End of Year Report

The last of the beetroot

The end is nigh! The end of my third spell in Wales that is. On Saturday I pack my bags and drive off south to spend the winter volunteering at Pilsdon Community in West Dorset, as I have the previous two winters.

It's fair to say it's been a bit of a tough growing season this time. All the local growers agree. The weather has not been kind. Where was the sun when we needed it? If I take the average of all the daily maximum temperatures for each month, I find that June was 16.1° (previous June it was 20.6) and July was 16.5 (last July was 20.3). It was a cool wet summer.

Add to that my endemic slug population who laugh at my pitiful attempts to eradicate them (nightly slug patrols picking hundreds of them off the veg each time, two applications of supposedly-slug-killing nematodes, spot checks on cabbages which they use as hotels along with caterpillars, earwigs and worms) - my plants have not had an easy time of it.

A slug caught in the act of producing eggs. This is why I can't get rid of them.

Some crops have just come to nothing, I couldn't sell any of it. The spinach, turnip and radish all went straight to seed, the carrots didn't grow at all and the butternut squash produced very few fruit which either split or were pecked by pheasants which somehow got into the polytunnel.

Other veg grew a disappointing crop that I did manage to sell some of - fennel (it didn't bulk up properly), courgettes (just a few tiny fruit each, totally unlike last year's bumper crop), french beans (badly attacked by slugs), and beetroot (at least half didn't reach a size you could use.) I'd hoped to make £700 from all the above veg - I made just under £60.

A mould of some kind attacks a french bean 

Luckily some things did better. I went to some efforts with the salad bags taking them direct to people's doors each week, and this paid off. They were easily my biggest earner at £475, though still shy of my target of £525! Cabbages I planted loads of, which unfortunately meant a huge effort trying to keep the pests off, but ultimately brought in nearly £250. Kale came in at number 3 with £214 when I'd only expected to make £100 from it - though I did plant more than I'd planned. Peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and runner beans all did pretty well bringing in £540 between them (more than the joint target of £390). 

All in all I made about £1680 from my veg, a bit below my target of £2000. When the expenses are taken into account my veg business made a princely profit of a little over £1400. It's fair to say I'm not in the higher income tax bracket, or any tax bracket for that matter.

This is what it's all about - bringing my freshly picked veg to the veg box scheme for packing.

I've been able to supplement that income through a few hours each week keeping the local Health Centre's garden tidy, and occasionally working for my friend Bob* the carpenter. Renting out part of my land for pheasant rearing has brought in more. What with Working Tax Credits and not paying rent or bills it's possible to make ends meet.  Not sure whether the Working Tax Credits will still come my way next year though with the twin threats of lowering the eligibility threshold and the sometime switch to Universal Credit.

I'm looking forward to getting to Pilsdon to enjoy some of those luxuries I've been missing out on - hot water from taps, meals made by other people, the camaraderie of the community. It's also a chance to step back and take time to consider strategies for the year ahead, and beyond.

Thank you for your faithful following, loyal blogreaders (you know who you are). And to those of you who've just dropped in, you've missed a lot! Get reading the back catalogue. You can also keep up with my winter life at my other blog, mattswanindorset. Bye for now!


*not his real name

Trees Please Me

A wren's nest formed between two upright planks leaning against my compost toilet. The mother used to pop out whenever I went to the loo and hop about petrified I'd go after her chicks

As I labour in my vegetable garden of delights I am surrounded by trees, many of which are currently displaying an autumnal feast for the eyes. In the recent sunshine the golds, browns and reds made a vivid display on the hillsides and riversides and of course are strewing their leaves everywhere including on my veg patch, providing new and exciting places for slugs to hide.

Trees on the north side of my veg patch...

... and the south

The six acres I own host a wide variety of tree species, both broadleaves and conifers. Some, particularly the conifers, have been planted deliberately - the steep bank below the road has lots of tall spruce, fir and larch, there's a long narrow plantation of young-ish Scot's pine, and there are a good number of Christmas trees dotted about, some way too big now to fit in your living room (unless you're the Queen.)

