Getting The Word Out

With my science and engineering background I have an instinctive distrust of all things marketing. “Marketing bollocks” was what we software engineers not-so-affectionately termed any literature that tried to hype up a technology with exciting-sounding words. Remember WAP? It was the first attempt to bring the internet to mobile phones, back in the early 2000's. “Surf the mobile super-highway!” crowed the adverts, as a cool surfer dude swooshed past. Then we all tried to do it on our Nokias and our Ericssons, and it was awful.

Hawthorn flowers have opened

However I am enough of a non-nerd to recognise the fact that a bit of marketing is often necessary to encourage people to spend their money on your product. They've got to know it exists, to start with. They then have to understand why and how their life will be improved if they purchase. This is normally where the sinister wiles of the marketeers begin to work their dark magic. Of course they don't explain how their particular deodorant will make a man smell different, a nicer smell than he would otherwise emit. (Maybe they would if Smell-o-vision ever took off.) No, they hint very heavily that he will have sex with lots of attractive women.

Blueberry flowers

Of course marketing does not have to be like that and often isn't. The marketing budget for my New Leaf vegetable products is constrained but nevertheless I know I have to get out there and try to get people to buy my stuff, without the help of bill boards, TV adverts or social media (apart from this blog I suppose!) Apart from what I sell to the box scheme, the rest I have to find my own customers.

Loganberry flower

So off I slog on my bike to the local hostelries to speak to the managers. The Red Lion, a couple of miles away, is a friendly village pub and the owner-manager Geraint* turned out to be open to buying salads and possibly some other veg. He serves good value pub grub so would not be the target market for, say, kale or asparagus. The Dolbrodmaeth hotel I passed by as I already have an agreement with the managers there, they will take a weekly box of whatever I can rustle up.

Buttercup

So onto the Brigands Inn, just a mile from my land. Every year there seems to be a new manager there. I hadn't met this one before but he was very keen to buy local produce, and to try to make the place more for local people rather than relying on the vagaries of the tourist trade. It's more of a gastropub than the others and I am led to believe the food is extremely good. I hope they made a nice rhubarb pie out of the rhubarb I sold them later that afternoon.

I may still go door-to-door to garner more custom, though last year that didn't result in many actual sales. If I go in the evenings I'll catch more people in and be able to persuade them by sheer force of logic that they are in dire need of fresh locally-grown leaves. Let's fill this rural district with lettuce!

The first jostaberries on their way

* not his real name

In Bloom

It would be easy to imagine that when you spend the whole of your waking life outdoors on the same patch of land that things would get to be a little, well, routine. Thankfully I've found this not to be the case. Unlike in, say, an office where the surroundings rarely change except perhaps some lame bunting at Christmas, here there is always something new to observe. This is especially so in spring of course.

This dandelion flower only lasted one day

Right now the crab apple tree is in full white blossom. Bluebells stand in clumps in the long grass looking splendid. The elder tree by the entrance is on the verge of producing its clusters of tiny white flowers in upended-umbrella formation. Next to it the hawthorn is also about to flower, each one still a tightly-fastened ball on short stalks reaching for the sky.

Elderflowers about to go for it

Hawthorn about to bloom

Even more exciting are the four blueberry plants that I planted two years ago. For the first time ever they have flowers on them, beautiful delicate pale-pink cups, that can mean only one thing - delicious purple globes of goodness! That's if the birds don't get to them first.

Then there are the out-of-the-ordinary events that happen from time to time as I toil amongst the cabbages. An owl hooting in the late afternoon. Aren't they supposed to wait till night-time? Must be an early riser. A mousetrap vanishing - it wasn't there in the morning. Something must have been caught but not killed, and ran off with it. The sound of a chainsaw nearby. I went to investigate, climbed up the bank towards the road, in time to see a large tree being felled on the other side. The smell of smoke but no sign of any. I ran to check my caravan wasn't on fire. I found out later it was my neighbour, a good 200m away, burning some hay that had unfortunately got wet and rotten.

Crab apple blossom

Fighter jets roaring past are an almost every day occurrence here as the pilots skim over the tops of the mountains and down low through valleys. Are they equipped with missiles? If not they certainly will be when sent to other more unfortunate parts of this world, and the same pilots no doubt will fire them. Here they are content with attempting to burst our eardrums but at least they only do so during the daytime, Monday to Friday. Which is why I was a bit shocked when one thundered overhead in the deep twilight after 9pm, its lights blinking, leaving me waving my fist pathetically after it shouting “What about the little asleep children?” Yes, that should give the MoD something to think about.

A baby lettuce with some of its friends

The Red Hot Chilli Pepper

Market day at Machynlleth on a sunny day in May. Crowds squeeze through the narrow gaps on the pavements left by the stalls. People browse old books, linger by tempting cakes, feel the quality of a pair of thermal underpants. A long queue forms at the Indian vegetarian curry stall. A giant chilli pepper wanders past.

