Life In The Fast Lane

A bird in the hand... isn't really worth two in a bush

On Friday afternoon I was cruelly plucked from my serene vegetable garden with its slow rhythms of growth and placed in front of a complex spreadsheet which had to be completed in a few short hours. I had to contact several people by phone and email, not all of whom I had contact details for, and the internet at home was down. My body had forgotten what the stress hormone feels like.

I had innocently put my hand up with a few others when Katie had asked for people to be back-ups for her role as veg-bag scheme coordinator, but then I was the only one who turned up for the training, and now Katie's gone away for two weeks leaving me in charge. Well, in charge of sorting out what goes into the bags anyhow.

This isn't as easy as it might sound. 

Somebody was giving a bath away, so I picked it up for the garden 

For starters, the six local growers (including me) who provide the veg are not producing enough at this early stage in the season to fill all thirty-eight bags so we have to buy in additional veg from an organic wholesaler. Also the local growers generally don't have enough of each type of crop to pop one in each of the thirty-eight bags – often they might provide only ten or twenty portions of, say, salad bags or onions. So not all bags can have the same stuff in them. The bags are divided into four groups and the aim is all those in one group to get the same veg (even that isn't always possible).

Then there are a few other rules which ended up seeming mutually incompatible: 

- each bag should have seven or eight different types of veg

- each bag should have a good mix of leafy and bulky types of vegetables

- a group shouldn't have the same veg in their bag as last week

- no leafy stuff from the wholesaler as it wouldn't store well overnight (it's delivered on Tuesday)

(and crucially) – the total cost of the veg in each bag must be kept below a specified amount.

Oh and I neglected to mention that one of the four groups is for “small bag” customers, so they only get four different veg.

Although everyone delivers their produce on Wednesday, just prior to the packing, the orders have to be firmed up the Friday before because that's the deadline the wholesaler sets us. 4pm to be precise. 

Christy*, who deals with all the veg-bag customers, had kindly allowed me to crash her kitchen and her WiFi to get it all sorted, and we ended up working on the spreadsheet together. Her previous experience as buyer for the shop at the Centre for Alternative Technology came in very handy, as she costed up portions of different types of veg in her head, and it's thanks to her that we managed to keep the costs under control. (“Strawberries? Too expensive!”) It did take us over three hours of brain-stretching to do it though. I was still getting texts from growers telling me what they could provide as late as 3:42pm which didn't help. So we missed the 4pm deadline by 45 minutes but I remembered Katie saying that the wholesaler would accept an early Monday morning phone call to place the order. We were OK. I just hoped they would still have in stock what we had chosen (mushrooms, apples, tomatoes and beetroot) - the thought of trying to rejig the spreadsheet again at short notice was not appealing! (It turned out they did).

Home sweet home. Or should that be, agricultural store sweet agricultural store

My job wasn't finished though. On Monday I had to email out to all the customers telling them what they could expect in their bag this week. And this afternoon I'll be helping with the packing itself. The Environmental Health Inspector has chosen this day of all days to come and see, for the very first time, whether we are abiding by the rules. We're going to wear aprons and wash our hands and everything, in the hope that she's not going to shut us straight down. Fingers crossed.


* Not her real name

p.s. Apologies for the mix of left and centre justification. It's Blogger playing tricks on me - it just will not allow me to left-justify everything. Plus it won't place a photo where the cursor is, only at the top of the blog. It does this periodically but not all the time. If anyone else has had similar problems and knows how to beat it into submission let me know! I'm using Google Chrome.

Man of the Soil

An alien from the planet Zob arrived in my polytunnel

A lot of my time nowadays is spent mucking about with soil. Like many things in nature it is easily taken for granted. It's just the stuff plants grow in right? Well, yes. But the moment you take a closer look at what it actually is, the mind begins to boggle. An ingenious mixture of minerals from rocks, decayed organic matter and living organisms that takes millennia to develop, it is everywhere, it is incredibly varied and without it we would not be here. Next time your mum complains that you've walked mud into the kitchen again, remind here of that fact and see where the conversation takes you. (Straight to your room I'll bet).

Tomato plants are flowering now

My soil is a light brown, stony, sandy and acidic type of soil. Not exactly the ideal for growing veg. The stones get in the way when seeds are germinating. The sandiness means water drains quickly through it leaving roots gasping after a dry day or two. And the acidity inhibits the complex biological mechanisms the plants adopt to extract nutrients from the earth – some are more bothered by it than others. (Blueberry plants absolutely thrive on on it, apparently – well, someone should have told mine.)

