Cat Got Your Tongue

As I reluctantly jigged around with the others in a circle, jerking my elbows and singing the Chipi-Chipi (a Spanish nursery rhyme translated into English on the hoof by a student from Barcelona) I reflected that the best way to shed oneself of an excess of dignity is to enrol on a course. It doesn't really matter what course as long as it's taught by someone who believes that getting everyone to make a fool of themselves will naturally unlock any inhibitions they may have had previously, thus provoking a free-flowing conversational style of learning. It seemed to work.

The course in question was a three-day Introduction to Permaculture, hosted at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) and led by an external tutor called Angie Polkey. Thirteen of us from various parts of Britain and Spain, including a family of five from Barcelona who had made this part of their holiday, gathered together to be educated in the ways of permaculture. If you aren't sure what this is (and I first heard of it only last year) then you are in good company as even on this course it was admitted that there are as many definitions of permaculture as there are permaculture practitioners. It started life in the 70's as a more environmentally-aware approach to farming (the name is a contraction of "Permanent Agriculture") and has since become an all-inclusive philosophy of sustainability which can apparently be applied to any and every situation. I'd say my interest probably remains primarily with the agricultural side of it.

Day Two saw us making an excursion out a few miles east of Machynlleth to a remote seven-acre plot belonging to Tom and Lisa Brown, a Quaker couple in their late fifties who have lived there the last twenty-three years. Over that time Tom has beautifully restored a tumble-down stone farmhouse and old kiln house using their own timber and locally-sourced recycled materials. Lisa grows veg and sells it at Machynlleth market, and Tom makes and sells honey from their six hives of bees (the homebrew mead they keep to themselves). Holiday guests can come to stay in the caravan that the Browns used to live in before the house was habitable. They both came across as thoughtful, gentle and extremely able.  We were all very envious.

For the duration of the course I was staying at a nearby house of a friend, perched dramatically on top of a hill across from CAT. She had gone away for the weekend leaving me in sole charge of a tabby cat called Esme and her four cute kittens, a responsibility that weighed rather heavily as I had somehow never before had to look after any pet animal. After each day of the course I would get back and find the kittens scrapping on the kitchen floor or in a sleeping bundle on the couch while the mother would approach me and mew politely for their next meal. On the last evening however I opened the door to an absence of cat. Searching all over the house proved fruitless. This was better than finding five furry corpses but I was still perplexed. I didn't think they could get outside, but then found an open catflap in the back door so headed out myself and soon saw Esme walk nonchalantly across the courtyard and back through the catflap. Where were her charges? After hunting outside for a while and checking with the neighbour I went back in and there they were, leaping and tumbling around as usual. Who knows where they had hidden themselves earlier, the rascals.

Back on my land, the digging continues. Greg came down again and finished off the rest of the tree stumps with his five-tonne excavator which are now all dumped higgledy-piggledy in twos and threes. I'd say some of them would make a great still-life if any artist out there fancies the challenge.  Not sure what else they're good for, but I might try to eBay them just for a giggle. You never know, there may be a wealthy tree-stump collector out there willing to pay good money for forty prime examples of twenty-year-old Norway Spruce stumps.

A few stumps placed carefully in an artistic arrangement

The digger responsible

Play The Pipes Of (Green)Peace

The email came through on Thursday morning marked Urgent. It was from Greenpeace. They needed someone to be at a music festival this weekend in Shropshire and were willing to pay for the ticket and all expenses, in return for manning the stall with two others. It sounded like a job for me.

And so it transpired that on Saturday morning I donned the Greenpeace vest in a field owned by Farmer Phil (whose festival it was) and began to work. The point was to sign up as many people as possible as "Arctic Defenders", essentially a petition to protect the Arctic from oil drilling and industrial fishing. This year's Arctic sea-ice minimum, which tends to be smaller each year due to climate change, is expected to be on September 15th. On the same date in London there will be revealed the world's largest polar bear puppet, the size of a double-decker bus, controlled from within by a team of puppeteers, and wrapped in ribbons bearing the names of the millions of Arctic Defenders. If you're in town feel free to join the parade!

We too had our own polar bear outfit and so for the second time this year I found myself taking on the appearance if not the essence of a wild white furry and probably doomed carnivore. I received more hugs from men, women and children in those two days than previously in my entire life. If you're feeling hug-starved now you know what to do. I even found myself on the main stage between acts, waving my giant white paws as my fellow Greenpeace volunteer had the harder job of announcing what we were doing there.

