One Man Went to Sow

The Crab Apple tree coming to blossom

I used to work in Soho, now I just sow and hoe.  OK we've got the outrageous pun out of the way, on with the show.

The minimum temperature has remained well out of the danger zone (i.e. freezing)  long enough for me to throw caution to the wind and start sowing seeds outdoors in earnest. Beautifully dark purple centimetre-long French beans are now buried in serried rows, four abreast. The off-white tiny knobbly seeds which have the spinach gene encoded within them have been packed in tight rows just a few centimetres apart, as none of them will grow very large before I snip their baby leaves off. They will all have another couple of goes at growing back, thus hopefully providing me with a plentiful supply throughout the summer.

A young oak in the wilder part of my plot

In another raised bed I've followed a similar strategy with salad leaves – a couple of types of lettuce, naturally, but also cultivated rocket, chard, and mizuna. This latter leafy plant hails from the oriental shores of Japan and is apparently pretty useful when attempting to grow salads in the autumn or winter as it, along with several other Japanese salad veg, seems to thrive in those cooler and shortening days.

 

My garden showing signs of new shoots of growth

I found a packet of mustard seed I'd acquired at Seedy Sunday back in March and decided to sprinkle it on the area ear-marked for my leeks which are still slowly growing in their cell-trays in the greenhouse. Mustard is a fast developer and so it should have sprouted in two or three weeks. Rather than attempting to harvest it I'm planning just to dig it all back into the soil a little while before the leeks get planted out, which gives the worms more to eat. The happier the worms are the better. This technique is using mustard as a “Green Manure” (as it's known in the gardening trade) which to me conjures up an image of a defecating cow that has something badly wrong with its gastric system.

 

The Scots Pine plantation can look a little spooky

Yesterday the temperature soared as the sun beat down mercilessly on all those of us toiling in the field. I took the opportunity whilst the soil was warm to sow more seed – beetroot this time, and runner beans under their recently-erected bamboo frame.  The garden is pregnant. It's hard to comprehend that simply by placing these small seeds a little below the earth and adding water, they will somehow realise that it's time to mutate into huge plants a hundred or thousand times larger than they are. And they do it in a matter of weeks.

 

Acorns I planted last autumn in leaf mould, of which two are now sprouting

Once they have done so, they will be merrily robbed of their edible parts by, well, me, which I will then attempt to hawk at various outlets for hard cash. On Monday I spoke with the head chef at the Brigand's Inn, a gastropub just a mile down the road, who it turns out is very keen to use local produce and would much rather use whatever I can offer than importing veg from miles away. Hopefully if we can come to an agreement on price, a discussion yet to be had, this could be the closest and most convenient way to sell my wares.

The brambles I cleared last autumn finally bite the dust. And become dust.

We're All Going To The Zoo Tomorrow

It's St George's Day and it seems people in Wales celebrate it as much as the English – that is, not at all.  However Easter was, I believe, celebrated by the Church of Wales and in fact the ancient stone church not far from me was used for an actual service on Good Friday, a fact I only discovered on Easter Saturday. It seems to have at most one or two services held there a year. I wasn't too put out at missing it though, as not only would it have been the 'miserable' service remembering the death of Jesus (as opposed to the 'joyful' service on Easter Sunday), it would have been conducted in the Welsh language, a tongue I have yet to master I'm ashamed to say.

Easter Sunday was instead marked by a dinner at Kelly's* where several of us brought vegetables of various kinds and Kelly cooked them all up into a veritable feast of colours, tastes and sounds. (OK maybe we had to make the sounds.) An Easter bunny made of chocolate was smashed with a spoon and distributed amongst us. I guess this ritual will have to do for this year.

Livingstone I presume?

Last Thursday and Friday, or Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to give them their full titles, I seemed to spend entirely in the car driving here and there with trailer attached collecting useful stuff. First off it was over to the nearby caravan park to pick up a backlog of about fifteen sacks of fresh horse manure, plus five bags of the well-rotted stuff. Having tipped that onto the ever growing pile on my land, it was over to Esgair woodland near the Centre for Alternative Technology with Belinda** and a pair of secateurs to harvest two hundred bamboo canes, beautifully striped green and white. Apparently the woodland owner doesn't mind as they are considered an invasive species. Now I have half of them constructed as a runner bean frame along the length of one raised bed; the rest soon to become a duplicate frame on the next bed along (I have to grow a LOT of runner beans for the veg bag scheme.)

