Getting Ready For The Weekend

It's my last week. On Sunday I will be driving south through Wales, across the Severn Bridge and down through south-west England to Pilsdon Community to spend another winter with them as a residential volunteer. I'm looking forward to the daily Tea and Toast at 4:30pm by the roaring hearth, oh and to seeing all my friends down there again! 

Where has this year gone? Can it really be nine months ago that I returned to my plot of land to start the growing season off again? Did summer happen?

There's a lot to do before I go. Not only does the veg garden and polytunnel need to be cleared (apart from some kale and brussel sprouts which I'll leave standing) and covered in garden lime that hasn't arrived yet, I have to pack everything up that I'm taking with me and store the rest in the polytunnel and at Anna's house. I'm also doing the last veg delivery today to the veg bag scheme - lots of Jerusalem artichokes, butternut squash and salad, and my last firewood delivery of the year.

My firewood business picked up a bit right at the end. Despite putting adverts around in various places a few months ago, I was only selling the occasional trailer-load to friends until I decided to stick in a little ad in the weekly “Swapshop” email last week, that local people use here mostly to trade unwanted things. 

That has resulted in some more trips, including one at Dynyn Cooperative, a house way up in the mountains accessible only by a long, narrow, steep and bumpy track. I got lost trying to find it but eventually arrived and unloaded the firewood. It was only the next day I discovered the trailer's right wheel was flat, it must have been punctured by the evil track. Thankfully I had a spare wheel otherwise I'd be in trouble - I need the trailer to take stuff back to Pilsdon!

Sadly Anna won't be able to join me on my winter retreat, as she has this thing called a permanent job. She will however be coming for a short break in December. And I will be returning to Wales a month earlier than usual, at the beginning of February. So this blog will only have less than three months hiatus, and in the meantime if you like you can follow my Pilsdon Progress at mattswanindorset. Thanks for reading!

p.s. Did you think you could get through a whole article today without hearing about Trump? Sorry. 

We're All Going On A Late Autumn Holiday

My companion and I took our seats in the finest Indian restaurant in Narberth, indeed, the only Indian restaurant in Narberth. On closer inspection it was Bangladeshi. A tall man propped up outside with a glass of wine, a cigarette and an odd habit of ending each sentence with a dirty laugh had told us the food was excellent. We let ourselves be convinced. The alternatives were steak houses, a noisy pub, an over-classy restaurant and a pizzeria, and we wanted curry.

Anna is vegetarian, and I usually only eat meat if I know the place it's come from or if it's organic, so we ordered meat-free dishes. The friendly waiter said “Are you vegetarians?” to which the simple answer was yes. I asked if he was too, he laughed and said no, no, he loves to eat meat although his religion did not allow it, or eggs in fact. To those of his religion, apparently, eggs are like meat. We surmised he was a not-very-strict Hindu. The food was pretty ordinary really.

Fishguard Harbour with Dinas Island in the distance

We were on a two-day holiday in south-west Wales, my first (and only) holiday of the year. Already we had sipped coffee in Newport, circumnavigated Dinas Island (which is confusingly joined to the mainland), and sauntered about Fishguard. The next day we were to visit a small organic farm just over the border of Carmarthenshire, the home of the wholesalers that our weekly veg-bag scheme sometimes uses to supplement our locally-grown veg. Not the most romantic of holiday destinations perhaps, as my giggling fellow growers were quick to point out, but nevertheless we were both keen to see a real working organic farm.

Despite having forgotten we were coming, Peter and Mary* gave us a very warm welcome, a cup of tea in the house and a tour of their site, chatting away about all aspects of their business. They have two large fields, one of which had long lines of kale and other veg growing, and in the other are nine huge polytunnels, each eighty feet long, the middle four joined together to form a massive indoor space full of chard, salads and rocket. They use a small tractor in there to rotavate the soil and a larger tractor outdoors, and Mary let me try out her “wheeled hoe” which you just push along and it pulls up the weeds as you go!

