The End Of The Beginning

Me in April 2013

I think it's time to lay this blog to rest. It's had a good innings, over four years and 161 posts. One post every week except over the winters when I was living down in Dorset (and updating my mattswanindorset blog instead). It has traced my journey from arriving on my patch of land knowing nobody in April 2013, all the way through to today, in my fourth season as a vegetable grower and producer. The photos tell the story probably better than the words.


The reason for the shocking news of this blog's imminent demise? Well, mainly because the name is no longer true. I'm not living off-grid any more, I'm living in a house. And this week it's a different house. We have moved, my partner and I, from the small terraced house in the village of Cwm Llinau to a big square stone house in the centre of Machynlleth.


No we haven't won the lottery, it isn't the entire house we're living in but a one-bed portion of it known as The Annexe. The rest of it is owned and lived in by our landlords, a lovely couple we know well.

Somehow we managed to squeeze the tall fridge-freezer sideways into my Suzuki Jimny, with the washing machine hauled up onto the trailer behind. It took several trips with two cars to transport everything from one abode to the other, eight miles apart, and we were predictably exhausted afterwards.

The polytunnel as it is now - courgettes on the right, tomatoes on the left

Nevertheless we then made an insane one-night trip all the way down to Pilsdon, 200 miles south, to attend a memorial service for Craig who passed away recently. We both knew him from our times at Pilsdon Community and wanted to be part of the ceremony, Anna playing the violin that he had given her. His ashes were buried just outside the church, along with an unusual objet d'art that he had created himself - two violin necks joined together with an oversized screw and restrung.


Don't worry, or maybe you should - this won't be my last blogpost. I'll be starting a new blog soon enough unless I get enough good reasons not to sent my way. Just got to think of a decent name for it.... 

Thanks for reading and for all of you who have sent me your thoughts and questions! It has been a fantastic experience to learn how to live off-grid in a tiny caravan in a muddy field and scratch a living out of the earth and I have learned an awful lot. May the learning and the seeking continue. 

Me in 2017

What's In A Name?

First-fruits from the polytunnel

When I bought the six-acre parcel of land in mid-Wales in the dying days of 2012, it didn't have a name. The title deed just refers to it as “Land to the south-east of Groesllwyd”, the name of a house on the other side of the A-road. Old tithe maps suggest that it once belonged to the owner of that house but at some point, maybe not all that long ago, it was sold off as a separate entity.

The previous owners didn't call it anything particular in their small ad which I found on the website permaculture.org.uk. They had owned it for five years or so and only visited it occasionally, living fifty miles away on the border with England.

So when I made it my own and began to live on it in a caravan, it was tempting to christen it. But try as I might I couldn't find anything that seemed right. “Matt's Bog” was one of the leading contenders. Something Welsh would have been more fitting, that would capture something of its essence - its river, its trees, its flatness, its bogginess? Yet an English person giving a bit of land in the heart of Wales a name, whether in English or Welsh, didn't seem quite right.

It's just remained “my land” ever since. Until now. I was chatting with the local vicar when he suddenly asked “Do you know what your land is called?” I didn't, I replied. I didn't think it had a name. “Well it does” he said, “Wern Isa”. He had been talking with the farmer at the top of the hill when my bit of land came up in conversation, and the vicar had been told that was its name.

After getting him to spell it, I asked what it meant. “Isa means low, and Wern means a marshy flat area next to a river, where alders often grow” he replied. That made sense. It certainly is marshy in places, and it borders the river Cleifion.

Oddly enough the market street in Waterloo I used to live near for several years is called Lower Marsh (presumably due to its long-gone historic marshy quality), and now I own and work on a real Lower Marsh. A coincidence almost worthy of Douglas Adam's Infinite Improbability Drive, no?

In A Welsh Country Garden

I stood within the largest single-span greenhouse in the world. It sat sleek and low-slung like a huge teardrop on a hill. All around me were tropical plants stretching their multi-coloured leafy protruberances towards the sky. The paths wended their way through, over narrow walk-bridges and past pools filled with golden fish. A group of trainee wood-carvers sat in a long row silently focused on their work.

