2018 AD

Christmas Eve on a mountain in the Lake District

In the last year I have asked a woman to marry me, been accepted, married her, bought a house with her, moved in and got her pregnant. No one can accuse me of dragging my feet.

What will the next year bring? Well if all goes to plan Anna and I will be joined by a third person, a tiny screaming bundle of fun, in the early part of June. And that will be enough life changing moments for one year, thank you very much! (Let's try to forget the fact the UK is wrenching itself out of the European Union just a couple of months beforehand.)

A tiny froglet

Some other edited highlights of my 2018...

- in January becoming coordinator of Edible Mach community project (1 day a week contract)

- in February my Suzuki Jimny 4x4 finally rusted beyond repair

- in June concluded a year of teaching primary school kids how to grow veg with a cooking event where we cooked and ate what they'd grown

- in July and August interviewing and hiring our first three employees of Mach Maethlon to run the “Pathways to Farming” project

- in September a honeymoon in France where we first discovered Anna was pregnant (joy tempered by the realisation she should therefore stay off the French wine and soft cheeses!)

- in October attending Pilsdon's 60th anniversary party, playing keyboard to accompany the wonderful play acted by residents

- in November joining a peaceful protest outside Barclays Bank in Piccadilly Circus to raise awareness of their dirty fossil-fuel investments

- also in November joining a local and very active Extinction Rebellion affinity group

- in December helping to petition Machynlleth council leading to them declaring a Climate Emergency

I also grew a lot of vegetables and sold them through the veg-bag scheme, which incidentally we've changed to all-year-round to help retain customers, relying on organic wholesale throughout the winter months.

Our broad beans

I've carried on learning Welsh, teaching piano, doing paid gardening work, and dabbled with learning to grow vegetable seeds commercially through the Gaia Foundation.

So 2018 has been very much a memorable year, all told.

Wishing you all a very happy New Year and may 2019 somehow not be a complete disaster for all us Brits! Roll on a second referendum...

Bean There, Done That

Anna picked a few beans too

I picked some of my beans today and sold them to the local garden centre. They will sell them on, and the beans will be served up on the dinner plates of strangers, or who knows, perhaps an unwitting friend. 

Most of them, over 2.5kg, were runner beans. I have a hundred runner bean plants, all of the variety Scarlet Emperor. If you don't stop the runners when they reach the top they would normally flop over and trail down, but because my garden is encased in a giant protective net they reach up and cling to it, climbing through and producing beans way out of reach. Unless you have a harvesting ladder!

The seeds for the runner bean plants come from the Seed Cooperative, a new organisation in the UK committed to producing seed which is both organic and open-pollinated (ie naturally pollinated by insects or wind). They even tell you where their seed is grown - my runner bean seeds were grown at Ruskin Mill College, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire.

I sold nearly a kilo of green (or French) beans. Two thirds of these were the Cobra variety - long, thin, with a circular cross-section. What you might expect a green bean to look like. The rest were a heritage bean called Romano - flatter, slightly paler and shorter. The Romano bean seed was produced by local grower and friend Lynn, a couple of years ago, and passed to me at a seed-swap event, along with another called Bridgwater which I'm also growing - this is grown for the bean inside the pod, not the pods themselves, and a wonderfully dappled and colourful bean it is.

French beans dominating in the polytunnel

We need to know more about where our food comes from, but more than that - we need to know where the seed that begets the food comes from. Most seed catalogues will not tell you a thing about where their seed originates. Mostly it will be from abroad, produced in climates different from our own. They will have been optimised for the commercial growers, not for gardeners - for uniformity, not for taste.




I love eating my beans that grew from seed that came from Lynn's field, just down the road. I will save some seed and offer her some back. Each time we do that, choosing the best plants to take seed from, the seed adapts a little better to our local conditions. Take control of your own veg supply!

