Let It Grow

Tomato seedlings of a "tall bush" variety. Not so tall or bushy yet.

And we're off! The sowing season is upon us. March is well and truly here and all growers everywhere are swiftly moving up a gear or two.

Seeds I ordered over winter from Real Seeds and Tamar Organics and stashed in cupboards are now being rudely awakened. I am digging out my plastic sowing modules from the greenhouse, giving them a clean, mixing up the organic compost from Sylvagrow with vermiculite to aid water retention, filling the modules with it and carefully placing a seed or two in each cell. Then lightly covering the seeds with more compost, writing a label with date and type of veg, placing in a watering tray for a while, and carefully balancing it on a suspended plank in the polytunnel that serves as a mice-proof shelf. This is particularly useful as I've been sowing lots of peas and broad beans, both of which the little critters are very partial to.

When visiting a friend on Thursday I was alarmed to see he had 15cm-tall broad bean seedlings in modules looking very healthy, and which were in fact already being “hardened off” i.e. placed outside during the day to get used to the cooler outdoor air. They must have been sown a few weeks ago already whereas mine only got pushed into the compost this week and have yet to sprout.

I do have a small tray of tomato seedlings however, kept safe and warm inside Anna's house, along with my second batch of onion seedlings that look like they may be going the same way as the first batch - getting droopy without thickening up and reaching straight upwards. They sit next to a tray of mixed lettuce seedlings, just beginning to emerge, and my ten potatoes slowly chitting, or producing sprouts out of their heads.

Onion seedlings a bit droopy

Apart from sowing, I've been shifting and sifting poo. Shifting it from my neighbour's pile of rotted horse manure, putting it into sacks which Anna and I push through a thorny hedge to be loaded onto my trailer on the other side. And sifting it back at HQ Polytunnel, removing all the naughty weed root systems buried within it so my soil doesn't get infected with them. Then shifting it again, wheelbarrowing it off to the garden to be spread and dug in, or just left on top of the asparagus bed. It's slow, smelly, messy but necessary work, and I'll be glad when it's over!

Darley Abbey in Derby, on a recent weekend break

Let's Fill This Valley With Veg!

A wind turbine spins above us despite the light snow 

On an exceptionally wet Sunday afternoon we gathered in the Bowling Club hall. This is our go-to place for gatherings. It's where we had our fundraising dinner for a shed for Edible Mach. It's also where we do the packing for the weekly vegbox scheme. But this time it was for something a bit different - it was the Mach Maethlon AGM!

Mach Maethlon is the not-for-profit company that oversees the vegbox scheme and the other two food-growing projects based in Machynlleth - Edible Mach and Dyfi Landshare. It's the company I recently became a director of, joining a team of six. And although I've been involved for three years now, it's the first time I've made it to an AGM (usually I'm still down at Pilsdon Community so I miss it.)

Before the AGM kicked off there was a Seed Swap. I doubt many companies' AGM's start with a Seed Swap. Anybody could bring along surplus veg seeds they might have and take some others in return. Some of these seeds people have saved themselves from veg they grew last year, thus promoting a healthy local self-reliance for veg production (reducing the amount of new seed bought from corporations each year) and encouraging strains of veg that adapt to the local climatic conditions. Other donated seeds were unused commercial packets from previous years. I ended up taking a few packets including some locally-saved seed: parsnip, sugar snap peas, garlic chives and New Zealand spinach, from three different growers.

My seed potatoes are still merrily chitting away. I'll plant them later this month

The meeting was public and so there were several other faces there apart from the usual crew which was fantastic. We sat in a circle. Katie, the Chair of the directors, led it but various people presented the different projects - what's been achieved in the last 12 months, what shape are the finances in, and a recent SWOT analysis done by each project's committee. It was great to be reminded of all the stuff that's happened in just one year (e.g more customers in the veg box scheme, a beautiful new Show Allotment by the Town Hall, people leading veg growing sessions in local primary schools) and look forward to achieving even more in the year to come.

