The Three Little Pigs (And Some Chickens and Sheep)

Last weekend my landlords went away on a short camping trip leaving me in charge of their livestock - three pigs, four chickens and about fifteen sheep. Ideally they would all still be alive on their return. Detailed instructions were left on an A4 piece of paper with timings, quantities of feed, and an invitation to eat the eggs.

The sheep were the easiest, as they are just given some feed each morning, poured into their two troughs. Given that they live on a grassy field and it is midsummer, they would not keel over and die if this breakfast was forgotten - it's a kind of daily treat. They have two breeds in the same field, both fairly rare - Balwens, which look a bit like big fluffy bears with dark brown coats and white noses; and Soays, that can be easily mistaken for goats with their short horns. The Soays self-shed their fleeces, so some of them are looking a little raggedy as they are mid-shed.

With the chickens it's a case of letting them out of their “Eglu” hutch in the morning with a breakfast of scattered grain on the ground (and chasing the importunate pheasant cock away who would invite himself to the breakfast otherwise), snatching the couple of eggs from the hutch when they're not looking, and at dusk checking they've climbed back into their Eglu and shutting them in to protect them from foxes and any other hungry quadruped with a taste for chicken. During the day they just roam about the property as if they own it.

The three pigs are the noisiest and most troublesome, but still a lot of fun. They're quite small, being about three months old, but growing fast and are fed twice daily. Their breed is 'Oxford Sandy and Black', another semi-rare variety. They live in a big enclosure with high fencing that is sunk well below the ground to prevent them from making a great escape. When they first arrived last month they were kept in another enclosure with slightly less secure fencing, to allow the grass to grow more in the main pen. They certainly did prove themselves effective escape artists - I was driving along the lane at the end of a salad-bag delivery round and found all three on the road ahead of me! Shauna was with me, and between us and the landlord we managed to grab them by the hind legs, hoik them up with their snouts dangling and heft them back home. This technique keeps them quiet - Shauna tried lifting one around its belly and it screamed to high heaven.

The wide circular feeding bucket and the water trough have both been tethered to the gate, inside the pen, to prevent them from being flipped over by naughty snouts so it's simply a case of pouring the feed (a locally-grown mix rather than the ubiquitous soy-based stuff) over the gate into the trough, and water into the other. Sounds easy. Try doing it with three pigs in the way, bouncing over each other, shrieking with anticipation and trampling in both troughs. I'm sure there's an art to doing it so that half the feed doesn't land on their backs and ears, but I guess I need more than a weekend's feeding to figure out how.

At least I can relax afterwards with a freshly-laid egg on toast.

Speaking of eggs, marvel at this geometrically arranged set of eggs I found on a kale leaf!

p.s. The nematodes seem to have had zero effect on my garden slugs. :-(

Just Say No

Halfway up Foel Dugoed, looking back at my valley.
That dense patch of trees in the distant valley floor surrounds my plot of land

The answer to my request to Snowdonia National Park that I might keep my polytunnel and greenhouse arrived by email yesterday, five and a half months after I had submitted it formally, accompanied by isometric drawings of the structures, a map showing where the land is, a map showing where the structures are on the land, an “access and design statement”, a detailed application form, and a cheque for £61. 

The answer was no.

It was not an unexpected no. Those of you who diligently pore over every word I spout online will be well aware of the twists and turns of the discussions I've had with the planning officer and the Highways Agency these past few months, and things were not looking promising.

My first raspberry on the canes I planted in March

And to be fair, it wasn't a flat no. In fact it was probably the nicest no that one could expect in the circumstances. In quite some detail the email explained that the only reason for the no was the Highways Agency's objection (due to the tricky access onto the A road) and the Park felt that they had to do what the Highways Agency said as they were effectively the Welsh Government, despite not agreeing with the Agency's reasoning. 

It was reiterated that there were no plans to enforce the decision by placing an enforcement notice on me, so I can carry on regardless. The option to appeal the decision was spelled out. The planning officer even attached the letter she had written to the Agency telling them what she thought and the fact that she wouldn't be enforcing the decision. She also said she would drop by in the next couple of weeks to discuss face-to-face.

This mouse had just conked out dead on the path in my polytunnel. 

It is all rather ridiculous really. All this fuss over two agricultural buildings on a piece of land designated for agriculture. Apparently if I had submitted a “prior notification” to the Park before putting the structures up, I would not have had to put in for planning permission at all! I'm not sure I agree with the planning officer that this is what the law actually says, but it's too late to argue the toss now anyway.

One of the packs of slug nematodes that I sprinkled everywhere on Monday. Too soon to say if it worked...

So do I appeal and hope the planning inspector overturns the refusal? It depends how important it is that the structures haven't got planning permission I suppose. Could a change of personnel in the Park's planning department decide to revisit this decision not to enforce? I doubt it somehow. They're much too busy dealing with new and ongoing planning applications. If I ever came to sell the land, would a prospective buyer be put off by the lack of planning permission, or use it as a bargaining chip to push the price down? Well, possibly, but not necessarily. 

