The Boy Is Back In Town

I'm going dairy-free. These are just two of the alternatives...

Depending on your point of view, I have now moved myself up to mid-Wales or the Earth has rotated beneath me bringing mid-Wales beneath my feet. Either which way, it's a bit chillier.

Great to be here again though, seeing the Dyfi Valley in its February incarnation for the very first time. The trees are really bare, the temperature is really refusing to climb above 4 degrees. Sometimes the sun shines forth and transforms the steep slopes and rushing streams into a landscape of startling beauty and colour.

Taking things a little easier between the muck-spreading of Pilsdon and the forthcoming muck-spreading on my own plot, I have nevertheless found time to move large amounts of firewood and organic compost around in my trailer.

The two loads of firewood were to repeat customers, having already burned up what I gave them in November. And the compost was the endgame of a long logistical dance orchestrated not by me, thankfully, to buy in industrial quantities of the stuff at wholesale prices to be split amongst a goodly number of fellow veg-growers in the area.

This is the first time this has happened, at least in my time here, and it's an excellent development. Rather than us all buying various different composts at retail price from shops or elsewhere, we can make significant cost savings this way. The compost itself, called Sylvagrow, is a new peat-free product that Which? Gardening gave a Best Buy award in 2015, so hopefully it will be good stuff. They were actually testing the non-organic compost so this new organic range is a bit of a gamble but it can't be worse than New Horizons which we've all tried in years past and often seemed to be more full of chunks of wood than actual compost.

Still it's the co-operative nature of the small-scale horticulture around here that I love. People helping each other to load the heavy sacks into their trailers. Someone had turned up with cake and tea to distribute freely. Apparently the last big delivery two weeks ago (of the non-organic stuff) the pallet-moving device had a flat battery so all the bags had to be passed out of the truck by hand along a human chain, which took an hour. 

Here's to a generous, sharing 2017. Forget all that news.