We're All Going To The Zoo Tomorrow

It's St George's Day and it seems people in Wales celebrate it as much as the English – that is, not at all.  However Easter was, I believe, celebrated by the Church of Wales and in fact the ancient stone church not far from me was used for an actual service on Good Friday, a fact I only discovered on Easter Saturday. It seems to have at most one or two services held there a year. I wasn't too put out at missing it though, as not only would it have been the 'miserable' service remembering the death of Jesus (as opposed to the 'joyful' service on Easter Sunday), it would have been conducted in the Welsh language, a tongue I have yet to master I'm ashamed to say.

Easter Sunday was instead marked by a dinner at Kelly's* where several of us brought vegetables of various kinds and Kelly cooked them all up into a veritable feast of colours, tastes and sounds. (OK maybe we had to make the sounds.) An Easter bunny made of chocolate was smashed with a spoon and distributed amongst us. I guess this ritual will have to do for this year.

Livingstone I presume?

Last Thursday and Friday, or Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to give them their full titles, I seemed to spend entirely in the car driving here and there with trailer attached collecting useful stuff. First off it was over to the nearby caravan park to pick up a backlog of about fifteen sacks of fresh horse manure, plus five bags of the well-rotted stuff. Having tipped that onto the ever growing pile on my land, it was over to Esgair woodland near the Centre for Alternative Technology with Belinda** and a pair of secateurs to harvest two hundred bamboo canes, beautifully striped green and white. Apparently the woodland owner doesn't mind as they are considered an invasive species. Now I have half of them constructed as a runner bean frame along the length of one raised bed; the rest soon to become a duplicate frame on the next bed along (I have to grow a LOT of runner beans for the veg bag scheme.)

Two hundred canes - for free

Now it's a simple matter of growing the beans

The next day, a hot one, I was up early and driving nine miles due west over the mountain pass and through the Dyfi Forest to get to the goldmine of horse muck – a couple who own about twenty acres and three male horses have over time accumulated tonnes of manure, much of which is now wonderfully dark and crumbly, and they were desperate to get rid of it. It took all morning and into the afternoon to make two round trips but I ended up with a polytunnel half-full of the stuff, having made only a slight dent in their pile.  After a quick bite for lunch I was off again, this time to a pig farm near a village blessed with the name Arthog. (I wonder when it lost the initial W?) Peter*** came along to make the introductions. They had a load of decking timber they no longer wanted, and seemed glad to let me take as much as my trailer could cope with, i.e. not very much. I've been a bit wary of it since a small part of its floor fell out a couple of weeks ago. Still, I took away seventeen 240cm lengths which I will use either for lining the path down the polytunnel or making sides for one of the raised beds.

A couple of woolly pigs on the pig farm

The decking timber made it back to my land

It's a good feeling to see this place slowly coming together, piece by piece. The polytunnel is all but complete, with just a couple of doors to finish off. The seeds are growing, encourage by the recent warmth and now some rain. Now all I need is the huge net to protect my garden from the pheasants; the gamekeeper has promised one but it has yet to appear, so at present each area I sow in I have to protect with a makeshift cage which gives my garden the appearance of a vegetable zoo.  Hmm, do I detect a revenue opportunity?  Bring your children this summer to the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo! It might just work.

The Mange-Tout Enclosure in the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo

* Not her real name.

** Also not.

*** Nope.