'Tis The Season To Wear Cardies

A Christmas selfie

It isn’t often that one’s vocabulary is challenged and broadened by a Christmas jumper. Often the only challenge such a gift can provide is how to remain convincing whilst affirming how much you like it (not the case this time as I actually do rather like this natty black and white cardigan - thanks Mum!) but concealed within this one is a small white label whose red text reads: “DUE TO THE NATURAL STRUCTURE OF THE KNIT A CERTAIN DEGREE OF PILLING WILL OCCUR”. 

This left me a little nonplussed. Was it a typo, and they meant “PILING”? If so what was going to pile onto what? Would I be crushed? I suppose it would depend on exactly how heavy “A CERTAIN DEGREE OF PILING” would be. A little more accuracy wouldn’t have gone amiss.  But if not a typo, then what does it mean to "PILL"? Surely it can’t refer to the consumption of the little medicinal capsules we are so prone to lobbing down our gullets at the slightest head-twinge or gut-gripe? It was hard to see how the structure of my jumper could affect the quantity of paracetamol I’m about to consume.

A quick internet search put me right. It means “BOBBLING”, a word that presumably didn’t carry enough gravitas with whoever it is whose job it is at the fine company of Bench to come up with the warning label messages. I am guessing that this is someone different from the person who was able to write “Music and laughter is the lifeblood of our consumers, and us too” in the ‘About Us’ section of the Bench website. I imagine that that person would choose the word BOBBLE over PILL.  

Along with millions of others, I spent this Christmas with my family, up north. To be clear, my family did not have millions of people stay over. The millions all went to be with their respective families, in-laws and out-laws, and that’s just as well really as it would have been difficult to get everyone to agree which channel to watch. In fact we seemed to spend more time playing miniature table-tennis than watching TV, which in our minds at least helped to offset the heavy calorie intake and got the adrenalin pumping almost as much as a good bout of University Challenge.

Pilsdon's Christmas tree in the Common Room

If it’s the season to be merry, it’s also the season to be thankful, and I am profoundly grateful to have both a loving family, and a warm and welcoming home in the shape of the Pilsdon community.  There are many who have neither. 

If you needed a reason for Pilsdon to exist, you need look no further than the two young guys who turned up here separately last Friday. Both had come to a crisis in their lives and both could easily have ended up on the streets during the horrific weather of the last few days, had they not been referred to Pilsdon by social services. 

Initially they were offered a weekend which was then extended to the full Christmas week, and both of them are now applying to become residential guests as they realised how much a sojourn at Pilsdon, removed from the temptations of drugs or alcohol, could help them put their lives back together.   It certainly puts my pilling worries into perspective.

The Great Indoors

After the uproar inadvertently caused by my blogpost last week which prompted an unprecedented number of comments (three plus my replies, so far), I feel I ought to tone it down a bit today and steer clear of any potentially hazardous topics or who knows, I might jeapordise my very existence at Pilsdon. One of the tree-hugger lobby might decide they’ve had enough and decide to do something they might regret (or worse, not regret). Besides, I have had a request from a faithful French follower of this blog to expand on the subject of Pilsdon’s glasshouses which, if I can steer clear of any mention of the three birch trees that are growing dangerously close to the back of the large one, should be pretty safe ground. Here goes.

Broad beans and lettuce in the large polytunnel

Pilsdon is well endowed with indoor growing space. There’s the large glasshouse (40' by 16') which featured in last week’s notorious blogpost, and next to it is the big polytunnel (50' by 20') which a whole team of us re-skinned, re-doored, and laid down concrete paths in the spring of 2012. Tucked away on the other side of the orchard is another polytunnel (65' by 12'), narrower but longer than the first, and then there are two small greenhouses which we use for raising seedlings until they are ready to be ‘transplanted’ into the soil somewhere (either outside or in a polytunnel/glasshouse). Seedlings are often started off in one of two electrically-heated germination cabinets in the potting shed; we use nine or twelve-celled plastic trays filled with sieved peat-free compost from the local garden centre and carefully (or recklessly, depending on who’s doing it) pop a seed in each cell.

Garlic and broad beans in the big glasshouse

Stuff we only tend to grow indoors: tomatoes, aubergines, sweet peppers, chilli peppers, i.e the real warmth-lovers. And stuff we normally grow both indoors and out in the fresh air: cucumbers, courgettes, french beans, runner beans, squash, pumpkins, beetroot, carrots, and more.  We have recently tried melons and okra in the polytunnel but neither were a great success. 