This pile of stones is a Bronze Age burial cairn, one of three on top of Foel Drygarn

It was all on a much larger scale than anything around Machynlleth but they still seemed to think of it as rather small, providing a “top-up” to their main wholesale business, importing organic fruit and veg (mostly from abroad but also from suppliers in Hereford) and selling it on. They've been doing it for many years and it's now grown to a stage when they are considering hiring an employee or two. We left impressed by their capability, warmed by their generosity and down-to-earth humour and inspired to continue growing organic veg!

Last of my outdoor butternut squash. The indoor lot did a lot better

* names changed

Our Shed, In The Middle Of Our Street

Borage flower

Edible Mach. Or in Welsh, Mach Maethlon. A familiar project perhaps, at least to those of you with enough idle time to glance through my blogposts once in a while, or indeed to those who actually live in Machynlleth and witness first-hand the edible plants that proudly grow in handsome wooden planters dotted all over the town. It's possible that a few of you have not only witnessed but actually partaken of the veg, picking off a few leaves of kale here, a sweetcorn cob there, or maybe some mint from outside the library to make a nice bedtime cup of herbal tea.

Ripening autumn raspberry

It is a fine project and its aims are laudable. It seeks to reconnect people with how food is grown, right slap in front of their faces as they shop on the high street. It shows how growing vegetables can be both useful and beautiful. It encourages community building as groups of volunteers create and maintain the various sites. It offers free veg to anyone bold enough to pick it.

But there's one thing it lacks, and that is a decent shed. The garden tools have to be stored somewhere and people need somewhere to potter aimlessly for hours. Funds however were absent to purchase such a thing, so the power-that-be decided to hold a fund-raising dinner. Last Saturday, it happened.

A male pheasant greedily eyes my vegetables from outside the netting

What a fantastic evening! The room was packed with sixty or seventy guests seated around eight dinner tables, a hubbub of conversation over the background music. I was helping as a volunteer whereas Anna had a ticket but she also got stuck in with the set up and food prep. “Getting the best of both worlds” was how she put it.

The sourdough loaves and rye bread for the starter were baked by Sam, an Edible Mach leader, and the relishes were homemade. The butternut squash in the risotto was locally grown, the risotto itself made by local chefs of the Green Goat Cafe. And all the many delicious dessert options were all lovingly made and donated by people involved in Edible Mach.

Salads and kale still going strong

The most stressful job I had was to place the risotto on everyone's plates in the kitchen, spooning it into a large cookie-cutter and patting it down before removing the cutter, with the chef hovering next to me adding on bits of roasted pumpkin. It was easy for splodges of risotto to end up all over the place, which I had to tidy as I went. Clearly I was the slow link in the chain. One rather unevenly-patted risotto earned the chef's comment “not good enough. The next one must be better.” That told me.

After the meal there was music by local group The Bung Bung Belles and a raffle with prizes donated by local shops and people. So many people had given their time, their skills and their money to make the night work well, it was a privilege to be part of it. Count me in for the Shed Building Crew next year!

STOP PRESS: Just found out that the evening raised £750!

8.6kg of my butternut squash harvested this morning (26th Oct)

and chopped into 16 portions for the Green Isle Growers veg bag scheme

The Leveller

I have been levelling things.

My little red Jimny got a brand new tyre on Wednesday to replace the one on the front right which had a slow puncture and not much tread. Driving it home I found the car wanting to veer to the left all the time which I eventually twigged must be because the new tyre was pumped up too much. So I levelled the car by releasing the air until it reached a pressure more equivalent to the others. Hey presto! Now it drives straight.

My little white caravan has been ever so slowly sinking on one side due to the general sogginess of the earth on which it rests. To the casual eye it did not appear to be lopsided but a permanent resident, such as myself, swiftly becomes accustomed to correcting for the lean when walking around inside it. Little annoyances such as the (hot) oven door swinging shut onto one's arm due to gravity, the oil in a frying pan always congregating at the lower side, and being close to rolling out of my narrow bed every night began to take their toll on my sanity.