The National Botanic Garden of Wales is the place to go if you find yourself in Carmarthernshire on a clement summer's day. It covers over 500 acres of a former private estate that had fallen into ruin. Three of the large pools have been restored to their former glory, and water features strongly in the artworks dotted around. A snaking channel of water burbles constantly down the main boulevard before ending in a spiral at the Circle of Decision, so called because there are so many directions to choose from.

Colourful flowering plants were everywhere, neatly presented. The evolution of plantlife was presented in one walled garden near the yellow house that was the old servant's quarters, with various living descendants of the earliest types growing there. Did you know the magnolia tree is one of the most ancient, and its flowers can only be pollinated by beetles because bees did not exist when the magnolia first appeared?

I wandered into the tropical butterfly house and marvelled at the irridescent colours of the large flying packs of butter.

Inside the extensive “double-walled garden”, with an inner brick wall and an outer stone wall, laid out very formally, there was one quarter dedicated to the growing of vegetables. This is where I felt most at home, and dallied between the leeks and the peas for a while.

On a gentle hillside across from the glasshouse dome had been planted trees from different corners of the world that have similar climates to Wales. I strolled alone through China but didn't have time to check out the monkey puzzle trees of Chile. They were still fairly young and the native weeds were threatening to overcome one or two.

Alongside the boulevard were laid large boulders. This was the “Rock of Ages” display, which in chronological order showed stone from different geological times beginning with the pre-Cambrian. Small signs on them highlighted the names of the lichens growing there apart from one which was limestone and so too uncomfortably alkaline for them.

They do research here too - they are investigating the wonderful properties of honey, perhaps from their own bee house, and have DNA-barcoded all Wales' native plant species, the first country ever to do so.

So it gets the Swan thumbs-up for a day out in South Wales. Just check the weather forecast first!

No Life On Mars

A huge dragonfly hanging out on my fence

You may have missed it but it's been reported this week that there is no life on Mars. Not on the surface anyway. Apparently the UV rays in the sun's light reacts with the compounds found on the Martian plains to break them down into even more toxic chemicals. Alien bacteria (and this is the kind of life we hope to find) wouldn't stand a chance.


In 2020 the European Space Agency is sending a new robot equipped with a two metre drill to hunt for Martian bacteria that may lurk beneath the surface, well away from the hostile environment above. If they find something it will be hailed as a huge breakthrough, and rightly so. Life would be proven to exist on our closest neighbouring planet, possibly independent from any connection with life on Earth, so we can expect life to exist on many of the planets out there circling other stars.

Yet as of today, we only know of life existing here on Earth. And what life. The sheer range and diversity of life is mind-contorting. We don't even know how many species there are. A 2011 study reported that we have yet to catalog 86% of the species on Earth, and 91% in the oceans. There may be about 8.7 million species in total (give or take a million or two).

Lots of these we are killing off before we even get a chance to say hello. The mass extinctions due to humans are between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate (ie what would happen if humans weren't here.) Possibly between 9,000 and 90,000 species are being irreversibly wiped out every year due to our actions.

.

Warming the oceans and filling them with plastic junk and toxic chemicals. Destroying habitats such as forests so we can grow soybeans and keep cattle. Burning fossil fuels to cause the overall climate to heat up and melt the ice caps. The list goes on.


A lot of this devastation is caused because humans need food, warmth and the ability to travel. These are necessary things, but the devil is in the detail. We can eat food grown more locally and more organically. We can take holidays on a train instead of a plane. We can warm ourselves by insulating our homes better, installing better heating technologies and wearing an extra layer! And we can make a fuss to let our governments know that they must take some pretty radical steps to halt the ongoing ecocide.

P.S. The sauerkraut was delicious if a little crunchy!

Gut Instinct

"Rosakrone" pea flowers

Once upon a time there were no refrigerators. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.


People preserved meats by salting them and keeping them in cool dark places. Vegetables they kept for months through fermentation. The Scandinavians buried fish in the ground.

