January 2002
Did you have a restful Festive Season? I hope so. Ours was hardly restive... but read on....
Some of you might imagine that winter with its cold weather and often unworkable land might be a time for us to put our feet up, eat mince pies in front of the fire and look at seed catalogues. Yes, seed catalogues - not holiday brochures. Holidays? What are they?
Well yes, there has been a certain amount of sitting before the fire - after dark. But most days have seen one or more of us outside all daylight hours working at one of the several projects which we've been pursuing.
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Polytunnel
Strange
polytunnel facts: 
- Our tunnel has its own robin. He comes in under the door and seems quite at home. Will he and Mrs. Robin nest there?
- The tunnel also manufactures its own fogs. Some evenings, the fogs are so thick you can't see from one end to the other. Weird feeling, getting lost in your polytunnel. Always take a compass.
Rainwater collection: The polytunnel has stood some alarming gales with no worries. Well it wasn't (apparently) worried. I was though. Outside, we've completed a cunning rainwater collection system using spare polythene sheet cut from the main cover in the summer. We dug shallow trenches along each side, lined each with the plastic and then backfilled it with stones picked from the soil (millions of 'em). Because the tunnel is on a gentle slope, all the rainwater runs down the two stone-filled gullies to pipes at the bottom end. Each pipe flows into a concrete-lined pond (hand dug) and each pond is designed to overflow into a bigger main pond, also lined. I've made steps down into this so that kids who fall in can climb out! I have (in this icy weather) fantasies about stripping off and jumping into this large pool to cool down after working in the tunnel next summer.
The next part of this water-saving project is to devise a windpump to pump the water up to a big header tank outside the top end of the tunnel. If the tank (probably one of those huge ex-fruit juice containers) is high enough, gravity should then feed the irrigation systems inside the tunnel. That at least is the idea. If anyone wants to get involved in building such a system, or has useful ideas, let me know. My son Richard is thinking about building something out of scrap metal. That sort of thing.
Beds in the
tunnel:
My
two sons, Mark and Richard, worked really hard this Christmas to help
me to get the whole tunnel properly cultivated. I capitulated and hired
a rotavator for a week to help us. Having done half the tunnel by hand,
I was only too aware of how long this took and what incredibly hard work
it was! I'd been using my wonderful Spanish tools: azadas and a long crowbar
to break up the subsoil and prise out the often-huge boulders which the
glaciers unkindly left behind when they melted 15,000 years ago. The rotavator
helped but we still had to scrape away many tons of earth after each pass
with the machine.
Thanks to my friend
Mike Langley,
I have been plundering a huge pile of 2-metre conifer logs from a place
near Beddgelert. Yes, this is legal! 
Today,
I had to wade through floodwaters to get there - and backing the trailer
up a steep hill is not easy. I'm not good at reversing with a trailer.
Ho hum. Anyway, these logs have finally solved the problem of how to retain
the tunnel beds effectively. I lay them out along the main paths and secure
them with off-cuts from fence posts from the Glasfryn forestry not far
from here.
Crops in our
tunnel: I'm happy to say we're ge
tting
quite a good crop of Pak Choi (oriental cabbage), 
Mizuna
(delicious feathery leaves), lettuce and now a multicoloured Chard. These
have stood through severe frosts (-2 degrees Celsius has been our lowest
temperature so far this winter inside the tunnel). Carrots are doing well
and will be ready in a couple of months. Slugs have particularly enjoyed
this thoughtful provision of food for them. These are small, white and
a bloody nuisance! I have to go and hunt for them by headtorch every night.
They don't seem to succumb to all the usual organic methods (beer traps
and the like). Snipping them with a pair of ex-haircutting scissors is
effective and deadly. And it's the only thing that works lest any of you
are going 'yuk' or 'ugh'!
The vegetable field
There's
more to life than the tunnel. Outside we've been busy too. I dug two long
beds for raspberries and we've now planted
around 130 - three different varietie
s.
That took many days of backbreaking... but you don't want to hear about
that, do you?
Then we made a number of new strawberry beds and planted them up with about 85 new plants. That took many days of... whoops, sorry. Expects plenty of strawberries this summer but don't hold your breath for raspberries. They take a little longer to establish.
Mark,
Richard and I made a complete new set of raised
beds to come into our 5-year rotation plan. This meant cutting
a rough area of field (long grasses), marking out the beds, stripping
the turves, rotavating, scraping out the loosened soil, rotavating again,
scraping again (the second scrape was the worst!), rotavating again to
break up the subsoil, piling the turves back upside down and then scraping
back all the mounds of earth onto the upended turves and fashioning it
into beds. That was a long, hard job - rather like that last sentence.
The
green manures we sowed where the potatoes
had been have thrived. These are essential in any organic system for building
fertility, useful soil microorganisms and soil structure. Our autumn-sown
onions seem to have stood up to the cold and wet well so we should have
plenty of onions a month or so earlier than usual.
We've dug 11 more holes for more fruit trees. These will be here in February and will complete our orchard field.
Our neighbour, Cristina, has kindly donated willow cuttings and a good deal of her time. She has helped us to plant hedges of these quick-growing willows to make shelter for birds and act as windbreaks around the beds.
Customers and the future: We now have a couple of regular customers - neighbours - who come and help themselves to what they want. One of them often comes and helps us out too which is great! We need many more customers of course if all our work is to be viable. We've also been selling some produce from the polytunnel via our friends' box scheme.
As to the future, we're still hoping to set up a CSA group but the article in the local paper has not so far been published through no fault of ours. We are beginning some minor advertising to test the waters. Probably we will link co-operatively with our friends at Ty'n Lon Uchaf farm (also in Llangybi and now fully organic whereas we're now in our final conversion year) so that we don't duplicate efforts. It makes sense for us to use our tunnel to grow rather more specialised crops such as our winter salad selections. People appreciate fresh nutritious green salads when all you normally get is carrots, onions and potatoes. In summer, we intend to grow some rarities, donated to us by the Henry Doubleday Research Association Heritage Seed Library. These are crops which you cannot buy anywhere because they aren't on the National Seed List. By growing them, we help preserve a little more diversity and, we hope, flavour.
Bry Lynas
18 January 2002