This Little Swanny Went To Market

Common hogweed flowers reach for the sky

If there's any question over whether Napoleon was right when he remarked that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, then I have just helped to tip the balance of the argument in his favour. On Sunday I moved into the hallowed realm of the producer-seller. I met the public face-to-face with only a market stall to separate us. Anyone could have walked into the village hall and bought my mange tout. It conjured up an odd mixture of feelings; of pride in my good-looking produce, of nervousness that no-one would buy it, of disappointment when people passed their gaze over my table and walked on, and of joy when people uttered the magic words “I'll take that please”.

The farmer's market was due to open at 10am. I got to the hall at 9, the car full of vegetables and my brand new six foot banner emblazoned with the “New Leaf” logo, and began to set up, as were others around me. Although I had been worried I'd have nothing to sell, I had managed to scrape together the following: five salad bags, two packs of broad beans, two portions of mange tout, three small bags of leaf coriander, one even smaller bag of lemon basil, and twelve courgettes. Fortunately Joe*, the guy who runs the market had sourced some additional things for me to sell (potatoes, carrots and bread – the latter I paid for upfront, the rest was his), so I was able to fill my table up and then some.

Just before 10am I was outside the entrance when a camper van drew up and a heavily-accented voice haltingly enquired “Can I sell bread here?”  I was somewhat taken aback, wondering how to explain politely that I would rather that I was the only bread-seller at this market. Fortunately before I had done so, the Austrian woman corrected herself with a laugh, “Ah, can I buy bread here?” This was a much more welcome question and I was able to say that I did indeed sell bread, so she and her companion came in and bought not only a loaf but also the first of my salad bags. Ker-ching! Let commerce commence.

Bonjour, French bean!

It would be nice to report that the floodgates were then opened and in poured a mass of eager shoppers, all bent on splashing out on my goods and those of the other eight stalls (namely, goats cheese, jewellery, cards, pork and cheese, honey and other bee-related products, arty photographs, Greek foods and ice cream).  It would also be a fib. A fairer assessment of the footfall over the next four hours would be “slow”. A blunter assessment would be “dead”. That's not to say that no one at all came in, certainly people did, but in dribs and drabs. Often there were no customers in the hall, which was when I'd listen to my next-door stall-holder hold forth very interestingly about bees.

The polytunnel is getting fuller

The lack of many customers did, on the other hand, make not having much to sell seem like a winning strategy. A good percentage of those that came in did buy something from me, and by end of play I could proudly say that all my own vegetables had been sold, bar four slightly wonky-looking courgettes, which netted me the immense sum of £23.20. And although I had quite a lot of bread left I had still made a slight profit, especially I was able to sell a few loaves at a reduced rate the next day to one of my local salad bag customers.

A four-legged inhabitant of my polytunnel

So it was a gentle step into the shallow end of the swimming pool of market trading. By next month's market I am sure my tomatoes will be ready, along with the cucumbers, and maybe even the carrots and cabbages will make an appearance, who knows. Perhaps more people will turn out next time. Food is being bought no more than two miles from where it was grown, harvested just shortly before market day, and sold by the person who grew it. This is surely how it should be.

*Not his real name, as per usual in this blog.

Bindweed Us Together Lord

The build-up is beginning, excitement is mounting and the days are being counted down. Can it be only four days to go till the moment everyone has been waiting for?  All the tension and fuss preceding the World Cup finals was as a baby's belch compared to the global pandemonium surrounding the momentous event so rapidly approaching. Matt Swan is due to make his debut appearance as a market trader.  Not the kind that shuffles trillions of dollars around in derivatives and other nefarious financial instruments, heedless of the sheer insanity of a world dependent on a gambling machine too complex for anyone to fully understand.  No, on Sunday he will be standing behind an actual market stall, under a banner proudly proclaiming his business name 'New Leaf', offering his carefully-nurtured vegetable produce to the good people of Dinas Mawddwy.