Late Submission

An awful, inexcusable, interminable amount of time has passed since my last post, back at the start of April. I say inexcusable, but we'll see as I'm about to offer a number of what I consider fairly reasonable excuses. Here they are:

1) I married Anna

Yes on April 7th there was a little wedding at Pilsdon Community in west Dorset. This was where we met as residential volunteers in the winter of 2015, and where we both feel a spiritual and emotional connection. The community were all invited and our families came and squeezed into the little church. After the ceremony, the sun came out on cue for the photos, then we had a home-made buffet in the manor house and walked it off with a mass jaunt up Pilsdon Pen. We were very blessed with all the generosity and love of the Pilsdon folk, letting us disrupt their rhythm in this way!

2) We bought a house

A slightly premature announcement as we actually complete in four days time. But all being well we'll soon be moving into a 19th century end-of-terrace cottage in a little hamlet called Forge, just one mile outside Machynlleth. It's a peaceful spot and backs onto a river in a gorge below. It's the first time either of us have bought a house so we've quickly had to get up to speed and engage with mortgage lenders, surveyors, estate agents, solicitors, and wood-stove experts. Lovely.

3) The drought

Normally by the summer you can start take a bit of a breather in the veg garden, as most things are in the soil and it's just a case of weeding and harvesting. Instead the almost complete lack of rain these last two months have meant a drudgery of watering - lugging watering cans to and fro in a ceaseless quest to prevent the poor plants from dying of thirst. In addition, the sunny weather has brought out legions of cabbage white butterflies who all laid eggs on my kale plants (of which I have nearly 100) so picking caterpillars off every leaf has also been an entertaining and never-ending task.
On the bright side the slugs have been almost entirely absent!

4) Work

Instead of a 5-day-a-week type of job where all your activities are to one end, I seem to have accumulated about 8 jobs, some paid, some voluntary, on top of the market gardening, all of which I have to juggle and squeeze into a week. On the plus side, I have an extremely varied work-life. There is barely a day when I just do one thing - e.g. on Thursday we went to work in the market garden, then I played organ at a funeral at 2pm, then returned to the market garden, and back to Mach in the evening to assist at a dairy-based workshop that I'd organised, making butter, yogurt and ricotta. And normally I would have taught piano that day, only they are away this week.

So the concept of leisure or "chill-out time" has become rather theoretical, or nostalgic.

5) Socialising

OK so it's not wall-to-wall work, we also find time to see friends. Mach is a small town and living in it means you bump into people, you get invited to things, it's not such an effort to arrange to have people come for dinner. All this is great. However it eats into valuable blog-writing time.

6) Learning Welsh

Every Tuesday morning during term-times has been taken up with the noble art of mastering Cymraeg. Dw i'n trio dysgu siarad Cymraeg ond mae'n anodd.

Am I excused?

Easter Fool's Day

Easter Sunday does not often fall on April Fool's Day but this year the two have coincided.

If you were to read the four original accounts of the event which Christians celebrate on this day, this unusual conjunction might not seem as incongruous as it initially feels.

Because in each of the accounts there is what appears to be a ridiculous April Fool. Jesus had been killed on Friday. Two days later, his small band of followers were still huddled in a locked room in Jerusalem, keeping their heads down and grieving the loss of their leader. It was the women who were brave enough to head off to the tomb that Sunday morning, to anoint the corpse with spices. It was the women who discovered that the corpse was no longer there. It was the women who had some encounter with angelic messengers. And in three of the four reports, it was the women who first met Jesus, returned to life.

My garden plan 2018

The women rush back to the men, burst in and tell them what they've seen.


This was not in the script. None of the rag-tag bunch of disciples had any idea they should expect this. “They did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense”. (Luke 24 verse 11). It was the first April Fool, as well as the first Easter Sunday.

In fact it wasn't even a very good April Fool because it wasn't very believable. It probably seemed like a joke in rather poor taste. If you're grieving the recent loss of a loved one, along with all your hopes of a radical new kingdom replacing the hated Roman overlords, the last thing you want is someone shouting “Wahay! It's OK I just saw him down at the Post Office. He's fine.” Because the one thing the Romans could be trusted to do was to make sure people were dead before they took them off their torture-crosses.