Pea plants are becoming a bit intimidating in the polytunnel

We have largely lost the knack of such things due to the omnipresence of the fridge in our cosseted First World lives. But cheap electricity may not be always with us. Maybe it's time we should reacquaint ourselves with some old-fashioned (self)-preservation techniques and give our guts a probiotic boost to boot.

I bought a couple of Kilner jars from the Co-op and a green cabbage.

Baby parsnip. Boy are they slow growing.

First step was to shred the cabbage with a kitchen knife. It wouldn't all fit in my bowl so I left some to cook up for a meal later.

Taking some salt I sprinkled a tablespoon over the shredded cabbage and mixed it all in.

Then I found a mashing implement (a wooden spoon) and began to mash. I could have done with one of those potato-masher utensils really. Bits of cabbage kept leaping out the side of the bowl and onto the floor but I carried on regardless.

Linseed plants begun to flower! I sowed them from the seed I usually sprinkle on my breakfast cereal

An interesting thing began to happen. The cabbage began to weep. Salty tears appeared at the base of my bowl. The volume of cabbage reduced by half or more as I pummeled it for ten minutes or so.

Into the jar it went, crushing it in, and only filling the jar by two-thirds. Enough juice had been released to cover the cabbage shreds, just about. I closed the jar and put it on a shelf.

That was Monday. I've opened it a couple of times since to push the cabbage down again because bits of it were above the surface, and my worry is the wrong kind of bacteria will develop on these bits.

Next Monday, one week after it was created, I'm going to taste my first homemade sauerkraut. If there's no more blogposts after this one you'll know why.

Who's In Charge Here?

OK everyone, what is going on?

The chap now in charge of the UK's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs attempted to remove Climate Change from the national curriculum in his former role as Education Secretary,  and has attacked the EU's Habitats and Birds Directives which currently protect our wildlife and natural ecosystems.

Potato flower

The blond chump at the head of the Foreign Office is a figure of ridicule to his counterparts across the world, so the UK becomes increasingly unable to maintain its standing in world affairs.

The Secretary of State for International Development has previously said she wanted this department to be abolished and replaced with a “Department for International Trade and Development”.

The Secretary for Health once co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be replaced with private insurance.

Foxgloves at the edge of my garden

And our Prime Minister, having called a general election on a whim which reduced her party's seats to below the number needed for a majority, is a humbled figure without the authority she needs to conduct the Brexit negotiations.

Somehow we find ourselves with the top positions in government held by the people least suitable for them at a perilous time for our nation.

George Monbiot warns us of a relatively new plant disease called Xylella fastidiosa which originated in South America but is now on our doorstep in France as well as other European countries. It affects both crops and trees and there is no known cure. There are 359 host species, and the international trade of live plants threatens to bring it into the UK.

A barrowful of comfrey leaves, ready for chopping up

Will Gove step up and take radical action? Will he outlaw all live plants being imported (with the exception of plants propagated in sterile conditions)?

This is a man who wants to strip away regulations not add to them, even if the threat is to our precious ecosystem which surrounds us and supports human life. No, business must continue! Growth, growth, growth! As long as we're talking about the economy not our trees and crops.

A binful of chopped-up comfrey leaves.
In a few weeks it'll have rotted down and produced a vile brown liquid which is one of the best organic fertilisers!

Gone Up In My Estimation

A riot of nasturtiums in my polytunnel

The art of estimating is crucial to the small-scale market gardener.


First there's the estimating that happens before the growing season begins. Plans have been drawn up as to which beds will have which veg growing in them. From that it's possible to work out the quantity of crops in total that will be produced from each, based on average yield per area for each type of veg. The next stage is to figure out when exactly those crops are expected to be harvested, across how many weeks. I end up with a beautiful spreadsheet that shows how many customer portions of each veg I will expect in my weekly harvest, for each month of the year.

Most of that veg will be going to the Green Isle Growers veg bag scheme, but not all. I make a version that's applicable to the scheme only, and share it with the group, as do the other growers. We make a combined spreadsheet so we know what the whole group can provide to the scheme, and then whittle it down through discussion to what would fit into fifty customer bags per week.

