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.