Wet Wet Wet

A baby squirrel lay lifeless but beautifully composed at the top of my entrance track.

Water. Wales is full of it. It gushes down the mountains, courses along the valleys, pools up wherever there's some kind of dam whether artificial or natural, and frequently drops straight down onto our heads from the heavy clouds above.  Even last July when there were nineteen consecutive rainless and hot days the stream on my eastern boundary blithely continued to flow down to join the river, albeit with somewhat reduced vigour. There must be some juicy aquifers up in them there hills.

The blackthorn thickets are heavy with white blossom which is just beginning to fall now

The last few days have been particularly wet. I once led a lifestyle that was so indoors-centric I considered rain to be a minor inconvenience to be warded off with an umbrella as I scuttled from home to office to pub to home. In my last job it was impossible from inside the office to tell what the weather was doing as the darkened windows faced a narrow alley. Of course rain was something of an irritation as it apparently served no purpose in a city other than to make the pavements slippery and to form puddles for buses to splash you with.

Out in the verdant wilderness of mid-Wales it's abundantly clear what the rain is for. Not only does it keep all the watercourses thrumming merrily along which are home to the fish, insects and other creatures that live within and around them, it also brings life to the myriad kinds of vegetation that populate the countryside – the trees, the wild flowers, the grasses, the ferns and mosses, and hopefully the edible plants that I am nursing into existence.

Welsh paddy field

Naturally it turns my flat plot of land into a swamp. There is a cunning little stream that comes from the hill right behind my caravan that is rarely actually there, but given a good 15mm or more of rainfall it suddenly appears and trickles down into my caravan's awning, rendering the ground inside sodden. A few weeks back, armed with a spade, I picked a spot some metres up the slope and diverted this rivulet away from the van which seems to have done the trick, but the water still has to go somewhere. After the recent deluges I have begun to consider creating a paddy field. Welsh rice anyone?

One of the wonderful characteristics of a polytunnel is its ability to prevent rain from entering and as such is the perfect place to be while the heavens are throwing down everything they've got. 686 square feet of pure dryness. Not only that but I've discovered that I can get decent radio reception by resting my portable radio's aerial against a polytunnel hoop, thus turning the entire structure into one vast antennae.  I can now dig over the soil inside to the strains of a Tchaikovsky violin concerto – what greater contentment is possible? Sadly every now and then my wheelbarrow becomes full of the rush-roots-infested soil I was removing, so then I pull my hood up and venture outside into the driving rain, heaving the barrow through forty metres of waterlogged mud to the bank I was tipping it onto.

Inside the polytunnel, manure is added to the turned-over soil

As for the polytunnel itself, it's not complete yet but progress has been made. I was stalled for a while as I needed an extra pair of hands to help with the battening of the polythene sheeting to the wooden frames at the ends, but yesterday Peter came over and we got it done, in return for which I footed his ladder as he went up a neighbour's house and repaired the chimney. No need for money to change hands when we can barter with our time and energy!