Most of the broadleaves however appear to be naturally self-seeded, with the river hosting some majestic examples of sessile oak, small-leaved lime, birch, and hazel, clinging precariously to the high crumbling bank above the water as ivy curls up their trunks. Other species living here are beech, ash, rowan, elder, crab apple, hawthorn, blackthorn, holly, goat willow and aspen. All these are native species, they've been growing in Britain since the last Ice Age. There may be others here - I'm still learning to identify them. I feel in awe to be living amongst such a diversity of treelife when much of the surrounding forests are monoculture plantations of larch or Sitka spruce.

The view from the top of a hill near me. The dark green patches are conifer plantations. I fought through one to reach the top of this hill.

Yet there's a real threat to British trees. Our most common tree, the oak, is susceptible to the scarily-named Acute Oak Decline which has been lurking in SE England since the 1980's and is still not well understood. More worryingly perhaps the third most common, the ash, could be wiped out by a fungus causing Chalara Ash Dieback which is spreading rapidly across the country. Japanese larch, a very widely planted forestry tree, is being decimated by a fungus-like pathogen labouring under the name Phytophthora ramorum.

And you may have seen in the news that gin drinkers are upset because the junipers of Scotland and the north of England that provide the unique berries that flavour the drink are being ravaged by Phytophthora austrocedri, a pathogen that arrived from Argentina in 2011 (the only other place it's known to exist.) I'd hope a few non-gin-drinkers will also find the news troubling. The juniper is one of only three native conifers on this island.

The Lantern Parade in Machynlleth last Saturday

Not to mention the nine other tree diseases the Forestry Commission puts in its Top Tree Diseases list which variously infect beech, plane, cypress, pine, sweet chestnut, horse chestnut, elm and alder, to name but a few. And the reason for all these diseases appearing relatively recently? You got it. Us. People bringing in live plants from abroad. It just takes one to be infected. So far at least, my trees seem healthy enough. It would be a shame to lose them after I've just got to know them.

Swap! In The Name Of Love

In the wee hours of each and every Sunday night, at precisely the moment when the Weekend morphs into a Working Day and everyone's dreams are suddenly wrought with a sense of tedious desperation, something special happens in Machynlleth. A computer server kicks up a gear or two, whirrs to itself happily for a moment before blasting out hundreds of identical emails, each one marked for a different recipient, most of whom live locally. This is no spam server. This is the communication that people in Machynlleth jump out of bed early for on Monday mornings. For this mass email is Mach Swapshop.

It is in essence a little like Freecycle but rather than giving things away for nothing, people are encouraged to swap stuff. So if you're offering a desk but really need a chair, you can say so and someone else whose chair needs are over-supplied but are somewhat lacking in the desk department, would respond forthwith and the trade would occur at some mutually benefical time and place. Often of course the match is not quite so serendipitous, so people more usually settle for a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate, some ready cash, or if they're feeling really generous, nothing at all.

I have a huge radish

Swapshop also lets people do the reverse and put Wanteds ads in, again with the swap philosophy in mind. Upcoming events also get a section so anyone can advertise something they're involved with. In the last Swapshop email I count twenty events advertised, including such diverse activities as a pub quiz night (which I'm planning on attending), a children's book club, a one-woman play about Edith Nesbit, a planetarium show, arts and craft classes, the weekly public lecture Mach Speak (the forum I spoke at a few weeks ago), a children's halloween party and a taster session of Emotional Freedom Technique, Matrix Re-printing, Reiki and Indian Head Massage, to name but a few.

This week's Swapshop email was number 651 so assuming it's been going weekly all that time, I make that over twelve years of Swapshopping! It's definitely well used. There are probably between 30 and 50 things being offered each week. I've made good use of it myself so far, mostly to obtain things - a free-standing clothes rail, a water barrel for my polytunnel, net bags to hang melons from, a jack-to-audio cassette adaptor so I can listen to music in my caravan, lots of plastic pots for seedlings, wooden pallets for stacking firewood, and lots and lots of horse manure. But I've also used it to give away the decrepit old trailer-tent that was on my land when I bought it, to a couple who have since become friends (they're on my pub quiz team tonight.)

I'm concerned these 80 cabbages aren't going to be ready to harvest before I leave in two weeks

Not only is Swapshop all the above but there is often a pithy and uncredited mots de la semaine at the top of each email. I'll leave you with the latest one:

“Imagine if trees gave free wi-fi, we would plant them like crazy. It's a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe”

Wild Thing

An aspen leaf. It's had a good life wobbling in the breeze. Now it's laid to rest.

