Hiss!

I’m an Irish boy. I don’t mean that as a statement of patriotic fervour* but merely as a statement of fact; I grew up in Northern Ireland and moved to Blighty when I was nineteen. The difference in plant and animal species surprised me – I had never seen the excruciating yellow of a field of rape before, nor the powder blue of cornflowers – and sometimes they still catch me out. The occasional visit of a glow worm to our garden causes me to vibrate with excitement, and although I have got used to the newts that live in Witchypoo’s pond the slow worms who inhabit the Slope still fascinate me.

There’s no doubt that our efforts to increase biodiversity in the Hollow are paying off, but now and again this brings me into contact with beasties I’ve never seen face-to-face before, which can be a little traumatic for all parties. Yesterday was a case in point.

I was in a nippy mood as I passed through the polytunnel, so I nipped out unwanted sideshoots on the tomatoes, melon, watermelons and cucumbers. The coriander and rocket got a bit of attention too (they bolt if you let them), so by the time I got out of there I had an armful of tender shoots to take to the composter. It's a New Zealand style three-bin system (probably a bit fussy, to be honest), and each section has a hat of old carpet to keep inside in and outside, er, out. It gets quite warm under there.

Flipping back the carpet cover on the right hand bin, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a sizeable snake. "Ah," I said to myself, and from the snake's demeanour it was thinking pretty much the same thing. I put the cover back and walked - no, tottered - back to the house to look at pictures of snakes. It's not that I'm phobic or anything, it's just that being Irish by birth I have never seen a wild snake up close (we haven't had any snakes in Ireland since the Ice Age). I found it a sobering experience.

Ten minutes and an internet search later, I was pretty sure our new resident was a grass snake. These aren't poisonous and very rarely bite humans even when handled, preferring to empty their digestive tract from each end to discourage predators, or even play dead. Bigger ones also know the trick of flattening their head and rearing up a bit to mimic a cobra, and my snake had done just that - but the dark collar shape around the neck was a giveaway.

I don't know why I was surprised, given that the compost bin is less than ten feet from the woodpile, introduced last year as a habitat for just such beasties. Regular readers might recall my mentioning that the Bleedin' Cats avoid that corner of the garden, and based on that thought I'm going to name the snake Redcap.

Anyhow, to make sure I was right about the snake (and if there are adders in the garden, I'd like to know) I went down for a second look, accompanied by Witchypoo and Number Two Son. I warned them what to expect and not to stand too close, in case I was wrong about the markings. Witchypoo seemed very calm, and with hindsight I should have realised why. I pulled the cover off the bin again. Grass snake.

"F****** ****!" opined WP, leaping back in horror and belatedly remembering N2S (now aged five). "*****!"

"It's okay," I said, leaning a little closer to see the beautiful beastie. "It's only a grass snake."

"Ooh," said N2S, moving in a bit as the snake slid away through a hole in the back of the bin. "Just like Harry Potter!"

Cover replaced and WP soothed, we began the walk back to the house. "Bloody hell," WP said weakly. "When you said a snake I thought, oh yeah, a tiddler. That thing must have been getting on for a meter long!" And then, as she replayed the situation, "Er, Son... you probably shouldn't say f****** in front of people. Mummy had a bit of a shock, that's all."

N2S nodded sagely. "What about *****?"

"Definitely not. **** is probably not a good idea, either."

A moment's silence. "How's about ******?"

"What? I didn't say ******!"

"Um... okay then, I won't say that either. It was a lovely snake though, wasn't it?"

*Actually my Irishness comes and goes, depending on to whom I am speaking, where I am in the world, and what time of year it is. There is nothing in all the world so Irish as a Paddy abroad on St Patrick’s Day, although I draw the line at green beer. I have, for the record, never said ‘begorra’ or ‘to be sure’, although I will admit that I did get up and shout with all the other shamrock-wearers in the pub when Riverdance first surfaced as a filler act in the Eurovision Song Contest back in 1994. I had, however, been living in England long enough for emotional repression to set in, so I merely cried “Gosh chaps, dashed good show, what?” and applauded politely.

The Most Expensive Chicken Dinner I'll Ever Have

At last, the chicks have their own run. In two days of hard work, we have cut back trees and shrubs, scythed down undergrowth, made a fence and a gate and provided a hanging feeder and their own cosy ottoman-condo. The total cost has been around £100 ($200), mainly for the post timbers and anchors, but these should last indefinitely - and with organic chickens costing anything from £7 up, it should pay for itself in about three clutches. Still, ouch.

