Lullaby of Birdland

The source of some of my garden's fertility

Like the Whooper Swan I migrate northwards in Spring, but whereas I only travel 200 miles to mid-Wales the Whooper Swan carries on to Lapland or Iceland. Bewick's Swans migrate even further, not happy until they have reached the high Arctic as they prefer their summer on the chilly side. Only the stockier and quieter Mute Swan, the most common in Britain and the only breed to have been domesticated, stays put all year round.

Birdlife is on the increase on my land although I have yet to see any swan here other than myself. The fluid songs of blackbirds fill the evening air and robins can often be seen close by, especially if I've been digging and potentially unearthing a worm. The short bursts of a woodpecker in one of the large oaks high up the bank betrays its presence; I've never managed to spot it so far. From my caravan I can look out on a small copse of blackthorn and sometimes spy on a couple of bullfinches meticulously stripping the buds off the branches. Other small birds flit here and there amongst the trees, rarely pausing for long and making identification difficult for a non-birdspotter like me.

Away it goes. This is all fresh stuff so I leave it to rot down till next year.

Inside that blackthorn copse is my compost toilet, artfully concealed, yet with a view out south to Mallwyd Hill. Back in 2013 when Matt and Mary helped me build it, I leaned three spare two-by-four-inch lengths of timber semi-upright inside to keep them dry, and there they still rest. Yet despite their apparent lack of purpose, they have in fact acquired a two-fold function. My digital thermometer perches on top of the taller one, kept both dry and in the shade. And the gap formed by the pieces of timber have proved tempting to birds looking for a good place to nest. It's dry and raised off the ground, with the only trouble caused by some human coming close every so often to fiddle with the thermometer, or to defecate.

Last year it was a wren's nest. As I sat there on the compost toilet just a couple of yards from the nest, a wren would nervously inspect me from every angle, from various branches around, or the ground. At the end of the season I extracted the nest and marvelled at the tight weave of twigs and other materials to create the cosy home for its young. This year, a treecreeper has taken up residence. Its nest is a larger and messier affair with larger twigs, and the adult bird does exactly the same as the wren last year when I go to the loo, but with a bit more creeping up tree trunks. My bird identification book says treecreepers' nests are “sometimes in a crack in a shed adjacent to woodland” which is just about right.

Most of these peas have germinated. They'll be planted outside when they're taller.

With the buzzards and red kites circling above and other smaller birds settling in or passing through over the next few months, it is a good place to be to deepen my appreciation of these flighted creatures. If you happen to stop by and find me stock-still, leaning on my spade and staring intently at a tree, you'll know why.

Oh and do please support the Edible Mach project which is needing funding to continue:
Edible Mach Maethlon is a community group based in Machynlleth, Mid Wales. For the last two years we have been turning unused land all around our town into beautiful Edible Gardens. With the help of over 70 volunteers, we have grown food crops in places such as the library, park, train station and fire station. This food is available for anyone to pick and eat.
https://chuffed.org/project/edible-mach-maethlon

Donkey Kong

The kohl rabi seedlings are on their way!
 I sow two per module and heartlessly cull the weaker. It's in case some seeds don't germinate.

Sunday just gone wasn't any old Sunday. Well, maybe it was for you. But depending on who you ask around here it was either Palm Sunday or Seedy Sunday. The former is an annual commemoration of the event of Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem for the last time (shortly to be betrayed and killed), seated on a donkey and greeted by a vast crowd of well-wishers waving palm branches. The latter is an annual commemoration of spring here in Machynlleth and involves, amongst many other things, people swapping vegetable seeds for sowing. I decided to celebrate both.

Seedy Sunday was an all-day affair whereas the church service was at 2pm so I offered to help out at Seedy Sunday from the beginning until it was time to leave. It was hosted in the secondary school hall which somehow managed to remain icy cold despite the sun shining brightly outside. My job was to man a stall advertising our cooperative veg box scheme, trying to drum up custom before it begins in June.

Here come the peas

There were several enticing things about my stall to attract those potential punters. It was very artfully decorated with daffodils, curly kale, and squash of all shapes and sizes. It had a big sign saying that if people signed up today they would get an extra big bonus bag in the summer. There were bags of spicy salad leaves for sale. And crucially there was a fun game that cost nothing to play. “Guess the number of beans in the jar!” was my clarion call and many flocked to guess. I wasn't even allowed to know how many there were in case clever people were somehow to winkle it out of me, perhaps by hypnosis. I merely jotted down their number and then hit them with the offer of a weekly veg box, to which the weaker ones acquiesced.

My sage bush looking a bit sorry for itself after a frost

Sadly I never did get to find out how many beans there were, or discover who guessed right, as that was all happening after I left. I shot off by car to the remote hamlet of Darowen, a place I had never been to before, which is miles off the main road up tiny winding lanes leading up high above the green fields of the valley. The sun shone, and far distant sheep looked like grains of salt. The church here is one of the four looked after by the vicar. Everyone wanted to come to this one today, though, because there was going to be an actual donkey.

We sang a hymn first (in Welsh) and then something else happened, also in Welsh. In fact the whole service was entirely in Welsh which made things harder for me to grasp. The service I normally go to is in a mixture of English and Welsh with the sermon always in English. Anyway it was clear at one point that we were all to troop outside and there was a real live donkey, gleaming white, with a young boy perched on top wearing a bicycle helmet (health and safety gone mad?)