Two hundred canes - for free

Now it's a simple matter of growing the beans

The next day, a hot one, I was up early and driving nine miles due west over the mountain pass and through the Dyfi Forest to get to the goldmine of horse muck – a couple who own about twenty acres and three male horses have over time accumulated tonnes of manure, much of which is now wonderfully dark and crumbly, and they were desperate to get rid of it. It took all morning and into the afternoon to make two round trips but I ended up with a polytunnel half-full of the stuff, having made only a slight dent in their pile.  After a quick bite for lunch I was off again, this time to a pig farm near a village blessed with the name Arthog. (I wonder when it lost the initial W?) Peter*** came along to make the introductions. They had a load of decking timber they no longer wanted, and seemed glad to let me take as much as my trailer could cope with, i.e. not very much. I've been a bit wary of it since a small part of its floor fell out a couple of weeks ago. Still, I took away seventeen 240cm lengths which I will use either for lining the path down the polytunnel or making sides for one of the raised beds.

A couple of woolly pigs on the pig farm

The decking timber made it back to my land

It's a good feeling to see this place slowly coming together, piece by piece. The polytunnel is all but complete, with just a couple of doors to finish off. The seeds are growing, encourage by the recent warmth and now some rain. Now all I need is the huge net to protect my garden from the pheasants; the gamekeeper has promised one but it has yet to appear, so at present each area I sow in I have to protect with a makeshift cage which gives my garden the appearance of a vegetable zoo.  Hmm, do I detect a revenue opportunity?  Bring your children this summer to the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo! It might just work.

The Mange-Tout Enclosure in the Mid Wales Vegetable Zoo

* Not her real name.

** Also not.

*** Nope.

The Darling Buds of April

A shaft of morning sun broke through the dense conifers on my steep bank and lit up a patch of bluebells, not yet flowering, as I made my way down to the stream edge to fill up my watering can. Having emptied it over some broad bean seedlings in the garden, I returned to re-fill. The ray of light had already moved along to illuminate an otherwise unremarkable pile of dead branches in the undergrowth. The sky was a brilliant blue above. Birdsong filled the air. The water was icy cold. It wasn't yet 8am and the day ahead was full of promise.

I went to check how my tadpoles were doing.  I first found the frogspawn two or three weeks ago bobbing around in a large puddle that forms whenever it rains hard, and have been monitoring their evolution ever since. The spawn has released hundreds of the wriggling young things and they are now each a couple of centimetres long. Last week's heavy rainfall had enlarged their home but in the subsequent dryness it has shrunk again leaving dozens stranded in outlying pockets of water. As my parents were visiting I gave my mother the task of topping it up with the watering can. The cold stream water bursting in on their warm puddle must have been an unprecedented shock in their young froggy lives but should also give them an extra lease of life.  I wonder when they'll grow legs and hop on out of there so I can stop worrying about them.

A Red Kite drifted into view from over my neighbour's tall firs, low enough to make out the patterns on the underside of its huge wings. It soared slowly overhead as it scoured my land for any animal corpses to pick at. This beautiful bird eats carrion by preference. It saw nothing but picked-clean pheasant bones scattered here, and disappeared off west. Later the same trajectory was followed, almost at the same altitude, by a couple of fighter jets that roared past one after the other down the valley, wings tipped almost at 90 degrees, leaving the pheasants squawking indignantly.

That night over the same neighbouring fir trees, a full Moon rose up through them whilst to the west the black silhouette of the hills gradually merged with the gathering gloom. The planet Mars hung above the white disc and Jupiter glowed high up in the southern sky. With no clouds around the Moon lit everything up, no need for torches. It was an other-world, a ghostly version of my garden, complete with spectral polytunnel and greenhouse, that we inhabited for a while. Peering through the telescope, first half-blinded by the brilliant Moon, we then focused on the planets with more success and picked out three of Jupiter's moons, the fourth (of the big four) presumably obscured by the planet itself.