Quite unexpectedly, the chicks' favourite feature is without a doubt the manky blue tarpaulin. This is presently covering a sizeable pile of turf and seedy weeds, into which an ant colony has moved in order to turn it into rich, crumbly loam over the next six months. In the meantime the chicks view walking up Blue Mountain as a definite challenge, the ascent to be accompanied with much flapping and slipping and falling over; and now that we've had the drama of the first couple of bedtimes in their new domain, hopefully we can skip the noise and drama and uncertainty while they work out where to roost.

In other news, I've had a go at spraying the tunnel skin with an organic algae cleaner called Algon, which smells rather strongly of vinegar. Five days later and the tunnel doesn't really look any cleaner, but then there hasn't been any rain - I shall take the hosepipe to it, I think, because on Sunday we're shooting a couple of minutes of promo video for the Polytunnel Handbook. Naturally the ant colony that lives under the middle bed has chosen this moment to send out a mating flight - hundreds of flying ants in your tunnel, anyone?

Oh, and potato blight has arrived. I've been expecting it really, given how wet the first half of the summer was, but it's still depressing. Oh well, I've cut the foliage down to ground level and made sure not to go near the tunnel afterwards; having blight get at the tomatoes as well would just be too much!

Mummy!

In the Hollow Garden, time is something that generally happens to other people. Unless I have an alarm set somewhere, or happen to be working in the tunnel where my old alarm clock sits in mute reproach, I will very happily work away until one of three things happens; a call from the family to let me know some kind of food is available, a thunderbolt realization that I'm supposed to be somewhere else, or the chickens going to bed.

Yes, my cue for heading in is usually a sudden silence descending on the garden, betraying the fact that the noisy birds have finally given up hope of attracting my attention and decided to call it a night. This means that it is nearly dark, a fact that I would otherwise miss until I couldn't actually see any more. But last Thursday night the birds didn't get quieter - they got noisier and noisier until finally I went down to investigate.

As I got closer, I realised that the shouting was all fairly high-pitched. At seven weeks, the chicks don't exactly go 'peep peep' any more, as they did when they were destitute little fluff-bundles in May; now they can make a high-pitched but insistent yawping sound that can shatter a beer glass at twenty paces. Pick one up and you get a sound that says Help! Murder! MURDER! so loudly that you find yourself looking left and right for the police rapid response unit. This sound wasn't like that... but it was close.

I found all five chicks clustered around the bottom of the rickety chicken ladder, peering anxiously up into the pop-hole and shouting Mummy! Mummy! Come back, Mummy! A quick peek in myself showed the awful truth; Chicken for a Hat had finally called it a day, and gone to bed with the Big Girls. And no, she wasn't coming back out.

I guided the chicks back to their house (a converted ottoman) where they clumped together for warmth. They seemed stunned, but in the morning they clustered around C4aH as if nothing had happened at all. The whole procedure was repeated for another couple of nights, and then abruptly they gave up on her. The truth had finally dawned; Mummy wasn't coming back, might as well get on with things.* They stick together now for the most part, the Band of Five, a flock within a flock. As for C4aH - well, she put up with quite a lot of bullying from the Big Girls while she was playing Mummy, but that stopped the night she moved back in with them (perhaps it's to do with her smell). She's no longer hat-shaped either, and so the title Chicken for a Hat goes back in the box.

Until someone goes broody again.

*So much simpler than the whole messy, drawn-out human parenting thing, don't you think? I mean if you don't watch it, demand feeding turns into demand car-borrowing, which turns into demand interpretation-of-the-Tokyo-Underground-map-at-four-in-the-morning because your offspring is lost halfway to a working lunch on the far side of the world. Surely we have something to learn from the humble chook.

High Tunnel Mornings

At this time of year I find it pretty much impossible to get out of the house on time in the mornings. It isn’t that there’s necessarily any more to do, but my morning routine includes opening up the polytunnel and right now it’s just too damned interesting to walk through without looking around. The summer crops are just coming into their own, and it’s only natural to want to give them that extra little bit of attention to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

This year the tunnel is a bit summer-heavy (we have to film a Youtube video in there in a couple of weeks) but ordinarily I try to strike a balance between summer and winter planting so that the tunnel is always producing food. The trouble is that the winter crops need to go in before the summer ones have finished cropping – no-one wants to pull out melons to make room for mooli, not when there are still fruits to be had! That’s why tunnel space is a bit like wardrobe space – no matter how much you have, a little more would always be handy. Thankfully, you can always decide to add on another hoop if you discover that you’d badly underestimated how much growing room you need.

