Full Nettle Jacket

Laying out some new black mesh sheeting between the runner beans to keep the weeds down

I wonder what single word you would choose if asked to describe your relationship with the stinging nettle. “Wary” might be one of the contenders. “Hate” could easily be chosen by those who have accidentally tripped into a clump of them as a young child. And for anyone who has tried to clear a patch of overgrown garden or patch of wasteland with its fair share of these harmless-looking yet vicious plants which always find a bare patch of skin regardless of how well covered you think you are, the mildest bon mot on offer is surely “annoyance”.

 

Not too many would choose the word “tasty”, I'll warrant. The very idea of putting something that stings in one's mouth, packed as it is full of sensory nerves, appears to be one that isn't worthy of a moment's reflection. But that's what the nettles want you to think!  If everyone realised that the sting disappears as soon as they're cooked, and that they are (a) appetising, (b) abundant, and (c) extremely good for you, then they would find life a good deal harder and there would be a lot less of them hanging around on lane corners waiting for children to fall into them. Let me quote from Roger Phillip's “Wild Food” : “Nettles contain iron, formic acid, ammonia, silicic acid and histamine. These chemicals aid the relief of rheumatism, sciatica and allied ailments. They increase the haemoglobin in the blood, improve the circulation, purify the system and have a generally toning effect on the whole body. Nettles also lower the blood pressure and blood sugar level.” There you have it – nature's wonder food! Forget quinoa, get me a gloveful of nettles.

Finally got a tap installed next to the polytunnel!

Avid followers of this humble blog may remember a posting a year ago in which I described the eating of some nettles I'd picked just outside my caravan. “Ha!” they are thinking, “he's run out of ideas and just rehashing his old posts. I'm off to browse my Twitter feed for a few hours instead”. But wait! Yes, 'tis true that I have previously eaten them, and am continuing to do so (I can feel that silicic acid kicking in!) but with so many of them around on my land I thought I'd try something else to use up the rest of them, and convert them into alcohol. (People reading this at Pilsdon Community can look away now).

Nettle beer has, I'm sure, been around for a long time, probably arising around the same era as the invention of gloves to pick them with. The process of making it is simple enough -  just boil them up in a gallon of water, take them out, stir in sugar, lemon juice (optional), and some cream of tartar, and wait for it to cool before adding yeast. I poured the resulting brown juice into a demijohn, put the bung in with the clever airlock device sticking through it (it lets out the gas produced by fermentation without letting air or bugs in) and placed it in the caravan awning to do its thing where for a day or two it filled the awning with a delightful sweet aroma. Apparently it only needs a week before you can start to sample it unlike homebrew wines, most of which apparently require the patience of a saint to wait for two years or more.

As I only started it going last Friday I have yet to taste any but check back next week to see what new word, if any, will best describe how my nettle-relationship has changed. It turns out that my nearest neighbour is also making nettle beer for the first time, so I'm looking forward to a session of comparing our two vintages. Meanwhile the nettles are growing back so the question of what to do when the gallon runs out almost answers itself. 

The rest I've shoved into the full water butt to make a natural fertiliser liquid for the veg

Mung Bean For Nothing And Your Chicory For Free

Free food! Growing on a street corner near you. Well certainly it is if you happen to live in Machynlleth or one of the several other towns about the UK who are following Todmorden's example by cultivating vegetables and fruit in public spaces, the pickings of which are for anyone who fancies it. As you potter down to the post office on Friday morning (should such an entity still exist on your high street) and notice a rumbling in your stomach, why not harvest a few kale leaves from the attractive wooden box outside to nibble on as you queue?

One of my two beds of runner beans

The concept is an intriguing one and of course laden with what ifs, whys and wherefores, none of which I have the answer to. It certainly places vegetable-growing in full public view and that in my opinion is no bad thing. People whose only relationship with a kale is a glimpse of a few leaves in a transparent plastic bag when they pass the salad section in Asda may now witness the plant itself in all its curly glory. And not just once perhaps, but they might see it every day on the way to work, and begin to feel something of a bond develop as it slowly matures and enlarges. They may begin to appreciate the time it takes to form those salad-bag leaves.