The nights are drawing in, and doing a bit of colouring in as well. A new carpet of orangey-brown leaves is being laid everywhere especially around my caravan where the aspens grow (they like to be the first to shed all their leaves). There was a spate of cold nights reaching 1.5 degrees C at the lowest. My fingers that morning were quickly numbed as I spent an hour picking salad leaves, I could barely tie knots in the bags afterwards.

It's pitch black by 7pm which means it's always dark by the time I've finished supper in the caravan and cycle up to my home. I tend to leave my bicycle parked near the top of my land's access track next to a majestic old oak. There's a hole in the bank just next to the tree at about eye-level and on Thursday as I reached for my bike my headtorch happened to shine directly into the hole and I was startled to see two eyes glinting back at me. They belonged to a mammal, quite a large one. I could see its front half. It had brown fur with markings on its face. It didn't seem fazed by my light but just stared back or looked nonchalantly off to one side. After almost a minute of this it eventually decided to retreat inside its den.

The polecat den is just after that large trunk on the left. You can't see it in this photo.

I'm pretty sure it was a polecat after an extensive Google Images search on my return home. Polecats are not so rare these days apparently though it's the first one I've ever seen. It's possible it was a feral ferret. Ferrets are the domesticated version of polecats and are very similar looking. They can also interbreed with polecats to create hybrid polecat-ferrets, also difficult to distinguish. But I think it was probably a polecat. I've reported it to the Vincent Wildlife Trust who are currently running their third 2-year survey of polecat sightings across Britain (dead or alive).

Otters are supposed to be living along the river here too. The ecologist who did my Preliminary Ecological Assessment in 2013 didn't find any evidence on my land but that didn't stop him writing of their probable existence in his report. Neighbours have said they've seen them further up the valley. But I've yet to catch a glimpse of one.

My entire sweetcorn harvest. Better luck next year.

What you really want to see here in Snowdonia is the pine marten. This is the second rarest British mammal after the wildcat. They're doing OK up in Scotland but here the population numbers are tiny and not growing. This has prompted the Vincent Wildlife Trust to boost the Welsh population by bringing a few down from Scotland and hoping they get on with the local Welsh ones. A few came last month and more are on their way according to this press release . It doesn't say exactly where they've released them but I'm hoping one wanders past my caravan soon. Camera at the ready!

Oh no! one of my two decent squashes has split

Beware the Gwyniad

The mice have paid the slugs to eat the bait before they are tempted to have a nibble

There is a lake twenty miles to the north of my home where the Gwyniad lives. 22,000 years ago as the last glacial period came to a welcome end this plucky little whitefish was left stranded in Llyn Tegid, or as the English prefer, Bala Lake. The species is found nowhere else on Earth now, or at least wasn't until a few years ago when some of them were scooped out and popped into a nearby lake. Some scientists had noticed that population numbers were dropping so it was thought best to double their chances of survival and give some of them a new home. Let's hope they make it to the next glacial period.

The town of Bala perches at the north-eastern corner of the lake where the River Dee flows out from it, off to Chester and the Irish sea. Apart from the lake, Bala has one high street and a church wherever you happen to look. It also has a reputation for being a bastion of Welshness. Welsh is the language you'd hear on the street. The parish church advertises a Welsh-language-only service followed by a bilingual one. All the signs are Welsh first then English.

One of the very few butternut squashes in my polytunnel

Luckily for me, it also has a ystad ddiwydiannol (don't bother trying to read that backwards, it's Welsh for industrial estate) with a unit that advertised chainsawing servicing and repairs. For my trusty saw, or should I say untrusty, had once again given up on me and, no doubt daunted at the remaining piles of wood that need sawing, simply refuses to start.

On Monday I made the journey to Bala choosing the scenic route which confusingly is also the direct route, being several miles shorter than going via Dolgellau. It does involve climbing over the highest mountain pass in north Wales, however, which is rather wonderful for its views at the top. You can even get out at a little car park there and once finished taking in the panorama, be informed by a small sign that test drivers of Austin cars used to hurtle along this self-same single lane track.

The wooden-steepled mediaeval church of Llanbrynmair which I visited for the first time last Sunday

So the chainsaw people took my chainsaw into the back and pretty quickly got it roaring away. A few minutes later it was back on the counter. “Yes it's fixed” said the man, “he's tuned the carburettor and replaced the fuel filter.” I handed over the required number of pounds and after a short mosey around Bala, went home. Of course, the infernal machine still refuses to start. I called them up and spoke to the guy who'd worked on it who told me rather gallingly that it had started pretty easily for him. I hung up. Thankfully in rural Wales, like deep space, no one can hear you scream.