Funding was raised as an issue for Edible Mach and Dyfi Landshare, as it's getting harder to find funding from organisations to pay for the part-time staff who coordinate these projects, as well as for the materials. A lot of time goes into preparing funding applications which may end up being unsuccessful. Crowdfunding is another route that has been employed already but this also takes up loads of time.

Sadly the onions I sowed in February have not done well.
Maybe I let them grow too quickly at first and they got "leggy". Also the compost was not fresh.

We then had some break-out sessions to brainstorm various ideas such as field-scale crops, revitalising the local council allotments, working smarter with other local organisations, and running cooking workshops, and then fed back all the ideas to the main group. What struck me is how much enthusiasm there is here in Mach for local food, even on a miserable soggy Sunday!

So I've sown some more!

Under Calf-Food Wood

Brussel sprouts plants looking a little worse for wear

“Nice cold, ice cold, fresh milk!” The catchy slogan from the 80s TV ad still trips off my tongue. I've been brought up to believe that cow's milk is healthy, good for our bones and for our bodies in all sorts of ways, and have been pouring it on my breakfast cereal and whitening my teas and coffees with it ever since.

Up till three weeks ago, that is. Since coming back to Wales I've begun an attempt literally to wean myself off it. Not just liquid milk but cheese too. And yogurt. Cheese and yogurt formed a staple part of my diet before, partly because they taste so good. I've even been avoiding things with milk in the ingredients, like most biscuits and cakes. Thankfully I'm not alone in this insane quest, as my girlfriend is joining me.

But why? What have cows ever done to me? One stood on my toe once, actually.

It's more to do with what the dairy industry is doing to our planet's health. And when I say dairy, it's the beef industry too. All the calves of the dairy cows who aren't lucky enough to become a dairy cow themselves (and that includes all the male ones) will become beef.

There's the pollution of watercourses with slurry. There's the methane emitted from each and every cow which is a powerful greenhouse gas and is one of the major drivers of climate change. And there's the huge amount of land used up by cows, not only pasture but also crops for their feed (including soy which is causing Amazonian deforestation). This land would be much better put to growing plants for human consumption, as the energy ratio is far lower (energy used to grow the food : energy gained in eating it), or simply re-wilded.

It's the sheer scale of animal agriculture that's causing such a problem. The film Cowspiracy is contentious but it does state the case for veganism very well, it's worth a watch.


We've been exploring milk alternatives. After trying oat milk and hemp milk, both of which were acceptable but quite pricey, I suggested we try making our own oat milk. We had a large bag of organic oats already. So we..

1) took some out (200ml-worth)

2) rinsed them

3) filled up the jug to over 1 litre

4) whizzed it up with an electric whizzing device

5) put the mixture through a muslin cloth into a jug

6) poured the jug into a bottle

7) put the bottle in the fridge

8) washed up!

We are enjoying our home-made organic oat milk. It takes a little more time to make than buying it at the Co-op, and needs a bit of a shake before use, but it's an awful lot cheaper! And we've been having fun experimenting with what to make out of the oat mash left in the muslin cloth - floppy chocolate biscuits and a thin lemon and raisin oatcake have been two innovative snacks we've come up with recently. Yum.

A Tale Of Two Cities And Two Conferences

Letting the damp out

One week, two conferences.

The first was in London so having only just arrived in Wales from Dorset a week ago, off I toddled back to southern England again. This conference was a weekend “activist” programme organised by Tearfund, a Christian relief and development charity, specifically for young adults.

Hang on, I can just about hear you mutter. Matt Swan might be an adult and may even be said to have a youthful outlook, but surely he can hardly still consider himself in the “young adult” category? I mean he's been alive the same length of time that light has been travelling from the half-molten exoplanet 55 Cancri e, and that's a long time.

The kale just about survived the winter

You're right, and the reason is I was there as a speaker not a delegate. My old friend Becca was the organiser and she decided to ask me to come and talk about how I'd changed my life from the days when I lived in London. I'd said yes a couple of months ago but as the event approached I became a bit nervous about how to express it in front of sixty people. I pulled together lots of photos and scribbled pages of notes which even as I stood up to speak I was half-tempted simply to read out.


