You Win Some You Lose Some

Let me tell you the sad story of my tomato seedlings.

They began life in late February in West Dorset when I sowed them in a small seed tray full of compost. There were two varieties, Gardener's Delight, and Red Pear - 10 of each. As I was still at Pilsdon Community I had the luxury of popping them in an electrically-warmed germination cabinet so they sprouted within just a few days. Just in time in fact as on March 1st I was off up to Wales with the seed tray carefully wedged beneath the driver's seat where hopefully nothing could fall on top of it and flatten the seedlings.

Unaccustomed as they were to road travel and despite being kept in near-darkness for six hours they seemed to survive the journey relatively well. At our destination they were brought into the polytunnel which was to be their home for the rest of their lives. Every evening I put a large plastic cover over the tray in an attempt to keep some warmth in.

My bog

However something was able to get in, as over time I noticed the leaves of several of the tiny seedlings had been nibbled back to almost nothing. Without leaves, no photosynthesis, no energy to grow.

The rest of them pluckily carried on growing, albeit very slowly. The warmth they needed simply wasn't there. The polytunnel doesn't warm up much in cool cloudy days, of which there were many.

When they were a month old I decided to re-pot a few of them, thinking that some fresh compost might give them a boost. Only seven of them were worth potting on, the rest having died or were stunted. These seven had at least grown a couple more tiny leaves. So I “pricked out” the seedlings and popped them in a pot each, keeping them watered and generally showering them with love and affection.

The frogspawn are hatching

None of this paid off. Last Wednesday night the temperature dropped to 0.1C outside, and it can't have been much warmer inside the polytunnel. All seven of them were drooping over when I went in to check on them on Thursday morning. It became a very nice warm day and I had hopes that they would recover, and some did seem to straighten up a bit. Others I propped up with little sticks.

But over the course of this week they have been slowly dying. They're all drooping despite the warmer nights, and the stems which are thin anyway are getting thinner and whiter. I don't expect they'll last another week. R.I.P tomato plants.

Fern-like fractal frost patterns on my greenhouse glass

Thankfully I did another sowing earlier in March so I do have healthier but smaller tomato seedlings in another tray. My intention to grow my own tomatoes from seed is still achievable. Yet if I had access to an airing cupboard, or just a centrally-heated room, I would have been able to keep the little blighters warm and tucked up at nights; my caravan sadly has neither. Maybe I should buy a house.

Tomato: The Next Generation

Lullaby of Birdland

The source of some of my garden's fertility

Like the Whooper Swan I migrate northwards in Spring, but whereas I only travel 200 miles to mid-Wales the Whooper Swan carries on to Lapland or Iceland. Bewick's Swans migrate even further, not happy until they have reached the high Arctic as they prefer their summer on the chilly side. Only the stockier and quieter Mute Swan, the most common in Britain and the only breed to have been domesticated, stays put all year round.

Birdlife is on the increase on my land although I have yet to see any swan here other than myself. The fluid songs of blackbirds fill the evening air and robins can often be seen close by, especially if I've been digging and potentially unearthing a worm. The short bursts of a woodpecker in one of the large oaks high up the bank betrays its presence; I've never managed to spot it so far. From my caravan I can look out on a small copse of blackthorn and sometimes spy on a couple of bullfinches meticulously stripping the buds off the branches. Other small birds flit here and there amongst the trees, rarely pausing for long and making identification difficult for a non-birdspotter like me.

Away it goes. This is all fresh stuff so I leave it to rot down till next year.

Inside that blackthorn copse is my compost toilet, artfully concealed, yet with a view out south to Mallwyd Hill. Back in 2013 when Matt and Mary helped me build it, I leaned three spare two-by-four-inch lengths of timber semi-upright inside to keep them dry, and there they still rest. Yet despite their apparent lack of purpose, they have in fact acquired a two-fold function. My digital thermometer perches on top of the taller one, kept both dry and in the shade. And the gap formed by the pieces of timber have proved tempting to birds looking for a good place to nest. It's dry and raised off the ground, with the only trouble caused by some human coming close every so often to fiddle with the thermometer, or to defecate.

Last year it was a wren's nest. As I sat there on the compost toilet just a couple of yards from the nest, a wren would nervously inspect me from every angle, from various branches around, or the ground. At the end of the season I extracted the nest and marvelled at the tight weave of twigs and other materials to create the cosy home for its young. This year, a treecreeper has taken up residence. Its nest is a larger and messier affair with larger twigs, and the adult bird does exactly the same as the wren last year when I go to the loo, but with a bit more creeping up tree trunks. My bird identification book says treecreepers' nests are “sometimes in a crack in a shed adjacent to woodland” which is just about right.

Most of these peas have germinated. They'll be planted outside when they're taller.

