Pat-A-Cake Pat-A-Cake Baker's Man

Trying my hand at baking 

Until last Sunday, the things I knew about bread could be counted on the digits of a four-toed sloth which had lost most of its limbs. I like eating it. I have seen it being made, particularly at Pilsdon. I have even made a moderately successful foccaccia or two in Pilsdon's Aga, so I know how to follow a recipe. But on Sunday I came face to face with a real baker, a man who has bread coursing through his veins (it does make his arms swell a bit). What this man doesn't know about sourdough is not worth knowing. And he was willing and very able to share his knowledge with those of us who had made the pilgrimage to his off-grid home-cum-bakery in the depths of darkest Carmarthenshire.

One of Rick's wood stores

Rick and Maggie have lived in their off-grid farmhouse for a couple of decades already, bringing up and home-schooling about nine children as they did so. They also ran an organic smallholding. A 2.5kW wind turbine, attached to two extremely heavy-duty 700Ah batteries, provides for all their electrical needs. Seven years ago Rick returned to his roots as a trained baker, building a brick oven that could take over fifty loaves, and hasn't looked back. His bread he takes to various outlets and markets all around, including the market in far-flung Machynlleth (which is how we heard about his Open Day this Sunday.)

These are the loaves we made

The entire day Rick never stopped talking, but neither did we tire of listening to him. He made sourdough bread seem the most important thing on earth, his manner being so infectiously enthusiastic and on a topic which he so obviously knew everything about. Not only that but he got us baking it too – he had prepared some dough which some of us moulded into the correct shapes, and then we slid them into the narrow oven entrance on long paddles, depositing the largest ones right at the very back and eventually filling it with loaves. The previous night he had lit a wood fire inside the oven until it had sufficiently heated the heavily-insulated bricks, and then scraped out the ashes and cleaned it ready to take the loaves the next day. Normally he would do several batches from a single burn, the oven remaining hot enough to bake hundreds of loaves. 

Looking over into my neighbour's land

Sourdough, I learned, is simply bread that has not had yeast added. There is natural yeast in wheat flour so sourdough bread should rise almost like 'normal' breads, it's just a bit trickier to get the starter going (which itself is just a mix of flour and water). The result is supposed to be more easily digestible than yeast-added bread, something to do with the gluten having stretched more. Or possibly less. It also has a distinctive sourdough taste. And Rick is pleased not to have to add yeast, the production of which he informed us is a dirty industrial process.

Incredibly he sources most of his flour from a real old-fashioned working windmill which grinds the organic wheat between huge horizontal stone wheels. The snag is it is in Boston, Lincolnshire, so every five weeks or so he makes the huge round trip, bringing back a tonne of flour in his truck. Since the windmill is run by his old pal, he doesn't mind so much.

The autumn sun finally breaks onto my land 

Rick's bread is possibly the most right-on bread in Wales. His mission is to bring proper bread to the masses, who are being badly let down by the bread industry as a whole, the loaves we find on supermarket shelves often not having nearly enough goodness in them, and probably causing the rising tide of wheat and gluten intolerances. He's also a really nice guy. Next time you find yourself in the vicinity of Carmarthen, make sure you search out some loaves made at Mair's Bakehouse, and treat yourself to the healthiest, most environmentally-friendly and tastiest bread this side of Offa's Dyke.

The mud bath approach to my caravan

Super Size Us

Autumn harvest veg at our "Meet The Grower" Harvest Party for veg bag customers

It's hard to describe how disconcerting it is when the beautiful but inanimate piece of decorative art that you were admiring, twitches. Your brain immediately tries to reconcile two contradictory facts – 1) objets d'art do not move of their own accord, 2) this one just did. While the brain is thus occupied, the backbone is released from its normal control and decides to send shivers up and down itself. Similarly the jaw, ordinarily kept lightly closed in accordance with social norms, is let loose to hang open leaving its owner at risk of being accused of looking gormless.

