Pilsdon Revisited

Pilsdon's onion bed October 2012

Pilsdon's onion bed June 2013

I am spending a week’s holiday On-Grid. The major difference is I don’t worry when I turn on a tap that the water may be about to run out. Also I don’t have to wait twenty minutes for hot water. And I can move around my room in two dimensions not just one.

Of course these niggles are more to do with the fact that my off-grid home is a tiny caravan rather than anything fundamental with living off the grid. It is perfectly possible to build a comfortable home that looks and behaves much like any conventional dwelling whilst still drawing its power and heating from the sun, wind, stream and coppiced wood. It’s just a question of making it happen.

I’m back at Pilsdon, the community in West Dorset where I spent a year volunteering up until this April. With the warden away on holiday they were looking for an extra pair of hands, and so I was tempted back with the lure of square meals of happy meat and fresh veg (some of which I planted myself this spring) as well as the chance to catch up with the Pilsdon crew.

Although I’ve only been away a little over two months quite a lot has changed. Baby River is one year old now and teetering on the verge of walking. Four people have left the community, two more have joined.  The honey bees have vanished from the hive, no one knows where. The pig weaners have vanished too but this mystery is explained by the freezer full of pork joints. Two of the three Jersey dairy cows have been sold yet even the one left, Angelica, is giving enough milk for everyone (young Snowdrop will become a milker later this year too). The chickens have all been replaced with another batch who are equally poor at laying eggs. A concession to modern life has been made with the provision of internet access for all in the form of a Windows 8 desktop in the library, whose flippy graphic tiles and lack of Start button confuses everyone. But with another nod to contemporary budget slashing, the daily newspapers will be axed at the end of this week. Swallows have arrived back from Africa and nested in the row of single storey buildings known as the Loose Boxes thus delaying their renovation until they fly off again this winter.

The garden is bursting full of growing things, both edible and weed, with each bed being managed in quite visibly distinct ways by the various garden team members. You can tell which plot belongs to someone suffering from OCD by the complete absence of any weed and the strict rows of beetroot and rainbow chard, each an exactly equal distance apart. Others are a riot of leaf. All approaches will ultimately result in food on the table.

As this break is for me a Busman’s holiday (apparently not named after a Mr Busman as one may be mistaken for assuming but simply after a “busman” or bus driver who also goes on holiday by bus), I was assigned a heavily overgrown corner of the vegetable garden, more a mini-jungle really, to turn into a patch ready for planting parsnip. So inbetween all my other tasks - milking the cow, driving the minibus to town, making soup for lunch, collecting prescriptions, shelling peas - I am ripping out quite beautiful yet inedible vegetation from the soil, buckets and buckets of the stuff, and making a weed mountain behind the hedge. And once I’ve finished this, it’s back to Wales to rip out inedible vegetation from the soil to make weed mountains. 

Pump Up The Volume

Pont Wrysgren, not far to the west of my land

The expression usually employed to describe what the state must do to prevent civilisation from crumbling into chaos is to "keep the lights on." I'm not sure this is the best choice of phrase as the great British public would no doubt quickly adapt to their light switches not working with matches and carefully-arranged candles. The romantic atmosphere thus created in millions of front rooms across the land, coupled with the absence of TV or XBox, may in fact help to rekindle long-lost passions and reduce the divorce rate (and increase the birth rate).

No, the phrase I submit to be more fitting is to "keep the water flowing." If the tap in every kitchen sink, bath, washbasin and shower across the country ran dry, within a week we would have spiralled down into a Mad Max post-apocalyptic nightmare. To put it bluntly, we'd all stink. Sales of concentrated fruit drinks would plummet. Those lucky few who have private supplies from springs or boreholes would be regarded as gods with their fresh-smelling clothes and their shiny-scrubbed faces, and would no doubt eventually take control and form the world's first washed-ocracy..

My taps don't work. Last Saturday my faltering water pump, which sits inside the water barrel outside my caravan, finally gave up the ghost. Taking it apart and putting it back together did not help. I was about to descend into my own personal Max Max post-apocalyptic nightmare. The only way to wash up would be to fetch a bucket of water from the stream, 70m away, and my bucket leaks. No more hot water either (the pump fills the caravan's water heater). Things were looking grim. 