The wood pile grows ever larger

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The bolted lettuces lift their arms to the rising sun in worship

As my axe swung down to split the round larch log before me, at the exact moment it made contact a shotgun blast went off just across the river making it feel like I had a far more powerful tool in my hands. This axe was dynamite! The wood didn't split though.

The sheer number of axe swings I've been making recently coupled with the fact that the pheasant shooting season is now open presumably makes it a statistical likelihood that the timings of axe thwack and gun shot will coincide once in a while. That doesn't stop it feeling like a miracle.

Count those rings. I reckon it's over 70 years old

Most of the eighteen big larch trees that were sectionally-felled by the council back in March as they improved the road barrier bordering my land are still lying around in intimidating piles. At least they were until a few weeks ago when I bought a new chain for my chainsaw which miraculously healed it of its inability to cut through anything, and since then I've been using all my spare moments to saw the large chunks into smaller chunks and then splitting them with an axe. Trying to get someone with a log splitter to come and do it for cash has proved fruitless so I've turned myself into a lumberjack. And I'm ok.

The split wood is being stacked on a series of pallets and covered with corrugated iron sheets to keep the rain off. According to this firewood-selling website larch only takes a few months to dry out properly. Then I'll be hawking it around the local wood-burning-stove-owning population.

This was taken a few days ago. It's now full. I'll have to start making it higher.

Talking of statistics (which we were a couple of paragraphs ago, unless you skipped it due to the utterly boring nature of statistics) a recent WWF/Unilever survey has shown that only 1% of us could correctly identify five common British trees - oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut. Now I don't know exactly how the survey posed the question but if it said “Here are the leaves of the oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut, can you identify which is which?” then if all respondents had answered completely randomly you'd still expect a 0.83% success rate (1 in 120). Let's round that up to 1%. So the survey is actually telling us that no one at all knows one tree from another. Time to get people out of the cities and into the woodlands.

A miniature mushroom woodland on one of my garden paths

All The World's A Stage

A tray of newly picked lettuce leaves ready for bagging up

In the first two minutes of sitting down at my computer on Monday evening I discovered that (1) Shell had decided to quit drilling for oil in the Arctic, (2) evidence for liquid water had been found on Mars, and (3) Facebook was down again, so I couldn't share any of the first two exciting bits of news on my favoured social media network. I thought instead I'd let you all know via the medium of this blog which has the advantage of allowing me to write the news in my very own words rather than simply posting links, but with the slight drawback that I'm not publishing the blogpost till Wednesday (official Mattswanoffgrid policy I'm afraid.) So that's why I'm so excited about what by now is two-day-old news.

However what you will be hearing for the first time here is the shocking truth that these two news articles are in fact linked. Shell only has so much budget to spend on damaging pristine environments but up till now was quite happy with its strategy of permanently scarring the northern icy cap of our planet. But suddenly the news broke in Nature Geoscience that there is water flowing on Mars. The top brass at Shell were unanimous. This was where they should be focusing their efforts. Imagine being in sole control of the supply of Martian spring water! Forget dirty oil, it'll all be gone soon enough anyway. Shell must get themselves into the extraterrestrial mineral water business to see its future into the 22nd century assured. The Greenpeace activists are going to have to get in some spacewalk training.

These are probably the only four of my red cabbages which will come to anything

In a way I was doing my own bit of activism last Wednesday on the windswept streets of Machynlleth. It was an “anti-austerity” event that had a slightly impromptu feel to it. A chap with a guitar was belting out protest songs into a microphone, a lady next to him was blowing huge bubbles that drifted ungainly over the heads of the shoppers before hitting a tree and popping. And then, at 11, a piece of street theatre materialised next to them. I was in it wearing a white robe.

The drama was a re-imagining of the story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. In short, two people ignore a beaten-up man by the side of the road, and a third helps him. The twist is that the first two are both religious types whereas the third is a despised foreigner (a Samaritan) who the original audience would never have expected to have helped one of them, a Jew, under any circumstance. The re-enactment went further than the Bible story and gave the characters a chance to defend their actions to Jesus (who was played by, guess who.) They poured scorn on the “Love your neighbour as yourself” message. The Samaritan flew into a rage at their “me first” philosophy and their fear of stepping out of comfort zones. Jesus didn't condemn but opened his arms to each of them.