It's been a good week for live music. Last Wednesday was the monthly folk music night at a pub in Ceinws to which some of my new Machynlleth friends were going so I tagged along too. In a back room were about ten musicians with a variety of instruments - violin, saxophone, Irish pipe, accordion, Irish drum and a few acoustic guitars. The sound they drew forth from these, usually accompanied by a lone male vocal, was enrapturing. They each played as if they'd been doing nothing else their whole lives. There was no chat in the room, the focus was wholly on the music. People who weren't playing just sat with a wistful expression.  At one point in the evening a guitarist put his instrument down and sang a haunting melody in Gaelic, completely unaccompanied.  No one wanted to leave, we were all still there at midnight.

On my land I have the music of the birdlife to accompany my labours. Sadly most of the more tuneful birds who tweeted their way through May, June and July have now moved elsewhere but I still have the raucous cawing of the crows, the hoots and squawks of pheasants, the shriek of a circling buzzard, the occasional honking of geese. OK it's more John Cage than Mozart but it's something.

More practically, the tree stumps are nearly all out after a two hour blitz by Greg and his digger, quite a wonder to behold these massive gnarly artifacts being torn out of the ground as if they were mere weeds. The final few will meet their end on Thursday. I've already made a start on the first couple of raised beds, marking their dimensions with string (10m by 1.2m) and digging them over extracting any remaining root systems of soft rush or other similarly nefarious weeds. I have room for 23 raised beds so I've got a fair bit of spadework ahead! Hi ho, hi ho...

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead Pheasants

I gazed out of my kitchen window distracted from washing-up by the death-throes of a pheasant hen. It made no sound. Lying on the earth near a pile of rotting aspen shoots, it arched its neck right back until its head disappeared behind a wing, its claws jerking and scrabbling for a while then pausing as it lay still but for a shallow pulse in its breast. There was no obvious wound that might have caused its demise. It could have contracted a disease of the gut which apparently they are susceptible to, or maybe it was simply starving since their feeding stations have now been removed to the other side of the valley, where the shooting will begin in October.

Another bird, a cock, approached the twitching hen and began pecking at its back. I banged on the window and it stopped and peered at me. I banged again and it ran off up the slope, only to return a minute later to continue its torment. A third knock had little effect, but by now the poor hen seemed to have died. The male pheasant enjoyed eating its feathers, plucking them out one by one and gulping them down. Another hen wandered close but contented itself with pecking at a shrub, perhaps aware that the cock would chase it off if it tried to join in, or maybe it didn't share its taste in cannibalism. Rather than having to witness the slow consumption and decomposition of the corpse over the next few days, I put on my gloves and carried it over to the track entrance where I tend to leave the bodies for collection, one or two a day being the current mortality rate.

Apart from dead pheasant clearing, my other tasks at the moment include Christmas tree clearing (the ones I felled last week, from which I've been hacking the branches off with a billhook), couch-grass clearing whose dense white root networks occupy areas where I want to create raised beds for veg growing, and tree stump clearing. These stumps, perhaps forty or so of varying diameters, are the remains of trees felled to make way for the electric lines, installed eight years ago right through the centre of my land. Like the couch-grass the stumps and their roots are just where I want to be growing vegetables. Having dug up six of the small ones armed only with a spade, a fork and a pickaxe, it was clear that I would be here until my dying days digging the other  ones out.  There's a time and a place for fossil-fuel power and in the absence of a willing chain-gang, I've decided now is the time and place.

I was tipped off by the pheasant keeper that the son of the lady at the petrol station down the road has a digger, so I enquired there and got his number. He was willing to do it but was booked up for the next couple of weeks, so suggested I try a chap who lives at Groes-Llwyd (Grey Cross in English), a house just up the road from me. There I went and met Greg*, a builder in his thirties who was friendly enough considering he knew some stranger had been living in a caravan down below the road for a few months. He came the next evening to have a look and I showed him round. The land used to be part of Groes-Llwyd Farm, stretching up the hill above the road, and his house was the old farmhouse. The previous owners had sold off most of the land; when Greg and his partner bought the house two years ago it came with just two acres, which they keep a horse on.  He offered me a few tonnes of free horse manure which I gladly accepted!

So we agreed that he'll bring his five-and-a-half tonne digger (the small one) on Thursday evening to have a crack at it. It's going to make a bit of a mess but I can't wait to be rid of these stumps. Step by step progress is being made.



April 2013



Now



*Not his actual name.