Cat Got Your Tongue

As I reluctantly jigged around with the others in a circle, jerking my elbows and singing the Chipi-Chipi (a Spanish nursery rhyme translated into English on the hoof by a student from Barcelona) I reflected that the best way to shed oneself of an excess of dignity is to enrol on a course. It doesn't really matter what course as long as it's taught by someone who believes that getting everyone to make a fool of themselves will naturally unlock any inhibitions they may have had previously, thus provoking a free-flowing conversational style of learning. It seemed to work.

The course in question was a three-day Introduction to Permaculture, hosted at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) and led by an external tutor called Angie Polkey. Thirteen of us from various parts of Britain and Spain, including a family of five from Barcelona who had made this part of their holiday, gathered together to be educated in the ways of permaculture. If you aren't sure what this is (and I first heard of it only last year) then you are in good company as even on this course it was admitted that there are as many definitions of permaculture as there are permaculture practitioners. It started life in the 70's as a more environmentally-aware approach to farming (the name is a contraction of "Permanent Agriculture") and has since become an all-inclusive philosophy of sustainability which can apparently be applied to any and every situation. I'd say my interest probably remains primarily with the agricultural side of it.

Day Two saw us making an excursion out a few miles east of Machynlleth to a remote seven-acre plot belonging to Tom and Lisa Brown, a Quaker couple in their late fifties who have lived there the last twenty-three years. Over that time Tom has beautifully restored a tumble-down stone farmhouse and old kiln house using their own timber and locally-sourced recycled materials. Lisa grows veg and sells it at Machynlleth market, and Tom makes and sells honey from their six hives of bees (the homebrew mead they keep to themselves). Holiday guests can come to stay in the caravan that the Browns used to live in before the house was habitable. They both came across as thoughtful, gentle and extremely able.  We were all very envious.

For the duration of the course I was staying at a nearby house of a friend, perched dramatically on top of a hill across from CAT. She had gone away for the weekend leaving me in sole charge of a tabby cat called Esme and her four cute kittens, a responsibility that weighed rather heavily as I had somehow never before had to look after any pet animal. After each day of the course I would get back and find the kittens scrapping on the kitchen floor or in a sleeping bundle on the couch while the mother would approach me and mew politely for their next meal. On the last evening however I opened the door to an absence of cat. Searching all over the house proved fruitless. This was better than finding five furry corpses but I was still perplexed. I didn't think they could get outside, but then found an open catflap in the back door so headed out myself and soon saw Esme walk nonchalantly across the courtyard and back through the catflap. Where were her charges? After hunting outside for a while and checking with the neighbour I went back in and there they were, leaping and tumbling around as usual. Who knows where they had hidden themselves earlier, the rascals.

Back on my land, the digging continues. Greg came down again and finished off the rest of the tree stumps with his five-tonne excavator which are now all dumped higgledy-piggledy in twos and threes. I'd say some of them would make a great still-life if any artist out there fancies the challenge.  Not sure what else they're good for, but I might try to eBay them just for a giggle. You never know, there may be a wealthy tree-stump collector out there willing to pay good money for forty prime examples of twenty-year-old Norway Spruce stumps.

A few stumps placed carefully in an artistic arrangement

The digger responsible

Play The Pipes Of (Green)Peace

The email came through on Thursday morning marked Urgent. It was from Greenpeace. They needed someone to be at a music festival this weekend in Shropshire and were willing to pay for the ticket and all expenses, in return for manning the stall with two others. It sounded like a job for me.

And so it transpired that on Saturday morning I donned the Greenpeace vest in a field owned by Farmer Phil (whose festival it was) and began to work. The point was to sign up as many people as possible as "Arctic Defenders", essentially a petition to protect the Arctic from oil drilling and industrial fishing. This year's Arctic sea-ice minimum, which tends to be smaller each year due to climate change, is expected to be on September 15th. On the same date in London there will be revealed the world's largest polar bear puppet, the size of a double-decker bus, controlled from within by a team of puppeteers, and wrapped in ribbons bearing the names of the millions of Arctic Defenders. If you're in town feel free to join the parade!