So one fine Saturday afternoon, or at least a Saturday afternoon without driving rain, I co-opted Anna to help me get it straight again. As there's only one person who can actually operate the jack at any one time, the presence of another was mainly to provide a sense of mutual encouragement, and to call the emergency services if the caravan decided to fall on my head.

Nevertheless we took turns at the jack and I found a large rock with a vaguely flat surface to jimmy under the newly-raised wheel of the caravan. This was a messy muddy job entailing the digging-out of soil with a trowel and forcing the heavy rock into a hole not quite the same shape as it. Eventually it seemed in position and we lowered the caravan onto it and checked the spirit level. Success! It was, almost, centred.

Weeds killed with an organic homemade weedkiller - vinegar and salt.

I couldn't stop grinning when I entered my small home at how pleasing it felt to be level. A pound coin placed on its edge on the counter did not, as before, begin rolling downhill but just sat where it was. The oven door when opened, remained open. I have rejoined the ranks of the perfectly-horizontal, but unlike the rest of you I am, for the moment, very aware of what a blessing it is!

Musical Duo Get Toes Tapping at Church Harvest Supper

Draft press release for all local media outlets:

Last night a musical duo burst onto the mid-Wales scene with a ground-breaking debut performance at the recently-opened Upper Room at St Peter's Church, Machynlleth.

My first butternut squash, weighing in at just under 1kg.

To a packed room “Anna and Matt” as the duo are known played a fairly brief set lasting no more than forty-five minutes, but what a forty-five minutes. The audience, having just finished a delicious three-course “Harvest Supper” meal in a rather warm environment, would in normal circumstances have been hard-pressed to stay awake through any type of post-prandial entertainment, but it is testament to the couple's abilities that not a single person was asleep at 8pm as the set drew to a close.

Is it a plane? No it's a home-made polytunnel scrubbing brush

Although the performers, who are rumoured to be an “item”, began on violin and keyboard, they didn't stay on these instruments for long. After a couple of Gershwin numbers, followed by some Handel and then Shostakovich's Gadfly, they traded places, the beautiful Anna taking a seat behind the keyboard and the rather more hirsute Matt picking up an alto saxophone. Toes began to tap and a few hummed along to renditions of Sweet Georgia Brown and On The Sunny Side Of The Street.

All change please! This time, Matt picked up the acoustic guitar and Anna found her violin again, or should I say fiddle as the climax of the evening was a medley of folk tunes. Starting with the bittersweet Scarborough Fair, in which both added their vocal cords to their instruments, they swiftly upped the tempo with five or six English fiddle melodies. The audience clapped along, and as the music sped up so did the accompanying claps - or at least those who could keep up did!

A box of kittens

Anna and Matt were presented with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine to thank them for their diverse and interesting performance. “Something a bit different!” was the phrase on everyone's lips. We can expect to see more of this dynamic duo in the future no doubt. Maybe they'll even have their own music stands next time.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

One of my more welcome garden residents

“Harvest over?” asks a man who clearly is not au fait with the small-scale growers' season. “Not quite!” I reply. There's a good few weeks left of harvest yet, although each week there is less. The garden still looks in full leaf but peer closer and you won't find the abundance of fruit that there has been during August and September.

The runner beans have done well, 80kg of the blighters picked so far (since 23 July) and more to come. Last year I only got 32kg in total although I had slightly fewer plants. They didn't even start producing fruit till 28th August last year, over a month later than this time - the weather was the culprit I suspect.

Jerusalem artichokes bask in the early morning sun

What else is a candidate for 2016's Best Producing Vegetable award? Rhubarb has got to be up there. I picked the first stalks on 11th April and the last ones on Sunday gone, that's just shy of six months of pretty much perfect rhubarb. Not bad for almost zero maintenance, just a bit of muck thrown on top and some weeding.

Lettuce on the other hand is a lot of work, sowing a series of batches throughout the season, planting out the seedlings, watering when dry, pulling out when they start to bolt and replacing, making futile efforts to protect from slugs. Not to mention the time it takes to harvest, finding the good leaves amongst the slug-damaged. But so far they've produced 419 salad bags, weighing in at 52kg, and the plants are all still looking pretty healthy. I can keep picking till well into November.