By an extraordinary coincidence however, for which I am quite prepared to offer a thank you to Him Who Orchestrates Coincidences, last Saturday was also the day my parents arrived for a week's holiday in a cottage in Mallwyd, my local village. It has running water. I have not had to do any cooking or washing up in my caravan this week. And that same day I ordered a replacement pump online for £27 which, having paid a £4 surcharge for "express" delivery, arrived on Tuesday. The next day my dad and I figured out how to detach the failed pump from its long tube and attach the new one, not as simple a task as you might hope. We popped it in the barrel and turned on the power.

All this while I didn't know whether it was the pump at fault or if it was something wrong with the socket connection, so I was mightily relieved when (a) the pump whirred into life and (b) water came out of the taps. However when the tap was turned off, the pump kept pumping. And pumping. I had to power off the pump before the caravan exploded like a water balloon. Unscrewing the socket plate causes water to burst out for a while. Not knowing much about these things, my guess is that for some reason the pressure switch inside the socket is not being depressed so the pump keeps on forcing more and more water into the caravan.

So I have a partial solution now since whenever I need water I can manually switch the pump on and off with a switch inside the caravan, but if any of you have some working knowledge of these arcane systems, your wise words of advice would fall upon very receptive and grateful ears.

Yes You Shall Go To The Ball

Eastern boundary of my land

I'm not generally one to compare myself with fairy tale characters but last weekend I was Cinderella, temporarily freed from an eternity of (admittedly self-imposed) solitary domestic labour to go to the ball, or in this case the barbecue. My senses whirled as I was thrust into the midst of the chattering throng of unfamiliar faces, laughing, singing, munching nut burgers. All the young eco-conscious of Machynlleth were here, most of whom had cycled across four miles and seven hills to reach the party.  I had to remember how to socialise, and quick.

Thankfully my powers of speech still appeared to be in working order, and I began to meet people. Many there had some connection with the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), either working or volunteering there or having done so in the past and stuck around. A guy in his twenties, Brian*, will soon finish volunteering at CAT as an organic gardener and is interested in coming to help me for a bit whilst camping on my land. I met the chap responsible for the next Zero Carbon Britain report that CAT will publish soon, showing how it is possible for the UK to wean itself off fossil fuels entirely (sneek preview: it's all about storing excess offshore wind energy in the form of electrically-generated methane, somewhat ironically). Another guy works for Dulas, a local renewable engineering company that was originally a spin-off from CAT, who was able to give me some names of local consultants who specialise in micro-hydro. And on top of all this tiring networking I managed to enjoy myself too.

The only reason I was there at all was due to a chance conversation with Kit at Lammas who then invited me to meet his friend Cynthia and her partner Colin when he came up to visit this weekend. This barbecue was on their itinerary so I tagged along too. Cynthia very helpfully drew me in, introducing me to people, letting me know when and where social events tend to happen, and even offering me her spare room if I need a place to crash. These are a very friendly bunch of people. Everyone seemed fascinated that I was living on my land nearby.

I left at the stroke of midnight, making sure my feet were both still clad to ensure no Prince Charming comes knocking on my caravan door, and unlike Cinderella was back the following day at a birthday picnic in the park where I met more people including Julie who runs a local veg-growing operation on rented land, selling it at the market and to cafes, who had a lot of useful advice.

Back to the removal of bracken roots. They pile higher and higher in grotesque blackened twists like the dried intestines of a huge disembowled alien creature. I have to admit to some satisfaction as I rip more out of the soil each day. On Thursday afternoon however I was interrupted by the arrival of an ecologist and his young acolyte, who I have paid handsomely to conduct something called a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal. Yes I'm afraid it has got to the stage that I'm paying people to visit me. He really did seem to know a thing or two about nature, pausing every few minutes before identifying yet another burst of birdsong, pointing out all species of trees, and hunting for evidence of dormice and otters, both protected species (he drew a blank).

His report will be a prerequisite for any planning application I may submit for change of use to residential, but will also be fascinating to me simply as a baseline document for what lives here right now. If I'm to encourage biodiversity here the first step is to know how biodiverse it already is.

* Names have been changed as per usual.