With the buzzards and red kites circling above and other smaller birds settling in or passing through over the next few months, it is a good place to be to deepen my appreciation of these flighted creatures. If you happen to stop by and find me stock-still, leaning on my spade and staring intently at a tree, you'll know why.

Oh and do please support the Edible Mach project which is needing funding to continue:
Edible Mach Maethlon is a community group based in Machynlleth, Mid Wales. For the last two years we have been turning unused land all around our town into beautiful Edible Gardens. With the help of over 70 volunteers, we have grown food crops in places such as the library, park, train station and fire station. This food is available for anyone to pick and eat.
https://chuffed.org/project/edible-mach-maethlon

Donkey Kong

The kohl rabi seedlings are on their way!
 I sow two per module and heartlessly cull the weaker. It's in case some seeds don't germinate.

Sunday just gone wasn't any old Sunday. Well, maybe it was for you. But depending on who you ask around here it was either Palm Sunday or Seedy Sunday. The former is an annual commemoration of the event of Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem for the last time (shortly to be betrayed and killed), seated on a donkey and greeted by a vast crowd of well-wishers waving palm branches. The latter is an annual commemoration of spring here in Machynlleth and involves, amongst many other things, people swapping vegetable seeds for sowing. I decided to celebrate both.

Seedy Sunday was an all-day affair whereas the church service was at 2pm so I offered to help out at Seedy Sunday from the beginning until it was time to leave. It was hosted in the secondary school hall which somehow managed to remain icy cold despite the sun shining brightly outside. My job was to man a stall advertising our cooperative veg box scheme, trying to drum up custom before it begins in June.

Here come the peas

There were several enticing things about my stall to attract those potential punters. It was very artfully decorated with daffodils, curly kale, and squash of all shapes and sizes. It had a big sign saying that if people signed up today they would get an extra big bonus bag in the summer. There were bags of spicy salad leaves for sale. And crucially there was a fun game that cost nothing to play. “Guess the number of beans in the jar!” was my clarion call and many flocked to guess. I wasn't even allowed to know how many there were in case clever people were somehow to winkle it out of me, perhaps by hypnosis. I merely jotted down their number and then hit them with the offer of a weekly veg box, to which the weaker ones acquiesced.

My sage bush looking a bit sorry for itself after a frost

Sadly I never did get to find out how many beans there were, or discover who guessed right, as that was all happening after I left. I shot off by car to the remote hamlet of Darowen, a place I had never been to before, which is miles off the main road up tiny winding lanes leading up high above the green fields of the valley. The sun shone, and far distant sheep looked like grains of salt. The church here is one of the four looked after by the vicar. Everyone wanted to come to this one today, though, because there was going to be an actual donkey.

We sang a hymn first (in Welsh) and then something else happened, also in Welsh. In fact the whole service was entirely in Welsh which made things harder for me to grasp. The service I normally go to is in a mixture of English and Welsh with the sermon always in English. Anyway it was clear at one point that we were all to troop outside and there was a real live donkey, gleaming white, with a young boy perched on top wearing a bicycle helmet (health and safety gone mad?)

Out come the hazel catkins

After another long hymn, Moses the donkey was led sedately by its keeper to the arched doorway but there it stopped and would not budge. I'm not sure quite what it was expected to do once inside but we shall never know. Everyone filed back in and continued with the service, with many a backwards glance in the hope of seeing the donkey behind us, but his owner said afterwards that it was the double step that foxed him. I rather suspect instead it was the prospect of a sermon in Welsh that put him off.

Mallwyd Hill looms over my garden and compost bins

Hard Graft

Seed trays suspended in my polytunnel... hopefully the mice can't get at them there

This week I learned the meaning of hard graft. Not in the sense of heavy labour although I've had my fair share of that, digging out wheelbarrowful after wheelbarrowful of rotted manure and forking it into my garden soil. No, on Saturday I enrolled on a workshop at the Centre for Alternative Technology to learn about grafting, and specifically the grafting of apple trees. And it is hard.

Our tutor, Chloe Ward, is a local specialist in fruit trees. A few years ago she conducted a survey of all the orchards she could find in Powys, the huge county in which Machynlleth nestles in its furthest north-west reaches, and wrote and published a detailed booklet with her findings. She wanted to find those varieties of apple which do best in the Welsh climate, ie very damp weather and generally poor soil. Her booklet identifies those she believes cope the most admirably with these conditions.

In go the mange tout seeds... 

I learned quite a lot about apple trees. Each variety of apple is a clone, so all Golden Delicious trees, for example, are genetically identical to each other. If you planted a Golden Delicious pip you would not get a Golden Delicious tree - it would be a unique new variety with most likely pretty awful fruit. To get a new Golden Delicious tree, you have to snip a bit of new growth off a branch, called a scion, and attach it to the top of a different little apple tree (just a stick with roots) called a rootstock. You've just grafted a new apple tree.

