Gut Instinct

"Rosakrone" pea flowers

Once upon a time there were no refrigerators. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.


People preserved meats by salting them and keeping them in cool dark places. Vegetables they kept for months through fermentation. The Scandinavians buried fish in the ground.

Pea plants are becoming a bit intimidating in the polytunnel

We have largely lost the knack of such things due to the omnipresence of the fridge in our cosseted First World lives. But cheap electricity may not be always with us. Maybe it's time we should reacquaint ourselves with some old-fashioned (self)-preservation techniques and give our guts a probiotic boost to boot.

I bought a couple of Kilner jars from the Co-op and a green cabbage.

Baby parsnip. Boy are they slow growing.

First step was to shred the cabbage with a kitchen knife. It wouldn't all fit in my bowl so I left some to cook up for a meal later.

Taking some salt I sprinkled a tablespoon over the shredded cabbage and mixed it all in.

Then I found a mashing implement (a wooden spoon) and began to mash. I could have done with one of those potato-masher utensils really. Bits of cabbage kept leaping out the side of the bowl and onto the floor but I carried on regardless.

Linseed plants begun to flower! I sowed them from the seed I usually sprinkle on my breakfast cereal

An interesting thing began to happen. The cabbage began to weep. Salty tears appeared at the base of my bowl. The volume of cabbage reduced by half or more as I pummeled it for ten minutes or so.

Into the jar it went, crushing it in, and only filling the jar by two-thirds. Enough juice had been released to cover the cabbage shreds, just about. I closed the jar and put it on a shelf.

That was Monday. I've opened it a couple of times since to push the cabbage down again because bits of it were above the surface, and my worry is the wrong kind of bacteria will develop on these bits.

Next Monday, one week after it was created, I'm going to taste my first homemade sauerkraut. If there's no more blogposts after this one you'll know why.

Who's In Charge Here?

OK everyone, what is going on?

The chap now in charge of the UK's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs attempted to remove Climate Change from the national curriculum in his former role as Education Secretary,  and has attacked the EU's Habitats and Birds Directives which currently protect our wildlife and natural ecosystems.

Potato flower

The blond chump at the head of the Foreign Office is a figure of ridicule to his counterparts across the world, so the UK becomes increasingly unable to maintain its standing in world affairs.

The Secretary of State for International Development has previously said she wanted this department to be abolished and replaced with a “Department for International Trade and Development”.

The Secretary for Health once co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be replaced with private insurance.

Foxgloves at the edge of my garden

And our Prime Minister, having called a general election on a whim which reduced her party's seats to below the number needed for a majority, is a humbled figure without the authority she needs to conduct the Brexit negotiations.

Somehow we find ourselves with the top positions in government held by the people least suitable for them at a perilous time for our nation.

George Monbiot warns us of a relatively new plant disease called Xylella fastidiosa which originated in South America but is now on our doorstep in France as well as other European countries. It affects both crops and trees and there is no known cure. There are 359 host species, and the international trade of live plants threatens to bring it into the UK.

A barrowful of comfrey leaves, ready for chopping up

Will Gove step up and take radical action? Will he outlaw all live plants being imported (with the exception of plants propagated in sterile conditions)?

This is a man who wants to strip away regulations not add to them, even if the threat is to our precious ecosystem which surrounds us and supports human life. No, business must continue! Growth, growth, growth! As long as we're talking about the economy not our trees and crops.

A binful of chopped-up comfrey leaves.
In a few weeks it'll have rotted down and produced a vile brown liquid which is one of the best organic fertilisers!

Gone Up In My Estimation

A riot of nasturtiums in my polytunnel

The art of estimating is crucial to the small-scale market gardener.


First there's the estimating that happens before the growing season begins. Plans have been drawn up as to which beds will have which veg growing in them. From that it's possible to work out the quantity of crops in total that will be produced from each, based on average yield per area for each type of veg. The next stage is to figure out when exactly those crops are expected to be harvested, across how many weeks. I end up with a beautiful spreadsheet that shows how many customer portions of each veg I will expect in my weekly harvest, for each month of the year.

Most of that veg will be going to the Green Isle Growers veg bag scheme, but not all. I make a version that's applicable to the scheme only, and share it with the group, as do the other growers. We make a combined spreadsheet so we know what the whole group can provide to the scheme, and then whittle it down through discussion to what would fit into fifty customer bags per week.

Sweetcorn in the polytunnel

The next estimating task comes once the scheme starts in June. Every Monday morning I have to assess exactly how many portions of each veg I can provide to the scheme on Wednesday. In an ideal world of course this would be the same as in the aforementioned plan but the unpredictable weather and the onslaught of pests makes it less than ideal. These figures are sent to the person doing the weekly ordering for the scheme (this year, it's me!), who may take all of it or just some of it depending on what's needed to fill the bags with a good variety of veg and fruit. It's vital to get these numbers right - if I overestimate how much I can supply, the scheme will suffer if I can't supply it.

And the final estimating comes at harvesting time, on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. I have to judge how much of each crop to pick that will constitute the right number of portions so I don't over-harvest and be left with more than I am allowed to sell to the scheme.