Sweetcorn in the polytunnel

The next estimating task comes once the scheme starts in June. Every Monday morning I have to assess exactly how many portions of each veg I can provide to the scheme on Wednesday. In an ideal world of course this would be the same as in the aforementioned plan but the unpredictable weather and the onslaught of pests makes it less than ideal. These figures are sent to the person doing the weekly ordering for the scheme (this year, it's me!), who may take all of it or just some of it depending on what's needed to fill the bags with a good variety of veg and fruit. It's vital to get these numbers right - if I overestimate how much I can supply, the scheme will suffer if I can't supply it.

And the final estimating comes at harvesting time, on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. I have to judge how much of each crop to pick that will constitute the right number of portions so I don't over-harvest and be left with more than I am allowed to sell to the scheme.

I don't always get these estimations right of course! I've been short of mange tout twice so far, having overestimated what I had, but luckily Ann had some extra that she could supply in place. But the more I estimate the easier it becomes. At least, that's the theory.

Children In Bloom

It's so easy for people in 21st century Britain to live our entire lives without ever being exposed to the origins of our food.

Those who live in urban areas may only rarely see a sheep or a cow, and the link between them and the packaged joints of lamb and beef on the shelves of Tesco's may never be more than cursorily dwelt upon. We might glance out of the train's window at the right time and glimpse fields of wheat or rape but have only the loosest idea how it is sowed, harvested, packaged, transported, processed, and end up as an ingredient in our kitchen.

A spread we laid on for people on the Big Walk that Eden Project is running

Then there are the vegetables and fruit that Eastern Europeans are harvesting for us in England's rich south-eastern soils, although whether they will still do this post-Brexit, and who will do this tough work instead, is another question.

Many of us will never have sown a vegetable seed in the ground, tended to the plant and eaten its produce. I certainly hadn't until I joined Pilsdon Community in my mid-thirties. I don't remember it ever being part of my education.

Which is why I jumped at the chance to teach veg-growing at a local primary school. Although not part of their official curriculum they believed it was important for the children to learn to grow their own veg and had applied for some funding to run a series of gardening workshops throughout the year, based in their own small veg garden.

My raspberries at the back, my comfrey at the front

The first one was last Tuesday morning. It had been raining all night but thankfully the heavenly tap was turned off just as we were beginning. Ffion* was assisting me, and could also speak Welsh which was the first language of most of the schoolchildren here. We got our first group of ten, along with a teacher, and played a game with them, first to see if they could identify pictures of veg (the ones we were going to grow!) and then to try to match the seed with the veg. The kids were refreshingly eager to answer questions and get involved.

We then went outside and began sowing that very seed, some in pots with compost and some direct in the soil. After labelling and watering, our session was up and they trooped back inside, whilst the next group got ready.

After four groups it was lunchtime and our work was done. We had sown beetroot and radish in a bed, planted sweetcorn seedlings, planted seed potatoes in planters made of car tyres, and sown squash, chard, runner beans, dwarf french beans and sunflowers in pots. The kids seemed to have enjoyed it. Let's hope the veg grows otherwise it might put them off for life!

* name changed as usual on this blog

Reach For The Sky

Potatoes of the "Alouette" variety, French for Skylark

Whoosh! Everything has shot up. The last two weeks of May has been warm and wet and all the plants on my land, both wild and tame, have reacted by reaching for the sky. Grass that was recently an inch high is now over a foot. Docks, nettles, brambles, and bracken are all exerting their dominance over the local landscape, making once easily-navigable routes rather more vexing.

In my garden, rows of lettuce have bloomed into young adulthood, having mostly escaped the risks of slug-kill in their infancy. Runner beans are wrapping their tendrils around the wild-harvested bamboo canes, and the climbing french beans aren't far behind. The hours of painstakingly planting out beetroot seedlings are paying off, as they are mostly settling in now and enlarging.