A moth decides to join me in my caravan

Kale was an early success story with both types, frilly and Tuscan, quickly producing large good quality leaves from ealy June. But in mid summer, disaster! The frilly ones all got some infection and all the new growth just rotted. Luckily the Tuscans were unaffected and the frilly ones have somewhat recovered, launching secondary shoots out their sides but producing smaller leaves. Caterpillars have been enemy number one this time, eating holes in both varieties with abandon before I can find them and dispatch them.

Let's not forget the mange tout, which even though all the plants gave up the ghost in mid August, did produce over 13kg which isn't bad considering how light a single mange tout is! It's equivalent to about 135 portions of 100g each.

And a daddy long legs

Herbs have been a surprise hit, with my perennial sage, thyme and marjoram really getting into their stride. The rosemary cuttings I took from Pilsdon early last year are finally starting to produce some growth. I tried sowing parsley for the first time and it did well both in the polytunnel and outside - the basil on the other hand only thrived in the polytunnel.

Then there's the middling bunch - the ones that did better than or the same as last year but that's not saying a great deal. Namely - french beans, broad beans, potatoes, beetroot, courgettes, radish, onions, chard, cucumbers. Must try harder, chaps.

We'll draw a discreet veil over the fiascos that were the bolting turnips, the slug-eaten kohl rabi, the poorly-germinating carrots, the extremely slow and pointless field beans and the blotchy and disease-ridden tomatoes.

My hair can be used as a useful blindfold now

I've enjoyed trying new things - the sweetcorn in the polytunnel grew very tall and tasted amazing! Quinoa has been an eye-opener. Purple cauliflower has produced about two semi-decent heads but looked pretty. The asparagus I planted two years ago finally began to produce a few (a very few) recognisable asparagus spears. Brussel sprouts have just begun to be picked. Patty pan squash that look like white UFOs have not been prolific but entertaining nevertheless. And the Jersualem artichoke have seven foot high stalks, I'll wait till next month to dig them up for the knobbly tubers.

Still to come, the king of vegetables - butternut squash!

This pheasant was shot by the gun-toting tourists across the river and landed here next to a jar of crab apple jelly

Big Fish Eats Big Fish

A model of an Italian town in a garden in Corris, mid-Wales!

Let's take a moment to remember that not all news is bad news. In the last couple of months the US and China have agreed to ratify the Paris Climate Pact; Sri Lanka has been declared malaria-free; the TTIP negotiations (with its terrifying ISDS clause whereby companies can sue countries if new laws impact their profits) appear to be stalling; Colombia has achieved a permanent ceasefire between Farc and the government; and the UK became the first country ever to connect a tidal turbine to the electricity grid. And that's not an exhaustive list. (I hope!)

But the news of this year's largest corporate merger to date - that of Bayer and Monsanto - is difficult to view as positive. In fact I'd go so far to say as it is pretty terrible news. What's the problem? Companies are always gobbling each other up in attempts to reach new markets and to bolster their share price.

Making sloe and apple jelly

Well it's to do with food, a commodity close to my heart (and closer still to my stomach), and the ever-increasing control of its supply by huge corporations. Bayer, amongst other chemicals and medicines, make insecticides. Monsanto, the most evil company in the world and proud of it, makes genetically-modified seeds and chemical weedkillers that cause long-term harm to soil.

Other massive agri-businesses are also wanting to tie the knot. The US chemical company Dow is merging with its rival DuPont, and ChemChina intends to purchase the Swiss seed and gene group Syngenta. Several of the world's biggest fertiliser companies are also amalgamating.

The veg bag collection point in Machynlleth

We could end up with just three companies controlling 60% of seeds and 70% agro-chemicals worldwide. The muscle these companies will have to lobby sovereign states to enact laws that benefit them to the detriment of peasant farmers, the environment and genetic diversity of crops will be unprecedented.

All is not quite lost - the mergers have yet to be approved by regulators. And farmer organisations from developing countries will be making their case at upcoming UN meetings, such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) committee on world food security in Rome next month.