A baby beetroot not yet ready for its moment to be planted outside

...and many of its compatriots

When I started two years back it was full of stones but had very little organic matter other than perennial weed roots (which I removed) so I had to import some. By a stroke of luck three of my neighbours just happened to have huge piles of rotted horse manure they were only too happy for someone to cart off, so I have spent many mucky days filling bags a spadeful at a time, hefting them into my trailer, driving them to my land, emptying them onto my veg beds and forking the good stuff in. The advantages are manifold – it stops water draining too quickly away, it provides the key chemical nutrients the plants need, and it increases the worm population (who are miracle workers in themselves.)

The mange tout in the polytunnel have been producing lovely big pods for a week now, the ones outside are half the size and only have a few tiny pods so far

Picking out all the stones beforehand sounds like a tedious job, and looked at from one angle, it is. But what I like about this backbreaking little task is that unlike weeding, once a stone is out, it's gone. It ain't coming back. And the big pile of stones just keeps getting bigger and more gratifying. Who knows they might even come in handy sometime! I have already used a few to fill a pothole up by my track entrance.

Weeds on the other hand just keep multiplying. There are two types of weed – annuals and perennials. The annuals have just one season to live so their job is to make as many seeds as possible before they die. If you can pluck them out before they do so, you've won. Worse are the perennials which have underground root systems that allow them to live year-on-year. You have to dig out the network of roots to eradicate it, which in some cases is nigh on impossible because if you leave a bit of root behind, it starts off growing again.

Dwarf French beans. On the left, those I sowed direct in the soil. On the right, those I started inside in modules.

 Generally speaking the most dispiriting job is painstakingly undoing something you had earlier laboriously done, and this is what I found myself doing on Monday when I discovered that some of the manure I had dug in was actually full of a dense perennial weed root system whose tiny white tendrils had over the months begun to spread throughout at least two veg beds. What it is I do not know, but I know it shouldn't be here. And that it's not going to be easy to get rid.

The rhubarb is a success story though, probably because I haven't done anything to them. 

The Office

A bluebell woodland on a Sunday afternoon hike

I would hazard a guess that many of you are reading this whilst in an office. Am I right? There's no shame in admitting it. Well ok, maybe a bit of shame admitting it to your boss who perhaps rightly would rather you were doing whatever it is you get paid for, but it's only going to take a couple of minutes right? Not even that if you skip the boring bits and only glance briefly at the pics.  

The Dovey river wending its way towards Machynlleth and the sea

So in an attempt to alleviate the dreariness of a Wednesday within the four grey walls of the office compound I thought I might expound a little on the joys of the outdoors life. An elegy on the simple pleasures of splitting larch wood on a sunny afternoon perhaps? An ode to the first pod spotted on the mange-tout plants or the first crimson nasturtium flower hanging nonchalantly amongst the leaves? A poem of praise of the rhythmic toil of a good bout of weeding, the satisfaction of a tidy veg bed and a gently aching back? But no, these things will only make you out of sorts. You'll glance at your spreadsheet and your desire will be no longer to massage the figures therein but to get outside, pull on your wellies and grow stuff. And this, sadly, cannot be.

A very exciting pea pod

 

Zoomed in, you can just about make out my polytunnel and garden

Instead I shall divert your attention to a subject just as praiseworthy but not so far removed from the tedious reality of your existence. My parents very generously gave me a laptop for my birthday. You may even be reading this on a laptop – we're on safe ground here I think. It came with a thing called Windows 8.1 squatting on it like a troublesome toad. Despite the laptop having the latest fastest processor that a reasonably priced computer might possibly claim to own (a 5th Generation Intel Core i7 for the technically-inclined) and a decent amount of memory (8GB RAM) it still did not seem as lightning-quick as I had expected. Click the Start button and it might twiddle its thumbs for a few seconds before offering me the Start menu. Apps might take a little while to open. I was slightly bemused. What was going on? Is Windows really that bad?
 
Thankfully (and here we finally get to the praiseworthy subject) there is an alternative, and its name is Linux. You might have heard of it. It is better than Windows. And it is genuinely free. No catches, no pop-up adverts. It's written by people inspired by the philosophy that software should be open-source, so anyone can (again for free) look at how it works and if they want, change it (as long as they continue to make their changes public).
 
I downloaded the most popular flavour of Linux, called Ubuntu, onto my memory stick. You can, if you want, try it out before you even install it on your computer just by plugging in the memory stick. And then if you want you can install it slap bang over Windows, replacing it entirely. Or if like me you want to keep Windows as well, just on the off-chance it might come in useful some day, you have to become a little bit tech-savvy and partition the hard drive so Windows sits in one bit and Linux in the other (as well as a few other tweaks so Windows will let Linux start instead of it).