Almost my entire harvest of broad beans... not much sadly

That is, if he has any actual vegetable produce to sell by then. This must be what's causing the nervousness, the sheer agitation that can be witnessed across a million Twitter feeds as his followers share their worries about the big day in question. They know he is confident that things will turn out all right in the end but they can't help but be concerned that much of the produce originally planned for sale is no longer viable for one reason or another.  Either the foodstuff has been harvested already as it has 'bolted', i.e. flowered too early, such as the spinach, the coriander, the rocket and the mizuna, or it hasn't ripened as quickly as expected, such as the tomatoes, the cucumbers and the runner beans. Or, as in the case of the broad beans, it's just given a small harvest which has already been sold.

Golden Mange Tout and a bunch of Coriander

As much of the rest of the garden is already committed to the veg bag scheme in Machynlleth, this doesn't leave a lot to place on the market stall. However, all is not lost. The lettuces are all growing well so I can make several nice-looking salad bags, along with a sign-up sheet to attract a few more customers to my salad bag local delivery service. The twelve courgette plants are now beginning to churn out their slender stripey green fruit so I'll have several spare to sell, beyond the ten courgettes a week I'm providing to the veg bag scheme. I might be able to make a pack or two of mange tout and coriander. And every day I'm in the polytunnel urging the few small green tomatoes to turn red, at least enough to make one punnet.

The first courgettes

On top of all this nervous tension, this week also brought a few unwelcome surprises. A slug in the fridge was the least of it (I finally worked out it how it got there – hitching a ride in with a cabbage I'd bought from the “Fresh and Local” stall). On Saturday I found two pheasants within the pheasant-proof fence. Admittedly they were trying desperately to get out rather than eating my veg, but it does mean the fencing is less impregnable than I'd ideally like, i.e. completely impregnable. Unlike the slug I've yet to figure out how they got in. And the day before that I had literally unearthed a bigger problem than that – a mass of underground creeping weed roots appears to be spreading throughout my polytunnel soil. They are thin and white and break into pieces very easily. The roots seem thinner than bindweed but it might just be that at an early stage. It hasn't produced any leaves or indeed anything at all above ground. I suspect it came in with the horse manure which I've dug in everywhere. Short of tearing all my plants down in a frenzy, there's little I can do till the end of the growing season.

Bindweed? Whatever it is, it's evil.

Still it's always good to count your blessings as well as your curses, and I had three good blessings this week in the shape of three friends visiting me, all for their first time, and bringing food and alcohol to keep me sustained. With friends like that, no bindweed in the world can stop me.

For Peat's Sake!

From left to right: Asparagus, rhubarb, salad, leek, carrot, red cabbage and broccoli

If you happen to have a seed and want to grow a plant from it you have two basic options. You can stick it in the soil, add water, and wait with fingers crossed.  Or you can choose the de luxe option of putting it in a tray or set of modules filled with “potting compost” (normally something you've bought in a big bag) and carefully nurture it indoors, eg on a window sill or in a greenhouse. This option obviously takes more effort as you (a) have to keep it watered because the rain isn't going to reach it, and (b) once the plant is big enough you have to transplant it, ie take it outside and plant it. The more delicate plants are supposed to need “hardening off” before planting outside which requires more molly-coddling, namely taking the seedling outside during the day and bringing in again at night for a week or so to get it acclimatised to the big wide world. All this takes time, and money for the compost, but the results should be better. More of the seeds should germinate (and not be eaten by slugs or mice), and be quicker to mature into nice big plants. 

A top of the range compost bin I have recently installed

I hedged my bets and tried both options for many of my types of veg. Broad beans, french beans and runner beans all definitely welcomed the head start that module sowing provides. So did the beetroot. Some, such as leeks, cabbages, broccoli and lettuces, I only sowed in modules but found that after the seedlings had reached an inch or two, they just stopped growing. I waited for weeks for them to get big enough to be transplanted (ie a few inches) but in the end gave up and put them outside as titchy things. Thankfully most of them have recovered and are growing nicely now, but no doubt they are still smaller than what they should be at this point.