A few of my young plants.. broad beans, french beans, mange tout, spinach, lettuce, mizuna and rocket

It's unlikely however that they will fully appreciate the time taken to construct and plant these incredible edibles unless they happened to join one of the Edible Mach volunteer days to do exactly that. I found myself turning up for the second time at the volunteer event last Sunday, a couple of us a little the worse the wear after the previous night's joint birthday party for five people (so we had to party five times as hard).  As the only willing vegetable-planter volunteer with a car with tow-hitch it fell to me again to be the driver, towing a trailer around filled with tools, wheelbarrows, willow stalks, blackboards, thermos flasks of tea, and the like. 

A moth contemplates the enigmas of existence on one of my tomato plants

Our mission was to create a circular raised bed on a patch of grass near the Leisure Centre and fill it with edible plants. It was to be three metres in diameter, have concentric rings of kohl-rabi, lettuce, calendula and yes, kale, surrounding a central willow sculpture of Machynlleth's clock tower with nasturtium climbing up it (you can eat the nasturtium flowers).  And if that wasn't enough we were also tasked with making a fourteen-metre-long path past the bed, with timber edges filled in with wood chippings.

A perfect circle had to be carved out of the stubborn thin and rocky ground and the plastic edging bent to fit. The topsoil was to be wheelbarrowed in from a huge pile a good five minute's walk away and mixed with soil conditioner from a pile in the other direction. We had to fetch the wood chip from the Centre for Alternative Technology a few miles away, filling the trailer from a wood-chip mountain in their barn. The path edges were to be laid out down the slight incline and hammered into place with wooden stakes, plastic lining fixed between and then the wood chip poured on. Beth was to spend the afternoon constructing the Clock Tower model with just a bit of help to reach the high bits. Oh, and at the end we shouldn't forget to pop the plants in. 

Amazingly, it all got done. As at first there were only four of us it did seem a rather daunting amount of work but throughout the day more people drifted in and helped out, until eventually we could stand back and admire our handiwork. It really did look pretty good. Just don't ask me in a few months time how it has fared from the antics of the local youth and passing dogs with full bladders. I'm not sure I want to know.

P.S. I got the irrigation pipe working again by detaching and blowing through the top section... such a relief to have the water flowing again!

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.

The Call Of Nature

One year ago

For much of my life I have given very little thought to the onward journey of my faecal matter. This is no doubt due to the fact I live in a country with an abundance of toilets, all connected to a massive, sprawling yet largely hidden sewerage system. It is considered human 'waste'. We are simply not encouraged to examine our turds for indications of our gastric health; they fall below the water and begin to slip away down the pipe even before the flush whisks them forever from our sight and mind.

Living off grid has forced a change of my approach to this aspect of existence. In the very first week here last year, while my friends Matt and Mary were staying, we built a simple wooden structure with a sloping corrugated iron roof, below which I dug two holes side by side, each about three feet deep. The idea was simply to let my bodily secretions fall into one of these holes where over time it would rot and be reabsorbed by the soil and the roots of the blackthorn around.  However before I began to use it I noticed that after heavy rainfall the holes would fill up from beneath thus propelling anything residing within upwards and outwards. So, for my whole sojourn on the land last year I was cycling a mile up and down the hilly road to the service station toilet every time I needed to take a dump. Sometimes it was quite a close call.

You can perhaps imagine, then, my delight this week at having finally installed a workable solution under that same timber toilet block. It's a wheelie bin, semi-buried in one of the holes which I have enlarged to take it, so the top is at seat level. The top is covered with a large square of MDF board with a hole cut out of it, around which some veneer strips are hammered into place, and my toilet seat bolted on top. Ta-daaa! My very first compost toilet. Many moons from now it will become full, at which point I shall remove it and park it somewhere for a couple more years. The contents by then should be fully composted, transformed into a non-smelly and useful substance that can be used in the garden as a mulch.

The other great step forward has been the arrival of the largest net in the world. It covers the entire growing area, 64 metres by 12 metres. The two gamekeepers fixed it to one side of the the existing perimeter fence, and I helped them unravel it width-ways trying not to step on the raised beds and easing it over the runner bean frames and peas sticks. It was then fastened to the other side making a fully enclosed cage, with two wide access doors. Three ten-foot-high T-shaped struts have been placed down the centre to push the net well above head height.

Finally, a pheasant-proof place! The feeling of security on the inside is wonderful. All the little cages around the growing veg I have torn down. The Vegetable Zoo has become something more akin to an aviary, except the birds are on the outside not the inside. I just have to remember not to leave a door open...

One Man Went to Sow

The Crab Apple tree coming to blossom

I used to work in Soho, now I just sow and hoe.  OK we've got the outrageous pun out of the way, on with the show.