The next day, a walk in the steep hills that line the Dyfi valley. Everything baked in the surprising April heat, including the bloody remains of a lamb that the Red Kites hadn't finished with yet. Chaffinches, blue-tits, lapwings, flitted in the trees about us. A birch tree clung to the edge of a slate escarpment next to the path, its exposed roots clearly following fissures in the rock to the soil three metres below. We could look down on the fighter jets apparently skirting the valley floor at supersonic speed.  Butterflies of varying hues perched on nearby twigs not quite long enough for photographs to be taken. A lamb with one black eye patch gazed our way whilst performing a yoga stance with its hind legs pushed out in a stretch, held for several seconds, before relaxing and nonchalantly wandering back to its mum.

Spring is happening and I am in the middle of it. There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now.

Wet Wet Wet

A baby squirrel lay lifeless but beautifully composed at the top of my entrance track.

Water. Wales is full of it. It gushes down the mountains, courses along the valleys, pools up wherever there's some kind of dam whether artificial or natural, and frequently drops straight down onto our heads from the heavy clouds above.  Even last July when there were nineteen consecutive rainless and hot days the stream on my eastern boundary blithely continued to flow down to join the river, albeit with somewhat reduced vigour. There must be some juicy aquifers up in them there hills.

The blackthorn thickets are heavy with white blossom which is just beginning to fall now

The last few days have been particularly wet. I once led a lifestyle that was so indoors-centric I considered rain to be a minor inconvenience to be warded off with an umbrella as I scuttled from home to office to pub to home. In my last job it was impossible from inside the office to tell what the weather was doing as the darkened windows faced a narrow alley. Of course rain was something of an irritation as it apparently served no purpose in a city other than to make the pavements slippery and to form puddles for buses to splash you with.

Out in the verdant wilderness of mid-Wales it's abundantly clear what the rain is for. Not only does it keep all the watercourses thrumming merrily along which are home to the fish, insects and other creatures that live within and around them, it also brings life to the myriad kinds of vegetation that populate the countryside – the trees, the wild flowers, the grasses, the ferns and mosses, and hopefully the edible plants that I am nursing into existence.

Welsh paddy field

Naturally it turns my flat plot of land into a swamp. There is a cunning little stream that comes from the hill right behind my caravan that is rarely actually there, but given a good 15mm or more of rainfall it suddenly appears and trickles down into my caravan's awning, rendering the ground inside sodden. A few weeks back, armed with a spade, I picked a spot some metres up the slope and diverted this rivulet away from the van which seems to have done the trick, but the water still has to go somewhere. After the recent deluges I have begun to consider creating a paddy field. Welsh rice anyone?

One of the wonderful characteristics of a polytunnel is its ability to prevent rain from entering and as such is the perfect place to be while the heavens are throwing down everything they've got. 686 square feet of pure dryness. Not only that but I've discovered that I can get decent radio reception by resting my portable radio's aerial against a polytunnel hoop, thus turning the entire structure into one vast antennae.  I can now dig over the soil inside to the strains of a Tchaikovsky violin concerto – what greater contentment is possible? Sadly every now and then my wheelbarrow becomes full of the rush-roots-infested soil I was removing, so then I pull my hood up and venture outside into the driving rain, heaving the barrow through forty metres of waterlogged mud to the bank I was tipping it onto.

Inside the polytunnel, manure is added to the turned-over soil

As for the polytunnel itself, it's not complete yet but progress has been made. I was stalled for a while as I needed an extra pair of hands to help with the battening of the polythene sheeting to the wooden frames at the ends, but yesterday Peter came over and we got it done, in return for which I footed his ladder as he went up a neighbour's house and repaired the chimney. No need for money to change hands when we can barter with our time and energy!

With A Little Help From My Friends

Some tasks require you to wrap your brain in knots to figure out how to achieve the desired result, but once solved in the mind the execution is relatively simple. Many planning exercises and logic puzzles fall into this category. Others are the opposite; it is quite simple to comprehend how it should be done but the devil is in the implementation.  Erecting a polytunnel is most definitely this latter type of job.

  

For instance the first page of instructions require you to push into the ground sixteen metal pipes, each 61cm long, two straight rows precisely fourteen feet apart, at exactly seven feet intervals, leaving just 10cm of each one poking up. The manual cannot overstress the importance of getting this right as otherwise you end up with a wonky-looking tunnel (not in these exact words of course). So I spent what seemed like days messing around in the mud with long stretches of twine to form diagonals which never seemed to quite match up, fiddling with a tape measure that was too short (5 metres) and which quickly broke anyway, whacking these pipes into compacted clay ground with a hammer over a piece of timber, several of which hit underground rocks that I had to dig out and then start again, whilst trying to re-locate the exact right spot for the pipe.  The ground was reasonably level but not quite, so of course none of the tops of the pipes were precisely the same height as each other – something the manual didn't even bother to warn about.