My suspicion lies with the compost I'd bought, and I've met others with similar experiences who would back me up. “New Horizons” is the culprit, supposedly the compost of choice for the environmentally-concerned. It is certified organic and peat-free, winning a Which? magazine award back in 2011. We had been using it in Pilsdon with no problems at all. However it seems this year's batch is simply bad, just not providing enough nutrients for the seedlings. 

Peat is a type of soil that's extremely rich in dead organic matter and comes from peatlands of which Britain naturally has a finite amount (2.3 million hectares to be precise*) of which only 20% remain unharmed by human activity. We carry on digging it out because plants thrive best in compost made from it. Unfortunately peat is best left where it is, because apart from the wide diversity of wildlife it supports it also acts as a massive carbon-capture sink. Unlike any other kind of soil, when it is in a healthy boggy condition it can keep pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere ad infinitum, for ever. As we all know by now, the less carbon dioxide in the air the better.

I've since discovered that Which? recently ran a comprehensive test on all peat-free composts and declared that none of them are worth buying.  Apparently they are just not reliable enough compared to peat composts. As the debate that their report sparked rages, those of us who give a damn for the planet are put in a quandary. To peat or not to peat? Having unreliable potting compost has a big impact when trying to grow sufficient produce for customers with a deadline.

My leaf mould in modules awaiting some lettuce seed

My solution is two-fold. Firstly I am sticking with peat-free compost (whilst trying out a different brand) but adding to it some organic 'blood, fish and bone' mix to boost the nitrogen and other nutrients.  Secondly I am trying out my own home-grown leaf mould which I collected last year from amongst the trees and deposited in a big enclosed pile to rot. Rather satisfyingly this latter zero-cost option, which also used no fuel to process or transport it, has so far also proved the most successful. Here's to the truly organic approach!

* Figures taken from the Zero Carbon Britain report (2013). 2.3m hectares is just under a tenth of the land area of the UK.

Lastly, for those of you for whom my flower quiz was just too easy, here's a slightly more challenging one with the latest flowers to grace my garden. Pictured below are : Courgette, borage, Cucumber, Pumpkin, two types of runner beans, mustard, komatsuna, tatsoi, french bean, pak choi. 

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K

Two Scientists Were Racing For The Good Of All Mankind

A cycle up to the top of the Dovey valley

 Gone are the days when scientific breakthroughs and new discoveries seemed, to me at least, to be limited either to the abstract but fascinating (superstring theory, planets discovered around distant stars) or to the benign and potentially useful (medical physics, gene mapping - OK, perhaps not so benign). An exception in which science sounded alarm bells that really hit the headlines was the detection of the hole in the ozone layer, prompting governments around the world to ban CFC's. Generally speaking though the work of scientists rarely seemed to impinge on the public at large. They worked away in their lab coats and occasionally gave cause for an “And finally..” news bulletin or improved some people's lives (normally the wealthier slice of humanity) in some small way.

No longer. The world's climate change scientific body, the IPCC, is regularly announcing to anyone who will hear that our current fossil-fuel-based lifestyles are having a damaging impact on the planet's climate system which will have, and is already having for some, terrible consequences for everyone (the poorest will be hit hardest, of course). And this week a group of scientists issued a report stating their study showed that the entire human food supply is at risk from the way we are producing our food. This is not a lightly humorous “And finally...” story, this should be a “And firstly...” wake up call.  By spraying all our crops with insecticides, particularly neonicotinoids, we are polluting the soil and killing off the bees and other insects which we rely on to pollinate all the crops. Without pollination it's game over.

Unbelievably, within my lifetime, science has been forced to adopt the role of an Old Testament prophet. To put it succinctly, change the way you live or things will go very bad. Like all respectable prophets the message is hard to hear, and as there is apparently so little we can do individually we learn to filter it out. There are however some things that can be done.