We too had our own polar bear outfit and so for the second time this year I found myself taking on the appearance if not the essence of a wild white furry and probably doomed carnivore. I received more hugs from men, women and children in those two days than previously in my entire life. If you're feeling hug-starved now you know what to do. I even found myself on the main stage between acts, waving my giant white paws as my fellow Greenpeace volunteer had the harder job of announcing what we were doing there.

It's been a good week for live music. Last Wednesday was the monthly folk music night at a pub in Ceinws to which some of my new Machynlleth friends were going so I tagged along too. In a back room were about ten musicians with a variety of instruments - violin, saxophone, Irish pipe, accordion, Irish drum and a few acoustic guitars. The sound they drew forth from these, usually accompanied by a lone male vocal, was enrapturing. They each played as if they'd been doing nothing else their whole lives. There was no chat in the room, the focus was wholly on the music. People who weren't playing just sat with a wistful expression.  At one point in the evening a guitarist put his instrument down and sang a haunting melody in Gaelic, completely unaccompanied.  No one wanted to leave, we were all still there at midnight.

On my land I have the music of the birdlife to accompany my labours. Sadly most of the more tuneful birds who tweeted their way through May, June and July have now moved elsewhere but I still have the raucous cawing of the crows, the hoots and squawks of pheasants, the shriek of a circling buzzard, the occasional honking of geese. OK it's more John Cage than Mozart but it's something.

More practically, the tree stumps are nearly all out after a two hour blitz by Greg and his digger, quite a wonder to behold these massive gnarly artifacts being torn out of the ground as if they were mere weeds. The final few will meet their end on Thursday. I've already made a start on the first couple of raised beds, marking their dimensions with string (10m by 1.2m) and digging them over extracting any remaining root systems of soft rush or other similarly nefarious weeds. I have room for 23 raised beds so I've got a fair bit of spadework ahead! Hi ho, hi ho...

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead Pheasants

I gazed out of my kitchen window distracted from washing-up by the death-throes of a pheasant hen. It made no sound. Lying on the earth near a pile of rotting aspen shoots, it arched its neck right back until its head disappeared behind a wing, its claws jerking and scrabbling for a while then pausing as it lay still but for a shallow pulse in its breast. There was no obvious wound that might have caused its demise. It could have contracted a disease of the gut which apparently they are susceptible to, or maybe it was simply starving since their feeding stations have now been removed to the other side of the valley, where the shooting will begin in October.

Another bird, a cock, approached the twitching hen and began pecking at its back. I banged on the window and it stopped and peered at me. I banged again and it ran off up the slope, only to return a minute later to continue its torment. A third knock had little effect, but by now the poor hen seemed to have died. The male pheasant enjoyed eating its feathers, plucking them out one by one and gulping them down. Another hen wandered close but contented itself with pecking at a shrub, perhaps aware that the cock would chase it off if it tried to join in, or maybe it didn't share its taste in cannibalism. Rather than having to witness the slow consumption and decomposition of the corpse over the next few days, I put on my gloves and carried it over to the track entrance where I tend to leave the bodies for collection, one or two a day being the current mortality rate.

Apart from dead pheasant clearing, my other tasks at the moment include Christmas tree clearing (the ones I felled last week, from which I've been hacking the branches off with a billhook), couch-grass clearing whose dense white root networks occupy areas where I want to create raised beds for veg growing, and tree stump clearing. These stumps, perhaps forty or so of varying diameters, are the remains of trees felled to make way for the electric lines, installed eight years ago right through the centre of my land. Like the couch-grass the stumps and their roots are just where I want to be growing vegetables. Having dug up six of the small ones armed only with a spade, a fork and a pickaxe, it was clear that I would be here until my dying days digging the other  ones out.  There's a time and a place for fossil-fuel power and in the absence of a willing chain-gang, I've decided now is the time and place.

I was tipped off by the pheasant keeper that the son of the lady at the petrol station down the road has a digger, so I enquired there and got his number. He was willing to do it but was booked up for the next couple of weeks, so suggested I try a chap who lives at Groes-Llwyd (Grey Cross in English), a house just up the road from me. There I went and met Greg*, a builder in his thirties who was friendly enough considering he knew some stranger had been living in a caravan down below the road for a few months. He came the next evening to have a look and I showed him round. The land used to be part of Groes-Llwyd Farm, stretching up the hill above the road, and his house was the old farmhouse. The previous owners had sold off most of the land; when Greg and his partner bought the house two years ago it came with just two acres, which they keep a horse on.  He offered me a few tonnes of free horse manure which I gladly accepted!

