It Never Rains But It Pours

 

The rain clouds finally drift off



After the giddy joys of last week's triumphs – the compost toilet, the big pheasant-proof net, the irrigation pipe being fixed (which I didn't even have time to mention in the last blogpost) - comes the dull thud of reality hitting home, as things variously fail to live fully up to expectations.

The day after the pheasant-proof cage was completed, I found a pheasant hen inside. She was in a corner, distressed and repeatedly hurling herself against the netting, whilst a male pheasant stood calmly watching her, perhaps muttering quiet words of encouragement to her under his breath or maybe just enjoying the scene. It was easy enough to catch her and carry her out of the compound, but it does beg the question how she got in. Some of the fence netting doesn't quite meet the ground in places so I will have to add some extra net along these sections and hope that does the trick.

Like everywhere else in Britain, it's been an astonishingly wet week and for me this has led to a number of unfortunate consequences. For one, my birthday was an absolute wash-out and I had to cancel a planned countryside ramble to find a mythical shed-pub. Secondly my brand-spanking new compost toilet, a.k.a. wheelie bin with a toilet seat on top, turned out to have some small holes in the side that I hadn't noticed previously. After heavy rain, the wide hole in which I semi-buried the wheelie bin fills up from below with water. I knew this would happen occasionally but had been relying on the water-tightness of the bin to keep the contents intact. As it was, the bin filled a quarter-full with water. I will either have to not bury the bin, thus making it rather high for the building it sits under, or somehow plug the holes.

I won't show you what it looked like inside

Thirdly, the wonder of a working water pipe, fed from the top of the stream a hundred metres away and fifteen metres up, was sadly short-lived. The stream turned into a torrent with all the recent rain and the force of the water must have pushed debris down the pipe, completely blocking it. It's the same pipe used by the gamekeepers to provide water for the young pheasants when they arrive on my land in July so they will need to have it working again by then; I just hope it can be fixed sooner than that, either by them or me, as it gets tiresome watering the forty tomato plants with a watering can when it can only be filled from the stream seventy metres or so from the polytunnel.

To top off the list of things going wrong, half of the floor of my trailer collapsed as I was ferrying sacks of manure back home.  Fortunately I was on a quiet mountain road with no other traffic around and was travelling quite slowly. As I rounded a bend I heard a bump and in my rear view mirror could see one of my sacks lying in the road behind with manure spilling out. My first thought was that it had somehow been bounced out, but this seemed unlikely as the trailer was tightly covered with a tarp. Uncovering this tarp revealed the problem – the floor at the back was entirely missing, and was in fact down the road next to the sack of manure. It had rotted through, not entirely surprisingly as it was originally built in the 1970's as a trailer-tent and only recently pressed into service as an agricultural trailer, by me.  I put four sacks by the side of the road to be collected later, pushed as much of the rest into the back of the car, and gingerly carried on home keeping a weather eye out for further mishaps, of which thankfully there were none.



The small planters for Edible Mach, in someone else's trailer



It's not been all doom and gloom, however. On Monday I was thrilled to participate in Machynlleth's first “Edible Mach” volunteer day. The task: to make Machynlleth edible. Or more specifically, plant fruit and vegetables in public spaces to be eaten, when ready, by anyone. This day it was the turn of the Leisure Centre to be ediblified (that got the spell-checker's pulse rate going). My main job was driver. With someone else's rather more robust trailer in tow, we delivered two very heavy newly- constructed wooden planters which were positioned next to the main doors, filled with wood chip, then soil, and finally with herbs. Flowering strawberries in pots were hung along a wooden fence. Peas were planted in some smaller wooden planters.  The Leisure Centre gave us free cups of tea. The most remarkable thing about the whole day was, it didn't rain once.