The minimum temperature has remained well out of the danger zone (i.e. freezing)  long enough for me to throw caution to the wind and start sowing seeds outdoors in earnest. Beautifully dark purple centimetre-long French beans are now buried in serried rows, four abreast. The off-white tiny knobbly seeds which have the spinach gene encoded within them have been packed in tight rows just a few centimetres apart, as none of them will grow very large before I snip their baby leaves off. They will all have another couple of goes at growing back, thus hopefully providing me with a plentiful supply throughout the summer.

A young oak in the wilder part of my plot

In another raised bed I've followed a similar strategy with salad leaves – a couple of types of lettuce, naturally, but also cultivated rocket, chard, and mizuna. This latter leafy plant hails from the oriental shores of Japan and is apparently pretty useful when attempting to grow salads in the autumn or winter as it, along with several other Japanese salad veg, seems to thrive in those cooler and shortening days.

 

My garden showing signs of new shoots of growth

I found a packet of mustard seed I'd acquired at Seedy Sunday back in March and decided to sprinkle it on the area ear-marked for my leeks which are still slowly growing in their cell-trays in the greenhouse. Mustard is a fast developer and so it should have sprouted in two or three weeks. Rather than attempting to harvest it I'm planning just to dig it all back into the soil a little while before the leeks get planted out, which gives the worms more to eat. The happier the worms are the better. This technique is using mustard as a “Green Manure” (as it's known in the gardening trade) which to me conjures up an image of a defecating cow that has something badly wrong with its gastric system.

 

The Scots Pine plantation can look a little spooky

Yesterday the temperature soared as the sun beat down mercilessly on all those of us toiling in the field. I took the opportunity whilst the soil was warm to sow more seed – beetroot this time, and runner beans under their recently-erected bamboo frame.  The garden is pregnant. It's hard to comprehend that simply by placing these small seeds a little below the earth and adding water, they will somehow realise that it's time to mutate into huge plants a hundred or thousand times larger than they are. And they do it in a matter of weeks.

 

Acorns I planted last autumn in leaf mould, of which two are now sprouting

Once they have done so, they will be merrily robbed of their edible parts by, well, me, which I will then attempt to hawk at various outlets for hard cash. On Monday I spoke with the head chef at the Brigand's Inn, a gastropub just a mile down the road, who it turns out is very keen to use local produce and would much rather use whatever I can offer than importing veg from miles away. Hopefully if we can come to an agreement on price, a discussion yet to be had, this could be the closest and most convenient way to sell my wares.

The brambles I cleared last autumn finally bite the dust. And become dust.

We're All Going To The Zoo Tomorrow

It's St George's Day and it seems people in Wales celebrate it as much as the English – that is, not at all.  However Easter was, I believe, celebrated by the Church of Wales and in fact the ancient stone church not far from me was used for an actual service on Good Friday, a fact I only discovered on Easter Saturday. It seems to have at most one or two services held there a year. I wasn't too put out at missing it though, as not only would it have been the 'miserable' service remembering the death of Jesus (as opposed to the 'joyful' service on Easter Sunday), it would have been conducted in the Welsh language, a tongue I have yet to master I'm ashamed to say.

Easter Sunday was instead marked by a dinner at Kelly's* where several of us brought vegetables of various kinds and Kelly cooked them all up into a veritable feast of colours, tastes and sounds. (OK maybe we had to make the sounds.) An Easter bunny made of chocolate was smashed with a spoon and distributed amongst us. I guess this ritual will have to do for this year.

Livingstone I presume?

Last Thursday and Friday, or Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to give them their full titles, I seemed to spend entirely in the car driving here and there with trailer attached collecting useful stuff. First off it was over to the nearby caravan park to pick up a backlog of about fifteen sacks of fresh horse manure, plus five bags of the well-rotted stuff. Having tipped that onto the ever growing pile on my land, it was over to Esgair woodland near the Centre for Alternative Technology with Belinda** and a pair of secateurs to harvest two hundred bamboo canes, beautifully striped green and white. Apparently the woodland owner doesn't mind as they are considered an invasive species. Now I have half of them constructed as a runner bean frame along the length of one raised bed; the rest soon to become a duplicate frame on the next bed along (I have to grow a LOT of runner beans for the veg bag scheme.)