So we agreed that he'll bring his five-and-a-half tonne digger (the small one) on Thursday evening to have a crack at it. It's going to make a bit of a mess but I can't wait to be rid of these stumps. Step by step progress is being made.



April 2013



Now



*Not his actual name.

I'm A Lumberjack And I'm OK

A normal week will see me trooping into Mach (as we locals fondly call Machynlleth as it involves less spittle ending up on each other's faces) only once, to stock up on food at the Wednesday market and to post the latest exciting installment of this very blog to keep my vast global readership from rioting in frustration and possibly stalling an already wobbly world economy. The week just gone has been anything but normal as I have for one reason or another graced Mach with my presence every single day (except Sunday, the day of rest). Last Wed, I hitched there. Thurs, cycled. Friday, drove. Saturday, hitched. Sunday, rested. Monday, my friend drove me. And Tuesday, I drove, but petrol expenses were paid. 

What precipitated this extraordinary turn of events? How is it I have suddenly become so Mach-centric? There is no simple answer I'm afraid, no unifying and illuminating truth, it's just the mutual congruence of a multiplicity of factors and forces that so determined my fate this week. Possibly.

Two of these trips, Thursday and Tuesday, I decided to go and volunteer with the local food growing outfit, Green Isle Growers (as featured in last week's posting). A few of us were sowing, planting and weeding on Thursday on one of their three plots, halfway up a hillside to the north of the town. Tuesday found us at the garden of George Monbiot's house which he lets them use, harvesting courgettes, spinach and blackcurrants in time for their weekly veg bag delivery that evening. I'd like to say George was out there with us getting his knees dirty but I hear  he tends to live elsewhere now, writing his provocative but compelling books and articles (I've just finished his excellent book "Captive State").

One of the other volunteers invited me to a fancy dress party on Friday with the theme of Album Covers, so in I went as Johnny Cash's The Man in Black and was glad I hadn't tried anything more elaborate as most people hadn't bothered to dress up at all. Pretty good party though. The following day was Mach's Carnival which I hitch-hiked in for. It turned out the hitch-hike was more interesting than the carnival parade, not that it was a bad parade (brass band, lots of floats, costumes and strident encouragements to applaud from the too-loud PA system), but the guy who gave me a lift turned out to be a local carpenter who has a whole load of timber in his yard he offered me for free, and who even suggested I work with him in the workshop sometime for cash. I told you hitch-hiking is the best way to travel.

What with my friend Adam coming to visit for the weekend, with whom I visited Mach again on Monday and bought a splitting axe and a billhook, it's really getting quite familiar. So much so that today I'm posting this from the pub in Dinas Mawddwy, the next village along from me, which I've discovered has WiFi - happy days! 

With Adam here I took the opportunity to don my luminous safety gear and take the chainsaw out for a spin, something I don't do solo in case I slice a limb off (Adam could just stitch it back on). Twenty of my Christmas trees have bitten the dust so if you want one, come and get one. OK it's not quite the season but as I'm not going to be here this winter, there seemed no reason to delay. The area I like to call the vegetable garden has now opened up a lot and is less shaded. Adam enjoyed hacking the branches off with the billhook. And the pheasants are loving to perch on top of the fallen trees for some reason known only to them, so everyone's happy.


P.S. The answer to last week's brain teaser is millipede. Well done.

It's a Bug's Life

Food is in the headlines again. "No more cheap food" exclaims the boss of Tesco, although for him a heaped dish of the finest caviar served with thinly sliced exquisite Kobe beef would cost him the amount he earned whilst making that statement. It's all cheap for him. Nevertheless over the last few decades we have all become accustomed to spending less and less as a proportion of average income on what we stuff down our colllective gullet. Back in the 1950's the average family in Britain used to spend a third of their income on it; these days it's more like 15%. Now it seems, at just the wrong time when money is tighter than ever and many are finding it hard to put food on the table, it's going to be costlier to do just that.

