In The Night Garden (And The Day)

My first stall of the year at the local farmer's market. Not laden with produce but it's been a slow start in the garden.

And they're off! After months of sheer dilly-dallying and dawdling my plants have received the starting pistol of a decent mixture of sunshine, rain and warmth and are finally assuming the shapes and sizes that you might have expected them to have about a month ago. The cold windy May and the dry June should take the blame for this. All the other gardeners I've spoken to say their veg have been slow.

So now all my lettuces are looking healthy, large and colourful - three 10-metre beds of them plus several others dotted around elsewhere. The runner beans are halfway up the poles, the climbing french beans a little further behind. Rhubarb leaves are giant and cover the narrow paths on both sides of its bed. All the many beetroot seedlings are planted out and are growing at different rates. The peas have been fruiting since two or three weeks ago - I had to add more canes to prevent the extremely tall Blauwschokker variety (with the beautiful purple flowers and pods) from bringing the whole edifice down. Dwarf french bean plants have begun to produce their spindly green fruit. The kale, both curly and Tuscan types, have mostly grown quite large. Some cabbages have formed heads and are nearly ready to harvest, while many others are much further behind.

A new bed of 83 tiny cabbages

Inside the polytunnel the 24 tomato plants are all healthy and some are above head height, all bearing some small still-green fruit. The cucumber and melon plants, seven of each, are climbing up their respective twines and boasting little yellow flowers and the beginnings of their crop behind them. I harvested my first bright yellow courgette this week. Butternut and Hokkaido squash plants, about ten in total, are still fairly small, no flowers yet. I have one solitary chili pepper growing on one chili pepper plant - another has lots of flowers so hopefully there will be more.

A melon plant

The picture is not all rosy. Nearly all my turnips bolted (making flowers instead of growing the root into a proper turnip), except about three. A similar story with the rocket, broccoli and Mooli radish. Most of the carrots and spinach never even sprouted above ground. Slugs eat the young fennel before they get a chance to thrive. A lot of the cabbages are looking a bit peaky - purple and crinkled instead of a healthy green - so they're getting a dose of “blood-fish-and-bone” powder which might supply some nutrients they are lacking. The outdoor courgettes, poor things, are much smaller than their pampered polytunnel brothers, their flowers are in tatters from tiny slugs and the courgettes so far have been the size of my little finger. The Tuscan kale is badly slug-eaten and many leaves are mottled yellow. Those beautiful slugs also love to eat holes in the Australian Yellowleaf lettuces (I have about a hundred of them) - severely limiting the number of leaves that can go in the salad bags.

Not looking that healthy?

On Monday I ordered two large packs of “Nemaslug” containing a total of sixty million nematodes Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita which infect only slugs and ushers them to an untimely end. It's an organic, biological control. There should be enough to cover the whole garden and polytunnel. It's not cheap but I am beginning to get fed up of spending between an hour and two hours every night picking hundreds of the tiny buggers off the plants. Unfortunately it wears off after six weeks but let's see what happens, perhaps the word will get around that my garden is a death trap. By this time next week the deed should be done, provided I get a rainy day as the nematodes don't like dry conditions. Those slugs don't know what's gonna hit 'em.

Man On The Moon

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hurtled towards their landing spot on an untrodden-surface in a souped-up tin can, much much further from home than anyone had ever been before, I wonder if either had one of those “what am I doing here?” moments. When for a split second you step outside your body and dispassionately observe yourself doing something perhaps rather extraordinary, and you seem to have the time to reflect on all the past decisions, coincidences, societal forces and accidents of birth that led to you, yourself, being here, doing this.

Or were they being wholly at one with the lunar lander, their instruments, the voice of Ground Control, the view of the arid crater-pocked ground rushing past and rising to meet them, their years of training as pilots and then as astronauts culminating in this point in their lives, the sheer volume of data to process and lightning-fast decisions required taking up all of their senses and more?

The new addition to my veg garden. 

I can't of course claim to have been in exactly that situation. The names of those astronauts who have landed on the Moon are well documented. But although being one of those whose lives are necessarily bound to the Earth's surface, I did recently find myself in a situation which required a (probably) similar blend of navigational control, mastery of machine, clear assessment of risk and fine judgment. All my prior experience of trailer-reversing was as if training for this moment, a series of sessions in the simulator before the real thing.

