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!

With A Little Help From My Friends

Some tasks require you to wrap your brain in knots to figure out how to achieve the desired result, but once solved in the mind the execution is relatively simple. Many planning exercises and logic puzzles fall into this category. Others are the opposite; it is quite simple to comprehend how it should be done but the devil is in the implementation.  Erecting a polytunnel is most definitely this latter type of job.

  

For instance the first page of instructions require you to push into the ground sixteen metal pipes, each 61cm long, two straight rows precisely fourteen feet apart, at exactly seven feet intervals, leaving just 10cm of each one poking up. The manual cannot overstress the importance of getting this right as otherwise you end up with a wonky-looking tunnel (not in these exact words of course). So I spent what seemed like days messing around in the mud with long stretches of twine to form diagonals which never seemed to quite match up, fiddling with a tape measure that was too short (5 metres) and which quickly broke anyway, whacking these pipes into compacted clay ground with a hammer over a piece of timber, several of which hit underground rocks that I had to dig out and then start again, whilst trying to re-locate the exact right spot for the pipe.  The ground was reasonably level but not quite, so of course none of the tops of the pipes were precisely the same height as each other – something the manual didn't even bother to warn about.

 

Then Thursday and Friday I had Peter over to help me make the hoops up, fit them on the pipes I'd eventually bashed into place, connect them all along the top with the ridge pipes, fasten up all the bracing pieces, door rails and crop bars, then build the wooden door frames and fit them in place. In a perfect world these door frames would be exactly aligned with the plane of the end hoops; sadly I don't live in a perfect world, and I have a feeling that once the sliding doors are on they will not slide quite how they are meant to.

Anyhow the big day arrived, Saturday. My first Volunteer Day. I had five volunteers in the end, three who drove up from Machynlleth and two from Dinas Mawddwy (Peter and a young lad he'd convinced the night before in the pub). The main goal: to put the polythene skin on the frame. It was a warm and sunny day, a relief since you cannot do this in the wet - the anti-hotspot tape wouldn't stick to the metal.

I first got some of them fitting the horizontal low wooden rails on both ends that the doors are supposed to rest against, while two others tightened all the nuts they could find. I made the tea and flustered around. In the midst of all the activities my neighbour turned up in a huge dumper truck with a gift of a mountain of horse manure which I'd agreed to take off his hands, and after the second load he found he couldn't get the machine back up my muddy track, it kept slipping off sideways. This was a big problem. I sawed down a young tree that had been getting in the way slightly, and he tried again whilst I held my breath – this time he just about made it, swearing never to bring the thing back down ever again.

The time came to put the polythene on. It was unravelled lengthways and laid next to the frame. We couldn't open it out fully due to the nearby thicket of blackthorn, but this wasn't a problem. Taking two corners it was pulled up and over and despite an inopportune gust of wind which ballooned it up threatening to lift us all up with it, we got it over and held down.

The tricky bit was getting it level in all directions and keeping it level while we tightened it lengthways, battened it at each end above the door frames, then tightening one side into the trench while it was re-filled with the soil, and doing the same on the other side. At least once we had to unfasten battens and re-tighten, and undig part of the trench to re-level it crossways. All exhausting and quite disheartening as the skin continually refused to become properly taut across the whole length. Tempers flared occasionally. We were all hot, muddy and tired. It took a lot longer than any of us expected. But by 5:30pm we had got it fixed down, except for the ends which will have to wait for another day. We could finally stand back and admire our handiwork.

Not much more has been done to it yet as I've been sowing seeds and entertaining my friend Claudio who had come all the way from the Amazon to see me and my land (and others too, I suppose). But with the skin on, it looks serious. I am the proud owner of a 49-foot polytunnel and am raring to get growing in it.

Makin' Plans

A walk up a wooded hillside two miles from my land

Let me tell you a little more about the sorts of things I'm hoping to grow this year on this patch of earth in mid Wales. The soil itself is crucial to the successful growth of any plant which is why I've been spending months trying to get it into a state which most vegetable plants will appreciate – namely not too waterlogged (hence making “raised” beds so excess water will drain downwards past their roots), containing lots of vital nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (so I've been mixing rotted horse manure and organic fertiliser throughout the earth which is packed full of these elements and others), and around 6-7 on the pH scale (a test last year revealed it was pH 5 so I've been adding hydrated lime to make it more alkaline.)

There are twelve raised beds so far, each ten metres by 1.2 metres, with paths between them. By the end of this season I hope to have made twelve more, which would fill the long rectangular growing area so next year I'll have twenty-four of them to play with. You may already know I have a small greenhouse which is now home to many young seedlings, and am currently in the process of erecting a polytunnel, roughly fifteen metres by four metres, where the warmth-loving types of veg will go – tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, butternut squash plus some leaf salads. There's also a corner of the garden where I've planted eight blueberry bushes which apparently love acidic soil, so they should be in their element.

Two of the raised beds are devoted to perennials, i.e. plants that stay put and keep giving fruit each year. As I mentioned in my last post I've chosen rhubarb and asparagus, but neither will provide any fruit this year as they establish themselves. That leaves ten beds for this year's growing.