The Hills Are Alive

Those of you moaning English minnies who wrote off Wales as a country after a single wet family holiday in Tenby when you were seven, now is the time to get yourself over here and repent of your childish snap judgment. For the last week the sun has been almost permanently shining (except at night time, naturally, when it gives the other side of the world a go). Temperatures have soared up to the low twenties in the shade (I've been keeping a careful tally) and nature is loving it, with foliage bursting forth, elderflowers and bluebells and red campion and buttercups splashing colour all over the place, and birds everywhere swooping and singing. I heard a cuckoo yesterday, and saw a heron flap lazily up from the river. Bees, butterflies and other flying beings flitter around the place. The forecast is for even more hot sun.

I took a walk out up into the hills the other side of the Dovey river last Sunday morning, intrigued by the purplish hue that now covers a swathe across the lower half of a wide slope. After hauling myself up to it past startled sheep I confirmed my suspicion - the fields were just thick with bluebells. Combined with the clear view up and down the lush Dovey valley, well, you had to be there. The photo above doesn't really do it justice.

Apart from occasional phone calls and brief exchanges with shopkeepers, it has been a very quiet week. I've been left entirely to my own devices, which has principally meant turning my attention to converting a gently sloping southwesterly-facing patch of ground, 20m by 6m, from a thicket of brambles and bracken into a clear area for the eventual planting of willow. Certain varieties of willow grow very fast so in just three years you can expect to get a decent amount of firewood from them; this is known as short-rotation coppice (SRC).  This patch isn't very big for that, but it's a start and anyway I have a lot of of semi-mature Scots Pine and Norway Spruce, plus thinnings of mature Sitka Spruce on the slopes, that should be suitable for firewood in the meantime, once felled and seasoned.

So with gloves donned and garden fork in hand I have for the last few days been manfully tackling the scrub, first pulling out the millions of bracken shoots one by one, then ripping out all the brambles (as I've been wearing T-shirts my forearms look like I've been repeatedly trying and failing to end my life), then clearing all the dead bracken and leaf litter left behind, and finally on Wednesday getting down to digging up the complex network of bracken roots that infest the entire area along with the occasional bramble or couchgrass root system for light relief. It's slow going but doable. Sticking to organic principles means chemical weedkillers are out. Pigs are known to eat and trample bracken but it would take years before the roots gave up, and anyway pigs take some looking after, although they do taste good.

Sweating under the scorching Welsh sun (not often you read those words together!) means it's nice to know the caravan's equipped with a shower, albeit cramped. Unfortunately even that small luxury I may have to do without since these last few days the water pump seems to be giving up the ghost, its engine struggling and often failing to cope with the effort of keeping up the water pressure. It even began spurting water where the pump fits in the socket, on the outside. I rang the dealer who sold me the caravan and he said the insurance won't cover a repair unless it fails completely, i.e. pumps nothing, but apparently you can buy replacement pumps quite cheaply. I then tried taking it all apart, including the socket, and putting it back together again which seemed to do the trick at first when I did the washing up, but demanding any larger quantity of water is putting stress on the poor pump again.

So if you do come and visit me make sure to leave your sense of smell at home, until I somehow manage to fix this properly.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Tarp

There are several objections that can be brought against wind farms but one you are quite unlikely to hear is that they spoil the view of the moon. Nevertheless last Saturday night as a huge red full moon lifted itself gently above the ridge to the east, a turbine formed a clear silhouette on its face. To me this unexpected juxtaposition only enhanced the moment rather than spoiled it but wind farms never fail to divide opinion so I can only assume someone thought the opposite.

It was my last night at the Lammas eco-village, a cloudless warm evening, and coincidentally also the 40th birthday of one of the residents, Ayres, who invited everyone to sit round a bonfire on his plot as the stars came out and to eat brownies. The moon grew white and swung off to the right as the hours passed. A Swiss girl next to me, another volunteer, told me that this summer she was going to drive her camper van right across the breadth of Europe to Lithuania so she could help some friends build a greenhouse. She was not concerned. It's just Germany then Poland, and you're there. Maybe a bit of Belgium first. 

I stayed till the early hours which turned out to be fortunate as a last-minute conversation with another resident, Kit, revealed that he was taking his family up to Machynlleth in a couple of weeks to meet up with a friend of his, someone who used to work at the Centre for Alternative Technology. As he knew I was new to the area up there he offered to invite me along too to introduce me to her. It's fantastic when chance encounters like these turn into opportunities to be more linked up with the local community.

