I've written a lot of doom and gloom lately. It sounds like I'm living in a literal nightmare of oppression, torture and slavery.

Now I'm not going to deny that, but it's all a matter of perspective innit? My life is an absolute luxury compared to most people's lives in this world. In fact, most of my posts about China aren't really about me, I'm more using myself as a gateway to the experience that is shared among the locals who have lived their lives here. I cannot tell their stories nor their elders, but I can give a glimpse into it through my own eyes.

That being said, as a foreigner in this land, a white one at that! - I do live a comparatively privileged life. Compound that with the fact I live in Shanghai, a city chock-full of ultra privileged brats and elites whose personalities consist of very little more than simply expressing how much money they have and how important they think they are on the grand stage, well, it's hardly Libya, is all I'm saying.

So I'm gonna focus on some positives in my life for a while. After all, my daily life is generally quite content, at least with the direction I am working on taking it.

Gardening Endeavours

Growing up as a kid, my house had quite a wonderful garden, cared for by my granddad, a very green-thumbed, nature-loving man 'til the day he died. He would teach me how to make a bow and arrow from bamboo, cut hedges with heavy tools, build a tent, collect the chickens' eggs, all that stuff. And, gardening.

We had apple & pear trees, gooseberries, green peas, all kinds of edible fun stuff as well as decorative flowers around the fish pond we built from scratch (which, according to google maps, has since been completely eradicated in place of a dry, flat patch of dirt... nice).

Once a frog n' fish paradise... sad.

With that rural upbringing, it still seems odd to me that I chose to move to a big concrete city in South Korea, followed by another 12 years - my entire adult life - in increasingly bigger piles of sterile concrete.

This will come to an end pretty soon, but that's a blog for another day. In the meantime, I've always tried to include a bit of greenery when I can. There's something immensely satisfying about growing your own food, and it somehow just tastes so much better when your cherry tomatoes are handpicked 8 seconds ago.

Besides, while I watch the world crumble, I'll be the last one laughing when I find a plot of uninhabited land with a bag of seeds, while the rest of y'all starve. (I'm aware half of this platform is made up of homesteaders/off-gridders or whatever).

It's surprising how much can go wrong when growing crops. Most of them are live fast, die young by design, but nature managed to keep up with its whole 'destroy fast, kill young' attitude. To me this is by far the most interesting part of the gardening experience. Many are totally dismayed by their crop failures, even if it's just a casual hobby for them. To me, this is the most interesting part! Not least because it's a very valuable learning process.

This year, I attempted the following:

• Green Peas
• Long Beans
• Potatoes
• Chilis
• Tomatoes
• Sunflowers (the focus of today)

This was the final year I was staying in my very unique little Oasis of an apartment which fortunately had an obscurely long balcony/catwalk, spanning 20 metres, plus a rooftop. However, the rooftop did me no favours in the past, as the sun simply roasted everything alive no matter how many gallons of water I poured into the pots. The catwalk has a bamboo garden looming over it, giving it some gorgeous shade, while also permitting a lot of direct sunlight. It was perfect!

That being said, I was still fairly limited in space, and before I could truly get started, a multi-month lockdown happened meaning I could no longer get access to basic food supplies, let alone garden supplies, soil, pots and so forth. At a certain point, I became cut off and trapped to work with and ration what I had.

This itself was a pretty interesting challenge, thinking back, but it did come with frustrations. For example, my sunflowers. By far the most fun thing for me to watch growing every day, but I bought some kind of Titanic-brand seeds which meant they were doing their damndest to grow 15 feet tall and beyond - in tiny pots barely fit for a carrot!

Nonetheless, I managed to see them through, surviving through the lockdowns and right until I moved out once and for all. I had to behead them fairly prematurely, as a new tenant was taking over, but I'd say about 10% of the seeds were viable enough for me to roast. The rest were kinda empty shells I think I'll just throw to the birds and they can dig around and see what they can find.

The Journey of the Titans

The trouble I went through to make these beasts thrive was fascinating. At a certain size, their leaves, from the bottom up, started shriveling and became as dry as if it had been oven roasted. 1-2 leaves started dying every day.

After everything we had gone through to get this far, I could see this was the end. It took me weeks to figure out what was killing them. I mean, obviously the tiny pots were the ultimate cause. But what exactly was causing it. Not enough water? Too much water? Root-bound? Disease? Googling and asking on forums gave me plenty of options, but I needed one answer, not 12.

Eventually, each of the giants had barely 5 leaves left and yet were still flowering out and providing a space for an absolute orgy from the bug community. I even saw a giant, black bee I had never seen before in all my years in this country, city, apartment. Pretty amazing.

Sunflowers are also apparently a fantastic home for many types of bugs, with ladybirds hanging out deep within the seeds beneath the petals, spiders getting ready to ambush from underneath, and to my dismay after taking the heads indoors, a bunch of other creepy crawlies too.

Fun Fact, a single sunflower is actually made up of a thousand teeny tiny flower thingy's!

By the time they were about to give up the ghost, I tried several things that you might think common sense, but my final idea actually worked!

The size of the pots meant that the roots, of which there were certainly wayyyy too many, were so crammed together that they made the soil within literally air-tight! Whatever water I was pouring in was getting sucked up by the top inch maybe only. The rest of the roots were left to dry out and starve.

I discovered this when I tried to poke holes in the pots to see what was going on, only to find a powdery dust of dirt poofed out from within. I had poured a gallon of water in there only an hour before!

So, still in lockdown there wasn't much I could do. I got a couple of sticks and started drilling holes into the soil, nevermind a few broken roots. It was super dense all the way down, but I made about 8 holes all the way round, and then incision-watered down to the bottom.

Surprise surprise, the daily leaf-death had suddenly ceased the very next day, and from that point on, those 5 remaining leaves stuck around until their final days as a flower! These 9-foot tall beasts found a way to sustain themselves with a little innovation and guesswork from me. Pretty incredible.

The lesson

Sure, it cost me months of effort, who knows how much in soil, potting, tools and water, and all I got was a small handful of seeds that may or may not be edible, but that was never the point! Now I'm equipped with an arsenal of solutions for the inevitable doomsday over the horizon... or just for when I get a nice garden in England, either way.

Learning the common diseases, pests, seasonal planting, rotations, partner plants, and everything in between means ultimately, I'll be able to start things off for a one-time starters fee, then I may never have to pay for potatoes again! And if society does perish, I could make a pretty nifty profit trading chilis for supplies.

The future.

I have officially and forever moved out of this home of 5 years, into a much bigger, more sterile environment. Though I am now just another little ant in a colony of nobody's living in a an architectural and ecological nightmare, far from my friends, it does come with the its own benefits. Besides, this is simply a temporary spot while we prepare for England, since that might take longer than you might think...