Out come the hazel catkins

After another long hymn, Moses the donkey was led sedately by its keeper to the arched doorway but there it stopped and would not budge. I'm not sure quite what it was expected to do once inside but we shall never know. Everyone filed back in and continued with the service, with many a backwards glance in the hope of seeing the donkey behind us, but his owner said afterwards that it was the double step that foxed him. I rather suspect instead it was the prospect of a sermon in Welsh that put him off.

Mallwyd Hill looms over my garden and compost bins

Hard Graft

Seed trays suspended in my polytunnel... hopefully the mice can't get at them there

This week I learned the meaning of hard graft. Not in the sense of heavy labour although I've had my fair share of that, digging out wheelbarrowful after wheelbarrowful of rotted manure and forking it into my garden soil. No, on Saturday I enrolled on a workshop at the Centre for Alternative Technology to learn about grafting, and specifically the grafting of apple trees. And it is hard.

Our tutor, Chloe Ward, is a local specialist in fruit trees. A few years ago she conducted a survey of all the orchards she could find in Powys, the huge county in which Machynlleth nestles in its furthest north-west reaches, and wrote and published a detailed booklet with her findings. She wanted to find those varieties of apple which do best in the Welsh climate, ie very damp weather and generally poor soil. Her booklet identifies those she believes cope the most admirably with these conditions.

In go the mange tout seeds... 

I learned quite a lot about apple trees. Each variety of apple is a clone, so all Golden Delicious trees, for example, are genetically identical to each other. If you planted a Golden Delicious pip you would not get a Golden Delicious tree - it would be a unique new variety with most likely pretty awful fruit. To get a new Golden Delicious tree, you have to snip a bit of new growth off a branch, called a scion, and attach it to the top of a different little apple tree (just a stick with roots) called a rootstock. You've just grafted a new apple tree.

The art is in the attaching correctly. The two ends have to match near enough exactly so that they fuse, in time. Both ends are cut diagonally and should neatly fit together so you can't see any of the inside. They are then bound tightly together with plastic tape.

The snow has melted, the sun is shining, the muck is being spread!

The outer layer (phloem) in the bark transports the sugars generated by leaves. The next layer (cambium) in produces cells for both the outer and the inner layer. And the layer behind that (xylem) carries water from the roots all the way up to through to the leaves. It's crucial to get the middle layer lined up on both sides or the graft won't take.

After an hour's teaching we all found ourselves hacking away at bits of twig with Stanley knives, trying to get the two cuts to match up. I chose two scions - a Bardsey Island and a George Cave - they both flower at about the same time of year which is crucial for pollination, since they like most apple varieties are not self-fertile. Eventually I managed to get them attached to their respective rootstocks and planted in pots of compost. It's very fiddly. Whether it worked or not only time will tell. I'll be keeping them in my polytunnel and watering them so they should grow a few inches by autumn. If so they'll be planted on my land somewhere in the winter. If not, well, I'll have learned that I'm not a grafter.

My efforts. With spade and bucket for size comparison

The Rain Has Got Its Hat On

Mud. It is the defining characteristic of my environment. I returned to my land in mid-Wales last week after a winter in Dorset to find the rains had turned it into a quagmire. No surprise there. Unfortunately it's worst just around where my caravan is sited as after heavy rains a little stream appears behind it from up the hill and has nowhere really to go, just pooling in the area between the caravan and polytunnel which is of course where I am stomping around the most. A few corrugated iron sheets now form a crude path.

Given the terrible gales over the winter I had been preparing myself for the worst but bar a couple of broken panes in the greenhouse, everything was surprisingly in good working order. Although the solar panel had been blown over onto its face, once back in position it continued to charge the caravan battery just fine. The tap fed from the stream still worked, the long pipe hasn't got blocked anywhere. The huge net over the garden remained intact. The polytunnel was standing just where I left it.

The first time I've seen snow on my land! It melted by midday

My caravan awning had to be erected again, no small feat solo but thankfully I had the assistance of my girlfriend Anna who had come up with me from Pilsdon for a few days. It was swiftly filled with the junk I had stored in the polytunnel over winter but at least I can now see where the veg is going to grow!

It is exciting to be back and sowing seeds for the season ahead. I've got tomatoes, broad beans and mange tout on the go already, mostly in modules and seed trays but yesterday about a hundred broad bean seeds of three different varieties were pushed into a recently-manured and rather soggy bed outside.

Velociraptor tracks

It's also challenging to start up afresh here after getting used to taps with hot water, washing machines, meals mostly cooked by others, readily available drinking water, central heating, decent dry storage space and a snooker hall. That's all a memory now - or did I dream it?

I aim to get my drinking water from the rain-filled water butt by the greenhouse, though putting through a gravity filter first just in case. Not wanting to risk the standing water in the butt which had lots of little flies buzzing around the top, I emptied it out and rinsed it and am now waiting for enough rain to fill it up again. I'll be drinking shop-bought water till then. I don't trust the stream water given the not-so-remote possibility of a sheep having died in it further up the hill.

Storm clouds loom over Aberdovey

I'm reconnecting with neighbours and friends here who now see me as a kind of bellwether of spring like the cuckoo. They say it's been a horribly wet and windy winter and are glad to see the back of it. Personally I will be happy once the ground has dried out and I can walk around without slipping and sliding like a deranged ice-skater. Bring on the sun!