After harvesting, all the soil indoors has manure or compost dumped on it and dug in - Pilsdon is fortunate in having a constant supply of muck from our cows and pigs that we let rot down over a year or so.

Another view of the glasshouse - the dormant vines just visible at the back

Each year we plan what goes where. To keep things simple, what gets sown in the large glasshouse and polytunnel are simply switched each year as they are both of similar size. So in 2013 the large polytunnel had the french & runner beans, garlic, squash, cucumbers, okra and beetroot while the large glasshouse had the tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and early potatoes. This two-year rotation hinders any veg-specific diseases building up in the soil, although normally a three or four year rotation is recommended (we practice a four-year rotation in our four main outdoor beds). The glasshouse also has two beautiful one-year-old grapevines at the back, one for white grapes and the other red, whose recent brush with death for the sake of a couple of trees is dealt with elsewhere. Bill sows whatever he feels like in the other polytunnel.

It also pays to squeeze in an extra harvest in the spring by sowing indoors in the autumn - the extra warmth and shelter allows some veg to grow successfully throughout the winter. So in April and May this year Pilsdon were eating loads of delicious fresh broad beans, cabbages, cauliflower and spinach that I’d sown the previous September (I missed out on eating them by moving to Wales in April, sadly). The over-wintered broccoli and beetroot didn’t yield so much.  This autumn we were a bit late but even so we have serried ranks of broad bean plants pushing their way into glory, three stately rows of garlic, some directly-sown spinach poking their noses up and in the small greenhouse some young cauliflower (27) and cabbage (36) in celltrays, not mature enough to go in yet.

The 'small' polytunnel, currently with green manure growing (field beans and mustard) that will be dug in to improve the soil

None of our greenhouses or polytunnels are heated. In the depths of last winter I had to prop most of the broad bean plants up with sticks as they were flopping over in the bitter cold, but they all survived. 

Winter is a good time to carry out those maintenance tasks that are so easy to put off. The concrete floor in the big polytunnel allows easy sweeping and a cleansing with water. The big glasshouse windows need a good clean with a long-handled mop (ours has a jet attachment to direct water on at the same time). Any broken panes are replaced (we had a couple blow out from a small greenhouse during last month’s big storm). Rips in polytunnel plastic are taped up. I’ve heard of people fumigating their greenhouses with a sulphur candle to kill all fungal and bacterial nasties but that’s generally not an option for us as there’s always some crop or other in there.

Now to sit back and wait for all the angry comments to flood in from those offended by the idea of killing fungi...

Battle of the Plants

Sunrise at Pilsdon

There is a war raging all about us and very few of us know about it. Even those of us living in the countryside where the fighting is the most intense are on the whole blissfully unaware. We can idly gaze at a landscape of wooded dales, bubbling brooks and verdant fields and believe that it is the very essence of peace and order, where the very opposite is in fact the case. We are looking at a battlefield. The combatants? Trees and plants.

OK, I’ll admit the action isn’t exactly Spielberg, but the long slow struggle is nevertheless real and deadly serious. The life of each tree or plant is at stake. The competition for the vital resources of sun, water and soil is intense.  Different species have their own strategies for survival, but all are bound by the same obvious constraint - they cannot move from where they were born. Wherever fate placed them, they have to make the best of it. 

Trees and grass are mortal enemies. When trees grow to maturity the sun won’t reach the ground beneath.  And in your average wood you are witnessing a race for the sun between trees themselves, as they try to out-grow each other to put their topmost leafy branches above the others. Some tree species such as beech and holly are ‘shade-bearing’ in that they are tough enough to cope with cover from taller trees, but many others such as oak, ash and chestnut demand the light and if they don’t get it, they don't thrive.

Humans often meddle with what grows where, normally for very good reasons such as to grow crops for food, or to manage a woodland. Being aware of the relative needs of each plant or tree for light, nutrition, warmth and water is vital for the success of either enterprise. The idea of companion planting, i.e. growing two species of mutually beneficial plants next to or literally amongst each other, often relies on one growing and maturing faster than the other so the first can be harvested before the other species is troubled by lack of light.