Joy of joys – it's quick! It starts up quick, it reacts quickly to mouse clicks, apps start when they should do. If you have ever struggled with Windows (especially the latest version 8.1) you could do a lot worse than giving Ubuntu a shot. (Or Mint, another popular Linux 'distro'). Get on board the open-source wagon and wave goodbye to Microsoft at last!

Rest When I'm Dead

Three 10-metre beds of lettuce - I hope people want to buy it all!

Picture the scene. It's the end of a long day in the office. You have been working on three different tasks, one a report that your boss needs first thing tomorrow, the other two are longer-term but with deadlines near the end of the month. Today one of them has involved you pulling in certain experts across the company for their views which you're not sure you have captured completely accurately, but your notes on your computer are as detailed as you could get them.  You rush out to try to catch the 7:14pm home.

A bean wigwam

Overnight someone breaks in. Rather than simply taking the computers as any decent burglar might, this incognito troublemaker finds your laptop and somehow logs in. To your dismay the next morning you find certain files modified, and others apparently vanished. The notes from yesterday's meetings have been wiped. The boss' report has been heavily edited, most of it deleted. It takes you most of the morning to rewrite the documents, relying on memory, and you're not that happy with the results. The next night, the same thing happens. And the next night. The police are called and make the right noises but as nothing physical is missing you get the feeling they are not going to bust a gut to find the criminal.

Now you know how I feel about slugs. 

Buttercups prettify my polytunnel exterior

I spend hours carefully teasing out lettuces one at a time from their seed tray, pulling their roots gently away from the others, and planting them in soil which often needs a bit of extra rotted manure dug in first, then watering each one around the base making sure the leaves are not caught in the flow (they are easily damaged, and the sun could scorch wet leaves). During the night a rampage of slugs, mostly tiny ones, slide out from their daytime hiding places and gorge themselves senseless on the vulnerable plants. The next morning I might find 20% of them killed, and others with one of their two leaves missing so reducing their chances of survival. This is why I'm going out at 10pm each night with a headtorch and spending at least an hour going round everything, picking them all off - their destination, the river. The big ones I don't mind so much, at least I can easily see them and pluck them from their breakfast. It's the little critters I hate, they're so fiddly, but just as deadly when en masse.

 Some of my many many cabbages

Anyway, enough about slugs, I hear you drawl. You were banging on about them last week. The only thing worse than a bore on their pet subject is a bore whose pet subject is slugs.

So let me share with you some of my non-slug-related activities of the last seven days. I have direct-sowed four metres of "Mooli" radish, the long white Asian type, and sowed in pots twelve fennel seeds, two more melon seeds and three butternut squash (some earlier-sown ones have sprouted already). I've replaced four dead or dying sweetcorn seedlings with four fresh ones, and done the same with nine climbing french bean plants, two runner bean plants and many lettuces. I made a wigwam out of bamboo poles and planted nine french bean seedlings around the base (of the climbing type I hope!) Many other plants in pots got big enough to be planted outside in the soil - one red cabbage, three dwarf french bean plants, fourteen green cabbages, fifteen red orache (a beautiful ruby-leaved salad plant), seventeen broccoli, 24 kale, 50 "Morton's Secret Mix" lettuce, 63 beetroot, and 90 "Australian Yellowleaf" lettuce. Into the polytunnel soil went the last four tomato plants and the first four yellow courgette plants. And a grand total of 189 cabbages have been potted on (ie removed from the module where it began life and given a larger pot of its own). Yes, you read that right - I've gone cabbage-tastic this year. There are more on their way too. Lest we forget, all these young seedlings need watering each day because they're under cover, and given the recent hot weather I've been watering outside a bit too.

Somehow I've had to squeeze all that in around certain paid odd-jobs that came up this week, joining a crew at a carpenter's workshop to make up wall panels and painting moveable steps and a lectern (it's for a conference in Brick Lane apparently) and then loading the lorry with them all, weeding the grounds at the local health centre, and giving a piano lesson.

And of course while I'm busy doing all the aforementioned, those darn garden weeds will keep on growing. One day I'll have to get round to doing something about it. Now, as I was saying about those slugs...

Less Far From The Madding Crowd

The happy couple

For a weekend I was plunged into a maelstrom of people. A wedding of a friend drew me from my idyllic hidey-hole, a train shuttling me out east out of peaceful rural mid-Wales to the grime of urban mid-England where a second train picked me up and escorted me south to the over-populated capital of the United Kingdom.  