I don't always get these estimations right of course! I've been short of mange tout twice so far, having overestimated what I had, but luckily Ann had some extra that she could supply in place. But the more I estimate the easier it becomes. At least, that's the theory.

Children In Bloom

It's so easy for people in 21st century Britain to live our entire lives without ever being exposed to the origins of our food.

Those who live in urban areas may only rarely see a sheep or a cow, and the link between them and the packaged joints of lamb and beef on the shelves of Tesco's may never be more than cursorily dwelt upon. We might glance out of the train's window at the right time and glimpse fields of wheat or rape but have only the loosest idea how it is sowed, harvested, packaged, transported, processed, and end up as an ingredient in our kitchen.

A spread we laid on for people on the Big Walk that Eden Project is running

Then there are the vegetables and fruit that Eastern Europeans are harvesting for us in England's rich south-eastern soils, although whether they will still do this post-Brexit, and who will do this tough work instead, is another question.

Many of us will never have sown a vegetable seed in the ground, tended to the plant and eaten its produce. I certainly hadn't until I joined Pilsdon Community in my mid-thirties. I don't remember it ever being part of my education.

Which is why I jumped at the chance to teach veg-growing at a local primary school. Although not part of their official curriculum they believed it was important for the children to learn to grow their own veg and had applied for some funding to run a series of gardening workshops throughout the year, based in their own small veg garden.

My raspberries at the back, my comfrey at the front

The first one was last Tuesday morning. It had been raining all night but thankfully the heavenly tap was turned off just as we were beginning. Ffion* was assisting me, and could also speak Welsh which was the first language of most of the schoolchildren here. We got our first group of ten, along with a teacher, and played a game with them, first to see if they could identify pictures of veg (the ones we were going to grow!) and then to try to match the seed with the veg. The kids were refreshingly eager to answer questions and get involved.

We then went outside and began sowing that very seed, some in pots with compost and some direct in the soil. After labelling and watering, our session was up and they trooped back inside, whilst the next group got ready.

After four groups it was lunchtime and our work was done. We had sown beetroot and radish in a bed, planted sweetcorn seedlings, planted seed potatoes in planters made of car tyres, and sown squash, chard, runner beans, dwarf french beans and sunflowers in pots. The kids seemed to have enjoyed it. Let's hope the veg grows otherwise it might put them off for life!

* name changed as usual on this blog

Reach For The Sky

Potatoes of the "Alouette" variety, French for Skylark

Whoosh! Everything has shot up. The last two weeks of May has been warm and wet and all the plants on my land, both wild and tame, have reacted by reaching for the sky. Grass that was recently an inch high is now over a foot. Docks, nettles, brambles, and bracken are all exerting their dominance over the local landscape, making once easily-navigable routes rather more vexing.

In my garden, rows of lettuce have bloomed into young adulthood, having mostly escaped the risks of slug-kill in their infancy. Runner beans are wrapping their tendrils around the wild-harvested bamboo canes, and the climbing french beans aren't far behind. The hours of painstakingly planting out beetroot seedlings are paying off, as they are mostly settling in now and enlarging.

The outdoor mange-tout are flowering, whilst the polytunnel mange-tout are naturally further ahead, producing delicious pods. Chard leaves are becoming ready to pick, if a little slug-eaten. Kale plants are bedding in, only recently having been popped in the ground. Onions are slender stalks still but noticeably wider than before. Leeks are still much thinner. Some of the rhubarb is producing nice fat stalks, others have become much thinner and limper unlike last year's miraculous crop of wonder-rhubarb, possibly due to me picking it too far into the summer.

Sadly several of my young cabbage plants have been killed by the maggots of cabbage root fly. The leaves go droopy and discoloured - dig it up and you find the stem just detaches from the roots which are crawling with wriggly white maggots. I had covered the cabbages with mesh netting but too late I guess. The latest batch I planted out yesterday I covered immediately.

And where are my carrots? I sowed an entire 10 metre bed in April and there's barely a sprig anywhere. My suspicions lie with, yes again, the slugs. They nibble on the new growth. Perhaps they don't intend actually to murder my carrots. But I'll get them on a charge of carrot-slaughter.

The veg bag scheme begins this week! Tomorrow I'll be finding out what the other growers have to offer on Wednesday, and making up the spreadsheet which describes what each bag will contain. (Not all bags are the same due to the varying amounts of different types of veg that come in, but the job is to make them all equivalent.) On Wedneday afternoon the first bags will be available for customers to collect. Sign up here, there's still time!

Broad beans are beginning to produce tiny pods from the lowest flowers

Scaling The Heights

The peak is behind me, as yet unscaled. (By me)

It is called Yr Wyddfa in Welsh, meaning “the tomb”. It is believed that at least 350,000 people visit it every year. It dominates the topography in North Wales. It is the highest mountain in Wales at 1085 metres. Nowhere in England is as high.

Snowdon.