The mission had seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. I needed more horse manure and had found someone who wanted to get rid of some. I drove there with Shauna who is helping me this week, my trailer in tow, and up the steep extremely bumpy single-lane track to discover that to get into the stables yard the left turn was so sharp I had to go past the turn-off and then reverse the car and trailer in, again up a fairly steep bend. This was a taster of what was to come. I got the trailer past the horses and up to the pile and for the next half an hour we shovelled it full of manure. The horse-owner had suggested that to avoid bringing the trailer up here we take the poo all the way down to the road one wheelbarrow at a time. I decided against that - it would have been exhausting and taken all day.

I thought the turning circle of the Jimny was tight enough to take it round the acute bend so I could drive forwards down the heavily-potholed track to the road and freedom. Unfortunately this was disproved on exiting the yard and attempting the manoeuvre. The rain made visibility poorer but I can't blame it all on that. Thankfully the car had enough grunt to reverse the now-laden trailer back up a bit towards the yard, then pull forwards and left up the track (which ended a little further up). I now had to reverse car, trailer and dung about a hundred metres down the precipitous and winding track with steep sides and potholes so large that much of it was more pothole than track.

The fact that I am typing this is evidence that I, at least, made it home. I am happy to say so did Shauna, the car, the trailer and the horse muck. The mission was a complete success. We got the telescope out later that night as the Moon rose between the trees to the west and observed those craters that Aldrin, Armstrong and ten others walked amongst over 45 years ago. Should there be another manned trip to the Moon in the next decade or two I feel that my candidacy would be well supported by such a case study of navigational excellence under pressure as the events described above amply demonstrate. ESA, take note.

My one giant turnip.

My two giant half-turnips

Greenfinger

It would be a lie to claim I have always been green-fingered. On the contrary the only plant I bothered to look after as a child was a tiny squat cactus that sat on my bedroom window sill, which I occasionally remembered to water with a capful of a Smarties tube top. This seems now to be a rather meagre amount, even for a desert dweller, and probably accounts for its eventual demise. What my mum did out in the edges of the garden, causing plants of various kinds to exist, was a mystery to me and I was happy for it to remain so. The only time I interacted with these leafy things was when my ball ended up within them and I had to tiptoe in without crushing anything, ideally.

Now I have slightly more right to claim to have verdant digits, or more accurately dirt-encrusted and callused digits. Not that all my plants grow well, by any means, but I am at least giving it a go and trying to learn from my mistakes.

Saw this on a walk in a nearby woodland. No idea what it is. Any ideas?

Could you say those with an aptitude for all things mechanical have metallic-grey-fingers? If so then I have yet to acquire that particular hue. The mechanical things in my life take great pleasure in stopping doing the one thing it is they have been created to do, forcing me to spend hours struggling and often failing to fix them.

Example one - the flat back tyre on my bike. It's a new tyre from a couple of months ago but somehow a paper clip punctured it and the inner tube. Removing the wheel was fairly easy but getting the tyre off the wheel with these useless plastic tyre levers was impossible. I had to resort to a screwdriver eventually, and in doing so punctured the inner tube further - a fact I only realised later when my spare inner tube turned out not to fit and I tried to patch the original tube with a puncture repair kit. Every time I patched a hole, let the glue dry and pumped the tube up, air hissed out of another hole. I've resorted to ordering new inner tubes of the right diameter and new tyre levers, and am hoping not have a whole lot of new grief getting the tube and tyre back on when they arrive.

Example two - the chainsaw that doesn't saw. Over winter it was the chainsaw that wouldn't start until I paid a chainsaw expert to fix it. He said there was water in the engine. Now it starts but barely saws - it starts cutting through the log but fails to get through more than an inch. I've sharpened the chain twice, it's on the right way round, the engine seems to be revving properly, I just have no idea what's going on. The chain and bar had been used on a Pilsdon chainsaw over the winter so maybe it got damaged somehow then (by me - I was the only one with a licence). I am thinking it may have to be a new chain.

Millions of little pheasants! Welcome to my land.