Pilsdon's large glasshouse

Birch trees at the back

The conflict between tree and cultivated crop came to a head in Pilsdon’s garden this week, and brought head to head the opposing philosophies of tree-hugger and gardener.  There are three birch trees growing quite close to the back of our large glasshouse, and I pointed out at the weekly garden meeting that their roots were now reaching into the soil inside the glasshouse, competing with the young grapevine that I had planted a year ago. My suggestion, to fell the nearest of the three trees, raised the hackles of all those present who consider native British trees sacrosanct, particularly since Pilsdon apparently has very few trees to call its own. The counter-suggestion, to uproot the vine, buy a new one and plant it at the other end of the glasshouse, seemed calculated to produce a similar amount of annoyance in me, and succeeded. After a group inspection of said tree, and long and heated debate of a scale only matched by global summits on climate change, a compromise agreement was finally reached.  The tree would remain but any of its roots heading into the glasshouse were to be cut.  

Trench warfare

A day later I carried out this savage task with spade, fork and saw. The grapevine can now grow unhindered and since the tree roots were not large the hope is the birch will not be unduly harmed. I hope that a few years from now, Pilsdon residents will clink together their glasses of grape juice and raise a toast to the saviour of their vine who rescued it from an early and ignominious demise.

If You Should Go Down To The High Street Today

If you are feeling hug-starved, you could do worse than join your local Greenpeace group and don their polar bear costume on a busy late-night-shopping evening with a sign around your neck saying “Free Bear Hugs”. I know what I’m talking about, I did exactly that two days ago in Bridport. Not because I was feeling particularly hug-hungry, before you all start to take pity on me, but because I was helping on the Greenpeace street-stall and the job fell quite literally on my shoulders.

Immediately I was transformed from a hairy man to a hairy bear, and was quite amazed by the throngs rushing up to me to get their hug. We’re not just talking children here. I had the whole age spectrum from tots to grannies. I had to hug low, hug high, hug wide and narrow. I hugged a whole troupe of teenagers in one go. Even the occasional grown man stepped up for a hug, usually accompanied by a throwaway comment such as “not often you get to hug a polar bear”. And this was all before 7pm - any later and I’m sure alcohol would have driven far more into my white furry paws.

The polar bear is of course just a sympathetic emblem of the true awfulness of what is happening at the top of the world. The entire Arctic habitat is slowly disappearing, melting into the sea. Not just polar bears but narwhals, seals, Arctic foxes, snowy owls and many other unique creatures face oblivion in the wild. And the Great Arctic Melt itself is an emblem of the climate disaster unfolding everywhere, as the world’s average temperature inches upwards. 

You might think humanity could solve this issue as we are, we like to think, pretty smart as a species. There are (at least) three big problems though:

1) The disaster is unfolding extremely slowly. Our attention span is too short. Three years ago the British PM could say that he wants his coalition administration to be “the greenest government ever” and expect it to win votes. Now the vote-winning policies are about easing the cost of living and environmental issues are slipping down and off our government’s agenda.

2) The cause of the warming is the very thing which makes our lives comfortable and which the globalised economy is driven by (namely, oil and gas). To completely remove our dependence on fossil fuels and switch entirely to renewables is a mammoth undertaking that would require all national governments to work in tandem to change the way everything works. Our corporo-democracies are unfortunately not up to it.

3) Fossil fuel companies have enormous resources at their disposal and have become adept at using their wealth both to lobby governments to allow them to continue extraction and exploration, and to quietly fund climate-change deniers who muddy the climate debate with half-truths and outright lies. When someone tells you that you don’t need to deal with the huge mess in front of you because it’s actually all ok really, the temptation is to believe them.

So is it for nothing that I hugged half of Bridport in a furry suit? Well at least I felt needed for a while! And maybe a few more people are reminded how humanity’s actions are impacting our planet. Change can only come when enough people stand up and make themselves count.

Ground Control to Major Tom

It was nearly dinner time. Sergey Ryazanskiy’s stomach growled in anticipation and he glanced briefly through the hatch opening to the mess module but none of the others had appeared yet. He had spent his day off reading a history of numismatics, exercising and composing a video message for his wife and three children back in Moscow, which he had just despatched. Their return message would probably be available when he awoke “tomorrow”. Two months of the mission had passed, four more to go before he could return to them. He smiled as he remembered his youngest son, Ivan, learning with frequent and spectacular crashes how to ride his first bike. By the time he returned Ivan would be effortlessly circling the yard, hooting with joy.