A female squash flower waiting to be pollinated by a male flower. Sadly none of the male flowers have opened up at the same time.

In these times of government spending cuts many people are struggling to make ends meet. At the same time refugees are desperately trying to escape war and starvation. I've met people in Machynlleth who have cycled to Calais and given refugees their bicycles. Another friend gave up part of her holiday in Bupaest to help with handing out provisions to migrants. Surely these are the modern-day Samaritans.

Stop press! Crab apples found on Mars.

Mind Your Edible Table Manners

The punters hadn't really arrived yet

Bleary-eyed I pitched up in Machynlleth at 8:30am on Saturday morning with a leaf salad, a cucumber and tomato salad and a few random vegetables for display purposes. The other volunteers, eager and less eager, rolled up in the next fifteen minutes but the object of our appointed gathering hadn't yet materialised. We kicked our heels for a few more minutes as the morning mist began to vanish with the warmth of the rising sun. Finally a truck appeared and its driver offered their apologies for the delay. It was bearing a huge and majestic Berber tent that was to be erected on the field by the town hall. We got to work.

The event was the Edible Mach Harvest Picnic, supported by the local veg bag scheme and their growers (including me!) An action-packed day lay ahead. Apple-bobbing, sack-race, pin-the-tail-on-the-carrot, workshops on making a willow structure and a DIY planter, a talk by Pam Warhust who is one of the founders of the Incredible Edible scheme in Todmorden, the creation of an “edible table” and a splendiferous banquet of a lunch, mostly from food grown locally.

Heave! with the central tent pole

We got the Berber tent up in good time

The edible table was not, I realised with slight disappointment, a table that you could actually eat. That would I suppose be ultimately counter-productive, tables being useful things that can be frequently re-used over the course of their usually long life. Instead it is a wooden picnic table, beautifully designed in this case with long benches on either side, with holes at regular intervals for apple trees and other edible plants to grow through. Picnickers in the not too distant future will be able at this table to supplement their own fare with apples they pick directly from above their heads. The idea comes from a similar edible table at Kew Gardens apparently.

The therapeutic Community Garden just a couple of hundred metres away was also holding its own celebration picnic in honour of having been awarded a “Green Flag” for their efforts, so people were drifting between the two, the hungriest of them timing it right to get two lunches. That garden is a beautiful spot where a variety of soft fruit and veg are grown, and a whole swathe of flowers to attract pollinating insects. A pond encourages more wildlife. Volunteers tend it a couple of days a week. We ate some of their cake.

It was a beaut of a day. The sun shone so sweetly, the wind was absent (no doubt elsewhere mucking up someone else's event), people came and sat in happy throngs or got involved in the games or the construction. We were inspired by Pam's re-telling of how Todmorden pioneered the concept of growing veg in public spaces for anyone to harvest and how that is now spreading across towns in the UK (including Machynlleth) and internationally. “Don't wait for permission” was one of the key themes. “Just do it” was another. Words of advice that are apt in many circumstances, I suspect, certainly ones that I decided to follow when I began my time off-grid and (arguably) paid off so far!

Making sloe jelly from my own sloes - I'm hoping it sets!

Run Rabbit Run

The daddy pig comes to investigate

In the last couple of days I have inadvertently killed two gastropod garden pests in bizarre ways. Whoops. On one of my regular morning rounds of checking the mousetraps in the veg garden, I found a snail caught in one. This was doubly weird because it's only the second snail I've ever seen on my land. And on Sunday as I was splitting some larch wood with an axe, I noticed something different about the crack I'd just made. Peering closer I found two halves of a slug which must have been hiding in a crevice. Not likely I'll be able to repeat that trick.

Slugs, mice, moles, shrews, caterpillars, millipedes, flea beetles, aphids, all have helped themselves to my veg at some point this year. But one pest that I'm thankful I don't (currently) have to worry about is the rabbit. These furry bundles of fun are feared by gardeners up and down the land due to their habit of just eating all the veg. Once you have rabbits it's a case of either giving up or investing large amounts of money in rabbit-proof fencing, sunk a foot or so underground all the way round.