My oca are germinating

The accounts carry on in a mixture of confusion and joy. Jesus begins appearing to more people. He appears to two previously unmentioned disciples on a walk outside Jerusalem, and pretends to have no knowledge of recent events including his own death, before revealing who he actually was. He somehow pops up in the locked room where the male disciples were hiding and proves he is not a ghost by eating a piece of broiled fish. He shows them the crucifixion holes in his hands and the spear mark in his side.

It takes them a little while to accept that this man is their recently deceased Rabbi, quite understandably. Yet at no point do they argue, you are someone else, not Jesus. They recognise him from his features, his voice. And when they begin to believe it is really him, joy replaces grief.

New "staging" in the polytunnel 

This strange series of events is, for me, at the core of the Christian message. Unpacking what it means, for them and even today for us, is an exercise that can take a lifetime. Yet I'd recommend it to anybody. If you have a few moments this long weekend, have a read of those accounts for yourself. It's the last section of each gospel. You can find them here:

Matthew chapter 28
Mark chapter 16
Luke chapter 24
John chapters 20 and 21

Jostaberry buds

War (What Is It Good For?)

It is not every day you get to speak to someone living in a warzone. Not just someone who has experienced war, but someone who is actually right there in it. And not just some bored soldier on active duty in a fortified compound, but a civilian hiding in a basement from heavy bombardment. And not just any bombardment, but the horrific sustained bombardment of Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus that the UN chief has described as “hell on earth”.

We sat in a small room in Machynlleth's town hall, thirty or forty of us, whilst the call was set up. Amongst us were perhaps ten Syrian refugees, who now live in Aberystwyth and Newtown, who had come to this public gathering to testify and explain to us what was happening in their home country. We had just been shown the short film “The White Helmets” which followed a few men of the Syrian Civil Defence, the non-partisan first-responders who rush to the site of every plane attack and pull out the wounded, dying and dead. It was distressing to watch, but particularly so for the Syrians, one of whom told us he knew some of the people in it as it was filmed in his area.

One of the Syrian women had good English, having been in the UK since 2014. It was her idea to hold this event, and she took the role of spokesperson. She told us of the loss of hope that had kindled back in 2011, that now the tiniest of hopes that they had was to stay alive. She was so angry at the misinformation put about by Russia, tarring the White Helmets as partisan ISIS supporters and justifying Assad targeting them with bombs. Someone asked her how it was to live here, knowing what was going on there. She said it was so hard trying not to be constantly telling people about it, and that this evening was a chance to relate it to those willing to hear. She ended by saying how helpless she felt, that she could do nothing. To which someone replied no, she was doing something by speaking to us here.

The voice link was established over Facebook. No video, not enough bandwidth. The Syrian woman's friend was at the other end, in the basement. He spoke (in Arabic) matter-of-factly, without discernable emotion. We couldn't hear the bombs but I could occasionally make out a child speaking in the background. As his words were translated, we heard of the difficulty of getting food, water and medical supplies. The basement had nothing. Food prices were escalating out of reach. He asked for the West to send supplies and money. They were desperate.

It left me feeling ashamed on a number of levels - of our comfort, of our ignorance and indifference to the terrible need of others, of our Government's lack of meaningful action, of the peace and security which we take for granted.

But what to do?

One thing we can do is to make them welcome, those few who make it here.

Tinkling The Ivories

Happy St David's Day! or “Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus!” as it should really be said.

Happy, especially if you like freezing blizzards and howling winds. We are hunkered down with the wood burner, having only dared to step out of the house to run across the road to the Co-op for supplies. Tonight we'll be celebrating St David with a warming meal with our landlords who conveniently live in the same house as us, and then we might brave the weather to head down the high street to catch the vibes at the Open Mic night at the Quarry Cafe.

Snow and music have been the themes of my week.