Sergey was itching to get back to work but rest periods were rigorously enforced. His tasks, alone amongst the six-man crew, centred around the prototype laser communications system OPALS which would one day replace the radio waves, packing far more information into that narrow red beam zero-ing in on a dish 240 miles below. His dream was to be at least a footnote in science history books as the man who proved that laser communications was not only possible but dramatically more effective than radio frequencies for long-distance communication across space. 

The International Space Station wheeled over the Earth, covering nearly five miles every second. At this speed it circumnavigated the globe in the time it took to play a game of football. The sun rose and set and rose again with remarkable alacrity. None of them noticed it any more. However, something made Sergey push off from the wall and drift across to the observation window to gaze down at the inky blackness below, clusters of yellow lights occasionally flashing past like weird deep-sea creatures. The lat-long monitor indicated they were travelling over south-west England at this moment. It was not a country he had been to, but one day he hoped to bring his family to see Buckingham Palace and Chelsea’s football ground. He stared downwards. Who was down there? Were they dreaming, or awake and on their way to work? What made them all carry on, living out their little lives as if each one mattered?

He could not know, but two men were standing below him, watching his spacecraft appear in their west and glide across the sky to the south-east, skirting past the gibbous moon. It was 6:18am. They held dung-forks in their hands, being interrupted from mucking out the winter quarters of the recently-milked three Jersey cows. For both of them it was the first time they had seen the Space Station. Its smooth procession across the sky, like a bright star that had been cut adrift from the firmament, captivated them. It had been up there for fifteen years but somehow they had missed it. Even now they only knew to look up because one of them had checked the NASA website the night before for its timetable.

Two minutes later the bright star vanished behind the roof of Pilsdon’s East Wing and they returned to the straw and the muck.  But somehow things seemed different. They had just witnessed a technological and diplomatic miracle. A laboratory the size of a football field pieced together in space by citizens of countries that just three decades before had been on opposing sides of a Cold War.  A brilliant emblem of scientific progress and international collaboration had passed overhead. One wheelbarrow was filled to the brim with cow dung, another was fetched.

Next week we are hoping to see another celestial body as Comet ISON swings round close to the sun, hopefully not disintegrating in the process. As it should be seen most clearly in the early morning, just before sunrise, depending on the milking rota I might well have my binoculars in one hand and a dung-fork in the other. 

----------

N.B. Sergey Ryazanskiy is really up there, right now. Find out about him and his crew-mates here.

Red Hot Dorset Peppers

I was standing on the pavement next to a Franciscan monk, watching the cars slip past on the eastern trunk road out of Dorchester. My gloved hand held one of two poles of a four foot wide banner, the other being supported by a woman in her forties who works for the town council's social services. The November sun hung low and bright across from us, its glare magnified by the windscreens of the car dealership opposite. Behind us was a petrol station owned by Shell, a company who has taken out an injunction against Greenpeace making it unlawful for any of their supporters to step onto a Shell forecourt. This included us, as we had gathered this morning under the auspices of Greenpeace to conduct a vigil for the 'Arctic 30', detained in Russia for daring to disrupt Gazprom's drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean. Check out the photos and videos here.

Perhaps because of the fine weather, a larger crowd than expected had turned out. Thirty-three of us lined the road on both sides, cheerily waving as passing drivers tooted their support. At least I assume it was support. 

The monk gave an impassioned speech direct to camera, telling whoever would listen that the Arctic 30 were being prayed for by name each day. I had actually met Brother Hugh previously as he belongs to a nearby Anglican Franciscan friary known as Hilfield which has close links with Pilsdon; last year he joined our cricket team for a couple of matches. Apparently he had been hoping to be arrested at today's vigil in empathy for the Greenpeace crew in Russia, but sadly we were all far too law-abiding. 

Coincidentally I was heading on to Hilfield Friary myself after the vigil to catch up with my friends Adam and Teresa who are volunteers there. They are both ex-Pilsdonites, in fact Adam was the warden when I arrived in the spring of 2012. It must be the only route out of Pilsdon for wardens, as the previous warden, Jonathan, also lives at Hilfield. I half-expected to open a cupboard door and find the skeletons of Pilsdon's three other wardens neatly stacked. 