Why is this happening? There must be many and complex factors at play but surely one of the main reasons is the fact that food, like almost everything this planet has to offer us, has been turned into a commodity to be gambled with on the global money markets. This causes the price of all the basic ingredients for the goods on our shelves to be dependent to an ever greater extent on the vagaries and whims of wealthy investors and hedge funds rather than being based on actual supply and demand. Unlike other globally traded goods, we need food to stay alive so this trend is reducing the ability of the world's poorest to feed themselves, to say nothing of struggling households in the UK.

On the bright side, this is one more reason to seek out locally-grown produce which should be immune from the rapacities of globalised economics. Is there a veg box scheme operating locally? Time to sign up. A farmer's market? Pop down to support it. A cafe that prides itself on sourcing many of its ingredients from the surrounding area? Choose it for your hot date instead of McDonalds. Own a garden? Dig up the turf and grow your own vegetables - if I've learned to do it, and I never thought my fingers were green, then anyone can.

In Machynlleth, the town closest to me, there is a fledgling Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in which signed-up members not only pay a tenner for their weekly veg but also volunteer a few hours a month to work in the vegetable gardens, which not only helps to make the project economically and practically viable but also brings customers face to face with the reality of where their food comes from.  Maybe there's one in your town too.

I met one of the two directors of this CSA this week, Katie Hastings, an articulate and energetic woman in her twenties who also runs a project called Dyfi Land Share which seeks to link those with spare land with those who want to grow food. She was keen to find ways to support me in my land-based endeavours and suggested organising a volunteer day sometime, shipping willing recruits up to my plot to help me rip out bracken roots or some such, which sounds good to me.

Somehow she also squeezes in time to arrange the occasional course for food-growers, so last Saturday morning I attended one of these sessions on 'Organic Pest Control', taught by Ann Owen who has decades of horticultural experience, and it shows. Now I'm up to speed on how to encourage the natural predators of the garden to take care of those problem creatures which love nothing better but to eat or otherwise destroy your crops. I'll round off with a pop quiz to test how green-fingered your credentials are : which is the garden pest, centipede or millipede?  To be answered in next week's blogpost...

A Bird In The Hand

One of the more obscure outcomes of Andy Murray's victory on Centre Court ten days ago was that I now have twenty-four large bagfulls of well-rotted horse manure in a heap near my caravan. Not only was it free, it comes with an open-ended invitation to collect as much as I need from a huge pile only a couple of miles away.  Far from a waste product, this glistening black stuff is a vital source of fertility for my soil. Without this added source of nitrogen and other goodies it is unlikely vegetables or fruit would grow well in it. Almost as significant a result for me as it was for Mr Murray.

Andy Murray can be forgiven for not feeling triumphant about this indirect result of his Wimbledon victory, principally because he is unlikely to be aware of the fact. He will just have to make do with being the first British champion since the 1930s. But, should he be reading this blog post, I will now draw his attention to the pertinent chain of events.

If you, Andy, had not reached the Wimbledon final this year I, whose meagre interest in televised sport is generally only sparked into action by a fellow Brit doing well, would not have gone to see the match at the pub in Dinas Mawddwy, a nearby village. And if I had not gone to the pub that day, I would not have been noticed by a local resident named Rob*. And if this Rob had not noticed me there he is unlikely to have stopped to pick me up as I attempted to hitch-hike back from Machynlleth the following Wednesday. And if he had not picked me up, we wouldn't have had a chance to get into a conversation. And if we hadn't had a conversation, he wouldn't have been aware that I had some land nearby that I was hoping to grow vegetables on. And if Rob hadn't been aware of this, he wouldn't have mentioned that the owner of the caravan park in Dinas Mawddwy had tonnes of horse manure he'd be glad to get rid of. There you are. If the shine of your recent triumph had begun to fade ever so slightly, that should rekindle your warm glow of satisfaction.

Another type of manure had actually begun to be applied to my soil even a couple of days before the fateful tennis match, known in these parts technically as pheasant dung. Yes, they finally arrived, in their hundreds, carted all the way here from Newtown and dumped unceremoniously in the large pen that encloses two thirds of my land. What I hadn't realised was that this pen is solely to keep predators out, not to keep the birds in. The blighters can fly, even at seven weeks old, and fly they do, over the fence and into the area where I live. They strut around like they own the place, poking their beaks wherever they feel like, defecating everywhere and occasionally falling down dead.