These are living things

A group of us stood in Sharon's kitchen, slack-jawed and shivering in astonishment, at the two large and intricate butterfly-shaped objects pinned to the curtain, each one 30cm or more from wingtip to wingtip. We were beginning to realise that they were alive. Sharon explained that they were Atlas moths and that they had been born a few feet away and lived their whole lives so far in her kitchen. Her son keeps giant stick insects in a tank on a nearby shelf.  Two beavers live in an enclosure outside. It was that kind of place.

We were there to discuss not giant insects however, but potatoes. As all of us are small-scale vegetable growers, of an organic persuasion, we know something about the relative value-to-effort ratio of different crops. For instance, salads are relatively low maintenance yet command a reasonable price whereas carrots are fiddly to sow, require stone-free soil, need 'thinning out' (pulling out the smaller ones to leave room for the best to grow) and cleaning once harvested, but are worth very little.  Potatoes similarly take a fair amount of space and effort but are two a penny when it comes to selling them. Growing them only becomes commercially viable when you scale up.

Taking the asparagus fronds down

So the idea under discussion was whether we could grow potatoes and carrots on a large scale, collectively, using one of Sharon's fields and her tractor. We could all contribute time to it and allocate any profits proportionally. Large tasks such as installing rabbit-proof fencing or muck-spreading could be managed easier with a group of us doing it. The produce could be sold to the existing veg bag scheme and local restaurants and cafes. We would all be learning about growing food in a different way from what we are used to. The tractor could be made to run on bio-diesel made from recycled vegetable oil from chip shops. Being able to supply carbohydrates locally would feel good, and if the end of the world comes it's nice to know you have a few potatoes of your own to eat.

Beginning to seed save... squash and cucumber seeds ready made for next year!

One or two logistical challenges were raised. An enormous amount of manure would need to be trucked in to bring fertility to the soil. Sharon's place is about the most inaccessible location in the entire Dovey Valley, being twenty minutes drive up a very narrow and winding lane from the main road. The cost of the fencing and hire of any necessary equipment would need to be covered by raising money somehow, either through official funding or crowd-funding. And most of us don't have a huge amount of time to devote to this next year so there's a risk that the bulk of the work could fall on just a couple of individuals.

My disappointing tomatoes - the bulk of them I've had to compost, they went mouldy

It was left with some of us taking actions to do more research and we'll discuss it again next month. If it could somehow be made to work, it would be fantastic to be part of. In the meantime it's back to our hoes and forks, weeding around the last of the season's vegetable crops on our raised beds with aching backs and weary arms. Somehow a tractor seems rather appealing.

My garden as of this week

Speaking In Tongues

Out on a walk above the upper Dovey valley

Although I am living only about eighty miles from where I was born in Cheshire I am surrounded by people who speak a completely unknown (to me) tongue as their first language. This is the real heartland of Wales where some go through life barely encountering the English language – they speak Welsh at home, Welsh at work, Welsh with their friends, watch Welsh TV channels.  Often I enter my local shop to hear a conversation in Welsh between the staff and a customer. The programme booklet for the annual village Sioe (or fete) was predominantly in Welsh and only portions of it translated into English – and not the contents page, rather unhelpfully.

A Crown Prince squash crushes my scales

I like the sound of spoken Welsh, the lilting cadences, the guttural rasps effortlessly combined into a stream of what must be sentences packed with meaning, if only I could decipher them. I like too the fact that it exists as a real language here in the UK despite attempts by the English throughout history to kill it off. And similar to its more widely spoken neighbour, it too has regional accents: North Walian and South Walian having many differences, but also I am told that someone from Machynlleth can tell someone from Dolgellau (15 miles away) from the way they utter their Welsh.

Before moving here I downloaded the first series of 'Say Something in Welsh' to my iPod and spent a while diligently listening and repeating back the phrases. The idea is that you learn better how to pronounce it if you aren't distracted by how it's written, which might work well for most people but it seems my brain prefers to know how things are written – I was finding myself imagining (no doubt wrongly) how the phrases were actually spelled, which will confuse things when I do begin to learn written Welsh.

