Pilsdon Revisited

Pilsdon's onion bed October 2012

Pilsdon's onion bed June 2013

I am spending a week’s holiday On-Grid. The major difference is I don’t worry when I turn on a tap that the water may be about to run out. Also I don’t have to wait twenty minutes for hot water. And I can move around my room in two dimensions not just one.

Of course these niggles are more to do with the fact that my off-grid home is a tiny caravan rather than anything fundamental with living off the grid. It is perfectly possible to build a comfortable home that looks and behaves much like any conventional dwelling whilst still drawing its power and heating from the sun, wind, stream and coppiced wood. It’s just a question of making it happen.

I’m back at Pilsdon, the community in West Dorset where I spent a year volunteering up until this April. With the warden away on holiday they were looking for an extra pair of hands, and so I was tempted back with the lure of square meals of happy meat and fresh veg (some of which I planted myself this spring) as well as the chance to catch up with the Pilsdon crew.

Although I’ve only been away a little over two months quite a lot has changed. Baby River is one year old now and teetering on the verge of walking. Four people have left the community, two more have joined.  The honey bees have vanished from the hive, no one knows where. The pig weaners have vanished too but this mystery is explained by the freezer full of pork joints. Two of the three Jersey dairy cows have been sold yet even the one left, Angelica, is giving enough milk for everyone (young Snowdrop will become a milker later this year too). The chickens have all been replaced with another batch who are equally poor at laying eggs. A concession to modern life has been made with the provision of internet access for all in the form of a Windows 8 desktop in the library, whose flippy graphic tiles and lack of Start button confuses everyone. But with another nod to contemporary budget slashing, the daily newspapers will be axed at the end of this week. Swallows have arrived back from Africa and nested in the row of single storey buildings known as the Loose Boxes thus delaying their renovation until they fly off again this winter.

The garden is bursting full of growing things, both edible and weed, with each bed being managed in quite visibly distinct ways by the various garden team members. You can tell which plot belongs to someone suffering from OCD by the complete absence of any weed and the strict rows of beetroot and rainbow chard, each an exactly equal distance apart. Others are a riot of leaf. All approaches will ultimately result in food on the table.

As this break is for me a Busman’s holiday (apparently not named after a Mr Busman as one may be mistaken for assuming but simply after a “busman” or bus driver who also goes on holiday by bus), I was assigned a heavily overgrown corner of the vegetable garden, more a mini-jungle really, to turn into a patch ready for planting parsnip. So inbetween all my other tasks - milking the cow, driving the minibus to town, making soup for lunch, collecting prescriptions, shelling peas - I am ripping out quite beautiful yet inedible vegetation from the soil, buckets and buckets of the stuff, and making a weed mountain behind the hedge. And once I’ve finished this, it’s back to Wales to rip out inedible vegetation from the soil to make weed mountains.