Part of Emma's veg garden, with the pigs beyond.

This is what Emma has had to do on her market garden, “Cae Felyn” near Llanidloes, enclosing no less than three acres to keep the bunnies from her crops. There was an organised trip to visit her site last Saturday and I went along, to be both inspired and terrified by the amount of work she does to keep it all going. Everything she's doing is on a much larger scale than mine. Her polytunnel is twice as long and wide, and she's getting another to go with it. Her veg beds are 25 metres long (mine are ten). Her pigs are digging over an area that will soon be put to more veg. She has a large area for flowers to sell cut, and hundreds of raspberry canes (too many for her to manage, she noted.) A young fruit orchard, a soft fruit area, chickens, a huge shed for packing and storage, and a flower meadow to relax in if she had the time. She's only been there four years.

They're a Kunekune cross with something else

Location and aspect are crucial. In Emma's case she benefits from having gentle south-facing slopes but has two massive challenges - strong winds (two valleys meet to the west, both funnelling the wind directly onto her land) and unseasonal frosts (it's about 240m above sea level, whereas my site is at 100m). Most of her young plants were killed this year by a frost in early June. To combat the winds new hedges have been planted in strategic positions but even birch takes a few years to grow tall enough to be effective. Still, she's there for the long haul and her resolve and enthusiasm is impressive.

The 25m-long beds

The 100-feet long polytunnel

Do you have access to locally grown organic veg or fruit? Is there a community farm or cooperative growers veg box scheme, or local farmers market? If so, please consider supporting it. It may or may not be a little more pricey than supermarket veg but (a) it's better for you as the plants will have grown on healthier soil and drawn up a wider range of minerals, (b) the food will have travelled much less far, and (c) you're supporting the local economy. For those of you in South London (and I know there's a few) check out Sutton Community Farm's veg box scheme, and while you're about it why not look into their recently-announced first ever community share offer?

Small Is Beautiful

Although big can be beautiful too

Forty-two years ago a 62-year-old German economist wrote his first book, just four years before his death. It was a book that would capture the imagination of the general public and help to spark the nascent environmental movement, as it turned conventional economics on its head by pointing out a basic flaw (namely that economics assumes nature's resources are unlimited) and suggesting some radical alternatives. The title he had given it was appropriately academic and dusty for an economic work - his publisher overrode him and gave it a title he apparently disliked. E.F. Schumacher's “Small Is Beautiful : A Study of Economics As If People Mattered” hit the bookshelves.

Today there's a Schumacher College in Devon, UK; a Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Massachussetts, USA; a Bristol-based thinktank called Schumacher Institute, plus other organisations which owe their existence at least partly to him without actually putting his name in their title: eg, New Economics Foundation, Practical Action, and the Centre for Alternative Technology.

I climbed Aran Fawddwy on Sunday

This last, as you may well know, is in Wales not far from where I reside. And last weekend it hosted for the first time the “Small Is Beautiful” festival which the alert reader may have already noticed has the same title as EF Schumacher's seminal work. In its own words, Small is Beautiful is “a festival that explores positive responses to our future through low carbon technology, social justice and the arts.” I thought I'd pop along for the day.

First I joined a workshop on pico-hydro power where we all constructed tiny water turbines, held them under some gushing water for a few seconds (getting ourselves soaked in the process) and cheered wildly when a small light lit up on a model of an Indonesian village. Next up was a well-attended seminar based loosely on the economics of the “barefoot economist” Manfred Max Neef.

This is the view from the top. Bala and Lake Tegid in the distance.

After lunch I listened to Andrew Simms, Fellow of the New Economics Foundation, giving a lecture on how Schumacher's book is utterly relevant today and how various aspects of his (Simms') idea of the way things should be are actually implemented in different places - e.g. Bristol's own local currency, Sao Paolo's mayor banning street advertising. He was followed by four short talks by different folk around the themes of land and food sovereignty. In Tanzania, amongst other places, it is now illegal to save seed produced from crops that are grown. Farmers are forced to continue to buy seed every year from companies such as Monsanto.

It's the highest mountain in southern Snowdonia, at 905m.

