Breaking the Law

Edible Mach signs, on standby

Every Wednesday evening in Machynlleth there is a talk. It can be on any topic, given by anyone. It's free to attend, you just turn up. It's called Mach Speak and it's great.


On 19th September last year there was a Mach Speak titled “Climate Change: Why we are heading for extinction and what to do about it”. Someone called Roger Hallam was giving it, I hadn't heard of him. It was a provocative title. Anna and I decided to go and check it out. It was a provocative talk. 

Roger, an organic farmer turned academic turned activist, wanted a lot of people to get arrested for the sake of climate change. He believed the IPCC reports were too conservative, that things will get a lot worse a lot faster than they predict. He spoke of the extinction of the human race as a distinct possibility. He told us he was going around the country giving talks like this, calling people to civil disobedience in order to bring about change. It was all going to begin in November, he said, and wanted to take our contact details to join the Extinction Rebellion.

A pianist on a bicycle at a recent Seedling Saturday

It's not often you're challenged to break the law for the sake of your conscience. It was true that too little is being done to avert climate breakdown and the sixth great extinction, but would I go to prison for it?



In October a group of us began to meet each week, as a local “Affinity Group” of Extinction Rebellion. Quite a large group of 15 to 25 each week. Clearly Roger's words had made an impact, even though we were not all clear about what Extinction Rebellion actually was or whether we were all totally aligned with its aims and methods. We decided that we would organise local awareness-raising events that would be (more or less) law-abiding, but also encourage and support those who would join in with the national actions planned in London.



Just six months later, Extinction Rebellion (XR) is becoming a household name. It's all over the mainstream news. Michael Gove is meeting XR representatives this week to discuss their demands. And how? Because Roger Hallam and others have inspired a new movement of people who are not afraid to block central London for days on end for the sake of getting attention on the biggest issue facing this world. I can hardly believe it is happening, but it is.

Trees above the Dolgoch Falls coming into leaf

What are their demands? 1) The government tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency. 2) The government act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. 3) The government create and be led by the decisions of a Citizen's Assembly on climate and ecological justice.



I can't see Michael Gove agreeing to all of those straight away but it'll be very interesting to see what happens next. We are at an extremely important point in history for the sake of all life on earth. Let's get involved and be part of the solution.

Lullaby in Birdland

On an Edible Mach volunteer session

We sat at the breakfast table eating our porridge. It was 7am. Through the window we gazed at our usual view, the leafless trees on the other side of the steep river bank partly obscuring the neighbour's sloping garden. Crows cawed and flapped above a distant oak.

Suddenly two pied wagtails flashed into view, spiralling together up from the water below, and then they were gone. A few seconds later they were back, black-on-white, white-on-black, spinning round each other, one chasing the other or possibly the other way round. They landed in next door's yard and we had to avert our eyes from what happened next.

As we were scraping our bowls they reappeared on our newly-constructed picket fence, one picket apart, shyly looking the other way, enjoying each other's company. We marvelled at their differing plumage, one having a black bib, the other a brilliant white strip on its tail.

Had that been all we would have been well content. But out of nowhere a grey wagtail appeared, perched on our nearby wall just a few feet from our window. Despite its name it has a glorious yellow belly which it seemed to be enjoying showing off. It had no partner with it unlike its pied namesakes in the background.

After all that excitement, the robin that swooped in afterwards was sadly not given nearly as much attention. Poor little redbreast, far too common a sight around here!

The wonder of it all, none of these avian miracles appeared to be aware that Britain is exiting the European Union. Or if they are, it's not clear they are fully cognisant of the risk that the humans in this country might end up relaxing the rules that currently (to some extent) protect our wildlife. If there is a second referendum, I hope Britain's birds are given a vote.

Coffee and Climate Cake

My home in Forge, on the left, with the Dyfi Valley beyond

What is the appropriate response to the knowledge that us humans are the cause of the ongoing sixth “mass extinction event” in the Earth's long history? Just over a year ago 15,000 scientists signed the second World Scientists' Warning to Humanity (coming 25 years after the first), more than any other journal article ever published. In it they state “we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

Look the other way? Hope someone is doing something about it? Feel smug because you always do your recycling? Or give up because it's too late for us to do anything about it?

Anna constructing a fence in our back yard to prevent people plunging down into the shallow river 

Perhaps there is something we can do. A new movement called Extinction Rebellion (XR) has appeared and it is calling for massive change. It caused the centre of London to grind to a halt last November leading many to be arrested in the hope of bringing this issue to the centre of our nation's conversation. We can expect more civil disruption this year. XR's three core demands are

- the government tells the truth about the climate/ecological emergency

- the government enacts laws to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 and reduce consumption levels

- creation of a national Citizen's Assembly to oversee the changes.

You can laugh these off as hopelessly unrealistic. But if drastic action is what is needed to avert a calamity, then that must be what is called for, realistic or otherwise.

I've joined the local XR group in Machynlleth which is getting 20 or more people each week turn up, buzzing with ideas. Some of us have joined in with the big events down in London. We helped organise a petition which led to Machynlleth council declaring a Climate Emergency, the first town in Wales to do so.

People queueing up to add post-it notes at our Climate Coffee Morning

But we're also wanting to do things locally, and yesterday we held a “Climate Coffee Morning” in the church hall. A hundred people turned up!

The focus was on how climate change is affecting us here in the Dyfi Valley and what we can do about it.  We had two short talks from a scientist and Paul Allen from Zero Carbon Britain, some Q&A, and then lots of chat over coffee and cake, whilst some wrote ideas on a board for ways we can work together to tackle the problems.

It was a fantastic event, and so encouraging to see people from different parts of the community come together to discuss this terrifying threat to the existence of much of the beauty and diversity of life on earth. Including ours.

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