Having lived in Snowdonia for over four years I felt it was about time I hauled myself up it. All these hundreds of thousands of people were finding their way to it from all over the country and beyond, and it's only 90 minutes drive away for me.

Anna had a bit of time off work so we made a thing of it, booking a tent pitch for two nights at a campsite near the base of the mountain. We studied maps. We arranged for a massive heatwave. And off north we drove on Wednesday afternoon with the car jam-packed with all manner of objects of various utility for our quest.

We stayed at Beddgelert campsite, a beautiful wooded spot with tame rabbits lollopping about. Sadly it's threatened with being turned into a posh glamping site with chalets, you can object to the ongoing planning application here!


Thursday dawned clear and hot. The sky was a solid blue. We walked half an hour through a forest to Beddgelert itself, jumped on a bus, and were carried round to the east side of Snowdon along a spectacular route with views of glittering lakes, jagged peaks and sheer slopes. At Pen-y-Pass we alighted and joined a mass of people of all ages, each one intent on climbing the same route as us, the Pyg Track. It wasn't that much fun being part of this sweating parade but Anna saw a gap and went for it, overtaking a clump of older people on a steep corner, we pushed ourselves up with our hearts hammering and pulses racing, and found ourselves out front.

From then on it was quieter, only occasionally passing or being passed by other walkers with a cheery grunt. The peak came into sight after an hour or so. Suddenly a clattering sound broke the peace, it appeared to be coming from above. Was it the steam train? It stopped, then resumed. No, it was a drum. Someone was drumming at the top. It went on and on. Finally it gave up. As we approached the summit ourselves we met a small group of men carrying a large round covered object, all wearing T-shirts promoting a Northern Irish Children's Hospice Charity. Yes, they said, it was them.

The top wasn't quite as busy as we had expected. No queues for the last little climb up steps to the zenith viewpoint. A haze obscured the furthest vistas but the panorama was still impressive.

View from the top

After a peek inside the visitor centre which seemed implausibly like a plush airport terminal plonked in the middle of the wilderness, we began the descent westwards along the Rhyd-Ddu trail, so named as this is where you end up at the bottom. It was a gentler route on the whole, and less popular with the tourists. About 5 and a half hours after we'd begun the climb, we arrived footsore at Rhyd Ddu and toasted our victory with small glasses of beer from the village's one hotel.

We had been higher in the UK than we'd ever been before, and we were down in time for the bus back. Cheers!

Spot the odd one out amongst these sacks of rocks

Bridging The Gap

The weekend just gone was a sad one. It had two leaving parties, one in Machynlleth and one in Pilsdon, West Dorset. Much as I wanted to be at both, this is not (to my knowledge) possible. I'd previously arranged to head down to Pilsdon to wish farewell to Chris and Jane, long-standing members of the community, so had to miss saying my goodbyes to Sam at a Blossom Party on the Ffriddgate field.


It was also a happy one. Several other ex-volunteers returned to Pilsdon for the occasion and it was quite a reunion. It is always a pleasure to revisit the community and catch up with my friends there. The place is in full bloom, a feast for the eyes that I rarely get to appreciate on my winter sojourns.

Heading back home again on Monday after too short a stay, we shared the driving, Anna and me. I was behind the wheel as we crossed the Severn Bridge into Cymru (Welsh for “Wales”, pronounced Cum-ri). As always seems to happen I chose the slowest queue, and we sat there watching the driver in front fail to pay with his credit card and having to call an assistant with the button.

Eventually he seemed to be waved through without paying. I nudged forward and waved the contactless card past the reader, feeling ever-so-slightly smug when it worked first time. The barrier lifted. My smugness almost instantly vanished as I found myself unable to move the car forward. What was going on? I was in first gear. The handbrake was off. The accelerator seemed to work. But the clutch pedal wasn't behaving. It refused to go down!

Very aware of the cars behind us getting increasingly impatient, there was nothing we could do. I pushed the “help” button outside the car and a woman's voice came through the speaker. I told her the car wasn't working. She thought I said the card wasn't working so it took us a little while to get on the same wavelength.

Eventually someone turned up and were very pleasant to us. “It happens once a day” they said. The cars behind us were asked to find other lanes. The Highways Agency car arrived and towed us to the side of the road, having temporarily closed all the lanes on the left hand side to allow us to cross safely. I felt a little pang of embarrassment.

Cabbages are feeling safe from butterflies under this netting

As it was Anna's car, it was her breakdown recovery we had to rely on. After 45 minutes or so a chap turned up, winched the car onto his truck and drove us to the nearest service station where he spent quite a long time banging things inside the engine. If he couldn't fix it, Anna's insurance wouldn't cover anything else so we were facing the prospect of spending the night down here in a hotel and trying to sort something out in the morning (when Anna should be back at work).

Relief flooded through us as the repairman informed us he'd fixed it, although he didn't offer a 100% vote of confidence in the repair. “You'll probably be alright getting back” he said, “Just stay in fifth gear if you can”. So we drove the last 100 miles of the journey using the clutch as little as we could and were mighty glad to get home. 

The first runner bean plant to find its pole