I lounged near the music stage for a while which had a guy singing old nautical songs accompanied on an accordion, then a sprightly Belgian chap who enraptured us with the haunting melodies he extracted from his violin. Sam Lee, a young folk singer whose star is ascending, arrived without his band (something about a burst appendix) but treated us to a cappela Irish gypsy songs, each one preceded by its full back story. And before I went home to close up the polytunnel I caught Robert Newman's comedic act, he of Newman and Baddiel early 90's fame, and really enjoyed his sharp wit as he subjected us, rather randomly but wonderfully, to a monologue on the brain. 

And I'll end just as randomly with two very baby mice.

So Much To Say

Finally got my chainsaw going again, with a new chain. 

Over the last seven days of my life the following have occurred:

- Won a pub quiz for the very first time.

- My passport expired.

- Read my first novel by Anthony Trollope.

- Spoke in a public forum about veg growing.

- Harvested the first runner beans of the season (three weeks later than last year).

- Witnessed a beaver eat carrots.

- Accidentally held a toad.


You can imagine how difficult it has been to decide where to place the focus of this week's posting. Do I wax lyrical about the resounding victory on Sunday night in the saloon bar of the Dovey Valley Hotel? (We won by one point. The prize, a free round of drinks, made the eight mile cycle home slightly more challenging.) Should I elaborate on the significance, if any, of the fact that I am no longer the holder of a valid passport? Would a brief book review of The Warden be instructive (drawing tenuous yet comic parallels with the Wardenship at Pilsdon Community perhaps)? Surely I should give a blow-by-blow account of the “local veg” talk at the weekly Mach Speak, as veg growing is my main thing? Or provide an update on how my runner beans and other produce are actually faring in this strange cool “summer” we're having? But as this is the internet, cute furry mammals are clearly the outright vote-winner, indeed my whole blog should probably be about them, and being a few metres from the second largest rodent cheerily munching its breakfast is worth a few paragraphs. Unless amphibians are more up your street and you're eager to hear about my brief encounter with a large toad.

The beaver pretends not to be interested in his breakfast of carrots.

Well, I did promise last week that I'd say something about the talk. It was held in a small upstairs room in Machynlleth town hall which felt crammed with about twenty people. Green Isle Growers, the cooperative veg box scheme I'm part of, was asked to fill this week's slot on the topic “Let's Fill This Valley With Veg”. Three of us spoke, with the other two covering the conventional farming system and its problems, alternatives such as local food initiatives, an overview of Via Campesina which represents 200 million small-scale farmers globally and their UK wing the Landworker's Alliance, the difficulties of accessing land for growing in the UK, and the specifics of our own veg box scheme.

My bit attempted to address the main difficulty with small-scale growing, which is economic. You just can't get much for your produce. I showed how much effort in minutes it took to produce cabbages, tomatoes and runner beans, as examples, putting an estimated time on each task and totting them up. So one cabbage head takes approx 30 minutes of effort spread across the cabbage lifecycle, and retails at about £1.40 (with an average weight of 700g). This equates to £2.80 per hour for cabbage growing, not an exceptionally lucrative endeavour I'm sure you'll agree. Runner beans pay more at £3.50 per hour, and tomatoes came top at £4.92 per hour. (Minimum wage in UK = £6.50 per hour.)

The leaves in my polytunnel : rocket at the bottom, then oriental salads, then rainbow chard.

None of these figures should be cast in stone of course, they're just based on estimates which might vary wildly between growers, and could be improved with investment in watering systems and suchlike (and tractors?) But they are indicative of a big problem facing those attempting to make a living from producing decent organic vegetables - how to survive financially. I've been doing so by living rent-free. If required to pay rent or a mortgage, the numbers don't stack up without a second paid job. Small-scale growers receive no government subsidies unlike large-scale ones, yet small-scale is by far more beneficial to the environment.

And the toad? Here (s)he is. I was digging through a bed with a garden fork and my bare hands, pulling out weed roots, and grabbed hold of something round and squishy which I immediately let go with a yelp. It was unharmed thankfully and I moved it to another corner of the garden where hopefully it will continue to eat slugs. It's certainly won't go hungry.

Party In The Field

At least my cucumbers are growing well

One of the nice things about living in the depths of rurality is that an invitation to a birthday party does not necessarily equate to an evening squeezed into a corner of a crowded, pricey and painfully hip restaurant, shouting to be heard over the music, and wondering if it is socially acceptable to duck out of the dancing at a club afterwards. Last Saturday's party was thrown by my friend Marga* at her home, which happens to be a caravan on a 30 acre site of fields, woods and a dilapidated farmhouse and barn, a few miles out of Machynlleth.