 

Then Thursday and Friday I had Peter over to help me make the hoops up, fit them on the pipes I'd eventually bashed into place, connect them all along the top with the ridge pipes, fasten up all the bracing pieces, door rails and crop bars, then build the wooden door frames and fit them in place. In a perfect world these door frames would be exactly aligned with the plane of the end hoops; sadly I don't live in a perfect world, and I have a feeling that once the sliding doors are on they will not slide quite how they are meant to.

Anyhow the big day arrived, Saturday. My first Volunteer Day. I had five volunteers in the end, three who drove up from Machynlleth and two from Dinas Mawddwy (Peter and a young lad he'd convinced the night before in the pub). The main goal: to put the polythene skin on the frame. It was a warm and sunny day, a relief since you cannot do this in the wet - the anti-hotspot tape wouldn't stick to the metal.

I first got some of them fitting the horizontal low wooden rails on both ends that the doors are supposed to rest against, while two others tightened all the nuts they could find. I made the tea and flustered around. In the midst of all the activities my neighbour turned up in a huge dumper truck with a gift of a mountain of horse manure which I'd agreed to take off his hands, and after the second load he found he couldn't get the machine back up my muddy track, it kept slipping off sideways. This was a big problem. I sawed down a young tree that had been getting in the way slightly, and he tried again whilst I held my breath – this time he just about made it, swearing never to bring the thing back down ever again.

The time came to put the polythene on. It was unravelled lengthways and laid next to the frame. We couldn't open it out fully due to the nearby thicket of blackthorn, but this wasn't a problem. Taking two corners it was pulled up and over and despite an inopportune gust of wind which ballooned it up threatening to lift us all up with it, we got it over and held down.

The tricky bit was getting it level in all directions and keeping it level while we tightened it lengthways, battened it at each end above the door frames, then tightening one side into the trench while it was re-filled with the soil, and doing the same on the other side. At least once we had to unfasten battens and re-tighten, and undig part of the trench to re-level it crossways. All exhausting and quite disheartening as the skin continually refused to become properly taut across the whole length. Tempers flared occasionally. We were all hot, muddy and tired. It took a lot longer than any of us expected. But by 5:30pm we had got it fixed down, except for the ends which will have to wait for another day. We could finally stand back and admire our handiwork.

Not much more has been done to it yet as I've been sowing seeds and entertaining my friend Claudio who had come all the way from the Amazon to see me and my land (and others too, I suppose). But with the skin on, it looks serious. I am the proud owner of a 49-foot polytunnel and am raring to get growing in it.

Makin' Plans

A walk up a wooded hillside two miles from my land

Let me tell you a little more about the sorts of things I'm hoping to grow this year on this patch of earth in mid Wales. The soil itself is crucial to the successful growth of any plant which is why I've been spending months trying to get it into a state which most vegetable plants will appreciate – namely not too waterlogged (hence making “raised” beds so excess water will drain downwards past their roots), containing lots of vital nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (so I've been mixing rotted horse manure and organic fertiliser throughout the earth which is packed full of these elements and others), and around 6-7 on the pH scale (a test last year revealed it was pH 5 so I've been adding hydrated lime to make it more alkaline.)

There are twelve raised beds so far, each ten metres by 1.2 metres, with paths between them. By the end of this season I hope to have made twelve more, which would fill the long rectangular growing area so next year I'll have twenty-four of them to play with. You may already know I have a small greenhouse which is now home to many young seedlings, and am currently in the process of erecting a polytunnel, roughly fifteen metres by four metres, where the warmth-loving types of veg will go – tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, butternut squash plus some leaf salads. There's also a corner of the garden where I've planted eight blueberry bushes which apparently love acidic soil, so they should be in their element.

Two of the raised beds are devoted to perennials, i.e. plants that stay put and keep giving fruit each year. As I mentioned in my last post I've chosen rhubarb and asparagus, but neither will provide any fruit this year as they establish themselves. That leaves ten beds for this year's growing.