I had been to Hilfield just once before to drop someone off in the early morning and stayed for breakfast, but found it impossible to introduce myself to anyone as they have a rule forbidding speech at breakfast-time. This would generally suit me fine as I prefer to limit my early-morning communication to a grunt or two, but on that occasion it didn't really help.  This visit was far more convivial, as we were allowed to chat over our lunch of jacket potatoes and re-constituted egg custard and Adam treated me to a tour around the 24-acre property, nestled as it is in a peaceful wooded valley. He is looking to become a university chaplain and would make a very good one, so let me know if you hear of any such vacancies and I'll pass it on.

The day ended more with a bang than a whimper as I went out on the tiles of Bridport to celebrate Mary's 30^th birthday in the traditional British manner - drinks and a curry. There's always one who insists on choosing the hottest dish on the menu, and as he was sat across from me I had the amusement of watching him struggle and sweat through his food whilst enjoying my sizzling tandoori chicken. His curry was packed full of a local Dorset pepper called Naga which apparently has won the accolade of being the hottest chilli in the world. So if you ever visit Dorset on holiday and fancy an Indian one night, consider yourself warned!

(Oh yes and I've been making some crab apple jelly as you can see from the pics)

28lb of crab apples, a smaller variety than the ones on my land

The jelly came out darker than previous batches but still tasty

I'm Pressing On

These weren't all of them

If someone asked you to visualise a third of a tonne of apples, could you do it? I certainly couldn’t. At least not until I began filling empty potato sacks with apples, standing on bathroom scales, subtracting my own weight to obtain the weight of the sack, then multiplying up the number of sacks we filled. Each sack weighed on average 20kg and by the end of several weeks of harvesting we had seventeen of them filled, plus three small crates. 20kg times 17 is 340kg, and since there are 1000kg in a tonne (last time I checked) we had just over a third of a tonne of the fruit, stored with care in an ex-chicken shed.

Monday the 11th of November arrived. Our two-day reservation at the apple-juicing facilities at Fivepenny Farm was finally beginning!  I had organised work crews of eager Pilsdonites for both days, and so at 9:30am five of us piled the bulging sacks into the back of our pick-up, crammed ourselves in with our packed lunches and rubber gloves, and set off on the twenty-minute journey along the narrow windy lanes of Marshwood Vale. 

We had been expecting to be working together with someone else who was bringing even more apples and splitting the juice proportionally, since the press could cope with an entire tonne of the spherical blighters. But plans change and she had to be in London instead so we had the whole press to ourselves. Thankfully a friend of hers was on hand to show us the ropes as none of us had ever done this before, certainly not on this scale. We were apple pressing virgins and a little nervous.

The press was housed in a beautiful two-storey A-frame thatched wooden building, built quite recently, that provides facilities for the processing of fruit, vegetables and meat for the smallholders in the area who can hire it out for a reasonable fee. The electric pulping machine was kept outside, perhaps because it made such a mess, preferring to hurl the pulp back out the top chute if it could rather than down into the holding bay below. Whilst Joey* gamely balanced on a chair and popped the apples into the thudding contraption with his face averted, Greg and I washed the apples and passed them up to him. Meanwhile Hilda and Yolanda were inside painstakingly cleaning over two hundred used 750ml bottles (there were no new ones available, but at least we got them at half price). 

Feeding the pulping machine

Pulp

A "cheese" being filled with pulp

A cheese half-filled

Wheeling the pulp holder inside, it was shovelled into a huge thick muslin cloth below the heavy duty press, which was then folded up into a big square, called a “cheese”. Juice was already beginning to leak out of it into the side channels and down through a funnel into a bucket, and we hadn’t even begun to press it. We had enough pulp to fill another cheese on top of the first, and then we heaved on the weighty square top piece, piled on a few blocks of wood where the four other cheeses could have gone, inserted a long steel rod into the gearing and began to turn it clockwise. There wasn’t space to turn it 360 degrees, after each quarter-turn the rod had to be taken out and reinserted back where it had been. Needless to say the last few pushes of the rod were two-man jobs, at full eye-popping strength.

Joey puts his back into it

The gushing sweet nectar was pumped into an intermediate tank, filtered through a tap into an open barrel, then pumped again up into another tank positioned ten feet above us. From there it was fed down through a tube into the bottling machine, an ingenious device which took four bottles at a time, automatically filling them on insertion and stopping when full. 

