July 2004

It's been a long time... since the last newsletter (September 2003), but you know how it is. We've got work to do and somehow, writing newsletters never seems very high on the list of priorities. For it is - or seems to me to be - proper prioritisation that is the key to a reasonably functional business. It's so easy to get sidetracked. All you have to do is walk around the farm and jobs which need doing scream at you to be done yet there's no way you can do them all. So you block your ears to the metaphorical screams, sit down, open a bottle of wine and talk things over; think things through. Prioritise!

The year so far: We had a mild, wet winter with few frosts, but we did get a good dose of snow - quite unusual in our part of Wales - in February. I have vivid memories of digging crates of carrots and parsnips in a blizzard at about this time. Mike and Jill were on holiday in Mexico and Val was visiting a friend in London. It was not fun. But we managed to keep on producing boxes and bags each Friday for all our customers. In March, we had to reduce the number because we simply didn't have enough produce.

The spring was uncharacteristically warm with weeks of sunshine and very little rain. We finally closed down completely in mid-May. This is the classic 'hungry gap' period when all the winter veg either runs out or bolts but none of the new year's plants are anywhere near ready. On 2 July, we re-opened with the first flush of all the new vegetables plus masses of strawberries.

The photo (left) of Val with some fine red and green lettuces formed the basis of a press release to the local newspaper. We were somewhat alarmed when re-starting 2 weeks ago to find that quite a few former customers chose to drop out, leaving us with fewer than 20 and a whole lot of veg. I wrote the press release along the lines of 'Use us or lose us' and, to my surprise, the paper ran quite a large article (embellished in the usual journalistic fashion with extra dollops from this website) which resulted in a flurry of interest. Within a few days, we almost doubled the number of customers! It's very encouraging that people are really taking to heart the notion of buying local organic produce rather than the admittedly-easier option of buying from some huge supermarket where the produce comes from who-knows-where with an unknown but large number of food miles attached to it.

Quack! Mike and Jill at Ty'n Lon have vast herds of ducks which sweep around the place like two-legged feathery wildebeest in some Welsh Serengeti. It seems that several ducks had cleared off in early spring and secretly laid eggs, hatched them and returned weeks later with their gangs of ducklings. Things are much more quiet and refined at Mur Crusto where our two ducks have just come back into lay. I had to build a secure, movable duck house (pictured) after an 'incident' with the fox. We did have three ducks, but after this fox attack, the remaining two have been suffering from post traumatic stress disorder resulting in a bizarre condition, previously unknown in duck-kind, which you might describe as aquaphobia. They won't go near their ponds where, presumably, the fox caught the one unfortunate. No amount of counselling has helped... but now they have two new young duck friends from the Ty'n Lon herd and we hope that all four will settle happily to a long, egg-laying and slug-eating life here.

Veg news: Both farms passed the annual Soil Association inspection a couple of weeks ago. Right now we're producing potatoes, lettuces, peas, broad beans, french beans, cucumbers, summer cabbage, carrots, onions (the autumn-sown Japanese variety), snap peas, mizuna and chard for the boxes. We had a glut of strawberries and now have a glut of delicious raspberries. In another week or so, tomatoes, sweet peppers and courgettes will be added to the list. Blight hasn't yet struck down the potatoes because it has been mostly cool and dry, and blight likes warm damp drizzly weather. Mike and Jill are trialling some special blight-resistant varieties, collectively called Sarpo potatoes so we wait with interest to see what happens. The blight fungus, the genus Phytophthera, is a seriously troublesome organism which notoriously devastated potato crops in Ireland and Scotland in the 1840s, resulting in mass starvation and emigration. It is also resonsible, among other things, for the new oak-wilt disease which has begun affecting various types of trees in Europe. This was imported accidentally from the USA where it is now killing large numbers of trees.

But the real culprit is mankind. It is our obsession with travel and trade, especially of exotic animals and plants, which has been the launchpad for so many damaging epidemics. From brown rats and influenza to Japanese knotweed and HIV, we humans are responsible. So... buying locally-grown produce makes even more sense, doesn't it!

Bry Lynas, 16 July 2004