Wild garlic as far as the eye can see, on the Torrent Walk near Dolgellau

Huh? Was this some dream triggered by spending too much time amongst vegetables? No. This was last Wednesday and I was that giant chilli pepper. I had adverts stapled to my front and back which announced the imminent commencement of the veg box scheme, inviting all and sundry to SIGN UP! I was being led through the busy streets by Katie who, not wearing a giant vegetable costume, did not have her peripheral vision restricted. We hoped that the sight of a tasty pepper, albeit with legs, might nudge some undecided souls into agreeing to buy a weekly bag of local veg for the next six months.

This photo comes from Facebook

To be fair Katie took her turn in wearing the chilli pepper, as did two others, all in the cause of getting enough customers to make our scheme viable. We need about fifty. Our efforts also included having a stall, with some nursery plants for sale to attract punters, and even tried playing some Red Hot Chilli Pepper songs on my wireless speaker. It did all pay off with several new customers, and others saying they would sign up later.

Our scheme begins bang on the 1st of June, a very early date for harvesting most types of veg. It'll be the salad leaves, chard, spring onions, radishes, rhubarb and whatever we can supplement from our organic wholesaler in Pembrokeshire. Thankfully these last few days the temperature has rocketed up (both day and night time), and we've had both sun and rain in copious quantities - my seedlings are responding as you might hope.

The abandoned slate mines above Dinas Mawddwy

So if you live in the vicinity of Machynlleth and feel like giving the scheme a try, or if you have been a customer and haven't yet got round to signing up again, now's the time to contact Sabrina on 01654 700115 (or email vegbox.greenislegrowers@gmail.com) who will be extremely happy to talk to you! Even if you're out in Corris or Dinas Mawddwy, someone will bring the bags up to you each Wednesday. We aim to please.

Grow little cabbages, grow!

Mary Mary Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

The young pine plantation on my land

Two months in. It's time for a status update on the progress of my efforts to turn seeds into food.

Let me preface this with a reminder that the weather has not been kind. We were fooled by a brief but beautiful hot dry spell in mid-April before winter came crashing down on us again with sleet, hail, and sub-zero temperatures. As I type there is hope that we are climbing out and up into a more clement late Spring, but the soil is still cold and will take a while to warm up.

Lettuce ready to be planted out

So right now I have a greenhouse jam-packed full of leafy brassicas in pots - two types of kale, two types of cabbage, and kohl rabi - all at different stages of growth. None of them have been planted out yet, but the time is coming, oh yes, very soon.

The polytunnel. A place of refuge from the driving rain and wind. I have many seedlings in modules and pots, most still in their infancy but with some near ready to get planted outside. The runner beans are itching to get their roots into my soil. The lucky lettuce has already begun to take that rite of passage, moving from cosseted indoor plantling to grown-up outdoor plant. Well, some of them were not so lucky - I planted a couple of hundred bare-rooted lettuce-seedlings out just before the terrible weather hit us. Sadly some didn't make it.

What else is growing in the modules? Healthy-looking brussel sprouts, very young cauliflower, swiss chard, beetroot, more kale and more cabbage, cucumber, calendula, sweetcorn; the latter is fortunate enough to be remaining in the polytunnel - I've started planting some of them inside already. Then there are the seeds in pots that I'm still waiting for some sign of life - butternut squash, french beans, courgettes, achocha, patty pan squash. They need warmth to germinate but there's been precious little of that recently.

Lettuce planted out

Elsewhere in the polytunnel I have stuff growing in the ground - rows of mange-tout peas putting on a recent spurt, a little squadron of broad beans who are looking strangely pale, and more lettuce that I've stuck in two long rows. Two more rows of chard seed I sowed direct seems very reluctant to come up, and a line of radish between them. At the far end is the anarchy of the self-seeding flowers - nasturtiums and borage. I need do nothing but water them occasionally.

Outside it's a bit of a sad story. I've sown a lot of seed but most of it is extremely slow to germinate, if it ever comes. Carrot, beetroot, chard - I peer at the beds each morning wondering if each little shoot I spot could be what I sowed, or just another importunate weed.

The broad beans have at least on the whole started growing although their cousins the field beans have not, apart from a few. The turnips are visible, with the first batch even large enough to “thin” (remove the unwanted ones). The mange tout are surfacing, as are two or three tentative asparagus spears. Radish is growing too, it's supposed to grow fast, but I'm wondering if they'll grow fast enough for the first delivery to the veg box scheme on June 1st. I somehow doubt it.

Thankfully if ever I'm tempted to be a little despondent I can turn to the rhubarb bed and admire the nine plants, some of them huge, vigorous and prolific. Of course it's the one vegetable I've done absolutely no work for this year, and it's the one vegetable that's already brought in some cash. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Convert the entire garden to rhubarb, perhaps?