Elderberries in foreground, hawthorn berries behind

We need to be supporting small-scale farmers across the globe so they don't become locked into buying expensive GM seed and accompanying chemicals from these corporate behemoths, but are able to farm using organic methods and save their own seed each year from crops. There's absolutely no reason why we must hand control of the world's food supply to three (and who knows, maybe two or one in future) profit-hungry companies.

(Oh, and while the bad news is rolling, I lost my appeal for getting Working Tax Credits. Boo.)

Winnow The Wisp

Thresh, Swan, thresh!

I've never been one for catching the craze, jumping in on whatever is “trending”. I started collecting Star Wars figures a couple of years after all the other kids got bored of them, meaning I could get hundreds of the plastic figurines at bargain basement prices. Whilst my friends were starting to discover girls, I was discovering Tolkien. In more recent years, the ice bucket craze left me cold (not literally.) I've never danced Gangnam-style. And although I did sign up to Twitter before most people had heard of it, that was only because I worked in the tech communications industry and wanted to know what it was. I'm not a big tweeter.

13th June

So it comes as no surprise that although it was way back in 2013 that the UN designated it the “Year of Quinoa”, it's only now that I'm growing it. (This year is the UN's Year of Pulses, apparently, so maybe I'll go pulse-tastic in 2020.) For those of you who don't know but wish you did, quinoa is food or according to some, a superfood. It's a kind of grain they grow in South America and you can buy it for quite a lot of money from some supermarkets and health food stores. Or you can be a cheapskate and grow it yourself.

8th August

I have twelve plants that have reached about four feet tall, outside in my garden, that I started from seed. It seems quite easy to grow. Quinoa is related to fat hen, the common weed, having the same “duck's-foot” leaf shape. I had to stake them as they got taller to keep them from being blown over by strong winds. During July and August the plants started forming bushels of seed-heads, a large central one and lots of smaller secondary shoots. They began green but turned orange, and then brown. At the start of September I picked all the main heads and hung them to dry in the greenhouse.

1st September - time of the first harvest

Then last Wednesday, Anna and I found time to do the fun bit - threshing and winnowing! I think it's safe to say it's the first time I've ever threshed or winnowed anything, let alone a superfood that I had grown and was about to eat.

Threshing meant rubbing the seed heads between our hands, gloved for protection from spiky bits, over a big garden riddle (sieve). Each seed was hidden within a dried flower bract and had to be released. The larger flower bracts were caught by the riddle but a lot of the others fell through.

So we tried winnowing - tipping from one bucket into another - to let the wind catch the light chaff (useless bits of stalk) whilst letting the heavier seed fall straight down. Despite an almost complete absence of wind we had some success with this if we tipped it from quite a height. The chaff mostly fell outside the lower bucket but we still had lots of flower bracts amongst the seeds. Actually they seemed to congregate on top of the seed so we simply picked most of them off. After a fair amount of messing around like this we eventually got a collection of pure quinoa seed weighing about 100g (enough for a meal for two.)

Boiling up a sample, the first impression was that it tasted a little bitter, but we were eating it by itself which perhaps wasn't a fair test. I had heard that you are supposed to soak them for a long while first, which we hadn't done. Later on we cooked a proper meal with it and were well pleased with the results. I declare 2016 the Year of Welsh Quinoa.

Painting By Numbers

Runner beans dangle through the pheasant-proof net

Whilst market gardening is my principal revenue-generating activity, I do operate a number of other sidelines to supplement the far-from-lucrative income that vegetables can generate. One such “nice little earner” is painting. Not watercolours, exactly, more slapping paint over something for cash. I have one regular client, a local carpenter, who from time to time gets me in to his workshop to help with a job.

This last week was one such time. The brief: to paint the inside of a large number of chipboard boxes he had constructed a pale utilitarian grey. Once bolted together and clad with some fancy timber, these boxes will together constitute two huge bars for a rather swish party in Geneva later this month. But don't bother trying to get tickets, it's exclusively for staff of a well known investment bank. Yes I am, very indirectly, working for the banking industry. Sorry.