Bottling

Bottled

Once we had eighty brimming bottles the tops were placed loosely on top and each gingerly lowered into a large bath of hot water, heated by five gas hobs.  To achieve effective pasteurisation the juice had to reach 76 degrees Centigrade, taking about half an hour, and then whipped out, tops firmly screwed on, and laid to cool horizontally to ensure the lid was also pasteurised by the hot juice.  All in all, quite an operation!

Pasteurising

Filling the truck

By the second day we found ourselves in possession of 221 bottles of delicious pure apple juice with only three breakages (due to the heat of the water), so many that I had to make two terribly cautious journeys home with them, easing the pick-up gently over the potholes listening to the clinkety-clink behind me. But it was all worth it when we sat down to our supper that night with merry jugs of juice instead of tap water. The plan is to sell quite a lot of them at the Bridport Christmas market but the temptation will be to glug it all down before then. Bottoms up!

*All names are made up but references to actual persons and events are completely intentional

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers

We live in strange times. 

The heads of our security agencies are dragged before a government committee to explain why their snooping on all our communications goes far beyond what anyone had realised, including our elected representatives. 

Economics undergraduates realise that they are still being taught the same ultra-liberal free-market dogma that is continuing to drive us closer to global financial meltdown, and actually propose an alternative curriculum to cover other models that may stand a chance to get us out of the mess we’re in. 

In 450 cities around the world on November 5th, thousands of people with Guy Fawkes masks march under the banner of “Anonymous” to demonstrate against both economic injustice and the mass surveillance by our governments’ security services. Russell Brand joins in the London march and in an interview with Jeremy Paxman calls for a revolution to do away with our tawdry big-business-loving political system that seems to be failing us and our planet in so many ways, sparking a media storm.

And the world’s climate scientists gather together and produce the first part of their fifth report in 23 years which once again sets out in dry detail how humanity is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, and how this is going to make things very unpleasant for our grandchildren. Humanity shrugs its shoulders and carries on as it did before.

It all seems a bit unreal. Did the German leader really call the American president and harangue him for having her personal mobile tapped?  Did George Osborne really tell the Chinese that he would relax banking regulations to encourage them to move to London? Meanwhile dirty wars flare up or fester in forgotten parts of the world such as the Central African Republic, mostly ignored by the Western media.

At Pilsdon, life goes on in much the same way as before. The events of the wider world seldom intrude, and that’s how it should be. Here I can spend the day with my gardening gloves on, turning the compost, weeding the brassica patch or sowing spinach in the glasshouse, stopping occasionally for a cup of tea, a chat or a communal meal. 

The small everyday things fill our days. I forgot one of my milking duties, a very rare occurrence I assure you, and discovered that Bill (not his real name) had stepped in for me, doing the mucking out of the cow’s quarters without having time to put his wellies on. Later I harvested the last sweet peppers he had grown as we’d agreed, and then pulled up the plants which apparently he had not agreed. He had wanted to keep them alive till next year somehow. We turned the kitchen waste compost together. I think he’s forgiven me.

The weight of Jamie the cat is a topic of lively debate, as he is being fed now by Sara (another unreal name) since his regular feeder left a few months back. Some say he’s fatter than before, others that he’s skinnier. All agree that he is a lot less active now, spending his days sprawled at the busiest intersections of corridors, as old age set in.

The highlight of the week has to be the “Krispy Kreme”-style ring doughnuts made by our resident American couple, consumed with gusto by everyone on Bonfire Night as I and two other brave men lit the fireworks on the wet grass inside a paddock.  Many of these fireworks seemed to have a fear of heights and so discharged their obligations safely (or otherwise) on the ground, making it all somewhat less of the jaw-dropping spectacle people expected.  Still, the doughnuts were lip-smackingly excellent. 

Magic (And Less Than Magic) Moments

A few moments from the week just gone:

-  Four or five of us gather by the piano on Sunday to sing somewhat hesitantly the four part harmonies of a couple of Christmas carols. The local choirmaster, forgetting to change his clocks back, arrives an hour early for the evening church service and so happily joins in with us.