But it all came out much more naturally, thankfully, as I flicked through the old photos projected onto the screen and only occasionally glanced at my notes. It was the first time I'd done this and it was a privilege to do it. I think I kept their attention for the forty minutes or so, and got quite a lot of questions afterwards as well as some “thank you's” for encouraging them to keep going with their gardening or their dreams for off-grid living. We all went for a “25-mile meal” afterwards at Lumberjack in Camberwell, oddly very close to where I used to live in London. De ja vu but with longer hair.

Brussel sprouts have been knocked about a bit

The second conference? Thankfully much closer to home, in Aberystwyth. And this time I was just an attendee. It was the Aber Food Forum, an afternoon focused on all aspects of local food. We got to learn about Welsh grain-growing which is a thing (it's not entirely sheep grazing here!) from a woman who makes and sells flour using an actual old water-mill a few miles further south. We heard from students who take “surplus” food from supermarkets and give it to charities. We saw a woman make sauerkraut (it's quite easy!) I was interested to hear from an organic veg grower who has his plot ten miles south of Aber. An MP said a few words. Katie Hastings gave a great summary of Edible Mach and Dyfi Land Share. We heard about the Food Assembly concept, which seems to be a web-based software platform that enables pop-up-style farmer's markets where the consumers have already bought the produce online beforehand, so the producers only need to bring what has been pre-bought. And a local livestock farmer (who also has an important job in the National Farmer's Union) gave some rather depressing thoughts on how Brexit might change things in farming (including the likelihood of many more mega-farms.)


Enough gallivanting for me. I've been back on my land digging in rotted horse-poo today.

Attempts at making our own oat milk have proved surprisingly successful

The Boy Is Back In Town

I'm going dairy-free. These are just two of the alternatives...

Depending on your point of view, I have now moved myself up to mid-Wales or the Earth has rotated beneath me bringing mid-Wales beneath my feet. Either which way, it's a bit chillier.

Great to be here again though, seeing the Dyfi Valley in its February incarnation for the very first time. The trees are really bare, the temperature is really refusing to climb above 4 degrees. Sometimes the sun shines forth and transforms the steep slopes and rushing streams into a landscape of startling beauty and colour.

Taking things a little easier between the muck-spreading of Pilsdon and the forthcoming muck-spreading on my own plot, I have nevertheless found time to move large amounts of firewood and organic compost around in my trailer.

The two loads of firewood were to repeat customers, having already burned up what I gave them in November. And the compost was the endgame of a long logistical dance orchestrated not by me, thankfully, to buy in industrial quantities of the stuff at wholesale prices to be split amongst a goodly number of fellow veg-growers in the area.

This is the first time this has happened, at least in my time here, and it's an excellent development. Rather than us all buying various different composts at retail price from shops or elsewhere, we can make significant cost savings this way. The compost itself, called Sylvagrow, is a new peat-free product that Which? Gardening gave a Best Buy award in 2015, so hopefully it will be good stuff. They were actually testing the non-organic compost so this new organic range is a bit of a gamble but it can't be worse than New Horizons which we've all tried in years past and often seemed to be more full of chunks of wood than actual compost.

Still it's the co-operative nature of the small-scale horticulture around here that I love. People helping each other to load the heavy sacks into their trailers. Someone had turned up with cake and tea to distribute freely. Apparently the last big delivery two weeks ago (of the non-organic stuff) the pallet-moving device had a flat battery so all the bags had to be passed out of the truck by hand along a human chain, which took an hour. 

Here's to a generous, sharing 2017. Forget all that news.  

Getting Ready For The Weekend

It's my last week. On Sunday I will be driving south through Wales, across the Severn Bridge and down through south-west England to Pilsdon Community to spend another winter with them as a residential volunteer. I'm looking forward to the daily Tea and Toast at 4:30pm by the roaring hearth, oh and to seeing all my friends down there again! 

Where has this year gone? Can it really be nine months ago that I returned to my plot of land to start the growing season off again? Did summer happen?

