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.

Swap! In The Name Of Love

In the wee hours of each and every Sunday night, at precisely the moment when the Weekend morphs into a Working Day and everyone's dreams are suddenly wrought with a sense of tedious desperation, something special happens in Machynlleth. A computer server kicks up a gear or two, whirrs to itself happily for a moment before blasting out hundreds of identical emails, each one marked for a different recipient, most of whom live locally. This is no spam server. This is the communication that people in Machynlleth jump out of bed early for on Monday mornings. For this mass email is Mach Swapshop.

It is in essence a little like Freecycle but rather than giving things away for nothing, people are encouraged to swap stuff. So if you're offering a desk but really need a chair, you can say so and someone else whose chair needs are over-supplied but are somewhat lacking in the desk department, would respond forthwith and the trade would occur at some mutually benefical time and place. Often of course the match is not quite so serendipitous, so people more usually settle for a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate, some ready cash, or if they're feeling really generous, nothing at all.

I have a huge radish

Swapshop also lets people do the reverse and put Wanteds ads in, again with the swap philosophy in mind. Upcoming events also get a section so anyone can advertise something they're involved with. In the last Swapshop email I count twenty events advertised, including such diverse activities as a pub quiz night (which I'm planning on attending), a children's book club, a one-woman play about Edith Nesbit, a planetarium show, arts and craft classes, the weekly public lecture Mach Speak (the forum I spoke at a few weeks ago), a children's halloween party and a taster session of Emotional Freedom Technique, Matrix Re-printing, Reiki and Indian Head Massage, to name but a few.

This week's Swapshop email was number 651 so assuming it's been going weekly all that time, I make that over twelve years of Swapshopping! It's definitely well used. There are probably between 30 and 50 things being offered each week. I've made good use of it myself so far, mostly to obtain things - a free-standing clothes rail, a water barrel for my polytunnel, net bags to hang melons from, a jack-to-audio cassette adaptor so I can listen to music in my caravan, lots of plastic pots for seedlings, wooden pallets for stacking firewood, and lots and lots of horse manure. But I've also used it to give away the decrepit old trailer-tent that was on my land when I bought it, to a couple who have since become friends (they're on my pub quiz team tonight.)

I'm concerned these 80 cabbages aren't going to be ready to harvest before I leave in two weeks

Not only is Swapshop all the above but there is often a pithy and uncredited mots de la semaine at the top of each email. I'll leave you with the latest one:

“Imagine if trees gave free wi-fi, we would plant them like crazy. It's a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe”

Wild Thing

An aspen leaf. It's had a good life wobbling in the breeze. Now it's laid to rest.

The nights are drawing in, and doing a bit of colouring in as well. A new carpet of orangey-brown leaves is being laid everywhere especially around my caravan where the aspens grow (they like to be the first to shed all their leaves). There was a spate of cold nights reaching 1.5 degrees C at the lowest. My fingers that morning were quickly numbed as I spent an hour picking salad leaves, I could barely tie knots in the bags afterwards.

It's pitch black by 7pm which means it's always dark by the time I've finished supper in the caravan and cycle up to my home. I tend to leave my bicycle parked near the top of my land's access track next to a majestic old oak. There's a hole in the bank just next to the tree at about eye-level and on Thursday as I reached for my bike my headtorch happened to shine directly into the hole and I was startled to see two eyes glinting back at me. They belonged to a mammal, quite a large one. I could see its front half. It had brown fur with markings on its face. It didn't seem fazed by my light but just stared back or looked nonchalantly off to one side. After almost a minute of this it eventually decided to retreat inside its den.

The polecat den is just after that large trunk on the left. You can't see it in this photo.

I'm pretty sure it was a polecat after an extensive Google Images search on my return home. Polecats are not so rare these days apparently though it's the first one I've ever seen. It's possible it was a feral ferret. Ferrets are the domesticated version of polecats and are very similar looking. They can also interbreed with polecats to create hybrid polecat-ferrets, also difficult to distinguish. But I think it was probably a polecat. I've reported it to the Vincent Wildlife Trust who are currently running their third 2-year survey of polecat sightings across Britain (dead or alive).