It had changed a little bit in the sixteen months I'd been away. Two new skyscrapers and a third being built. Lower Marsh, one of my local haunts in Waterloo, had more trendy cafes than you could shake a skinny latte at. The bookshop on the corner of Waterloo Road had vanished, taking the entire building with it. Waterloo Station had smartened up good and proper. There seemed to be more souped-up cars idling past than I remembered. Boris Bikes were now advertising Santander instead of Barclays. Old-style Routemaster buses were on the roads. 

My preferred mode of transport, sporting new gear sprocket and chain and brake blocks

Perhaps I'd changed a bit too. I found myself noticing the trees more. Sirens made me jump - although they were deliberately starting them just as they went past me, the ambulance driver lolling out of his window and jeering "Beardy!" as he roared past. Yes, this is London.  And the people everywhere, all looking slightly younger than last time, thronging around happily in the sunshine as if there was nowhere else on Earth to be. I joined in, met a few old friends, and became for a while a Londoner again.

An old bridge in Dinas Mawddwy

In reality my day-to-day life affords me only occasional interactions with other humans. Mostly I commune with the young plants in my care which seem keen to teach me a lesson in how to make the most of what life throws at us, in their case howling gales, driving rain, acid soil, wildly varying temperatures, and slugs. Some do not make it. Others are hanging in there, the verdict undecided. Yet those that live will, in just a few short months, transform from a single seed to a mighty plant bearing edible gifts for whosoever may choose to pluck. Get your beaks off, birds!

A visiting sibling showing off his new head

 I do also occasionally commune with the beings which move under their own volition. There are a lot more of them around now, fragile flying things that fly into my face at night attracted by the headtorch, birds arriving from their winter holiday in southern Africa and noisily telling the other stay-at-home birds all about it, a frog that I found squatting amongst the asparagus stems that refused to move even after a gentle prod, beetles galore. And slugs. Slugs, slugs, slugs. #FreeFoodAtMatts is trending on whatever passes for Twitter in the slug kingdom.

Ok I don't really commune with them, unless you can stretch the definition a little to include collecting them all in a large yogurt pot and hurling them into the fast-flowing river. This I do every night at the moment, having been galled to find my lettuce, turnip, beans, asparagus, kale and cabbage all badly eaten, with lots of the young lettuce seedlings killed. It can take an hour to search the garden and polytunnel. The slithery menaces only come out when it's dark so I have to stay late on my land. It's more effective than any other slug-prevention techniques I've tried. Don't talk to me about beer traps - the only trap I pour beer into is my own mouth. And believe me, I need to after a few evenings like this.

Scroll down if you're not freaked out by the sight of slugs in a pot

Climb Every Mountain (or at least the manageable ones)

It was my fortieth birthday on Sunday. The British electorate had a whip-round and got me a Conservative government without checking first if it's something I actually wanted. In actual fact I'd much rather have had a good kicking but there we go, that's what they got me and apparently it can't be returned, they lost the receipt. It has a product lifespan of five years so I'm going to have to put up with it now until I'm 45, when I'll be really old. These Conservative governments have a reputation for breaking what they're supposed to take care of, in this case, our society. For my 45th birthday I'll be a lot clearer about what I want. 

Llyn Cau

To take my mind off it, and to mark the passing of my thirties (one of my more turbulent decades), on the eve of my 40th I gathered a small group of friends and marched to the top of the most stunning peak in south Snowdonia, namely Cader Idris. OK, 'march' doesn't quite capture the reality of it as we were scaling the tough steep southern face. 'Slowly trudged' reflects the truth somewhat better. We slowly trudged to the top, through mind-bendingly beautiful vistas of loud tumbling streams in ferny gulleys, far-off thin waterfalls glistening on the sheer black rock face, over squelchy moorland and tumbled boulders, past the bottomless lake Llyn Cau, as the temperature dropped and we approached the cloudline. The summit was completely enveloped. 

It was not all plain sailing. One of our number, Lisa*, stumbled on an awkward jutting rock and twisted her ankle, yelping but without resorting to any of the swear words that could be considered appropriate on such an occasion. Unfortunately she had to turn back due to the pain, her boyfriend helping her to hobble back down to the car park. We were down to six. Another of our group, Sophie*, was required to be at a life drawing class by 4:30pm so knew that she was unlikely to have time to do the full route. It's not like she could just skip this class – she was the model! So when we were well inside the cloud but not yet at the summit, she made the hard decision to turn round and head back down to allow herself enough time. Jeff* returned with her to help her with the route, as this was her first time up and he was a Cader veteran. 