When I get tired of being frustrated by mechanical objects I can opt to get frustrated by more intangible things, such as government officials attempting to stop me doing what I'm doing. My planning application for the polytunnel and greenhouse, submitted nearly five months ago, is still not decided. The Highways Agency are still maintaining that they cannot allow new development on my land due to the substandard nature of my access, and so are directing refusal to my planning officer who actually disagrees and would approve it if she could. I found a clause in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB) which states that on trunk roads with a 40mph limit it is the Local Planning Authority who make planning decisions, not the Highways Agency. As my stretch of A458 is on a 40mph limit (albeit a long-term temporary limit) I pointed this out to the Highways Agency who claimed that this clause means that the planners get to choose whether to contact the Highways Agency or not - in my case they have, and the Highways Agency say no way Jose. But this isn't actually what the clause says, and my planning officer is inclined to agree with me - she's going to look into it more closely and get back to me. 

All I'm trying to do is grow a few vegetables.

The first courgette flower

I'm The Chairman Of The Board

Wood you believe it?

Any self-respecting business has a marketing department to concoct and portray its image out to the wider world. And a financial control department to keep tabs on where all the money is going. A sales team to drum up more business, plus a legal division for dealing with contractual matters and disputes. A “human resources” group who know how to hire and fire people. Somebody at the top to take the credit and/or blame. Oh and a division of people doing whatever it is that actually makes the business money. We mustn't forget them.

My business, New Leaf, naturally has all of these departments, being a very self-respecting business. Perhaps not HR, actually. But all the other groups are fully staffed and operational using a groundbreaking new employment model which seeks to maximise the potential of all employees (well, employee) whilst making efficiency gains through focusing on eliminating the need for meetings and leveraging the abilities of the staff to multitask, such as fleshing out the five-year corporate strategic plan whilst also watering the broccoli.

Pheasants have started to appear and strut around like they own the place

That's not to say that the business couldn't benefit from a larger employee headcount - detailed forecasts which assume the doubling or even tripling of staff show that output would increase and profits rise almost proportionally. That is of course with the premise that none of the additional staff were to receive any salary. Factoring in salaries, even at minimum wage levels, immediately makes any hiring out of the question given expected revenues from the business' vegetables this year. Until the cost of a cabbage rises above the £20 mark at today's prices, this will sadly remain unfeasible. Fortunately the business has been able to recruit occasional temporary staff at no cost other than three meals a day and a tent to sleep in, and this trend is expected to continue on an ad hoc basis.

The mange tout pods are huge...

..and the plants are trying to reach the polytunnel ceiling

Recently there has been a renewed push by sales and marketing to grow the “Door-to-door” customer base. This nascent but important element of the business seeks to bring fresh produce right to the door of the customers on a weekly basis within a two-mile radius of where it was grown. Bags of salad leaves have been chosen as the primary product for this particular play, being seen as a value item and widely consumed during the summer months, and having a visual aesthetic. Comparable products from supermarkets can be easily shown to be inferior due to the use of chemicals in an attempt to keep the leaves fresh for days (weeks?) prior to purchase.

Filling up the caravan's water barrel from the stream via a long pipe

So on Monday, and the previous Monday, our CEO/founder/salesperson/broccoli-waterer could be found visiting all the nearby residences in Mallwyd and Minlynn and, should there be someone in, making a pitch and presenting them with an A6 colour leaflet which neatly summarises the product and how to contact New Leaf to make an order. Empty homes were left with a leaflet through the letterbox. The second sales trip immediately generated three additional customers to add to the existing seven, some of whom have more than one bag on their order (and a few have asked for kale as well!). One of the new customers is a local hotel under new management keen to buy local seasonal produce for its restaurant. The sales drive also rather unexpectedly resulted in an invitation and free ticket to a Leyline-Finders Moot Day in a fortnight hence with the possibility of more sales to the prospective Leyline Discoverers.

An outdoor mange tout plant has more attractive flowers, it's a Blauwschokker variety

Although Door-to-Door does not currently bring in much revenue, the CEO is keeping a close eye on it and rumour has it that he thinks it has potential one day to match, possibly even exceed, the income generated by the main sales outlet for New Leaf, the Veg Bag Scheme! These rumours generate a healthy rivalry between the two project teams, or at least it would do if they were staffed by different people. You know how much I get paid to write this blog? Zilch. It ain't right. I'm going to take it to the boss in the morning.

These borage flowers go into the salad bags - they're edible and taste slightly sweet

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!