The art is in the attaching correctly. The two ends have to match near enough exactly so that they fuse, in time. Both ends are cut diagonally and should neatly fit together so you can't see any of the inside. They are then bound tightly together with plastic tape.

The snow has melted, the sun is shining, the muck is being spread!

The outer layer (phloem) in the bark transports the sugars generated by leaves. The next layer (cambium) in produces cells for both the outer and the inner layer. And the layer behind that (xylem) carries water from the roots all the way up to through to the leaves. It's crucial to get the middle layer lined up on both sides or the graft won't take.

After an hour's teaching we all found ourselves hacking away at bits of twig with Stanley knives, trying to get the two cuts to match up. I chose two scions - a Bardsey Island and a George Cave - they both flower at about the same time of year which is crucial for pollination, since they like most apple varieties are not self-fertile. Eventually I managed to get them attached to their respective rootstocks and planted in pots of compost. It's very fiddly. Whether it worked or not only time will tell. I'll be keeping them in my polytunnel and watering them so they should grow a few inches by autumn. If so they'll be planted on my land somewhere in the winter. If not, well, I'll have learned that I'm not a grafter.

My efforts. With spade and bucket for size comparison

The Rain Has Got Its Hat On

Mud. It is the defining characteristic of my environment. I returned to my land in mid-Wales last week after a winter in Dorset to find the rains had turned it into a quagmire. No surprise there. Unfortunately it's worst just around where my caravan is sited as after heavy rains a little stream appears behind it from up the hill and has nowhere really to go, just pooling in the area between the caravan and polytunnel which is of course where I am stomping around the most. A few corrugated iron sheets now form a crude path.

Given the terrible gales over the winter I had been preparing myself for the worst but bar a couple of broken panes in the greenhouse, everything was surprisingly in good working order. Although the solar panel had been blown over onto its face, once back in position it continued to charge the caravan battery just fine. The tap fed from the stream still worked, the long pipe hasn't got blocked anywhere. The huge net over the garden remained intact. The polytunnel was standing just where I left it.

The first time I've seen snow on my land! It melted by midday

My caravan awning had to be erected again, no small feat solo but thankfully I had the assistance of my girlfriend Anna who had come up with me from Pilsdon for a few days. It was swiftly filled with the junk I had stored in the polytunnel over winter but at least I can now see where the veg is going to grow!

It is exciting to be back and sowing seeds for the season ahead. I've got tomatoes, broad beans and mange tout on the go already, mostly in modules and seed trays but yesterday about a hundred broad bean seeds of three different varieties were pushed into a recently-manured and rather soggy bed outside.

Velociraptor tracks

It's also challenging to start up afresh here after getting used to taps with hot water, washing machines, meals mostly cooked by others, readily available drinking water, central heating, decent dry storage space and a snooker hall. That's all a memory now - or did I dream it?

I aim to get my drinking water from the rain-filled water butt by the greenhouse, though putting through a gravity filter first just in case. Not wanting to risk the standing water in the butt which had lots of little flies buzzing around the top, I emptied it out and rinsed it and am now waiting for enough rain to fill it up again. I'll be drinking shop-bought water till then. I don't trust the stream water given the not-so-remote possibility of a sheep having died in it further up the hill.

Storm clouds loom over Aberdovey

I'm reconnecting with neighbours and friends here who now see me as a kind of bellwether of spring like the cuckoo. They say it's been a horribly wet and windy winter and are glad to see the back of it. Personally I will be happy once the ground has dried out and I can walk around without slipping and sliding like a deranged ice-skater. Bring on the sun!

End of Year Report

The last of the beetroot

The end is nigh! The end of my third spell in Wales that is. On Saturday I pack my bags and drive off south to spend the winter volunteering at Pilsdon Community in West Dorset, as I have the previous two winters.

It's fair to say it's been a bit of a tough growing season this time. All the local growers agree. The weather has not been kind. Where was the sun when we needed it? If I take the average of all the daily maximum temperatures for each month, I find that June was 16.1° (previous June it was 20.6) and July was 16.5 (last July was 20.3). It was a cool wet summer.

Add to that my endemic slug population who laugh at my pitiful attempts to eradicate them (nightly slug patrols picking hundreds of them off the veg each time, two applications of supposedly-slug-killing nematodes, spot checks on cabbages which they use as hotels along with caterpillars, earwigs and worms) - my plants have not had an easy time of it.

A slug caught in the act of producing eggs. This is why I can't get rid of them.

Some crops have just come to nothing, I couldn't sell any of it. The spinach, turnip and radish all went straight to seed, the carrots didn't grow at all and the butternut squash produced very few fruit which either split or were pecked by pheasants which somehow got into the polytunnel.