-  Looking up from digging over a patch of garden, I witness the birch and willow trees being lit golden by a sunshaft, stark against the heavy grey rainclouds behind. Later a rainbow forms an arch over them.

-  The much-heralded storm of St Jude rages past in the early hours of Monday morning but thankfully leaving very little damage in its wake. Our sandbag defences prove needless.

-  In one fell swoop I harvest the last of the prolific raspberries, which have since been turned to jam, then harvest the last of the even more prolific apples. The latter requiring a step-ladder and some very careful balancing amongst a thicket of gnarly branches and twigs.

-  Reversing the Citroen Berlingo into a ditch on the organic farm belonging to Pilsdon’s Chair of Trustees, I have to be towed out by her neighbour and his tractor.

-  I drive a minibus-load of people on a wet windy Wednesday night to Dorchester to catch a screening of Captain Phillips which garners a complete spectrum of opinions from the Pilsdonites: “too violent”, “not violent enough”, “too tense because I thought Tom Hanks would be killed”, “not tense because Tom Hanks could never be killed”, etc

-  Spending far too long peeling and chopping many beetroots of an unusual and beautiful yellow-orange variety, I then have to accept assistance from a kind soul to help me finish my roasted veg pasta bake in time for supper.

-  The fire alarm goes off at 6:20am dragging everyone out of bed except for those already milking the cows. Apparently it’s caused by someone having a shower in the wayfarer’s accommodation with the door open. Having snuggled back under the covers, the bells are set off again just long enough for me to drag myself out of bed a second time. And then they go silent.

-  Clover, one of our three beef cattle, is taken off early one morning to the abattoir. As she is led into the horsebox, another one, Boris, decides it’s time to make a break for it and clambers out of his pen using his trough as a step; he has to be rounded up and re-incarcerated. Although he doesn’t know it, he has another year left. Boris was born shortly before I arrived at Pilsdon in March 2012, I remember him as a calf being led around the farm on a leash like a large stubborn dog.

-  I wear my favourite Superdry shirt which until recently had a large rip across the back. Now it sports an even larger tartan square patch that covers half the back of the shirt, having been repaired by an occasional visitor who specialises in needlework, and naturally attracts comments from everyone. The overall consensus is that I am the vanguard of a new fashion in personalised Superdry clothing.

-  Dragging myself with excessive reluctance out of bed at 5:40am to milk Snowdrop and Angelica, and to give half of Snowdrop’s milk to her little black calf Jasmine who is kept separately; she sucks at the bucket’s teat with a force approaching violence and the milk vanishes in seconds. In three days time she will be weaned and only given solids (beef nuts).

-  Visiting Matt and Mary one evening I am introduced to their new mongrel puppy Sasha whose idea of a friendly welcome is repeatedly jumping up on her hind legs and landing her forelegs on my crotch. They say she’ll calm down in a couple of years (!)

All these and many more happenings, conversations, times by the fireside, times on the piano, times in the church, times on the internet, times asleep, glimpses of nature being even more stunningly glorious than usual, the commonplace, the dull, the tiring, the fun, all add up to make one single week at Pilsdon.  Yet they all race past so fast.

F=G(m1*m2)/(r*r)

An apple fell on my head yesterday. I paused for a moment in case it were to spark the formation of a ground-breaking advance in physical theory in my brain. It didn’t. I picked up the apple and put it in my wheelbarrow, where it nestled amongst hundreds of its compatriots. It’s apple harvest time and Pilsdon’s two orchards have had a joyously abundant growing season judging by the weight of fruit on the branches. 

I have become an apple processing specialist in the short time I have been back at Pilsdon Community. It’s a highly technical field that only those with the right “appletitude” (as we joke in the apple industry) can succeed. Whole books could be written on this subject but in essence what I do is take the apples from the tree (or beneath the tree for those which have already “descended”, i.e. dropped off) and then route them through to one of five possible end products.

First there are the Eaters, which are those placed on the meal tables. These are taken from the trees on an as-needed basis. Secondly there are the Storers, the really firm-skinned perfect fruit, which are placed in our outside store in stacked dimpled trays such that they do not touch each other - this prevents the spreading of rot. Thirdly there are the Cookers, i.e the tart varieties used for cooking, which we have been peeling, coring, quartering, blanching (i.e. dunking in boiling water to kill microbes) and then freezing for future use. Fourthly, the Preservers which are apples we make into some form of preserve. So far we have made apple and marrow spicy chili chutney, apple butter (a thick apple cinnamon spread popular in the States) and dried apple rings.  Finally, the most numerous category, the Juicers. This year, for the first time in living memory, we have decided to make our own apple juice.  We will be taking about 250kg of apples to a local cooperative’s apple press and pasteurising facilities on 11th and 12th November, and hopefully end up with about 200 bottles of delicious golden juice!