Planting french beans and sunflowers outside Machynlleth's police station

Should look good when they flower!

We can 'de-carbonise' our own lifestyles as much as possible. This means different things for different people, but could include limiting (or cutting out) car and plane travel, or making our home more efficient to heat, or switching to a so-called 'green' electricity tariff, etc.  I suspect one reason why many don't bother with any of this is because they don't want to be tarred with the 'green' brush, accidentally joining a minority that they don't consider themselves a member of.  This is a real tragedy and one day I hope it will be the refuseniks who are the minority, those social deviants who choose to continue recklessly burning fossil fuels at the expense of the planet and the next generation's quality of life.

We can join with others in calling upon our governments to stand up to the colossal power of the fossil fuel lobby and enact and enforce reasonable legislation to reduce global carbon emissions dramatically, or in shaming certain companies into changing their practices. (Joining Greenpeace is a good start – there's that word 'green' again!)

As our global food supply is apparently at risk through the indiscriminate and systemic spraying of chemicals, another thing we could perhaps do is seek out locally grown, certified organic or at least chemical-free produce instead. (Should I declare my interest here as the producer of locally-sold vegetables grown without any pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilisers? If you live in the Machynlleth area, get in touch..)

Harvesting pesticide-free spinach one leaf at a time

And finally...  the answers to last week's quiz! If you got them all right, you have earned a free flower to keep of your choice(redeemable when you come and visit).

A : Tomato

B : Wild Blackberry

C : Potato

D : Mange Tout

E : Mizuna

F : Nasturtium

G : Rocket

H : Broad bean

I : Asparagus

I've Got The Spinach, You've Got The Parsley, Let's Make Lots of Money

From front to back : Beetroot, spinach, salads, runner beans and more runner beans

Nearly a year and a half after buying the land, and after nine and a half months of working on it, it  has finally happened. Someone has paid me for the plant life I've teased out of my soil. The joy of finally becoming an actual producer of edible goods was perhaps disproportionate to the sum of money involved (£5 for five small bags of spinach) but that's because a principle has been established. I am in business. My labour has begun to be recompensed.



Broad beans on their way



This is definitely a different kind of feeling from when I received a salary as employee of the various businesses I have toiled for in the past. Then I simply had to do what was expected of me by my bosses and I would be rewarded each month, the agreed amount deposited in my bank account. Now it's the stuff that I have chosen to create, or at least try to nurture into being, that is itself of value and for which people seem to be prepared to pay.  No doubt soon it'll start to sink in how small the sums are that one gets for fresh veg considering the hours input, but for now it is time to  celebrate (with a glass of nettle beer!).

My very first produce for sale

I delivered the spinach last Wednesday to Machynlleth's Bowling Club where all the other growers also deposited this week's produce. It was the second week of the veg bag scheme and Katie had already got the system down pat. She had organised a rota of volunteer “packers” and this week I was down to help. Three of us gathered at the Bowling Club at 12:30pm and spent the next three hours or so following Katie's instructions on which of the nearly forty bags gets which types of veg. Because the scheme is taking vegetables only from small-scale local producers there isn't enough of each item simply to make all the bags identical, so each week Katie has to divide them into four batches, each batch getting a different selection of veg, making sure that everyone gets a fair amount of roughly equal worth.  Add into the equation some customers saying they don't want celery or whatever, and one batch only being half-size bags for people paying less, and it gets complicated pretty quickly.

A few of the veg bags in the process of being packed. Those are my bags of spinach at the front!

At least we didn't have to deliver them to houses. Customers are expected to collect the bags from one of three drop-off points around town, so all we had to do was take them to the drop-off points. Not having a car we had to use a large wooden two-handled trolley to transport the bags which only took about eight, but the main drop-off point was close to the Bowling Club and with three of us we got it done without too much stress. 