Otters are supposed to be living along the river here too. The ecologist who did my Preliminary Ecological Assessment in 2013 didn't find any evidence on my land but that didn't stop him writing of their probable existence in his report. Neighbours have said they've seen them further up the valley. But I've yet to catch a glimpse of one.

My entire sweetcorn harvest. Better luck next year.

What you really want to see here in Snowdonia is the pine marten. This is the second rarest British mammal after the wildcat. They're doing OK up in Scotland but here the population numbers are tiny and not growing. This has prompted the Vincent Wildlife Trust to boost the Welsh population by bringing a few down from Scotland and hoping they get on with the local Welsh ones. A few came last month and more are on their way according to this press release . It doesn't say exactly where they've released them but I'm hoping one wanders past my caravan soon. Camera at the ready!

Oh no! one of my two decent squashes has split

Beware the Gwyniad

The mice have paid the slugs to eat the bait before they are tempted to have a nibble

There is a lake twenty miles to the north of my home where the Gwyniad lives. 22,000 years ago as the last glacial period came to a welcome end this plucky little whitefish was left stranded in Llyn Tegid, or as the English prefer, Bala Lake. The species is found nowhere else on Earth now, or at least wasn't until a few years ago when some of them were scooped out and popped into a nearby lake. Some scientists had noticed that population numbers were dropping so it was thought best to double their chances of survival and give some of them a new home. Let's hope they make it to the next glacial period.

The town of Bala perches at the north-eastern corner of the lake where the River Dee flows out from it, off to Chester and the Irish sea. Apart from the lake, Bala has one high street and a church wherever you happen to look. It also has a reputation for being a bastion of Welshness. Welsh is the language you'd hear on the street. The parish church advertises a Welsh-language-only service followed by a bilingual one. All the signs are Welsh first then English.

One of the very few butternut squashes in my polytunnel

Luckily for me, it also has a ystad ddiwydiannol (don't bother trying to read that backwards, it's Welsh for industrial estate) with a unit that advertised chainsawing servicing and repairs. For my trusty saw, or should I say untrusty, had once again given up on me and, no doubt daunted at the remaining piles of wood that need sawing, simply refuses to start.

On Monday I made the journey to Bala choosing the scenic route which confusingly is also the direct route, being several miles shorter than going via Dolgellau. It does involve climbing over the highest mountain pass in north Wales, however, which is rather wonderful for its views at the top. You can even get out at a little car park there and once finished taking in the panorama, be informed by a small sign that test drivers of Austin cars used to hurtle along this self-same single lane track.

The wooden-steepled mediaeval church of Llanbrynmair which I visited for the first time last Sunday

So the chainsaw people took my chainsaw into the back and pretty quickly got it roaring away. A few minutes later it was back on the counter. “Yes it's fixed” said the man, “he's tuned the carburettor and replaced the fuel filter.” I handed over the required number of pounds and after a short mosey around Bala, went home. Of course, the infernal machine still refuses to start. I called them up and spoke to the guy who'd worked on it who told me rather gallingly that it had started pretty easily for him. I hung up. Thankfully in rural Wales, like deep space, no one can hear you scream.

The wood pile grows ever larger

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The bolted lettuces lift their arms to the rising sun in worship

As my axe swung down to split the round larch log before me, at the exact moment it made contact a shotgun blast went off just across the river making it feel like I had a far more powerful tool in my hands. This axe was dynamite! The wood didn't split though.

The sheer number of axe swings I've been making recently coupled with the fact that the pheasant shooting season is now open presumably makes it a statistical likelihood that the timings of axe thwack and gun shot will coincide once in a while. That doesn't stop it feeling like a miracle.