Two hundred canes - for free

Now it's a simple matter of growing the beans

The next day, a hot one, I was up early and driving nine miles due west over the mountain pass and through the Dyfi Forest to get to the goldmine of horse muck – a couple who own about twenty acres and three male horses have over time accumulated tonnes of manure, much of which is now wonderfully dark and crumbly, and they were desperate to get rid of it. It took all morning and into the afternoon to make two round trips but I ended up with a polytunnel half-full of the stuff, having made only a slight dent in their pile.  After a quick bite for lunch I was off again, this time to a pig farm near a village blessed with the name Arthog. (I wonder when it lost the initial W?) Peter*** came along to make the introductions. They had a load of decking timber they no longer wanted, and seemed glad to let me take as much as my trailer could cope with, i.e. not very much. I've been a bit wary of it since a small part of its floor fell out a couple of weeks ago. Still, I took away seventeen 240cm lengths which I will use either for lining the path down the polytunnel or making sides for one of the raised beds.

A couple of woolly pigs on the pig farm

The decking timber made it back to my land

It's a good feeling to see this place slowly coming together, piece by piece. The polytunnel is all but complete, with just a couple of doors to finish off. The seeds are growing, encourage by the recent warmth and now some rain. Now all I need is the huge net to protect my garden from the pheasants; the gamekeeper has promised one but it has yet to appear, so at present each area I sow in I have to protect with a makeshift cage which gives my garden the appearance of a vegetable zoo.  Hmm, do I detect a revenue opportunity?  Bring your children this summer to the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo! It might just work.

The Mange-Tout Enclosure in the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo

* Not her real name.

** Also not.

*** Nope.

The Darling Buds of April

A shaft of morning sun broke through the dense conifers on my steep bank and lit up a patch of bluebells, not yet flowering, as I made my way down to the stream edge to fill up my watering can. Having emptied it over some broad bean seedlings in the garden, I returned to re-fill. The ray of light had already moved along to illuminate an otherwise unremarkable pile of dead branches in the undergrowth. The sky was a brilliant blue above. Birdsong filled the air. The water was icy cold. It wasn't yet 8am and the day ahead was full of promise.

I went to check how my tadpoles were doing.  I first found the frogspawn two or three weeks ago bobbing around in a large puddle that forms whenever it rains hard, and have been monitoring their evolution ever since. The spawn has released hundreds of the wriggling young things and they are now each a couple of centimetres long. Last week's heavy rainfall had enlarged their home but in the subsequent dryness it has shrunk again leaving dozens stranded in outlying pockets of water. As my parents were visiting I gave my mother the task of topping it up with the watering can. The cold stream water bursting in on their warm puddle must have been an unprecedented shock in their young froggy lives but should also give them an extra lease of life.  I wonder when they'll grow legs and hop on out of there so I can stop worrying about them.

A Red Kite drifted into view from over my neighbour's tall firs, low enough to make out the patterns on the underside of its huge wings. It soared slowly overhead as it scoured my land for any animal corpses to pick at. This beautiful bird eats carrion by preference. It saw nothing but picked-clean pheasant bones scattered here, and disappeared off west. Later the same trajectory was followed, almost at the same altitude, by a couple of fighter jets that roared past one after the other down the valley, wings tipped almost at 90 degrees, leaving the pheasants squawking indignantly.

That night over the same neighbouring fir trees, a full Moon rose up through them whilst to the west the black silhouette of the hills gradually merged with the gathering gloom. The planet Mars hung above the white disc and Jupiter glowed high up in the southern sky. With no clouds around the Moon lit everything up, no need for torches. It was an other-world, a ghostly version of my garden, complete with spectral polytunnel and greenhouse, that we inhabited for a while. Peering through the telescope, first half-blinded by the brilliant Moon, we then focused on the planets with more success and picked out three of Jupiter's moons, the fourth (of the big four) presumably obscured by the planet itself.

The next day, a walk in the steep hills that line the Dyfi valley. Everything baked in the surprising April heat, including the bloody remains of a lamb that the Red Kites hadn't finished with yet. Chaffinches, blue-tits, lapwings, flitted in the trees about us. A birch tree clung to the edge of a slate escarpment next to the path, its exposed roots clearly following fissures in the rock to the soil three metres below. We could look down on the fighter jets apparently skirting the valley floor at supersonic speed.  Butterflies of varying hues perched on nearby twigs not quite long enough for photographs to be taken. A lamb with one black eye patch gazed our way whilst performing a yoga stance with its hind legs pushed out in a stretch, held for several seconds, before relaxing and nonchalantly wandering back to its mum.

Spring is happening and I am in the middle of it. There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now.