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