Horse manure queuing up to go onto the beetroot bed

Garlic nearly fills one raised bed. I planted the cloves last October and made an attempt to protect them over winter from ravenous pheasants by staking a fence around the bed but on my return I discovered most of the young shoots had been nibbled to the quick. A net now covers them but I don't know if they will fully recover.

On either side of the garlic will go leeks and carrots, one bed each, and next to the leeks will be a bed shared between courgette and butternut squash. Runner beans will take up the largest area, of one and a half beds; the remaining half is to be occupied by cabbages, which spill over onto the bed next-door as well, sharing that one with broccoli.  Baby spinach is to take an entire bed, and beetroot will take another. Finally one raised bed will be devoted to broad beans, french beans and yellow mange-tout.

Some of the decisions on what to grow were taken on suggestions from Katie who is running the veg bag scheme that I'm supplying to, but mostly it's a mix of foodstuffs that I like to eat and enjoy growing. If all goes to plan I'll be feeding myself from it all and with a bit of luck, selling the rest to Katie and other outlets.

The polytunnel begins to take shape

This Saturday is my first “volunteer day”, as Katie has sent out a mass email calling for volunteers from Machynlleth to come up to help me to put the skin on the polytunnel, so I'm working all hours to get the frame up and the trenches dug on either side where the edges of the skin will be buried under soil to keep it in place. And of course my electric drill now has to run out of juice on a site with no mains supply...   Watch this space to find out if we made it!

Easy Like Seedy Sunday Morning

Seeds of frogs.. or toads?

 It was a fresh bright Sunday morning in Machynlleth. Birds swooped and sang in the sun, the odd butterfly preened in sheer delight. This wasn't just any Sunday however.  It was the day of the legendary annual event known as Seedy Sunday.  The good people of Mach congregated at the school hall bringing seeds of all kinds, both flowers and vegetables, to swap amongst themselves. I was there as a volunteer, manning the seed-swap table.

Some of the packets had originally been bought commercially and presumably been surplus to requirements. Others, more interestingly, were completely home-made – both the packet and the seeds within. With utmost care and diligence, people had allowed some of their vegetable plants to flower and “go to seed” rather than simply harvesting them to eat, then collected the seeds, dried them, and tucked them into little paper bags inscribed with the type of vegetable, variety, year, and occasionally instructions on how best to sow them.  I looked inside a bulky one marked “carrot” and found a selection of beautifully intricate pale brown candelabra-shaped dry seed-heads, each carrying a vast number of seeds and each one from a single carrot.

Why do people go to this trouble when seeds are not that expensive to buy? Aside from the social aspect of meeting others who are into growing stuff, it's partly about preserving varieties that would otherwise pass into obscurity. Commercial seed growers seek to make profits by creating and patenting new supposedly better hybrid varieties of vegetables (the seed name has “F1” at the end) but which are “mules” – any seeds these plants subsequently produce are useless, so instead of seed-saving you are forced to buy new packets each year. Seed swaps allow non-hybrid, or “open-pollinated”, varieties to be perpetuated – these are the old varieties that have in some cases adapted to regional climates. 

The EU is presently attempting to pass a law that could spell an end to these heirloom varieties, as it forces every seed-seller to pay an annual fee to keep each variety on its enormous “approved” list. It will be illegal to sell a seed variety not on this list.  And it will not be economically viable for any company to register the thousands of heirloom varieties every year, given the relatively small market for each (compared to those sold to industrial-scale farmers).

On an earthier note, I've found a whole load of frogspawn bobbing around in a muddy ditch which had filled up from the rains a fortnight ago. Wildlife carries on reproducing with scant regard for human law-making. Throughout the dry period since, the pool has steadily shrunk threatening the very lives of these tiny frogs-to-be so I've been topping it up occasionally with water from the stream. Now it's raining again I can relax.

Carrot seeds in place

I've been sowing some of my seeds this week (which I'd bought from Real Seeds who only sell non-hybrid): lettuce, broad bean, tomato, carrot, leek and cabbage, all in cell trays in the greenhouse except the carrot which has been boldly strewn on the soil itself. Yesterday twelve rhubarb crowns and sixty asparagus crowns arrived in the post (including three rhubarb crowns I'd forgotten to bring with me from Pilsdon that were kindly forwarded!), which I have already begun to bury in the raised beds. Roll on 2016 when I might with luck be able to sample their delights!