If I do decide to appeal it's because I'm still game for the battle. I don't see why Mr Alun Jones, Route Engineer for the Highways Agency, who has never met me or phoned me, should be allowed to dictate whether I have a polytunnel on my land, vital for my business. I'm just thankful that I have an understanding planning officer!

In The Night Garden (And The Day)

My first stall of the year at the local farmer's market. Not laden with produce but it's been a slow start in the garden.

And they're off! After months of sheer dilly-dallying and dawdling my plants have received the starting pistol of a decent mixture of sunshine, rain and warmth and are finally assuming the shapes and sizes that you might have expected them to have about a month ago. The cold windy May and the dry June should take the blame for this. All the other gardeners I've spoken to say their veg have been slow.

So now all my lettuces are looking healthy, large and colourful - three 10-metre beds of them plus several others dotted around elsewhere. The runner beans are halfway up the poles, the climbing french beans a little further behind. Rhubarb leaves are giant and cover the narrow paths on both sides of its bed. All the many beetroot seedlings are planted out and are growing at different rates. The peas have been fruiting since two or three weeks ago - I had to add more canes to prevent the extremely tall Blauwschokker variety (with the beautiful purple flowers and pods) from bringing the whole edifice down. Dwarf french bean plants have begun to produce their spindly green fruit. The kale, both curly and Tuscan types, have mostly grown quite large. Some cabbages have formed heads and are nearly ready to harvest, while many others are much further behind.

A new bed of 83 tiny cabbages

Inside the polytunnel the 24 tomato plants are all healthy and some are above head height, all bearing some small still-green fruit. The cucumber and melon plants, seven of each, are climbing up their respective twines and boasting little yellow flowers and the beginnings of their crop behind them. I harvested my first bright yellow courgette this week. Butternut and Hokkaido squash plants, about ten in total, are still fairly small, no flowers yet. I have one solitary chili pepper growing on one chili pepper plant - another has lots of flowers so hopefully there will be more.

A melon plant

The picture is not all rosy. Nearly all my turnips bolted (making flowers instead of growing the root into a proper turnip), except about three. A similar story with the rocket, broccoli and Mooli radish. Most of the carrots and spinach never even sprouted above ground. Slugs eat the young fennel before they get a chance to thrive. A lot of the cabbages are looking a bit peaky - purple and crinkled instead of a healthy green - so they're getting a dose of “blood-fish-and-bone” powder which might supply some nutrients they are lacking. The outdoor courgettes, poor things, are much smaller than their pampered polytunnel brothers, their flowers are in tatters from tiny slugs and the courgettes so far have been the size of my little finger. The Tuscan kale is badly slug-eaten and many leaves are mottled yellow. Those beautiful slugs also love to eat holes in the Australian Yellowleaf lettuces (I have about a hundred of them) - severely limiting the number of leaves that can go in the salad bags.

Not looking that healthy?

On Monday I ordered two large packs of “Nemaslug” containing a total of sixty million nematodes Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita which infect only slugs and ushers them to an untimely end. It's an organic, biological control. There should be enough to cover the whole garden and polytunnel. It's not cheap but I am beginning to get fed up of spending between an hour and two hours every night picking hundreds of the tiny buggers off the plants. Unfortunately it wears off after six weeks but let's see what happens, perhaps the word will get around that my garden is a death trap. By this time next week the deed should be done, provided I get a rainy day as the nematodes don't like dry conditions. Those slugs don't know what's gonna hit 'em.

Man On The Moon

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hurtled towards their landing spot on an untrodden-surface in a souped-up tin can, much much further from home than anyone had ever been before, I wonder if either had one of those “what am I doing here?” moments. When for a split second you step outside your body and dispassionately observe yourself doing something perhaps rather extraordinary, and you seem to have the time to reflect on all the past decisions, coincidences, societal forces and accidents of birth that led to you, yourself, being here, doing this.

Or were they being wholly at one with the lunar lander, their instruments, the voice of Ground Control, the view of the arid crater-pocked ground rushing past and rising to meet them, their years of training as pilots and then as astronauts culminating in this point in their lives, the sheer volume of data to process and lightning-fast decisions required taking up all of their senses and more?

The new addition to my veg garden. 

I can't of course claim to have been in exactly that situation. The names of those astronauts who have landed on the Moon are well documented. But although being one of those whose lives are necessarily bound to the Earth's surface, I did recently find myself in a situation which required a (probably) similar blend of navigational control, mastery of machine, clear assessment of risk and fine judgment. All my prior experience of trailer-reversing was as if training for this moment, a series of sessions in the simulator before the real thing.