Tal-y-Llyn on the left, Llyn Cau on the right

So it was only four of us who actually reached the stone at the top, 893m above sea level. Apart from the crowds of other tourists of course, all snapping windswept photos of each other, the presumably panaromic views completely obscured by the white blankness. After stopping just long enough to eat a sandwich and get bitterly cold, we set off on the alternative route down. Although it was my first time up Cader, two of the others had been up many times before and so I was slightly surprised several minutes later when they declared we were lost. We were wandering across the plateau in the thick fog searching for the path down. There was talk of a fence that we should meet that we would then follow downwards, but the fence had not materialised. We soldiered gamely on, wondering if we'd end up on the wrong side of the mountain, but the relief was palpable when out of the gloom emerged the fabled Fence Posts of Hope. 

We carefully negotiated our way back down, pausing as we left the cloud behind to gaze gob-smacked at the view that finally became ours – both the mountain-top lake and the larger lake at the foot of the mountain became visible simultaneously. Poor Lisa was still in the car park, unable to drive her car home as her foot hurt too much, she was waiting for one of us to drive her. We found out later that she'd fractured her foot and is now on crutches. Lisa, get well soon!

On top of the world

* Names changed as per usual

Election Fever

The results of the first two hours of using a tractor-mounted log splitter

On the eve of the most tightly-fought General Election in the history of the world, as the media whips us all into a frenzy of elevated political discourse (is it Shiny-Face or Boggle-Eyes?), and as we all prepare to step up to the polling booth tomorrow to cast our vote to decide the fate of our nation, many of you have surely come straight to this blog for some last minute guidance. It's so hard to choose between them. Do we vote tactically, or honestly, or not at all? Why has there been so little in the run up to this election to inspire us?

The sweetcorn have just been planted out

Baby sweetcorn plants are a greater inspiration than all our political leaders. They'll certainly produce tastier fruit.

Tomorrow I won't be going to the polling station. Before you start to harangue me about those who died to get the right to vote, the reason I'm not voting tomorrow is because I already have. That's right, I jumped right ahead and did the deed a couple of weeks ago. I'm on the electoral roll down in West Dorset but since I knew I'd be in Wales in May I got myself a postal vote organised. So it's too late now for me if any fresh announcements are made that might change my mind (the Tories re-nationalising the railways and offering free travel, Labour giving huge windfall subsidies to small local food producers). My vote is cast. The Greens got it. That's assuming it didn't get lost in the post.

Baby French Beans (the climbing variety, each provided with its very own pole to climb)

Natalie Bennett came to the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Centre for Alternative Technology last year, I saw her there give a great speech about what the Green Party stood for. She didn't have a brain freeze. She spoke with optimism and clarity about the systemic changes that must be made to place our society on a better footing. She urged us to vote for who we believe in, not tactically just to stop a worse bunch from getting in. And I think on the whole that's the best thing to do even when you know it's not going to get them into power. (My vote is in Oliver Letwin's constituency, one of the safest Tory strongholds). It may not this time, or next time, but small parties can only grow if people vote for them. 

Baby cabbages buffeted by the howling winds with only a couple of old cloches to protect them

So if you are in a bit of a dither over who should get your precious vote tomorrow, pour yourself a small glass of chilled Chablis, have a seat by the fireplace and, if you haven't already done so, spend a few minutes glancing over the Green Party manifesto. It's worth a read even if you don't vote for them. It certainly isn't just about how we can stop destroying our planet, although that does feature (thankfully).

I'll end on a bit of slightly good news. My planning officer came to visit me last Wednesday on my land and we spent nearly an hour talking about my various planning woes. Those of you who've been following this blog will know that (a) I'm no longer allowed to live in my caravan on the land, and (b) I was forced to put a planning application in to keep my polytunnel and greenhouse, which the Highways Agency has subsequently objected to. With regard to (a) she remained adamant that it would be a breach of planning control to live on my land, and I can't be classed as a seasonal agricultural worker. So no joy there.

However, on (b) she is taking my side against the Highways Agency. That's not to say she won't follow their direction and refuse it (they're playing the “We're the Welsh Government” trump card) although she's pushing back on them to explain their reasons more precisely. But if she does refuse it she says she will consider it inexpedient to enforce it. Which boils down to me being able to keep them without any more hassle. I also have the option of appealing a refusal decision which could end up with it being overturned – in which case the two structures would finally get the legitimacy of official blessing from on high! I tell you they don't make it easy for veg growers around here.