Yesterday Anna and I were on my land which was doing its best to audition for a remake of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The soft whiteness transformed the place, and then the sun came out to make it all sparkle. We sawed and chopped the three big Christmas trees I felled last week to make the veg garden less shady. It was bitterly cold but we were quite toasty with the exertion. Pushing wheelbarrows of firewood up the steep track to the car certainly kept me from freezing.

After that I gave the weekly piano lesson to my neighbour's young daughter as I've been doing for a year and a half now. For the first time she tackled a C major scale with both hands! Playing the piano is so good for young people's manual dexterity. A recent news report lamented children's lack of ability to write with a pen since they are so used to tablets and phones. Pianos are an effective antidote.

And then back to Machynlleth in time for a bewitching Chopin event around a piano in the Museum of Modern Art. A local musician in his 20's, Tom McMahon, gave us renditions of his waltzes, mazurkas and nocturnes, interspersed by scholarly reflections on Chopin's musical influences. Now I know to play his mazurkas more in the style of jaunty Polish folk tunes! Oom-pah-PAH! Oom-pah-PAH!

We discovered in the pub afterwards that he and his friends have jam nights at the Friendship Inn in Borth once a month so we hope to head down there later in March. And we've also been invited to join a totally improvisional soundscape-style music event, where pieces are conducted and given a theme, but there is no tune, let alone sheet music. We could break new musical ground.

So the apple crumble's nearly ready. Stay safe and warm! Till next week...

Spring cleaning!

You Are What You Eat

Sprouting a few seed potatoes on the window-sill

We need to talk about our food.

First off let's remember where it all comes from. Farmers. Every edible item in the supermarket, every sweet snack in the newsagent, every guilty pleasure in the fast-food outlet, regardless of how ultra-processed it may be originates in a farm, or more likely a number of farms scattered across the globe. Farmers keep all of us alive.

It's sometimes difficult to imagine these places because we are so rarely exposed to what an industrial-scale "factory farm" looks like. They vary of course dependent on what the produce is, but most arable farms will be vast fields of a single crop tended by tractors and sprays. Then there are the meat and milk farms, producing the  flesh and secretions of animals which are increasingly being kept inside huge warehouses for their entire lives, and fish which are either farmed in underwater cages or trawled from the open seas often using massive indiscriminate nets.

A vegan chocolate truffle cake made at one of Edible Mach's recent workshops.

How are these farms managed? Why should we care? Because agriculture is creating such havoc to our living planet. Habitat destruction and pollution and chemicals causing sharp biodiversity decline. Degradation and loss of soil which has taken thousands of years to accumulate. Over-watering leading to aquifers and rivers drying up. Greenhouse gases from livestock driving climate chaos. It is our food, as much as anything, which is tearing our planet's ecosystems apart.

Secondly, what is our food doing to us? In the UK over 50% of family food purchases is “ultra-processed” (the study is based on data from 2008, but is unlikely to have improved since then). And a recent French study links ultra-processed foods to cancer. Diabetes is rocketing. The NHS is spending ludicrous amounts on dealing with the fall-out of the crap our British food system is churning out for us.


There are alternatives, and they are not necessarily expensive. They take a little knowledge and a little willpower to change our routines. As we're in the season of Lent, perhaps it's a good time to take stock of our eating habits. Here's a few ideas to try.

1. Choose organic produce where possible, or produce from local farms and growers. Join a vegbox scheme.

2. Cook from scratch rather than getting takeaways or ready meals. If you don't have much time, make a big turreen of stew and freeze portions of it.

3. Eat less (or no) meat. Once or twice a week makes it a treat. 

4. Eat more grains and pulses. Buy them in bulk to keep costs down (eg from Real Foods)

5. Teach children how to cook from fresh ingredients, at school and in our own kitchens. 

6. Eat with others if you can. Invite neighbours and friends over but not for an elaborate dinner party, just make it a simple and enjoyable meal. It might happen more often that way.

Any other suggestions?

Weddings demand a tie. But which one?