Not content with the £5, this week I have also made another £7.90 by selling four salad bags (150g) and another spinach bag to three sets of customers – neighbours and others I have met to whom I had let slip that I was able to offer freshly cut leaves in a bag. My neighbours have even promised to take two salad bags a week from now on so the big bucks are really going to start rolling.

I'll end with a quick quiz. Below are some flowers from the vegetable plants in my garden, your task is to name them. To make it easier I'll give you the plant names so it's just a question of matching them up. Some of the flowers will turn into the fruit I'll pick – tomato, broad bean and mange tout (pea pod); some flowers are not relevant to the edible parts – potato and asparagus; others are from salad plants which have 'bolted', which means they have given up producing leaves for me to pick and decided to make flowers and seeds instead (this is a bad thing) – rocket and mizuna are pictured here; still other flowers are being grown to go in salad bags and be eaten - nasturtium. And I've thrown in a photo of a wild blackberry flower too from the patch outside my caravan. Good luck! Add your answers as comments below, if you're able and willing. I'll post the definite answers next week.

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I

Quake, Rattle and Roll

A young oak on my land with Mallwyd mountain behind

I consider myself something of a connoisseur of church weddings, having been to so many of them. During my twenties many of my friends, both from university and those I'd made subsequently, decided the time was right to declare public vows of lifelong commitment to another human being in a place of Christian worship. In fact by my thirties I found that the number of my friends remaining unmarried I could count on my toes without running out of feet (something I do from time to time when at a loose end). As most of them had also produced a number of progeny by that point, Christmas cards were getting trickier as the names of the various children all had to be matched to the right parents in the correct card.  Writing “To my friend, his/her spouse and all their dependants” in all of them turned out not to be acceptable. Of course at the age of 34 I myself joined the ranks of the married for a brief period but that's another story.

So to accept an invitation to a Quaker wedding was to step slightly out of my comfort zone. My friends Matt and Mary, both of whom I met at Pilsdon Community when we were all living there in 2012, had been regularly attending a Quaker meeting for some time and so it was natural for them to have their marriage solemnised there, according to Quaker customs.

The day chosen was Saturday just gone. All such trappings as an officiating priest, hymns, music of any kind, procession down the aisle, sermon, best man fumbling for a ring, were dispensed with. Everyone filed into the room past a sign requiring absolute silence and sat on chairs arranged in concentric circles around a table. The room was full, maybe a hundred souls were there. Both bride and groom were absent until 11am when they walked in together with their family members and sat near to the table on reserved seats. As I'm aware that there may be people reading this blog who just have to know, I will simply remark that Mary's dress was beautiful and simple, a colourful floral pattern overlaid on a dark background. Matt's dress was different.

A small woman stood up, gave a general welcome and briefly explained the format of the proceedings. There was then silence. Five or ten minutes later the happy couple stood up, faced each other and first Mary spoke her vows to Matt and accepted a ring onto her finger and a kiss; then Matt said his (identical) vows to Mary and received his ring from her and another kiss. They sat down. Some were already in tears. There was then a period of perhaps forty minutes when anyone was allowed to speak out words they felt appropriate to the moment. Family members, friends of many years and more recent friends, spoke words of blessing, encouragement and sometimes humour. It was quite an emotionally charged atmosphere as the depth of people's feelings for the couple were given voice in many differing ways.

Finally the registrar stood up and had Matt and Mary sign the large certificate that was laid out on the table, but not before she read out what was written on it. It included the vows, word for word. Parents signed it too then everyone in the hall was asked to add their name to it. And that was it – once you had scrawled your name it was time for drinks, sandwiches and cakes out in the exquisite flower garden under a bold blue sky, and the festivities began.

Matt and Mary have been of so much help to me as I've started up my new life in a Welsh bog – you can check back on this blog to find them assisting me with positioning the caravan and building a compost toilet right back at the beginning in March 2013, and constructing the greenhouse frame and a wood-store last September. Not only that but they phone me up each week to make sure I haven't succumbed to the madness which apparently lurks close by those who live solitary existences (they tell me there's no sign of it yet.)  If any couple deserve a wonderful, enriching and life-long relationship, they do.

