camps, et cetera, to create this hügelkultur idea on slopes, that then becomes a terrace,” Jensen says. “And that's common practice all over the tropical world and the Mediterranean world, where they've dealt with these climatic changes of heavy deluge and long periods of dry.”
Hügelkultur is the practice of burying organic matter—things like logs, leaves, biochar, and sticks—to capture and hold onto moisture in a garden. When he designs a planting area, Peter pairs hügelkultur with techniques that direct water to where he wants it to flow.
“Water flow is under best control if it’s curved,” Jensen says. “A straight line is too powerful. If you make water bend it slows down and it sinks, it’s like an oxbow in a river and it spreads itself out. We want the water to ‘drill’ in a sense, to go down. And then as it goes down, it also spreads through the soil, as opposed to over the soil. Water flowing over soil is erosion, runoff and erosion but water going through the soil—again, an organic matter-rich soil, logs, leaves, wood chips, compost, fungal matter—that purifies it but also holds the water, saves the water for those times, long periods of time when we don't have any rain.”
The gardens Jensen creates are designed to catch and hold rain that comes as fast as three inches per hour—think Nor-easter or hurricane. And to show me what this can look like, he took me on a tour of his own home vegetable garden off a busy road in Orleans.
“We take the water off of Monument Road here,” Jensen old me. “It's coming anyway. It was flooding the front yard. By taking it in with direction and guidance, it saturates into a pond. Before it can just rush into the driveway or rush across the lawn, it goes through a saturation hole. And that saturation hole then guides it through a hugel terrace, hügelkultur that hosts the biological life, fungal, bacterial that will actually capture the nitrates, capture the phosphates, and detoxify the petrochemicals that are coming off the road.”
He’s created a series of swooping, sloping, curving bends and ponds running through the hügelkultur beds—a lot like a natural river—and only after the water has made it through this maze does Peter direct it toward his home food production garden because finally it’s filtered and clean.
“Now we're getting into some food crops, the blueberries,” Jensen says. “And down here we have an arch where we're just beginning now training butternut and cucumber and zucchini underneath because we're now at the bottom of the garden, well away from the road.”
It’s a different way of thinking about making sure our food plants get plenty of water—instead of a sprinkler or a hose, it’s a system where the rain does the work—with a little help from humans thinking ahead.
Here's a link to learn more about Peter's work: https://provincetownindependent.org/farm-garden/2024/04/24/gardens-that-make-runoff-a-resource/
For more on agro-ecology: https://www.thisisterrafirma.com/about