So – here I go, clad in my morning uniform*. Feed the Bleedin’ Cats, which necessitates gently punting Number Two Cat out of the way with one foot, as he is too stupid to realise that I cannot put food in his dish if his head is in it already. Whisk gracefully down the garden, resisting the urge to leap gleefully onto the last of the retreating slugs and snails. Check fruit cage for illegal immigrant thrushes. Lift chicken house door and observe birds parachuting out. Resolve, for the fifth time this week, to fix the chicken ladder this evening. Hang feeder out. Birds ignore it in the hope of… well, you’ll see.

Fill two plant saucers with growers’ pellets (tastier and higher in calories than regular chook food) and attempt to climb over the chicken fence. Realise too late that I have not turned the power off, and get foot hopelessly caught in the fence in my haste to disengage my wedding tackle from the wire. Stagger about cursing, but narrowly manage to avoid dropping the growers’ pellets this time. Chickens sigh in disappointment and get on with the regular food.

Turn off power and renegotiate the fence. Lay saucers of growers’ pellets in adult-proof enclosure, and release the velociraptors.** Resolve, for the fifth time this week, to get their new enclosure ready. Climb out of the run, hurling a scoop full of treat seeds over my shoulder to shake off the pursuit squad. Saw Indiana Jones do this with a crowd of Egyptian beggars once, and was highly impressed. Open polytunnel, tutting about my flabby end.*** Top up capillary bed reservoir. Head back for breakfast.

A-ha, no – that’s what I should do, but what I actually do is;

Check the tunnel beds for moisture, spot-watering where necessary and keeping a weather eye out for pests and moulds. Tap sweetcorn to help with pollination. Make sure cucumbers, melons and watermelons are still securely wrapped around their support strings (they grow about 3cm a day at the moment). Tap tomato flowers and remove axial buds. Marvel at numbers of grass hoppers. Become momentarily obsessed with developing globe artichoke buds, and speak encouraging words to sweet peppers. Swear at chilli peppers, on the grounds that they should be as angry as possible. Catch sight of alarm clock on suspended shelf and gasp in horror. Am late again. Run to house, rapid fire shower and shave.**** Coffee in a hurry. Toast at the traffic lights. Vow, for the fifth time this week, to learn to delegate.

*Manky gardening shoes, a bathrobe and a scowl. File that under ‘mental images I could do without’ and be grateful there’s no-one there to take photographs.

**The chicks are now quite large, and although Chicken For A Hat still roosts with them she has stopped looking out for them during the day. This means that they have had to take their place at the bottom of the pecking order. They manage to avoid getting in trouble by being highly manoeuvrable, beetling in and out of the adults at high speed like the Mini Coopers in the chase scene of The Italian Job. They also have no respect for the electric fence, relying on speed and surprise to squirt through the mesh between pulses – all so that they can eat the French bean seedlings. The little tinkers.

***Pleating the tunnel cover tightly round the door frame is tricky enough without your helpers sodding off and leaving you to it; next time things will be different, or my name’s not Horatio P. Fartwatering-Smythe.

****Shave optional. Oh, so optional. Thank you Mr George Michael, for making stubble socially acceptible.

Did I forget my deodorant?

Hedgewizard at Large

How many worm bins can a man usefully make in one afternoon? I know you lie awake worrying about such things – but, happily, Hedgewizard is here to help.

The last time the Transition Town Dorchester core group* met, we mumbled into our beer about having a social event. Actually, all the core group events are pretty social (and usually involve beer), but this one would be different. There would be no agenda, no arguments, and no goal except having a nice time. But how to satisfy a group of a dozen people with nothing in common except a growing suspicion that our future economy is based on a lie?

Easy. Get ‘em to roll up their sleeves.

So it was that last Sunday we all met in Martinstown in Dorset for a quick argument (you have to have one, it’s the law**), sorted out the stragglers into a carpool and trundled off to Ourganics in Litton Cheney. Run along permaculture lines, Ourganics started off as an organic market garden, but now it is as much about sustainable living as it is about fruit and vegetables. Every year upwards of a hundred volunteer workers (WWOOFers, as they’re known) pass through, trading six hours of work a day for their bed and board, and the chance to get some hands-on experience of off-grid existence. There are also the day-workers like us, herded into specific open days because they need so much attention from the owner (or custodian, as she prefers to say), Pat Bowcock.

Pat’s a bit of an enigma. From a conventional background, Pat chucked her ‘normal’ life in the bin when her children left home, and went travelling around permaculture operations in Britain and Ireland instead, eventually buying a permanently flooded paddock near Dorchester. She shook hands with the seller, she told me, standing on a barn roof in the middle of a roaring gale – and this attitude to adversity (or ‘challenge’ as she calls it) is typical of Pat. Small, wiry and with hugs for everyone, Pat relishes every moment in her six-acre fiefdom.