Chopped into portions along with my butternut squash

That was all last year and I'm afraid not much has stuck, partly due to the lack of actually trying it on anyone. So when I was invited to join a local Welsh class for total beginners there was no hesitation – I was keen to try learning with others. It's held in a new community space in Dinas Mawddwy called The Old Shop (because it was the old shop), and so far there have been two sessions, both totally focused on pronunciation. Quite helpfully, Welsh is a phonetic language so once you realise that 'w' is pronounced 'oo', 'y' is pronounced 'uh' (or 'ee' when in the last syllable),  'f' is pronounced 'v' etc, you can read aloud any bit of Welsh you see! Understanding it is totally another matter, of course.

My last stall of the year was last Sunday - sold about 2/3 of it

Many of the non-Welsh people I've met who live around here have tried learning at some point but given up before becoming in any way fluent. Some are still persevering. Welsh is a tough language to learn, and you stand a chance only if you're get to practice speaking it regularly with a native speaker with barrel-loads of patience. As I live alone in my bog, even my English is getting rusty so I'm not sure what chance of success I have with Welsh.

Anyway the next session is tomorrow evening, I'm looking forward to it. I might never be fluent but at least I'm giving it a go, and getting to know more locals while I'm at it.  Gweld chi wythnos nesaf!

Hard Times of Old Wales

 

A pylon slowly steaming in the early sun

Mostly these days I can be found digging with a fork slowly through the uncultivated part of my garden. I rig a piece of twine to enclose a rectangle ten metres by 1.2 metres, just half a metre from a previously dug bed of similar proportions. With a wheelbarrow for collecting clumps of weed root system or parts of thin tree roots, and a bucket for stones, I fork my way backwards from one end to the other. One bed can take several days, the soil being so thoroughly stony and weedy. Whenever the bucket or the barrow is full, they're taken off and emptied on one of the two growing hillocks of rejected earth or stones.

Once a bed is complete I cover it with rotted horse manure and then dig a shallow trench along the ten-metre long gap between it and its neighbour, shovelling earth on top of the manure, again removing stones and weed roots as I go. Hey presto, another raised bed!

Normally I switch my mind to auto-pilot and let it meander where it will as I plug away through the soil. There's always a chance it will hit upon something revelatory or revolutionary, an idea that will change the course of history. By a strange coincidence there's exactly the same probability of my striking a seam of Welsh gold. Both hopes, although meaninglessly small, nevertheless remain stubbornly alive to tickle my imagination once in a while.

Instead, the sort of thought I tend to get is as follows. I was once told that there are no dairy farmers around these parts of Wales because the soil is not good enough to produce grass sufficiently nutritious for dairy cows; only beef cattle and sheep can tolerate it.  The milk in the shops come from many miles away. Then how, I idly wonder, did they manage back in the days before the petrol engine?  Milk did not keep long then, no refrigeration or pasteurisation. If you wanted milk, you had to live not too far from a dairy cow. I can only assume one of the following is true:

1) they did not drink milk

2) they only drank sheep's or goats' milk

3) they did, in fact, keep dairy cows despite the poor soil. However the milk yield from each cow would have been less than those on richer soils, and much less than what is considered economically viable nowadays.

Squash

My hunch is that (3) is the correct answer but I am happy to be proved wrong. Not having the internet here to research further into the matter, I have decided to indulge in a spot of bloogling to uncover the truth. Now don't panic if you've never heard of bloogling - it is a term which has in fact been coined for the first time right here in this paragraph. It means when a blogger requests his or her audience to do some googling on his or her behalf, and respond with the answer in a comment underneath the blog. You can understand why I've had to invent the term; I don't expect any other blogger has been forced to bloogle before. Bloggers, almost by definition, have access to the internet and can undertake their own web searches whenever they like. I am a freak off-grid blogger with only an hour of internet time each week at the library thirteen miles away, and so am forced to rely upon the good nature of my beloved readership who presumably have both internet access and time on their hands (why else would you still be reading this waffle?)