The outdoor mange-tout are flowering, whilst the polytunnel mange-tout are naturally further ahead, producing delicious pods. Chard leaves are becoming ready to pick, if a little slug-eaten. Kale plants are bedding in, only recently having been popped in the ground. Onions are slender stalks still but noticeably wider than before. Leeks are still much thinner. Some of the rhubarb is producing nice fat stalks, others have become much thinner and limper unlike last year's miraculous crop of wonder-rhubarb, possibly due to me picking it too far into the summer.

Sadly several of my young cabbage plants have been killed by the maggots of cabbage root fly. The leaves go droopy and discoloured - dig it up and you find the stem just detaches from the roots which are crawling with wriggly white maggots. I had covered the cabbages with mesh netting but too late I guess. The latest batch I planted out yesterday I covered immediately.

And where are my carrots? I sowed an entire 10 metre bed in April and there's barely a sprig anywhere. My suspicions lie with, yes again, the slugs. They nibble on the new growth. Perhaps they don't intend actually to murder my carrots. But I'll get them on a charge of carrot-slaughter.

The veg bag scheme begins this week! Tomorrow I'll be finding out what the other growers have to offer on Wednesday, and making up the spreadsheet which describes what each bag will contain. (Not all bags are the same due to the varying amounts of different types of veg that come in, but the job is to make them all equivalent.) On Wedneday afternoon the first bags will be available for customers to collect. Sign up here, there's still time!

Broad beans are beginning to produce tiny pods from the lowest flowers

Scaling The Heights

The peak is behind me, as yet unscaled. (By me)

It is called Yr Wyddfa in Welsh, meaning “the tomb”. It is believed that at least 350,000 people visit it every year. It dominates the topography in North Wales. It is the highest mountain in Wales at 1085 metres. Nowhere in England is as high.

Snowdon.

Having lived in Snowdonia for over four years I felt it was about time I hauled myself up it. All these hundreds of thousands of people were finding their way to it from all over the country and beyond, and it's only 90 minutes drive away for me.

Anna had a bit of time off work so we made a thing of it, booking a tent pitch for two nights at a campsite near the base of the mountain. We studied maps. We arranged for a massive heatwave. And off north we drove on Wednesday afternoon with the car jam-packed with all manner of objects of various utility for our quest.

We stayed at Beddgelert campsite, a beautiful wooded spot with tame rabbits lollopping about. Sadly it's threatened with being turned into a posh glamping site with chalets, you can object to the ongoing planning application here!


Thursday dawned clear and hot. The sky was a solid blue. We walked half an hour through a forest to Beddgelert itself, jumped on a bus, and were carried round to the east side of Snowdon along a spectacular route with views of glittering lakes, jagged peaks and sheer slopes. At Pen-y-Pass we alighted and joined a mass of people of all ages, each one intent on climbing the same route as us, the Pyg Track. It wasn't that much fun being part of this sweating parade but Anna saw a gap and went for it, overtaking a clump of older people on a steep corner, we pushed ourselves up with our hearts hammering and pulses racing, and found ourselves out front.

From then on it was quieter, only occasionally passing or being passed by other walkers with a cheery grunt. The peak came into sight after an hour or so. Suddenly a clattering sound broke the peace, it appeared to be coming from above. Was it the steam train? It stopped, then resumed. No, it was a drum. Someone was drumming at the top. It went on and on. Finally it gave up. As we approached the summit ourselves we met a small group of men carrying a large round covered object, all wearing T-shirts promoting a Northern Irish Children's Hospice Charity. Yes, they said, it was them.

The top wasn't quite as busy as we had expected. No queues for the last little climb up steps to the zenith viewpoint. A haze obscured the furthest vistas but the panorama was still impressive.

View from the top

After a peek inside the visitor centre which seemed implausibly like a plush airport terminal plonked in the middle of the wilderness, we began the descent westwards along the Rhyd-Ddu trail, so named as this is where you end up at the bottom. It was a gentler route on the whole, and less popular with the tourists. About 5 and a half hours after we'd begun the climb, we arrived footsore at Rhyd Ddu and toasted our victory with small glasses of beer from the village's one hotel.

We had been higher in the UK than we'd ever been before, and we were down in time for the bus back. Cheers!

Spot the odd one out amongst these sacks of rocks