In the winter, Pat lives in a prefab hut with power from solar panels and a small turbine. As of March she has hot water from a passive solar heater (home-made from some reclaimed copper piping and an old patio door), but in the summer she gives the hut over to the WWOOFers and goes to live in a little caravan on the other side of the stream. It isn’t watertight, so rather than keep re-proofing it she erected a wooden canopy over it, with a living roof. There's also rather a lot of work to do. Still, when Steve Atkins asked her what the hardest part of her life was, she didn't hesitate. "Doing the accounts," she said. "I've never been good with figures."

The core group were duly inspired and impressed. We admired the sluice gates that flood the vegetable beds; we coveted the chaotic Eden of the polytunnel; we marvelled at the solar shower; we even had a damned good gander at the composting loo. Even so, we still found time between lunch (organic, natch) and coffee breaks to muck in with the WWOOFers, and so worm bins were rebuilt, willow-heated bathtubs constructed, seedlings planted, ceilings painted and flapjacks, er, eaten. We came away tired, but more than ready to pitch in again another day.

When I closed my eyes that night, I was ready for my brain to replay the worm bin construction (after all, I'd learned a couple of refinements to the design), but no. Instead, as I drifted off I was taunted with the very real sensation that I was still wearing my bush hat, and I spent a fitful night waking at intervals to attempt to hang it up...

*The core group are the bunch of people who push along a Transition Group until it finally “goes public” with a big event, referred to as the Great Unleashing. As event names go I think that sounds a bit alarming, actually – surely for a proper Great Unleashing you need to release at least a hundred genetically-enhanced killer tigers, rather than have a conference. Or even better, you need to release a hundred genetically-enhanced killer tigers at a conference. But hey, no-one ever listens to me.

**One of the outcomes of this argument was that I agreed to function as Press Officer for the time being. So far as I can make out this means sending snippets of information into the local papers, who whizz it all up in a blender, get it confused with the local LETS scheme, lose half of it down the back of the coffee machine and then make stuff up to fill in the blanks.

Rank

Having been away for so long, I reckon I'd better do a bloggage flurry to keep everyone happy for a while. To stop things degenerating to the level of “watched Meet The Parents on TV tonight. Has Bobby de Niro always been that ugly?”, I’m going to employ a few diversion tactics so that if I’m not being entertaining, I can at least poach content from tell you about someone else who is - so without further ado, let me introduce the "Blog What I Found" spot. This just me getting some cheap jollies by telling you about some of the more worthwhile blogs I've tripped over. It's not a meme, so there's no taggage. It's not an award either - well, not as such. There isn't even a banner to display. How cheap am I?

First up is Spiral Skies. Spiral, aka Jen, is a "gonnabe" novelist who chronicles her struggle to get into print, which might not sound like a barrel-load of laughs - except that Jen writes well, takes a mean photo, and seems to have access to an apparently endless series of startingly apt cartoons. Jen’s blog is a gateway from the mundane world of rubber bands, jam and lawnmowers into a strange, shadowy, angst-ridden dimension – the dimension of writers’ blog-rings. This is a plane that I feel unworthy to enter, having taken the weasel route to getting my saggy ass* into print, (whispers) non-fiction. Enter at your own peril.

Jen and I have one thing in common, which is that we don’t really talk about work in our blogs. In her case this is because she has already had to explain to one boss (through a mouthful of egg sandwich, on her mobile in the car park) why she had referred to him as ‘indecipherably posh’ online; in my case it’s nowhere near so interesting. One of my colleagues recently enthused that I could write a book about my experiences in pharmacy but, as I glumly pointed out, it’d be so dull that no-one would want to read it.

Mind you…

If you fancy a tale to turn people green in a posh restaurant, I once removed a pubic louse from the eye of an attractive young lady. In case you missed that, that’s a crab louse from her eye. Much mortification and hilarity (provided by her staggeringly unsympathetic friend) followed, and eventually she revealed that she had been at a (very famous and thus utterly unrepeatable) male strip show the previous night. She had been right in front of the, er, action – and had caught a high-velocity-armour-piercing G-string right in the face.

I wonder who was more surprised – her, or the louse?

*Incidentally, the bottom dropped out of the original saggy ass shortly after this picture was taken, so I composted it.

All things wear out in time, but for some reason my trousers always wear out at the crotch. This started perhaps ten years ago, and I can’t pretend it’s not worried me a little. Why would this start so abruptly? Am I developing pubic hair like wire wool – like Superman (and in a sudden moment of clarity, that’s why he wears his underpants outside his tights)? Have I started unconsciously and vigorously massaging myself at bus stops and, if so, do I drool as I do it?