At least young pheasants don't seem to make a lot of noise, emitting an occasional quiet squeak, so presumably the annoying squawk begins when their voice breaks. I can't really complain about the fertility-bringing faeces either although I wish they wouldn't do it on my rainwater-collection tarp.  They have more to complain about - in a week or two they'll be shoo'ed off across the valley into a wood where they'll have only two months of freedom before the Hooray Henrys arrive with their expensive tweed and their shotguns. That will be the end of most of them. Goodbye Twinkles, Flightwing, Jimmy the Nutter, Blackspot, Happy Larry, Donatello, and the rest of the gang. It's been real.

*Not his real name.

The Road Is Long

Those twelve hilly miles between my caravan and Machynlleth, the nearest town, have been weighing on my mind. How best to traverse them? The need does arise fairly often - to visit the market to stock up on fruit and veg; to use the internet and post to this blog; to make some essential purchase for my work here; or simply to meet up with new friends who happen to live there. I try to combine some or all of these activities on each trip but still, at least once a week I haul myself over to the ancient Welsh capital.

My shiny red automobile might seem to be the obvious choice. It can whisk me in in twenty minutes, at a time entirely of my choosing, and repeat the trick in reverse. It can be filled with all sorts of goodies that I might purchase there. There is always a free parking spot somewhere. I even have a trailer now to tow stuff that won't fit in the Jimny. The downside is that the manufacturer decided to make it run on petrol, a fossil fuel (a dependency from which I am trying gradually to wean myself off) and this particular little 4x4 guzzles through the juice like it's going out of style making each return trip cost over £6, by my reckoning.

The bus service around here is something of an unfunny joke, nevertheless I have made use of it on Saturdays when there are more than just two a day. The handy extra bus service on Wednesday mornings for the market was scrapped, so to get to the market by bus I would be forced to catch the 08:08 there (I'm normally just putting the kettle on at this time) and hang around all day for the 15:37 back. A return ticket costs £3.30, so it's half the price of driving there and almost as fast (not taking into account the one mile cycle to the bus stop and then chaining up the bike).

I have twice cycled all the way to Machynlleth and back, and may well do it again when I'm feeling up for a challenge. With a fair wind I can do it in just over an hour, but the first time it took me almost ninety minutes. Thankfully there is a quiet B road on the other side of the Dovey river that goes all the way so there's no traffic clipping past at 60mph, but it's slightly less direct and has its fair share of steep ups and downs. On the plus side, it's free, I can choose when to go, and it keeps me fit; on the flip side, it's slow (or I'm slow) and to put it bluntly, it's knackering. And the idea of carrying all my shopping on my back does not appeal in the slightest.

Taxis are out of the price range of an unwaged labourer like myself. Don't even suggest walking.

So I was hunting for another way, ideally one that was free, quick and comfortable. And then it came to me - hitch-hiking! Despite being a convert to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at a young and impressionable age, I came late to actual hitchhiking, it being not until my thirty-sixth year that I first stuck out a thumb on a road. In fact I didn't even get to do that as I was with a friend of the female gender who, as I was scrabbling around writing the destination on some card, just flagged a van down in twenty seconds flat and we were off. So this Wednesday morning it was really my very first thumbs-out that began to try to persuade a driver to take me to Mach.

Fifteen minutes passed and lots of cars, and I began to wonder if my hirsute appearance might be putting them off. But then one kind soul stopped and in I jumped. It turned out he was from the nearby village and on his way to Aberystwyth to teach Welsh to the Welsh Assembly staff (no joke). We got chatting about this and that and by the end of the journey he had offered me a chance to play electric guitar in a soul band he's setting up. Is this what normally happens? Maybe not but it's a pretty encouraging start. The return journey required just five minutes wait, an older chap from the same village who had lived there all his life. He was also friendly and I learned during our conversation that there's a monthly farmer's market in that village - a pearl of local knowledge that may prove very useful.

There you have it - hitchhiking beats all other forms of transport. Not only is it zero-cost, fast, easy on the muscles and burns no more fossil fuel than would have happened anyway, you also make friends with locals and get asked to play in bands.

P.S. Having said all that, the reason I didn't post this on Saturday was because I couldn't manage to hitch a lift in to town, giving up after 45 minutes standing in the heat. Maybe hitch-hiking isn't all I've cracked it up to be.