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