Might As Well Admit It

A snowy walk outside Mach

Back in times of lore (the 1980's) I was a committed subscriber to a monthly magazine called Your Sinclair. It covered, basically, ZX Spectrum computer games, a subject I had a particular fascination for at the time, and it did so with an irreverent editorial style which lives on in such rags as Private Eye (indeed one of the Your Sinclair staff writers went on to write for that illustrious paper). Issues came with a cassette taped to the front cover, bursting with playable demos of new titles and full games of a more trivial nature. I read it from cover to cover. I tracked the Top 10 game sales each month on my own handmade chart. I totally geeked out on it.

13 Feb: Sowing the first seeds of the year - broad beans.

Inside, games were reviewed and marked out of 10 but none ever got more than a 9 (“a YS Megagame!”). The ratings were also broken down by graphics, playability, value for money and addictiveness. It's that latter quality that was the most important. A game could be drawn badly, hard to play, and pricey, but if it had you coming back for more time after time, it was a surefire winner. You wanted to be addicted to a game, if you were going to fork out fifteen quid for one.

Sixteen pallets of compost arrives to be divvied up amongst local growers

Later during my software programming years at Symbian, I recall discussions of Symbian's various smartphone User Interfaces (UI's) and the absolute necessity for them to be “compelling”. The user must be compelled to keep using it, to be drawn back to the screen by the slickness of the way the controls slide across when you swipe.




Now of course we have various social media giants connecting us via our smartphones to each other on their networks. And they, surprise surprise, have made their products as compelling, or as addictive, as possible. Why wouldn't they? They want the advertising revenue. Any company would do the same. The only snag is, most companies' products are not on our person 24/7. At least with a game console you can put it down after a solid ten hours of play and head out blinking into the sunlight. Not so the smartphone. It is always there, somewhere, its bleep announcing either a vital new Facebook message or an utterly trivial “What's New” suggestion. You have to check it to find out which.

My Jimny on its last mission, bringing muck.

There's a media backlash right now, but the media will eventually tire. It's up to each one of us to regain a little control. Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, the start of the forty days of Lent, which some people mark by changing some aspect of their lives. I offer the suggestion of visiting your notification settings on your phone and switching your social media to OFF.

Facebook active users

We're All Going On A Winter Holiday

A long trench to electrify Pilsdon's fancy new greenhouse

This winter is the first winter since 2011 that I have not lived at the Pilsdon Community. Normally come mid-November I've packed up everything here in Wales and shifted my life south 200 miles. I have had two homes, two lives. A summer Swan and a winter Swan. Not till February would I pack up again and drive back up over the Severn bridge to resume my Welsh life.

I began doing this not only to avoid spending winters alone in a miniscule caravan, but also to keep my connection with Pilsdon. It is an antidote to everything depressing about modern life. A place where people live and work together, eating the produce they have grown, caring for the livestock, bearing with one another's quirks, helping each other through crises. People who have previously known only urban sprawl are immersed in the peace and birdsong of rural Dorset. 

It's been doing this for nearly 60 years. I've recently met someone there who was just back after a 30-year gap and asserted it was still very much the same as it was way back then.

Kale, sprouts and purple-sprouting broccoli are still producing in Pilsdon's garden

Now my centre of gravity has swung towards Wales. My better half has a permanent job here so we can't go both head down to Pilsdon for months at a time. The winter of 2016 I left her here and spent ten weeks at Pilsdon, this time round I've stayed put (and proposed). I am a full time resident of Wales.

We both wanted to return to Pilsdon though, at least for a week, and so last week we did just that. It was bendigedig (Welsh for 'wonderful'). We were put to work of course. I chainsawed through the remains of some logs. Anna joined a work gang creating a trench maybe 30 metres long from the Annexe to the new greenhouse at the end of the veg garden, laying an electric cable down it as they went. I drove the minibus on the Wednesday afternoon shopping trip. We both made meals (our home-made pizza went down very well). 

And we found time to make some wedding arrangements at the church there, the date for which is now not very far away. April 7th here we come!

Winter veg in my own polytunnel, a month or so ago before it all got eaten by something overnight.

