This essay is part of our column, A Taste of Climate, that considers the intersection of food and climate.

I knew I was in over my head when I found myself in my garden plot sweating from head to toe in the early morning as mosquitos attacked me from all angles. I was dressed in jeans, a long thin blouse, and thick gloves, yet the mosquitos still managed to sneak in bites through the gap between my socks and jeans, on my wrists, through my blouse, and all over my bare face. At 85 degrees with thick, sticky humidity, the air hung onto me like cling film. It felt like being in a sauna. Except there was no escape hatch.

It was barely 7 a.m. 

I had spent the week before in the exact same situation—hot and uncomfortable, pulling weeds out from my plot—an 890-square-foot veritable jungle thick with Spanish needles and stubborn pigweeds. Yet from a glance, you wouldn’t know I had put any work into it. The weeds had grown back with a vengeance. 

When I first moved to Taiwan full-time in 2020, I had a bold dream of passively maintaining an organic garden on the outskirts of town during my free time. After a string of volunteer stints at farms across the world, I wanted to challenge myself to grow as much of my own food as possible. 

I put out some feelers, and within a couple of weeks, became a steward of a large rectangular plot about thirty minutes away from the city. When the landlord handed it over to me, the ground was covered in a thick black plastic tarp ostensibly for weed suppression. Without thinking, I giddily peeled the tarp off, convinced I could manage the eventual overgrowth.

My vision for the space: a lush subtropical food forest sans any chemicals or plastic, anchored by tall banana trees among lemongrass and thick Taiwanese basil bushes. In Taiwan, organic farms only make up 3 percent of arable land and though my plot would not make a dent in that figure, at least I could have first-hand access to clean food. For the cooler months, I dreamt of garden beds stacked with familiar produce from the Americas, where I grew up, like lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and corn.

As a child of dry and parched Los Angeles, the constantly wet, jungle-esque climate of Taiwan felt like a proverbial garden of Eden, where I believed I could grow food year-round more easily. I felt prepared enough for the task; years before my move to Taiwan, I spent a month living on a tropical permaculture farm in Costa Rica, where we nurtured fields of taro and cassava. There, I learned the importance of covering the soil with mulch for weed suppression and moisture retention and prioritizing plants naturally adapted for the climate.

So I went full speed ahead, recruiting friends and strangers to help me dig up mounds of soil and edge them out with trimmed bamboo poles so that they looked like proper raised beds. For mulch, we collected dried leaves from the parks, and piles of cardboard. I prioritized subtropical perennials like lemongrass and curry trees—proven to thrive in heat and able to survive year-round. 

Yet maintaining my subtropical garden in Taiwan felt like a Sisyphean task. My thin layer of leaves and cardboard were not enough to suppress the weeds. The pigweeds, with their pink, wiggly, wormlike roots, found their way through any and all the gaps for light. Any bare inch of soil was overrun by weeds, which would then grow over and around any seedlings I had planted. The spiky seeds of the Spanish needles would cling to my clothes like Velcro as I worked my way through the garden, and I’d have to manually pluck each and all of them off when I got home. 

And it wasn’t just the weeds. African snails indistinctly razed over most of what I planted, especially delicate leafy greens like lettuce or anything in the brassica family like broccoli, cabbage, or kale. My tomatoes developed fungal diseases. Plants wilted and rotted faster than they sprouted. Instead of an Eden, my garden felt like a cursed hell, matted over with pests and pestilence. 

While these issues aren’t unique to hot and humid climates, they are especially exacerbated in these conditions. As a subtropical island, Taiwan experiences all four seasons but also alternates between distinct wet and dry periods. During the wet summer season, the air is thick with moisture and the temps are blazing hot. It feels like being suffocated with plastic. Just the act of walking outside is unpleasant; most people spend those months ensconced indoors huddled underneath the air conditioning. With the exception of certain hardy tropical crops like sweet potatoes, bananas, and cassava, most plants struggle in these extreme conditions, often succumbing to the pests and diseases that thrive in the hot and damp environment. 

The dry season gives a little break with cooler, steadier weather, but because of global climatic shifts, what was once a balance between wet and dry seasons has shifted. According to reports, Taiwan now faces summers that can stretch on for as long as seven months.

I looked to my garden plot neighbors for inspiration. Most of them were retirees who had taken gardening up as a hobby. Many of them sprayed their neat rows of vegetables with pesticides, or had their plump rows of cabbage covered under plastic hoop nets to create a physical barrier from the snails. 

The one exception was the American permaculture teacher who had first introduced me to both the landlord and the garden. She was an experienced gardener who had, over many years, built her plot into a layered, multistoried food forest—a self-sustaining network of diverse plants. Her garden did not have an inch of plastic, nor did she spray. She was able to keep the pests and weeds at bay through thick layers of mulch, like rice husks, which helped retain moisture and suppress unwanted growth, and by establishing a vibrant ground cover of low-growing plants like oregano that acted as a living mulch. Most importantly, she kept a dedicated eye on her garden. 

But what she accomplished through time and patience, I desperately lacked. 

I could barely allot more than thirty minutes a week to the garden, which, as I found out the hard way, was not enough time to keep up with the overgrowth. Instead, I found myself quickly losing the battle between the heat and weeds and snails. Within weeks, my layers of leaves and cardboard disintegrated. Within months, the weeds were taller than me. Within a year, even my bamboo borders began to rot and blend into the soil. 

When I gave birth to my son, a couple years after I had first started the garden, I knew it was time to throw in the towel. When I handed the plot back to my landlord, she was visibly unhappy with the mess I had left her.

Suffice it to say that my relatively short-lived gardening experiment was a humbling—albeit embarrassing—experience. In the process, I gained a newfound respect for the people who grow our food, regardless of how they might do it—with chemicals, or plastic, or with plants that have been bred to withstand the extreme fluctuations in temperature. 

Climate change is often synonymous with global warming, but it does not just mean hot temperatures; it also brings increased humidity and volatility, all of which create ideal conditions for pests and fungal diseases. As farmers increasingly rely on fungicides and insecticides to combat these outbreaks, resistant strains emerge, feeding into a vicious, seemingly never-ending cycle. 

In Taiwan, 80 percent of crops are sprayed with pesticides via drone, a statistic that would’ve shocked and disgusted me prior to my gardening stint. But it’s hard to get large, consistent yields otherwise. In fact, insecticide use is expected to increase in a warming climate, despite the health and environmental repercussions. Studies have also shown that the pesticide industry intensifies climate change and degrades the soil.

From my conceptual high horse, it was easy to romanticize food grown in pristine and verdant conditions. However, as I learned the hard way, achieving these systems requires significant labor and effort—much more than just a cursory thirty-minute-a-week commitment. Food does not grow itself, and for a plot as large as mine was, you either have to be all in or all out. 

This isn’t the end of gardening for me. I hope to one day get back in there. But next time, I’m most definitely not going to take on a massive 890-square foot plot by myself. I’ll start with a couple of small garden beds or planters, and work mostly in the winter months when the temperatures are manageable. Having a thriving couple feet of land packed with food is much more manageable than an unruly, overwhelming food forest. 

And during the high peak of summer, I’ll take a break. Instead of battling the inevitable and feeling guilty about it, I’ll let the beds go fallow and the weeds go wild.

There’s no point in fighting the heat.