Back on my land again. Everything is greener. After two weeks in a tent the caravan seems palatial. The potatoes have started to push up shoots and leaves. I installed my new rain measuring equipment (basically a test tube) just in time for two very wet days that I can state with a degree of confidence dumped 11mm and 12mm of rain consecutively. Taking advantage of the conditions I pinned my large tarpaulin to the slope next to the caravan and below it placed a five litre bucket where the water collected. Within minutes it had filled, which I then left to settle overnight and then decanted into a British Berkefeld gravity filter with two ceramic and activated-carbon "candles" inside that slowly, drip drip, purified it. Free drinking water (if you forget the cost of the candles) without the downside of potential sheep-dip poisoning that prevented me from trying the stream.

All week I have had a niggling and growing suspicion that my solar panel wasn't working, upon which I depend for lighting, phone charging, laptop charging, water heater ignition and the water pump itself. The battery meter seemed to be slowly dropping although still in the green third. Leisure batteries such as this should never be discharged more than half-empty or they lose total capacity. The charge controller unit that the panel plugs into has an indicator marked "Sun" which remained off, but I didn't know if this should light only when it is sunny (which it never seemed to be) or when it's getting anything from the panel - even on cloudy days it should provide charge. I kept checking the leads were properly connected to the charge controller. Yesterday I remembered I had a multimeter so I waited till there was full sun and tested the voltage on the leads - not a micro-volt. Behind the panel I unscrewed the other ends of the leads, one at a time, and re-inserted them. At last the multimeter flickered into life! It must have been a loose connection in the solar panel that was jolted when I moved it outside again on my return. 

Now I can rest easy in the knowledge that I won't run out of juice. These blogs are gonna keep on coming, don't you worry. Or maybe that's what you're worried about? You were hoping for a bit of peace and quiet on the internet but Swanny keeps on posting his interminable monologues every week. Tough luck!


P.S. My local pub, The Brigand's Inn, has now closed so I can only update this blog whenever I get into Machynlleth hence why this is appearing on Saturday not Friday...

Eco Village People

Three years ago the Government of Wales enacted a rather extraordinary piece of legislation. Buried within a Technical Advice Note to the updated Planning Policy of Wales was introduced the concept of "One Planet Developments" into law. The idea is to encourage those who want to live their lives as if we have just one planet (which the sharp-eyed amongst you will know, is actually true) rather than as if we have three planets-worth of resources (which is how most of us in Britain live), by allowing people to live off the land in a self-sufficient and environmentally low-impact kind of manner. 

Can't people already do this? Well yes if they happen to own a mixed smallholding, which these days is well out of the price-range of nearly everyone. The difference with One Planet Developments (OPDs) is that you can buy a piece of agricultural land, around ten times cheaper than residential land, and then build your own house on it using local materials.  The catch is that you have to show to the local council in great detail exactly how you plan to live off the land. Within five years you are expected to be getting 65% of your food needs from it, as well as most of your energy for heating, cooking and warmth, and sufficient income from some kind of land-based business (such as selling your fruit and veg, running basket-making courses, etc) to keep you afloat. The other catch is that local councils are not falling over themselves to grant permission for OPDs.

The eco-village Lammas where I have been staying this past fortnight was set up in response to a similar policy in Pembrokeshire in West Wales that slightly predated the national One Planet Development version, and in fact helped to shape it. There was a long tortuous battle to gain planning permission for Lammas which they eventually got on appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. They are three and a half years into their five year plans now; apparently some are well on track to hitting their targets, others less so, but there is cautious optimism that on balance Lammas will meet them and be allowed to continue. 

Very unusually there was only one attendee for last Saturday's Lammas tour - me. I could bend the ear of Paul Wimbush, the leading proponent of all things OPD, for an entire hour as he showed me round which was very useful as I am using this year to weigh up whether to go this route on my bit of land. One key bit of advice he had was regarding the number of people my plot could support, which he believed could be no more than two or at a stretch three people, based on its size and topology. This of course would limit the type of community that could form there, as I had been thinking more in terms of five or six people, purely from the social angle.

It's been a privilege this last fortnight to have been a small part of this vital experiment at Lammas, which in practical terms has meant helping Nigel put a sloped roof on his barn extension. I'm proud to say we did it. The four heavy wooden rafters were cut to size with an angled top surface, lifted on top and slotted into their chiselled-out holes, ten long batons laid and nail-gunned cross-wise over them with a sheet of felt material inbetween, and then large OSB chipboards carefully cut to size and nailed on top of that; the whole she-bang tightly covered temporarily with recycled plastic sheeting as the tiles are not ready to go on yet. Amazing how a single sentence can boil down seven days of ingenious problem-solving and hard labour! 

