Say Goodbye

Podded runner beans ready for boiling up

This is it, folks. The growing season is over. My last leek sold. The garden is being put to bed for the winter. The polytunnel's doors will soon be drawn shut for the last time this year. In three days time I will lock up my caravan and venture south for the winter on the balmy shores of Dorset.

It has been quite an incredible experience, this first year growing vegetables for a “living”. Back in March I really didn't know if anything much would grow at all, in this soil which has never previously been used for growing. I didn't have a polytunnel or any panes in my greenhouse (though these were top priority and by the end of March they were in place). The fact that most things have grown reasonably well is encouraging; it can only get better as I improve the soil with lime, manure, compost and organic fertiliser. And before this year I had never actually sold anything to anyone, really, certainly not as a trading business, now my income depends on it.

Before

After

Through selling salad bags locally I have met nearly everyone up the nearby Cwm Cewydd lane, and some have become friends. By having a stall at the local farmer's market I've got to know all the other regular traders, as well as getting my face known by the people from the village, again some of whom have become friends, inviting me over to dinner occasionally. Beginning to attend the local church has widened my circle further, and given me a chance to play the piano! The Mach veg bag scheme has been a great way to meet the other veg growers in the neighbourhood, and we've all been able to encourage each other by cooperating in this way. And although I'm on the periphery of the Mach social scene, being thirteen miles out, I do occasionally get invited to parties!

Red cabbages

From time to time someone enquires whether what I'm doing is sustainable, by which of course they mean financially, not ecologically. It is a very good question. Everyone knows that there's no money in veg. Of course if you asked the same question to a large-scale farmer, you might find that their business is only tenable due to subsidies which sadly are not (yet) available to small-scale growers despite the fact that the environmental impact is tiny in comparison (and arguably has a positive impact on biodiversity if the right permaculture practices are followed). Also not many businesses are profitable in their first year, so the proper answer is “ask me in a couple of years time”.

But to give you an idea, anyway, here are some figures. This year (from June to November when I actually had any crops to sell) my veg business brought in about £1240, largely thanks to the Mach veg bag scheme. Business expenses were around £1500, but £1000 of that was the 15 metre polytunnel. I expect to be bringing in more next year, both because I'll have more growing space thus more veg, and because I'll be getting better at both growing and marketing.

I've broken down my earnings by vegetable. Runner beans win the prize for highest earner, netting me £305 (but then I did have over two hundred plants!). Second place were the salad bags, bringing in £179. Courgettes won bronze, with £176, and in fourth place were tomatoes at £85.

I keep tabs on all my daily expenses so I know that since I arrived in March I've spent around £2100 on non-business stuff – mostly food and petrol. Fortunately I've been able to balance the books by a combination of a) letting out my land for pheasant rearing, b) doing occasional odd-jobs for people, and c) registering for Working Tax Credit. 

So now it's time to say goodbye - till next spring!  I'll continue to blog on my mattswanindorset site over winter so you can't get rid of me completely. Happy winter everyone.

\the bog will survive the winter without me

 

Roaming Around

Mallwyd Hill looms over my winter brassicas

Not content with trundling down to Carmarthenshire last week to visit an off-grid bakery, this week I have ventured afield to four (yes, 4) places: Newtown, Birmingham, Derby and China.

Hold your horses if you are about to vent your spleen all over my comments box about how hypocritical of me it is to jet across to the Far East for what must have been a very short visit, all will be made clear.

Cwm Harry's veg beds

In Newtown there is a well-established veg box scheme run from a centre called Cwm Harry which both grows its own (providing opportunities for some with learning disabilities to get involved) and buys in veg from local people and through an organic wholesaler in Lampeter, which is then distributed to the doors of about 25 customers each week.  A few of us who help run the Machynlleth veg bag scheme got ourselves organised (with help from the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens) and trekked over there to pester the manager with lots of questions as to how it all works, logistically, financially and emotionally. Nearly everything is done differently from how we do it, but that's fine – Machynlleth's scheme is explicitly aimed at supporting local growers (whilst providing customers with very local and fresh produce) whereas Newtown's version is more about providing customers with better veg than what the supermarkets offer, at a competitive price. An instructive day out.

Cwm Harry's raised beds (they sell them flat pack)

A sedum roof gathering spot at Cwm Harry

The attractions of Birmingham are legendary. Shop till you drop at the Bullring. Gawk at the paintings and old things in the gallery-museum. Look fashionably well-read by strolling around the new Library, sniffing the various herbs in its outdoor gardens on large balconies several floors up with a Wordsworth anthology under your arm. Shop some more at the Bullring. Yet despite all these extremely compelling features, it was actually something else entirely which drew me there – the confluence of two pairs of university friends with associated pairs of children, none of whom I had caught up with for a number of years, and a great couple of days was had re-acquainting ourselves and getting muddy playing football.

Derby being just a stone's throw from Birmingham, at least if fired by some military-grade missile-launcher, I decided to hop on over and see how Brian and Martha* were settling in there. Brian had been the Warden of Pilsdon Community when I was first investigating it and had made the decision to take me on as a residential volunteer, so it's largely down to him that my life has taken the trajectory it has over the last couple of years. He is now a chaplain at the University of Derby and enjoying getting his teeth into a new challenge (as well as drawing a salary for the first time in about ten years - even Wardens at Pilsdon don't get compensated much in actual money.) Martha is offering her (recently accredited) counselling skills voluntarily at a women's refuge.

It was great to see them both and they even took me out to the theatre to see the first night of a production of Little Voice, guessing rightly that such cultural opportunities come few and far between when living in a boggy field in rural Wales.

Some of the stones I've dug out of the garden

And China? OK so I haven't physically jetted there myself this week but what happened was this: a Chinese friend of my parents, who lived not far from them in Lancaster, came to visit to make a short documentary about what I'm up to, and why.  After editing the footage he took of me droning on about small-scale ecologically-aware farming, he plans to upload it to the Chinese version of YouTube and convert the entire population who, he says, are entirely devoted to the consumerist dream – everyone is moving from countryside to city, virtually no one is moving the other way. He took his wife and son back to live in Beijing this week; the documentary has gone with him. If there are more people like him in China there's hope that the tidal wave of consumerism and all the environmental impacts that go with that might begin to abate.

* names have been changed