Count those rings. I reckon it's over 70 years old

Most of the eighteen big larch trees that were sectionally-felled by the council back in March as they improved the road barrier bordering my land are still lying around in intimidating piles. At least they were until a few weeks ago when I bought a new chain for my chainsaw which miraculously healed it of its inability to cut through anything, and since then I've been using all my spare moments to saw the large chunks into smaller chunks and then splitting them with an axe. Trying to get someone with a log splitter to come and do it for cash has proved fruitless so I've turned myself into a lumberjack. And I'm ok.

The split wood is being stacked on a series of pallets and covered with corrugated iron sheets to keep the rain off. According to this firewood-selling website larch only takes a few months to dry out properly. Then I'll be hawking it around the local wood-burning-stove-owning population.

This was taken a few days ago. It's now full. I'll have to start making it higher.

Talking of statistics (which we were a couple of paragraphs ago, unless you skipped it due to the utterly boring nature of statistics) a recent WWF/Unilever survey has shown that only 1% of us could correctly identify five common British trees - oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut. Now I don't know exactly how the survey posed the question but if it said “Here are the leaves of the oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut, can you identify which is which?” then if all respondents had answered completely randomly you'd still expect a 0.83% success rate (1 in 120). Let's round that up to 1%. So the survey is actually telling us that no one at all knows one tree from another. Time to get people out of the cities and into the woodlands.

A miniature mushroom woodland on one of my garden paths

All The World's A Stage

A tray of newly picked lettuce leaves ready for bagging up

In the first two minutes of sitting down at my computer on Monday evening I discovered that (1) Shell had decided to quit drilling for oil in the Arctic, (2) evidence for liquid water had been found on Mars, and (3) Facebook was down again, so I couldn't share any of the first two exciting bits of news on my favoured social media network. I thought instead I'd let you all know via the medium of this blog which has the advantage of allowing me to write the news in my very own words rather than simply posting links, but with the slight drawback that I'm not publishing the blogpost till Wednesday (official Mattswanoffgrid policy I'm afraid.) So that's why I'm so excited about what by now is two-day-old news.

However what you will be hearing for the first time here is the shocking truth that these two news articles are in fact linked. Shell only has so much budget to spend on damaging pristine environments but up till now was quite happy with its strategy of permanently scarring the northern icy cap of our planet. But suddenly the news broke in Nature Geoscience that there is water flowing on Mars. The top brass at Shell were unanimous. This was where they should be focusing their efforts. Imagine being in sole control of the supply of Martian spring water! Forget dirty oil, it'll all be gone soon enough anyway. Shell must get themselves into the extraterrestrial mineral water business to see its future into the 22nd century assured. The Greenpeace activists are going to have to get in some spacewalk training.

These are probably the only four of my red cabbages which will come to anything

In a way I was doing my own bit of activism last Wednesday on the windswept streets of Machynlleth. It was an “anti-austerity” event that had a slightly impromptu feel to it. A chap with a guitar was belting out protest songs into a microphone, a lady next to him was blowing huge bubbles that drifted ungainly over the heads of the shoppers before hitting a tree and popping. And then, at 11, a piece of street theatre materialised next to them. I was in it wearing a white robe.

The drama was a re-imagining of the story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. In short, two people ignore a beaten-up man by the side of the road, and a third helps him. The twist is that the first two are both religious types whereas the third is a despised foreigner (a Samaritan) who the original audience would never have expected to have helped one of them, a Jew, under any circumstance. The re-enactment went further than the Bible story and gave the characters a chance to defend their actions to Jesus (who was played by, guess who.) They poured scorn on the “Love your neighbour as yourself” message. The Samaritan flew into a rage at their “me first” philosophy and their fear of stepping out of comfort zones. Jesus didn't condemn but opened his arms to each of them.

A female squash flower waiting to be pollinated by a male flower. Sadly none of the male flowers have opened up at the same time.

In these times of government spending cuts many people are struggling to make ends meet. At the same time refugees are desperately trying to escape war and starvation. I've met people in Machynlleth who have cycled to Calais and given refugees their bicycles. Another friend gave up part of her holiday in Bupaest to help with handing out provisions to migrants. Surely these are the modern-day Samaritans.

Stop press! Crab apples found on Mars.