On Sunday I head back home to my caravan in Snowdonia to find out what Spring has been doing to the plantlife there and to begin to prepare the soil for growing food. I feel better equipped after these two weeks with people who are several years into doing it. It is certainly no picnic, I've heard many grumbles from people here as they chafe against the daily routines of feeding animals, the impact of the turbulent weather systems on their gardens and the intrusion of council officers into their living arrangements and financial affairs, but one thing is for sure, it is an intriguing and important alternative to the consumerist and non-sustainable lifestyle of the typical Westerner. 

The Lishman's plot

If I Had A Hammer

This week's message comes to you from the wild west of Wales, the dark heart of Pembrokeshire, from a tent on the side of a hill perfectly situated to welcome all the howling winds and raging gales that turn up from the Irish Sea wondering where to start the party. I am spending a fortnight here at the family home of Nigel, Cassie and their three kids, volunteering my time to do whatever needs doing in return for food and a warm welcome. Cassie is away this week so like any normal family the children are playing up, trying to wear down dad's defences and get themselves treats. The only unusual thing really about this family is that they live in a recently established eco-village called Lammas and so are trying to live off the land, off-grid, along with eight other residences.

The Lishmans have five acres of what was simply a big heavily-grazed field with a small conifer wood at the top. Over the three years they have been here it has been transformed into an attractive smallholding with a timber and straw bale roundhouse for hanging out in, an A-frame roundwood barn, a greenhouse made of lime-clad cob, a large vegetable garden and fledging fruit orchard, hundreds of coppiced willow stumps for their basketry rods business, a huge pit which apparently will become a swimming pool one day, a tiered grey-water system, a compost toilet under a canvas pyramid, several ponds, and various chickens, rabbits and ducks, the latter which waddle free all day getting under your feet in an endearing manner, although they get almost aggressively attached to you when you're out throwing feed to the chickens. Nigel and Cassie have clearly been very busy, so busy in fact that they haven't got round to building their actual house yet - they still sleep in a yurt.

Having volunteers stay with them must help a bit to keep things moving forward; certainly I've had no shortage of work thrown in my direction. The main focus of operations at the moment is the barn extension which will provide a solar-heated shower and a cubby-hole for visitors to kip in. The wooden frame for the extension is already in place but it lacks walls and a roof. Until Wednesday it also lacked a stable footing on the southern edge where the ground slopes away but this now has a dry stone wall made of slate below it helping to keep the foundations firm. Luckily it wasn't just me building this wall or I would never have a good night's sleep again wondering when I'd hear about the great eco-barn disaster; I was accompanied by two others, both of whom knew a thing or two about putting one stone on another in a stable manner. By the end of the day I was beginning to feel like I was actually helping rather than hindering. Probably a horribly flawed misconception I know.

Yesterday Nigel and I began selecting the three cross-beams for the roof from a large pile of timber he happened to have lying around, and cutting them down to size; soon enough we'll be whipping them up the scaffolding and slotting them into the roof frame. And whenever it rains, which it does fairly often it has to be said, I go inside the barn and carry on painting their yurt's many wooden struts, and myself to a large degree, with a red waterproofing tincture. 

Nigel is an ever-flowing fount of knowledge about many things, environmental, structural, social. I've learned a great deal from him in just these few days. Our first conversation upon my arrival was about the best design of a compost toilet. He's been very willing to answer all my questions about what it's like to live here and how it all works despite having to fend off constant demands and emotional outbursts from his offspring. I've discovered that all nine dwellings at Lammas are now provided with a decent amount of 240V electrical power from their own hydro-electric turbine; the Lishmans also have a small solar panel feeding batteries for their 12V LED lighting. Their water comes from a communally-owned spring, fresh enough to drink although they normally put it through a gravity-filter just in case. A wood-stove can heat the roundhouse but it doesn't take much heating, being incredibly well insulated. They are not self-sufficient in food but grow a fair amount during the summer months. 

Tonight I'll be heading to the "Hub Social", a weekly gathering at Lammas' communal roundhouse, and tomorrow I get a tour of the whole site by Paul Wimbush whose brainchild it all is, so stay tuned for the next installment of Eco-Village News.