Horse manure queuing up to go onto the beetroot bed

Garlic nearly fills one raised bed. I planted the cloves last October and made an attempt to protect them over winter from ravenous pheasants by staking a fence around the bed but on my return I discovered most of the young shoots had been nibbled to the quick. A net now covers them but I don't know if they will fully recover.

On either side of the garlic will go leeks and carrots, one bed each, and next to the leeks will be a bed shared between courgette and butternut squash. Runner beans will take up the largest area, of one and a half beds; the remaining half is to be occupied by cabbages, which spill over onto the bed next-door as well, sharing that one with broccoli.  Baby spinach is to take an entire bed, and beetroot will take another. Finally one raised bed will be devoted to broad beans, french beans and yellow mange-tout.

Some of the decisions on what to grow were taken on suggestions from Katie who is running the veg bag scheme that I'm supplying to, but mostly it's a mix of foodstuffs that I like to eat and enjoy growing. If all goes to plan I'll be feeding myself from it all and with a bit of luck, selling the rest to Katie and other outlets.

The polytunnel begins to take shape

This Saturday is my first “volunteer day”, as Katie has sent out a mass email calling for volunteers from Machynlleth to come up to help me to put the skin on the polytunnel, so I'm working all hours to get the frame up and the trenches dug on either side where the edges of the skin will be buried under soil to keep it in place. And of course my electric drill now has to run out of juice on a site with no mains supply...   Watch this space to find out if we made it!

Easy Like Seedy Sunday Morning

Seeds of frogs.. or toads?

 It was a fresh bright Sunday morning in Machynlleth. Birds swooped and sang in the sun, the odd butterfly preened in sheer delight. This wasn't just any Sunday however.  It was the day of the legendary annual event known as Seedy Sunday.  The good people of Mach congregated at the school hall bringing seeds of all kinds, both flowers and vegetables, to swap amongst themselves. I was there as a volunteer, manning the seed-swap table.

Some of the packets had originally been bought commercially and presumably been surplus to requirements. Others, more interestingly, were completely home-made – both the packet and the seeds within. With utmost care and diligence, people had allowed some of their vegetable plants to flower and “go to seed” rather than simply harvesting them to eat, then collected the seeds, dried them, and tucked them into little paper bags inscribed with the type of vegetable, variety, year, and occasionally instructions on how best to sow them.  I looked inside a bulky one marked “carrot” and found a selection of beautifully intricate pale brown candelabra-shaped dry seed-heads, each carrying a vast number of seeds and each one from a single carrot.

Why do people go to this trouble when seeds are not that expensive to buy? Aside from the social aspect of meeting others who are into growing stuff, it's partly about preserving varieties that would otherwise pass into obscurity. Commercial seed growers seek to make profits by creating and patenting new supposedly better hybrid varieties of vegetables (the seed name has “F1” at the end) but which are “mules” – any seeds these plants subsequently produce are useless, so instead of seed-saving you are forced to buy new packets each year. Seed swaps allow non-hybrid, or “open-pollinated”, varieties to be perpetuated – these are the old varieties that have in some cases adapted to regional climates. 

The EU is presently attempting to pass a law that could spell an end to these heirloom varieties, as it forces every seed-seller to pay an annual fee to keep each variety on its enormous “approved” list. It will be illegal to sell a seed variety not on this list.  And it will not be economically viable for any company to register the thousands of heirloom varieties every year, given the relatively small market for each (compared to those sold to industrial-scale farmers).

On an earthier note, I've found a whole load of frogspawn bobbing around in a muddy ditch which had filled up from the rains a fortnight ago. Wildlife carries on reproducing with scant regard for human law-making. Throughout the dry period since, the pool has steadily shrunk threatening the very lives of these tiny frogs-to-be so I've been topping it up occasionally with water from the stream. Now it's raining again I can relax.

Carrot seeds in place

I've been sowing some of my seeds this week (which I'd bought from Real Seeds who only sell non-hybrid): lettuce, broad bean, tomato, carrot, leek and cabbage, all in cell trays in the greenhouse except the carrot which has been boldly strewn on the soil itself. Yesterday twelve rhubarb crowns and sixty asparagus crowns arrived in the post (including three rhubarb crowns I'd forgotten to bring with me from Pilsdon that were kindly forwarded!), which I have already begun to bury in the raised beds. Roll on 2016 when I might with luck be able to sample their delights!

Through A Glasshouse Darkly

The brook that provides me my water

The beginning of this season on my land could not be more different from the beginning of last year's. Then, I was learning for the first time to live completely alone, in a caravan with no mains water or electricity, in an almost totally unknown land. Now I have six months of experience to fall back on and I'm back in familiar territory. Then, I knew nobody at all. This time, in my first week I've met up with five or six friends, and I even had a surprise visit from two guys from the local village donating a trailer-full of fresh horse manure.  Then, the plot was a jungle of soft rush, bracken, brambles and other interesting weeds. And now it is already beginning to take the shape of a cultivated market garden.