A pheasant has a rest on my garden net

Good luck with your task! Especially with posting your responses, since many have told me that they have been quite unable to. I think you need a Google+ account. Failing that, those of you who know me on Facebook or email can always send in your bloogle-response that way. And for extra bonus points, try examining all your food and drink this week to find out what has the lowest 'food-miles' and what has the highest. You can even place them all into a long line in the kitchen in order of their food-mile ranking and get your loved ones to guess what you're doing. Oh the fun to be had!

A pheasant has a longer rest -
it had been shot by the shoot across the river and glided across to die here.

I made full use of the free meat!

Down On The Denmark Farm

From vintage to eco. Cars haven't changed so drastically over the decades really

An earlier version of myself thought nothing of flying off to other countries at the bequest of my chosen company masters, or as travel lust lured me off to foreign climes. It was a quiet year indeed if I never made it out of Europe. Things have changed. My passport expires next year and I am not expecting to renew it, thereby saving the poor overworked Passport Office another bothersome renewal request to process. Since I renounced plane travel in a fit of guilt, and am in any case attempting to get by on the pittance afforded by growing and selling vegetables, it doesn't seem likely I'll be needing a passport any time soon.



My delivery to the veg bag scheme last week: runners, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and kale



These days my world is my plot of land in mid-Wales and the villages and towns within twenty miles. No more stressful tedious journeys to airports to join a mile long queue through security. Instead, I step outside my caravan each day to find myself at my workplace. The pheasants greet me with a chorus of squawks and noisily fly off across the river where no one will bother them for a bit (at least until today, when shooting season starts). A grey heron has been making an appearance recently, each time in the same spot. It stands stock still for a while before lazily strolling towards the tree cover, then lifts itself into the air with its huge wings and flies off along the river.

Spot the heron

Last Friday however was a big day out. Along with two friends and co-growers, I travelled south over fifty miles (beyond even Aberystwyth!) to reach a place called Denmark Farm. Despite the name it was neither in Denmark nor a farm. This confused me for a bit until I realised it used to be a farm until the 1980's when it was converted into a conservation site with wild flower meadows, bogs and such like to improve biodiversity.  The Denmark bit is still a mystery.

Birds eye view of my veg plot (I was up a ladder picking sloes)

The Fed had called us to be there along with other growers in mid Wales. Not the FBI, thankfully, as I suppose even they would consider their remit not to reach so far as to hunt down Welsh horticulturalists.  No, this Federation is of City Farms and Community Gardens and it is very much their remit to encourage the growing of fruit and veg in a communal way. A group of perhaps fifteen of us were gathered to share the different ways that community veg growing is currently happening in mid Wales, to get some mutual encouragement and support, and to learn from each other's successes and mistakes. 

A couple of the participants were real farmers. They have many acres of grazing land and keep sheep and cows for a living. And yet they have also established a 'Transition Town' in their locality and are doing their best to ensure the community is more self-reliant for its food. They had held meetings, found out what people wanted to do (community veg growing being the main thing), and found a suitable site where raised beds were built in which people could grow veg. One of the farmers had asked the local chippie if they would take potatoes from him if he could supply them, which they would, so he's now converted part of his land from sheep grazing to potatoes. He told us he knows that other farmers in the area consider him an oddball for taking these steps, or a “bloody idiot” as he put it. I certainly haven't heard of any other Welsh farmers pushing others to take sustainability seriously but it was refreshing to hear these two talk about their efforts.

A tidy bit of Denmark Farm

After lunch was a foraging tour led by a botanist, at the end of which we brought together the various leaves of ash, bramble, wild strawberry and yarrow we had plucked from nature, and made tea from them. How British of us. They had a very mild flavour which was unfortunately totally dominated by the biscuit I was given at the same time. Despite the masses of brambles and several ash trees within spitting distance of my caravan, I don't expect I'll be erasing Normali-Tea from my shopping list any time soon.

A yurt at Denmark Farm