P.S. The nettle beer I made two weeks ago turned out fairly sweet but very quaffable and it hasn't killed me yet.

P.P.S Apologies for the lack of wedding photos, I forgot my camera, but here's an up-to-date video of my garden in recompense.

Pop Goes The Weasel

Slowly my vegetables grow

I saw my first weasel the other day. In fact I saw two, scampering across the lane in single file before my car reached them and diving through the hedge. These miniature carnivores, the smallest in Britain, are not particularly rare but somehow I’ve lived nearly forty years without bumping into one, until now. It probably has something to do with spending much of my life in towns which are apparently not where weasels like to hang out. Rats, sure. Foxes too are increasingly moving to the city to make their living. But the humble weasel still prefers the quiet life out in the countryside.

These were not Welsh weasels as I was not far from Pilsdon in West Dorset when I spotted them, unless they like me had travelled from Wales for a short break in the south. For a whole week I am leaving my crops to grow untended. The hope is that they can manage well enough without me for a little while although it won’t take long before the slugs realise I’m not coming out every night with murderous intent, and send out invites to all their slug relations in neighbouring woodlands to the biggest feast of young beanlings, cabbages, lettuces and spinach that their sluggish minds can dream of. Let’s hope the party’s set for next week when I’m back. The vegetable plants sheltering inside the polytunnel - the tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and butternut squash - are being watered daily by a kind neighbour. I have left the polytunnel doors open so it doesn’t get too hot during the day, and constructed a makeshift wire gate across them to prevent pheasants from wandering in for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Tomatoes and butternut squash on the left, courgettes and spinach on the right

So now all I have to do is try to forget my concern for all my baby plants struggling to survive in the Welsh heartlands and focus instead on the wondrously luscious and bountiful place that is Pilsdon’s garden. Cared for as it is by a team of six or seven enthusiasts and primed with tonnes of rich cow manure over many years, the plants have had no trouble in exploding into maturity in a few short months. Broad bean plants in the big polytunnel that were just a foot or two high when I left at the beginning of March have since shot up, fruited, been harvested (twenty kilos of beans now in the freezer) and partly cleared. My job on Tuesday was to clear the rest of them from the bed and get it ready for about a million over-large tomato seedlings that are itching to get out of their cell trays and into some proper soil. In doing so I disturbed a mouse which had made its residence amongst the forest of broad bean plants; it scurried off to make mischief somewhere else. 

We suspect a mouse or possibly a larger rodent to be responsible for the devastation of one of the rhubarb plants that I had covered with a dustbin back in February to “force” it, i.e. to make it grow quicker and more tender in the darkness. It  should have been removed and the rhubarb eaten by now, but this had been overlooked with all the thousand other things going on in the garden. When we lifted the bin all we found was a sad looking limp stalk lying on the soil, and a hole.

The spinach bed, or the slug's party zone, depending on your perspective

In the spring we had discovered a rat living in Pilsdon’s one of compost bins whilst I was demonstrating to those taking over from me how to look after them. Even though we are careful not to put any cooked kitchen waste into the compost so as not to attract them, obviously the rat still thought it a worthwhile place to set up home. So far I haven’t found rats on my Welsh plot, although last week I was woken up one night by a scratching sound under the caravan somewhere, which stopped when I poked my nose out. Let’s hope it was just mice, of which I have seen one or two around there. Of the other mammals that are possible co-habitants of my land, I have seen only grey squirrels and the occasional mole. No rabbits, thankfully, although there are some in a field a mile away. No otters, although the ecologist who surveyed my land last year reckoned they would be around by the riverbank. No deer. Certainly no weasels. What I would really love to see is the pine marten, but the last concrete evidence of any of these rare animals living anywhere around here was some poo found near Aberystwyth in 2007.  I’ll keep my eyes peeled.