 

A heap of free fertiliser

Once I had settled into my tiny home and more or less got my stuff to fit where it should or could or at least would, I was desperate to get started with sowing seeds especially as the heatwave began to sweep across the nation. First though I had to get the greenhouse into working condition. The glassless frame had survived the winter, just. Some steel wire tying it to the base was the only thing that prevented it from being whisked off to England by the gales. With the help of Peter* from Dinas Mawddwy we bent it back into position, tightened up some loose nuts, screwed it firmly to the base plates which themselves had to be repositioned, and more or less managed to get the whole thing level with judicious jimmying of slivers of wood in corners.  The glass panes were then carefully slid into place.

My hitching spot in Mallwyd

At least, the bottom ones were. It turned out I didn't have any of the Z clips that connect upper to lower panes, so an annoying forty hour hiatus occurred until Monday morning when the shops re-opened and I was able to hitch in to Machynlleth and buy some. The rest of the day I spent balancing with the pedantic care of a bomb defusion expert, lowering sheets of glass onto the roof whilst perching on a stack of palettes for height or lifting them up into position from within, then popping in the edge clips to secure them. A second old greenhouse that Peter had kindly donated to me was cannibalised for its glass to replace previously broken panes. And it was done! A thing of beauty to behold. Not since the Crystal Palace was completed in 1851 has a house of glass been so excitedly welcomed.

I'm using straw bales as tables - they help to keep it warmer at night.

A day later, it is full of cell trays thrumming with potentiality, or more accurately damp compost and vegetable seeds. So far there are twenty-seven broad beans, forty 'summer' cabbage, and 120 leeks in there, still in their embryonic form, and perched next to them is the tray of tomato seedlings I started off at Pilsdon with which I had to share my caravan since arriving as the only warm(ish) place for them, until now.

In the midst of all this I have also been replacing my caravan water inlet and pressure switch to fix the long-standing issue with my kitchen taps (I can't tell you how sweet it feels simply to turn a tap and water to flow out), adding lime to the raised beds that hadn't yet had it, picking out the many pebbles of varying size that are strewn throughout the beds, pulling up old cardboard and carpet I'd used to stop weeds growing, planting more small blueberry shrubs to replace the ones that the pheasants destroyed over winter, protecting the garlic shoots which also have been nibbled almost to extinction, and generally having a good time.

The twelve raised beds soon to be bursting with edible vegetation

* names changed as usual

Back to Basics

I have re-entered a world of solitude, of brutal beauty, of labouring heavily to meet the simplest of needs.

The overwhelming emotion on arriving back on my patch of land on Monday afternoon was relief. I had dreamt up nightmare scenarios of the river bursting its banks and washing my raised beds away, of a fallen mature oak caving in my caravan, or high winds toppling it over. If the weather hadn't ruined things, surely thieves would have found the van and smashed everything up, after taking the 180W solar panel stored inside? 

The caravan was upright and intact, no thieves or rainwater had got in. Even its battery still had power. The raised beds are still raised, though perhaps the paths between are slightly higher from erosion. The fencing around the growing area is still in good condition. The compost loo is as I left it, nestled amongst the blackthorn thicket, and the glass panes for the greenhouse are still stored leaning against it. The ground is mostly wet, the soil become a thick sticky mud in many places, but not worse than I expected.  One or two trees have been blown over on the wooded bank above but none appear to have fallen onto the road.

The winds had ripped off the corrugated iron roof of the makeshift woodshed and torn part of the palette walls off, but the wood is still dry under a tarp I had tucked over it.  The greenhouse frame, despite being tethered to its base with wire, had been warped by the storms. I am hoping I can warp it back into position. Most of my garlic cloves seem to have sprouted but their leafy stems have been eaten, no doubt by hungry pheasants. I don't know if they will continue to grow.  All in all though, it could have been a lot worse.

After a night's rest I had to find drinking water. This meant a cycle to the petrol station shop a mile away. Next up was to ensure the caravan battery wouldn't run out, by wiring the solar panel to it – the green light came on immediately to indicate charging. Water for washing was a matter of filling up the water barrel with buckets from the stream, fixing the water pump attachment to the van, popping the end in the barrel and screwing the taps back on inside.  It worked, though it still has the annoying glitch of it being only the shower tap that causes the water pump to whirr into action and deliver water to all the other taps.

I still hadn't unloaded the car and trailer. Before I could do that the caravan awning had to go up, a dry place to put everything. This was not an easy task for one person. Both it and me got very muddy as I wallowed around trying to get the awning cover to slide into and along the runners that line the edge of the caravan. Somehow I finally succeeded, and then erected the poles inside it that hold it up. A doubled-up dry tarp was laid down inside after levelling the slight slope with a spade, and then – I could unpack! Everything had to be carried 50 metres from the trailer in the parking area to the caravan, as there was no way I was going to repeat last year's ordeal of getting the car stuck in the boggy ground by the van.

So, I'm here. It feels good to be back. The start of the growing season. A new business to be formed, a new life to be forged. The pheasants seem pleased to see me.

Out of office

I'm temporarily back on-grid, spending the winter down in Dorset volunteering with the Pilsdon Community.

Check out my Dorset blog to catch up on my whereabouts.