As the hours drift by and I continue to daub and roll paint over these embryonic pieces of alcohol-provisioning structures, attempting to get a nice even coat despite the fact that not one banker will see this side of the bar (and the bar staff no doubt will be too busy to examine it) I have time to reflect on the meaning of life, or in particular the working life. There is something affirming about being a small part of a larger operation, however worthy or otherwise the ultimate goal may be. No doubt hundreds of people are employed for weeks to bring this party into being, preparing the venue, organising the festivities, ordering in the alcohol, hiring the bar staff, and so on. Everyone is doing it for the money. “Grab the cash and run”, as my carpenter friend wryly puts it. But whilst we work, we are doing what humans do. Solving problems, either alone or with others. Planning. Using our wits, our dexterity, our skills, to achieve an end.

Quinoa drying in the polytunnel

That's not to say that work is always good. Stress, excessive hours, punishing physical labour, low pay, poor management, etc, can all have a damaging effect on health and on relationships outside of the workplace. And if the job you are doing is ultimately not fulfilling for whatever reason, psychological problems can ensue.

Carrots drying in the polytunnel

I found this on the polytunnel floor. It's an exploded achocha fruit, revealing its seeds.

Still, despite the boredom and the pontificating, I quite enjoyed my painting. I worked outside in the fresh air unlike the carpenter and his mate getting dusty and hot inside. I got all my clothes and skin covered in paint, but it washes off easily. I could say how many hours I wanted to work, and when. Cups of tea were plentiful. Stress levels were rock bottom, for me at least. And it pays better per hour than market gardening. Which isn't hard.

Sting In The Tail

A quinoa plant ripe for harvest

One of the guilty pleasures of working by myself in a secluded vegetable garden is the absolute absence of pressure to look fashionable. There's no one around to judge my outfit, although the crows do sometimes sound like they're laughing. Of course even when I am amongst other humans I don't let such social pressure worry me unduly, but I notice I do remove my white bobble-hat before heading out.

My white bobble-hat is my most useful accessory. It's not for its warmth that I like it so much although during the wintry months I relish its thermal capacity. Its threefold benefits are: it fits my head, it's easy to put on and take off, and crucially, it keeps the hair out of my eyes. It's so much easier to pop on the hat than to fiddle around putting my hair through a hairband, which also involves taking my glasses off first to ensure no strands are missed in the general sweep upwards of hair, then groping for my glasses again once the procedure is complete.

Letting the quinoa hang to dry for a few days

The one drawback with the hat is that as I labour in the garden, I eventually get too hot wearing it. This generally sends me caravan-wards to throw the hat inside and reluctantly begin the hair-tying-up process. Last Wednesday I was doing just that, but as I gripped the bobble to pull it off it bit my hand sharply. I yelped and threw it to the floor where it lay innocently as if it were just a bobble-hat, incapable of biting anyone's hand. Then I spotted a bee crawling away. It must have been hitching a ride on my bobble.

A mighty sweetcorn cob

Later that same day, out shopping in Machynlleth, I noticed lots of caterpillars devouring one of the kale plants in an Edible Mach planter outside the Co-op. In a burst of public-spiritedness I squished them all and then entered the shop to a chorus of thank-yous and light applause (that may have been my imagination). But by the time I'd finished shopping my right eye was blurry, watering, and half-covered with some weird mucus-membrane. I must have rubbed my eye with the blood of many caterpillars, triggering this rather unpleasant reaction. They had their revenge in death.

The top quarter hasn't developed corn. This is better than some I've tried

Having a nurse as a girlfriend comes in handy sometimes although I was hardly put at ease by her declaration that it was a very rare type of eye complaint. Once thoroughly washed out with water, and antihistamined up, the eye improved although it took a couple of days for crusts to stop forming in the corner.

Boil it up...

What next? Ants biting my ankles? A heron pecking at my nose? I've been on high alert but the only stings I've had since have been from nettles whilst weeding. Nevertheless I am treating my insect neighbours with a heightened respect. Don't mess with 'em.

...and eat. SO sweet when picked an hour before eating!