The mission had seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. I needed more horse manure and had found someone who wanted to get rid of some. I drove there with Shauna who is helping me this week, my trailer in tow, and up the steep extremely bumpy single-lane track to discover that to get into the stables yard the left turn was so sharp I had to go past the turn-off and then reverse the car and trailer in, again up a fairly steep bend. This was a taster of what was to come. I got the trailer past the horses and up to the pile and for the next half an hour we shovelled it full of manure. The horse-owner had suggested that to avoid bringing the trailer up here we take the poo all the way down to the road one wheelbarrow at a time. I decided against that - it would have been exhausting and taken all day.

I thought the turning circle of the Jimny was tight enough to take it round the acute bend so I could drive forwards down the heavily-potholed track to the road and freedom. Unfortunately this was disproved on exiting the yard and attempting the manoeuvre. The rain made visibility poorer but I can't blame it all on that. Thankfully the car had enough grunt to reverse the now-laden trailer back up a bit towards the yard, then pull forwards and left up the track (which ended a little further up). I now had to reverse car, trailer and dung about a hundred metres down the precipitous and winding track with steep sides and potholes so large that much of it was more pothole than track.

The fact that I am typing this is evidence that I, at least, made it home. I am happy to say so did Shauna, the car, the trailer and the horse muck. The mission was a complete success. We got the telescope out later that night as the Moon rose between the trees to the west and observed those craters that Aldrin, Armstrong and ten others walked amongst over 45 years ago. Should there be another manned trip to the Moon in the next decade or two I feel that my candidacy would be well supported by such a case study of navigational excellence under pressure as the events described above amply demonstrate. ESA, take note.

My one giant turnip.

My two giant half-turnips

Greenfinger

It would be a lie to claim I have always been green-fingered. On the contrary the only plant I bothered to look after as a child was a tiny squat cactus that sat on my bedroom window sill, which I occasionally remembered to water with a capful of a Smarties tube top. This seems now to be a rather meagre amount, even for a desert dweller, and probably accounts for its eventual demise. What my mum did out in the edges of the garden, causing plants of various kinds to exist, was a mystery to me and I was happy for it to remain so. The only time I interacted with these leafy things was when my ball ended up within them and I had to tiptoe in without crushing anything, ideally.

Now I have slightly more right to claim to have verdant digits, or more accurately dirt-encrusted and callused digits. Not that all my plants grow well, by any means, but I am at least giving it a go and trying to learn from my mistakes.

Saw this on a walk in a nearby woodland. No idea what it is. Any ideas?

Could you say those with an aptitude for all things mechanical have metallic-grey-fingers? If so then I have yet to acquire that particular hue. The mechanical things in my life take great pleasure in stopping doing the one thing it is they have been created to do, forcing me to spend hours struggling and often failing to fix them.

Example one - the flat back tyre on my bike. It's a new tyre from a couple of months ago but somehow a paper clip punctured it and the inner tube. Removing the wheel was fairly easy but getting the tyre off the wheel with these useless plastic tyre levers was impossible. I had to resort to a screwdriver eventually, and in doing so punctured the inner tube further - a fact I only realised later when my spare inner tube turned out not to fit and I tried to patch the original tube with a puncture repair kit. Every time I patched a hole, let the glue dry and pumped the tube up, air hissed out of another hole. I've resorted to ordering new inner tubes of the right diameter and new tyre levers, and am hoping not have a whole lot of new grief getting the tube and tyre back on when they arrive.

Example two - the chainsaw that doesn't saw. Over winter it was the chainsaw that wouldn't start until I paid a chainsaw expert to fix it. He said there was water in the engine. Now it starts but barely saws - it starts cutting through the log but fails to get through more than an inch. I've sharpened the chain twice, it's on the right way round, the engine seems to be revving properly, I just have no idea what's going on. The chain and bar had been used on a Pilsdon chainsaw over the winter so maybe it got damaged somehow then (by me - I was the only one with a licence). I am thinking it may have to be a new chain.

Millions of little pheasants! Welcome to my land.

When I get tired of being frustrated by mechanical objects I can opt to get frustrated by more intangible things, such as government officials attempting to stop me doing what I'm doing. My planning application for the polytunnel and greenhouse, submitted nearly five months ago, is still not decided. The Highways Agency are still maintaining that they cannot allow new development on my land due to the substandard nature of my access, and so are directing refusal to my planning officer who actually disagrees and would approve it if she could. I found a clause in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB) which states that on trunk roads with a 40mph limit it is the Local Planning Authority who make planning decisions, not the Highways Agency. As my stretch of A458 is on a 40mph limit (albeit a long-term temporary limit) I pointed this out to the Highways Agency who claimed that this clause means that the planners get to choose whether to contact the Highways Agency or not - in my case they have, and the Highways Agency say no way Jose. But this isn't actually what the clause says, and my planning officer is inclined to agree with me - she's going to look into it more closely and get back to me. 

All I'm trying to do is grow a few vegetables.

The first courgette flower