Other veg grew a disappointing crop that I did manage to sell some of - fennel (it didn't bulk up properly), courgettes (just a few tiny fruit each, totally unlike last year's bumper crop), french beans (badly attacked by slugs), and beetroot (at least half didn't reach a size you could use.) I'd hoped to make £700 from all the above veg - I made just under £60.

A mould of some kind attacks a french bean 

Luckily some things did better. I went to some efforts with the salad bags taking them direct to people's doors each week, and this paid off. They were easily my biggest earner at £475, though still shy of my target of £525! Cabbages I planted loads of, which unfortunately meant a huge effort trying to keep the pests off, but ultimately brought in nearly £250. Kale came in at number 3 with £214 when I'd only expected to make £100 from it - though I did plant more than I'd planned. Peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and runner beans all did pretty well bringing in £540 between them (more than the joint target of £390). 

All in all I made about £1680 from my veg, a bit below my target of £2000. When the expenses are taken into account my veg business made a princely profit of a little over £1400. It's fair to say I'm not in the higher income tax bracket, or any tax bracket for that matter.

This is what it's all about - bringing my freshly picked veg to the veg box scheme for packing.

I've been able to supplement that income through a few hours each week keeping the local Health Centre's garden tidy, and occasionally working for my friend Bob* the carpenter. Renting out part of my land for pheasant rearing has brought in more. What with Working Tax Credits and not paying rent or bills it's possible to make ends meet.  Not sure whether the Working Tax Credits will still come my way next year though with the twin threats of lowering the eligibility threshold and the sometime switch to Universal Credit.

I'm looking forward to getting to Pilsdon to enjoy some of those luxuries I've been missing out on - hot water from taps, meals made by other people, the camaraderie of the community. It's also a chance to step back and take time to consider strategies for the year ahead, and beyond.

Thank you for your faithful following, loyal blogreaders (you know who you are). And to those of you who've just dropped in, you've missed a lot! Get reading the back catalogue. You can also keep up with my winter life at my other blog, mattswanindorset. Bye for now!


*not his real name

Trees Please Me

A wren's nest formed between two upright planks leaning against my compost toilet. The mother used to pop out whenever I went to the loo and hop about petrified I'd go after her chicks

As I labour in my vegetable garden of delights I am surrounded by trees, many of which are currently displaying an autumnal feast for the eyes. In the recent sunshine the golds, browns and reds made a vivid display on the hillsides and riversides and of course are strewing their leaves everywhere including on my veg patch, providing new and exciting places for slugs to hide.

Trees on the north side of my veg patch...

... and the south

The six acres I own host a wide variety of tree species, both broadleaves and conifers. Some, particularly the conifers, have been planted deliberately - the steep bank below the road has lots of tall spruce, fir and larch, there's a long narrow plantation of young-ish Scot's pine, and there are a good number of Christmas trees dotted about, some way too big now to fit in your living room (unless you're the Queen.)

Most of the broadleaves however appear to be naturally self-seeded, with the river hosting some majestic examples of sessile oak, small-leaved lime, birch, and hazel, clinging precariously to the high crumbling bank above the water as ivy curls up their trunks. Other species living here are beech, ash, rowan, elder, crab apple, hawthorn, blackthorn, holly, goat willow and aspen. All these are native species, they've been growing in Britain since the last Ice Age. There may be others here - I'm still learning to identify them. I feel in awe to be living amongst such a diversity of treelife when much of the surrounding forests are monoculture plantations of larch or Sitka spruce.

The view from the top of a hill near me. The dark green patches are conifer plantations. I fought through one to reach the top of this hill.

Yet there's a real threat to British trees. Our most common tree, the oak, is susceptible to the scarily-named Acute Oak Decline which has been lurking in SE England since the 1980's and is still not well understood. More worryingly perhaps the third most common, the ash, could be wiped out by a fungus causing Chalara Ash Dieback which is spreading rapidly across the country. Japanese larch, a very widely planted forestry tree, is being decimated by a fungus-like pathogen labouring under the name Phytophthora ramorum.

And you may have seen in the news that gin drinkers are upset because the junipers of Scotland and the north of England that provide the unique berries that flavour the drink are being ravaged by Phytophthora austrocedri, a pathogen that arrived from Argentina in 2011 (the only other place it's known to exist.) I'd hope a few non-gin-drinkers will also find the news troubling. The juniper is one of only three native conifers on this island.

The Lantern Parade in Machynlleth last Saturday

Not to mention the nine other tree diseases the Forestry Commission puts in its Top Tree Diseases list which variously infect beech, plane, cypress, pine, sweet chestnut, horse chestnut, elm and alder, to name but a few. And the reason for all these diseases appearing relatively recently? You got it. Us. People bringing in live plants from abroad. It just takes one to be infected. So far at least, my trees seem healthy enough. It would be a shame to lose them after I've just got to know them.