The answer, of course, is that since I have become more environmentally aware (and am on septic tank drainage) I wash my clothes at lower temperatures, and with non-bleach non-bio washing products. Because of this, they don’t need to be thrown away because of fading; they last until they wear out.

At the crotch.

A crotch repair of my saggy-ass gardening trousers was out of the question, since I attempted this with a pair of trousers in the 90s and it was not a happy experience. The Frankenjeans looked all right, but there was a certain unpleasant grippiness about the repair that used to fetch my nether regions a painful tweak when I least expected it. I tried to wear them in, but all that happened was that I started to walk like Herman Munster in an attempt to avoid flexing the seams. In the end they had to go.

After some thought, it seemed appropriate to compost my old trousers. On th’internet I discovered that burying new jeans for a couple of weeks to distress them is a common, if inexplicable, practice; I just hoofed mine into the cold compost heap, leaving them in one piece so that I could watch what happened. Six weeks later, mixing some browns into the heap to start it cooking, I found that there was very little left of them. I look forward to finding the rivets when I top-dress the raised beds this autumn.

Never Apologise, Never Explain (sorry, but you see...)

Ooh, see what happens when you turn your back for a minute? I feel like I’ve just woken up halfway to work, with no clear idea of how I got there. I think a quick update is in order, don’t you?

The book
As of ten past nine on Monday morning, The Polytunnel Handbook (Andy McKee and Mark Gatter, Green Books, spring 2009) is officially finished – finished, I say! – and off for proofing. This is a huge relief, because although I’m very happy to know rather more about polytunnels (aka hoophouses or high tunnels) than any sensible individual ever needs to know in their life, I would quite like to stop devoting such a large area of my brain to the things. Just lately, I’ve been mishearing things on the radio as tunnel jargon. When I catch something white out of the corner of my eye, I’ve been mistaking it for a polytunnel. When I doodle, it’s been hoop shapes. And when I dream… well, let’s just say they concern film-covered structures and leave it at that.

The fruit
In winter 2006-2007 I dug so much that ended up confronting my own mortality, with the aim of meeting the family’s needs for soft fruit. Eighteen months later we find ourselves harvesting around half a kilo (one pound) each of strawberries and raspberries daily, with blackcurrants and blueberries just about to come in. Job done, I’d say, although the edible hedge and fruit trees won’t go into serious production for another year or two yet. Actually, this amount of fruit is slightly overwhelming. We’ve already made a dozen jars each of strawberry and raspberry jam, enough for our own needs for the year; although the surplus is being frozen for smoothies and cooking, I’m going to have to look for lower-carbon alternatives to freezing before too long.

Growing fish
It’s worth mentioning that I got four meals’ worth of white fish off the strawberry plants too, since I was able to swap some of my surplus for some pollock, freshly caught off the coast nearby. Who said that man cannot live by strawberries alone? Not me, matey.

Mr Mole
Yes, he’s back; this year’s mole intake is currently making a hell of a mess of my raised beds and the Slope. Unfortunately, moleage seems to be part of life in the Hollow, given that we border on paddock owned by an elderly lady who is disinclined to deal with the problem herself. Oh well, down go the traps and I’ll get him eventually. Mr Tall next door is using an ultrasonic device, purchased out of desperation, and complaining bitterly that it doesn’t seem to be doing anything – but he’s wrong. It’s putting my bloody teeth on edge, that’s what it’s doing.

The Chicks
It's just about time to move the babies away from their Mommie now, but Chicken for a Hat is showing no signs of impatience with them, so I'm in no hurry. I have a new run all laid out for them, but I have to fence it off which is bound to take me the best part of a day. The chicks themselves are big enough to reach up to the Big Birds' drinker, yet still small enough to squirt through the electric fence and make a nuisance of themselves elsewhere. The sooner I get their own run ready, the better...

The Henge
Y'know, for a pagan I don't get out much - by which I mean that I haven't "done" many of the well-known sacred sites. The problem is that with paganism having gone underground for so long that it was pretty much forgotten, we've not had a continuous culture - and so have lost the rights to our own monuments. Send a thousand people a day through a place, and the energy it is supposed to channel gets diluted and carried away until you have to dig deep to find it. And so it is with Stonehenge - I mean, it's huge, ancient and mysterious all right, but power? So far as I'm concerned, I can get more out of a walk in the woods at twilight, but maybe that's just me.

Anyhow, now that the book's out of the way my every waking moment is no longer spoken for - so you can expect a return to my normal random mumblings. Oh, joy...