Donkey Kong

The kohl rabi seedlings are on their way!
 I sow two per module and heartlessly cull the weaker. It's in case some seeds don't germinate.

Sunday just gone wasn't any old Sunday. Well, maybe it was for you. But depending on who you ask around here it was either Palm Sunday or Seedy Sunday. The former is an annual commemoration of the event of Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem for the last time (shortly to be betrayed and killed), seated on a donkey and greeted by a vast crowd of well-wishers waving palm branches. The latter is an annual commemoration of spring here in Machynlleth and involves, amongst many other things, people swapping vegetable seeds for sowing. I decided to celebrate both.

Seedy Sunday was an all-day affair whereas the church service was at 2pm so I offered to help out at Seedy Sunday from the beginning until it was time to leave. It was hosted in the secondary school hall which somehow managed to remain icy cold despite the sun shining brightly outside. My job was to man a stall advertising our cooperative veg box scheme, trying to drum up custom before it begins in June.

Here come the peas

There were several enticing things about my stall to attract those potential punters. It was very artfully decorated with daffodils, curly kale, and squash of all shapes and sizes. It had a big sign saying that if people signed up today they would get an extra big bonus bag in the summer. There were bags of spicy salad leaves for sale. And crucially there was a fun game that cost nothing to play. “Guess the number of beans in the jar!” was my clarion call and many flocked to guess. I wasn't even allowed to know how many there were in case clever people were somehow to winkle it out of me, perhaps by hypnosis. I merely jotted down their number and then hit them with the offer of a weekly veg box, to which the weaker ones acquiesced.

My sage bush looking a bit sorry for itself after a frost

Sadly I never did get to find out how many beans there were, or discover who guessed right, as that was all happening after I left. I shot off by car to the remote hamlet of Darowen, a place I had never been to before, which is miles off the main road up tiny winding lanes leading up high above the green fields of the valley. The sun shone, and far distant sheep looked like grains of salt. The church here is one of the four looked after by the vicar. Everyone wanted to come to this one today, though, because there was going to be an actual donkey.

We sang a hymn first (in Welsh) and then something else happened, also in Welsh. In fact the whole service was entirely in Welsh which made things harder for me to grasp. The service I normally go to is in a mixture of English and Welsh with the sermon always in English. Anyway it was clear at one point that we were all to troop outside and there was a real live donkey, gleaming white, with a young boy perched on top wearing a bicycle helmet (health and safety gone mad?)

Out come the hazel catkins

After another long hymn, Moses the donkey was led sedately by its keeper to the arched doorway but there it stopped and would not budge. I'm not sure quite what it was expected to do once inside but we shall never know. Everyone filed back in and continued with the service, with many a backwards glance in the hope of seeing the donkey behind us, but his owner said afterwards that it was the double step that foxed him. I rather suspect instead it was the prospect of a sermon in Welsh that put him off.

Mallwyd Hill looms over my garden and compost bins