This blog has been superseded by...

...this new blog : http://mattswaninwales.blogspot.co.uk

See you there :-)

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!