As her caravan would probably only fit about four people at a push, and the farmhouse a construction site, we congregated around outdoor tables set up under what would have a good shot at winning the Mid Wales Large Awning competition, should such a thing be organised.

The caravan's original awning was extended by about four times its width by large square heavy canvas sheets ingeniously attached to metal ladders and ropes which were hoisted up over the caravan and tied off on the other side. Despite the evening sunshine the forecast was for rain around 10pm and we were intent on staying dry, apart from those who decided to go for a dip in the fast-flowing stream that bounded the field we were in. Others opted for the outdoor bath, heated by a woodfire beneath it.

A sunny afternoon in my garden

Marga bought the farm this spring and is attempting to get the tumbledown house into a liveable condition by Christmas, a major building project. She has plans to let some fields regenerate with native trees and use another to grow food on. A local farmer has already dumped a huge pile of manure there, so that's where the polytunnel will be! Her idea is that it'll be a place where people are welcome to drop by, stay for a while helping out with whatever needs doing, or maybe use the space for some artistic endeavour or rehearsal. 

As the global stock market appears to be crashing around our ears again it is an apposite time to reflect on the urgent need to establish better food sovereignty. The less reliant on imported food we all are, the better we will all cope with any economic shock to the global food distribution system. In late October the annual gathering of the National Food Sovereignty Movement will take place at Hebdon Bridge to discuss these issues and figure out what can be done.

And later today the Green Isle Growers veg box scheme that I'm part of will be giving a talk in Machynlleth about local small-scale veg production. I have a slot where I'll be examining the actual value of organically-grown veg compared with the amount of effort taken to produce it, based entirely on my own experience of the last couple of years. If you're lucky I might include a few titbits in next week's blog. 

A new Edible Mach site I helped construct last Saturday. It's modelled on a Victorian fruit garden and will have espaliered apple trees.

* Not her real name

And Your Bird Can Sing

An onion seedhead surveys my garden

In the ancient Welsh legend of Branwen the eponymous queen has been demoted to the scullery and given a regular beating because her half-brother, a nasty piece of work, had mutilated some horses belonging to the king. Her only friend is a starling which in a desperate bid for freedom she teaches to speak (in Old Welsh presumably, quite a formidable undertaking for a bird-brain), instructs it to locate her other brother who happens to be a giant, and ties a letter to its leg. Even though the bird could talk I suppose she didn't want to risk it forgetting what the message was on its long search.

I could be forgiven for thinking that a similar fate has occurred to one of my siblings and they're sending birds to find me (they must have lost their mobile phone). A wren last week came hurtling through the caravan door as I sat doing the crossword and spent a while flitting around the cramped space, chirping, presumably in an attempt to communicate with me. Any letter crying for help attached to its leg must have previously come loose and fallen off.

Harlech, where Branwen was from

It gave up eventually but then on Sunday night up in the outhouse where I sleep I opened the door and a blue-tit flew straight in. Again, any message it may have had for me it singularly failed to communicate. It didn't really utter any sound at all. It just flew around the room, clinging to the striplight, a wall-hanging, my armchair, the curtain-rail, even the top of the door, letting me get quite close to it as I tried to encourage it back out of the door. For a good half-an-hour I left it open but the bird refused to leave - maybe because I hadn't yet understood its message. In the end it was me who gave up, shut the door, turned the light off and went to bed. Early the next morning I tried the same tactic and this time it was off like a shot. I'm still searching for its handwritten note.

I'm reminded of the dolphins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which, being more intelligent than humans, were aware of the Earth's imminent demise and spent a good while trying to alert the human race through all means at their disposal, inevitably misinterpreted as amusing acrobatic displays. Eventually of course the dolphins had to give up and leave Earth by their own means, their last message being misconstrued as “..a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner.” It actually meant So Long and Thanks For All The Fish.

.
In reality it's birds not dolphins that are sending us a message - about the warming planet. Research such as this finds that birds are living further north each year - e.g the little egret was recently only found on the Continent but is now frequently seen in England. Cetti's warblers are being spotted further north in Britain. And some British species, such as the golden plover or the snow bunting, will be unable to move further north and so face decline. Unlike dolphins they won't have an escape route to another dimension. 

What is this tomato plant trying to tell me?