There's a lot to do before I go. Not only does the veg garden and polytunnel need to be cleared (apart from some kale and brussel sprouts which I'll leave standing) and covered in garden lime that hasn't arrived yet, I have to pack everything up that I'm taking with me and store the rest in the polytunnel and at Anna's house. I'm also doing the last veg delivery today to the veg bag scheme - lots of Jerusalem artichokes, butternut squash and salad, and my last firewood delivery of the year.

My firewood business picked up a bit right at the end. Despite putting adverts around in various places a few months ago, I was only selling the occasional trailer-load to friends until I decided to stick in a little ad in the weekly “Swapshop” email last week, that local people use here mostly to trade unwanted things. 

That has resulted in some more trips, including one at Dynyn Cooperative, a house way up in the mountains accessible only by a long, narrow, steep and bumpy track. I got lost trying to find it but eventually arrived and unloaded the firewood. It was only the next day I discovered the trailer's right wheel was flat, it must have been punctured by the evil track. Thankfully I had a spare wheel otherwise I'd be in trouble - I need the trailer to take stuff back to Pilsdon!

Sadly Anna won't be able to join me on my winter retreat, as she has this thing called a permanent job. She will however be coming for a short break in December. And I will be returning to Wales a month earlier than usual, at the beginning of February. So this blog will only have less than three months hiatus, and in the meantime if you like you can follow my Pilsdon Progress at mattswanindorset. Thanks for reading!

p.s. Did you think you could get through a whole article today without hearing about Trump? Sorry. 

We're All Going On A Late Autumn Holiday

My companion and I took our seats in the finest Indian restaurant in Narberth, indeed, the only Indian restaurant in Narberth. On closer inspection it was Bangladeshi. A tall man propped up outside with a glass of wine, a cigarette and an odd habit of ending each sentence with a dirty laugh had told us the food was excellent. We let ourselves be convinced. The alternatives were steak houses, a noisy pub, an over-classy restaurant and a pizzeria, and we wanted curry.

Anna is vegetarian, and I usually only eat meat if I know the place it's come from or if it's organic, so we ordered meat-free dishes. The friendly waiter said “Are you vegetarians?” to which the simple answer was yes. I asked if he was too, he laughed and said no, no, he loves to eat meat although his religion did not allow it, or eggs in fact. To those of his religion, apparently, eggs are like meat. We surmised he was a not-very-strict Hindu. The food was pretty ordinary really.

Fishguard Harbour with Dinas Island in the distance

We were on a two-day holiday in south-west Wales, my first (and only) holiday of the year. Already we had sipped coffee in Newport, circumnavigated Dinas Island (which is confusingly joined to the mainland), and sauntered about Fishguard. The next day we were to visit a small organic farm just over the border of Carmarthenshire, the home of the wholesalers that our weekly veg-bag scheme sometimes uses to supplement our locally-grown veg. Not the most romantic of holiday destinations perhaps, as my giggling fellow growers were quick to point out, but nevertheless we were both keen to see a real working organic farm.

Despite having forgotten we were coming, Peter and Mary* gave us a very warm welcome, a cup of tea in the house and a tour of their site, chatting away about all aspects of their business. They have two large fields, one of which had long lines of kale and other veg growing, and in the other are nine huge polytunnels, each eighty feet long, the middle four joined together to form a massive indoor space full of chard, salads and rocket. They use a small tractor in there to rotavate the soil and a larger tractor outdoors, and Mary let me try out her “wheeled hoe” which you just push along and it pulls up the weeds as you go!

This pile of stones is a Bronze Age burial cairn, one of three on top of Foel Drygarn

It was all on a much larger scale than anything around Machynlleth but they still seemed to think of it as rather small, providing a “top-up” to their main wholesale business, importing organic fruit and veg (mostly from abroad but also from suppliers in Hereford) and selling it on. They've been doing it for many years and it's now grown to a stage when they are considering hiring an employee or two. We left impressed by their capability, warmed by their generosity and down-to-earth humour and inspired to continue growing organic veg!

Last of my outdoor butternut squash. The indoor lot did a lot better

* names changed