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.