Singing In Tongues

The toll bridge over the Mawddach estuary

Earlier this month I dipped my toe in the proverbial waters of a Welsh tradition called Plygain (pronounced Plug-aye-n). Every January around these parts, certain churches open their doors for a special evening service of unaccompanied singing.

The songs are old Christian carols, written in Welsh and performed in Welsh (Cymraeg, pronounced Cum-r-aye-g). The whole service is entirely in Cymraeg. The participants tend to be first-language Cymraeg speakers. The only reason I was there is that I attend one of the churches that hosts an annual Plygain service, and as a congregation we decided to put a small choir together and join in.

An inscription on our woodstore

By the time we'd got our act together and decided to do it, we only had about ten days left. We quickly scheduled some rehearsals. Hardly any of us speak Cymraeg to any great degree so we relied heavily on Roland the vicar (who can) for how to pronounce the lyrics of the two carols we chose. Fortunately a few of us knew something about singing and could read music so we were able to fit the four parts (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) together by the end of the first rehearsal. I was singing bass with Roland and a local farmer we'd drafted in. We were the weakest link. I realised that I had never actually sung in a choir before - and now I was doing it in Cymraeg before an entirely Cymraeg-speaking audience.

On the night Anna and I rushed to be there on time, she had to leave early from work in Aberystwyth. I was playing the organ too for a couple of congregrational hymns at the start so had to be prompt. Then the Plygain was declared open. There is no compere at a Plygain. Groups or individuals just get up as they feel appropriate, go to the front and launch in. However since we were the host congregation, we got to go first. Lucky us!

Some of my produce for the veg box scheme last year

It wasn't terrible. Neither do I feel we did ourselves justice. But we got through our song and sat down. No one applauds, or even smiles. This is a serious event. About thirteen acts followed, some of them absolutely beautiful. A half-time congregational hymn, then we all went again in the same order but with our second carols. No song can be repeated, even by a different group. If someone else sings your carol before you get to sing it, you have to sing a back-up one.

The finale was all the men in the church (including me) going to the front and singing a carol out to the women. I had no idea of the tune or what the words meant, but at least I had a lyrics sheet so I could mouth along. Which I had to do because I was in the middle on the front row.

It was a fascinating insight into a part of the local culture which is normally a closed book to the English. By this time next year my Cymraeg might actually have improved enough that I know (roughly) what I'm singing about!

A bean burger from an Edible Mach cooking workshop

R.I.P. Jimny

Jimny in 2013

 Those of you with long and sure memories might be able to recall an event five years ago which I committed to blogprint here. It was the purchase of my first car, a red Suzuki Jimny. Even then it was twelve years old but to me it seemed brand new. Everything about this 4WD worked well. It performed its principle function admirably - to tow my caravan from Devon to Wales and then down the steep and narrow track onto my land. 

Arriving onto my land

It has since been invaluable for bringing many trailer-loads of manure down that track onto my land, and taking many crates of fresh produce up that track off my land. Not to mention all the trailer-loads of felled wood going down and chopped and seasoned firewood going up. Its four-wheel drive let me leap up the slippery muddy slope with a careless laugh.

Sadly the years and the rain and mud have taken their toll on this fine workhorse. Last year I had to spend hundreds to get it through the MOT, with hours of welding required to patch up the rust which was spreading like a cancer through the chassis. This week it failed its MOT for that rust has continued to spread. You can see the road through holes under the back seat. Every wheel arch needs work. Last year's welding work would need to be removed and a whole week's worth of welding done. That's not counting the other failures - exhaust leaks, emissions breaking legal limits and an axle apparently a bit loose.

So it's time to say goodbye to my Jimny. A couple of people have said they'll take it off my hands. We still have Anna's little Hyundai to get to the land from town but we have to park at the top and walk down.

I'm in the market for another 4x4. I'll need it for this year's growing season. It can't be too pricey since market gardening is sadly not a rich man's game. Main criterion: no rust. Any tips you might have on buying such a vehicle, send my way!