In the half-year that I’ve been away from Pilsdon, young River has grown from baby to small boy. He now walks, says a few words like “Mummy”, “Daddy” and “fire”, can identify parts of his body, and this morning has learned how to stroke the cat nicely instead of yanking its tail. I have recruited him as an apple harvester apprentice, so he follows me around in the orchard making random quality inspections of the apples in the wheelbarrow by taking a bite or two out of each.

Everyone else here has of course aged by the same amount but developed in less immediately perceptible ways. What has noticeably changed is the male/female ratio as the community currently has four women guests, more than at any time that I’ve been here. This is generally considered a good thing as the women don’t feel quite as outnumbered by the men and perhaps exert a beneficial influence on the community’s atmosphere. Certainly people are behaving more socially than last winter. Instead of retreating to their rooms after supper, small groups hang out chatting in the library or by the Aga, or impromptu musical gatherings occur by the piano. Last week we were treated to a few beautifully sung duets from the couple from the Bruderhof community who are volunteers here. And plans are afoot to start up an occasional series of evening talks, given by anyone who has a topic they want to share with the rest of us.

This to me is what community living is all about. Working together, eating together, sharing together, and making music together. Long may it continue here at Pilsdon.

House of Straw

Leaving my new home in Wales all packed up, awning removed and water drained from the pipes, I climbed into my Jimny and exchanged a few unpleasantries with the pheasant perched defiantly on the bonnet before embarking on the two hundred mile journey back to the community at Pilsdon in West Dorset. I have to trust that the wind won’t blow my net protection off from the six fledgling blueberry bushes I planted, leaving them to the mercy (or otherwise) of the ravenous pheasants, and that my hastily erected fencing around the 150 recently sown garlic cloves stays standing. Next spring the gamekeepers will install an enormous net over the entire 700m² growing area as protection from their birds but they won’t do it now for fear a heavy winter snowfall might bring it down along with their fencing.

I broke the journey near Builth Wells where a couple of friends, let’s call them Gerard and Hannah, have recently moved onto their land in a caravan. The difference between them and me is that rather than sensibly escaping the bitter winter frosts by upping sticks and finding shelter, they are actually trying to build their own house on the land before the real bad weather starts, using straw bales and timber. When I arrived they were just about to lay the very first straw bale onto a large rectangular platform base, resting on tyres filled with stone. I helped them place the initial layer of bales around the edge of the platform, creating the beginnings of some extremely thick walls.

I had never previously done any straw bale construction and it was fascinating to see how simple and quick it was. The base bales were pinned to the platform with short wooden stakes pushed into holes in the platform, spike upwards. Once the bales are stacked six high, staggered like brickwork, they will be held together with long stakes forced through from the top. The exterior will be clad with timber, leaving a narrow gap for ventilation, and an insulated tin roof fitted from which rainwater will be collected as their water supply (this is Wales, after all - you can depend on the rain).

Hannah and Gerard’s home will be single storey but straw bales can be used for larger, more complex buildings, and are becoming more common since they provide such fantastic insulation for minimal cost. The amount of compression the straw is under prevents it from being a fire risk. Straw can normally be bought locally from farms so the carbon footprint is tiny. All in all this should be a much more widely used building material; probably the reason why it isn’t is the inertia and conservative approach of the British construction and insurance industries. 

Before heading on my way I paused to admire and nervously stroke their enormous fluffy Angora rabbits which they hope to turn into a wool business supplying ethical clothing companies who prefer not to buy the stuff from China where (a) Angora wool mostly comes from and (b) rabbit welfare is pretty low on the list of things people bother much about. More than half of their land is a very large field from which they will grow hay to feed to their rabbits thus reducing the need to buy expensive rabbit food.

The whole project is driven by a desire to live more simply with as little impact on the environment as possible - it’s a huge job for just two but I’m sure they can pull it off! Check out their planning application for more details.

Arriving at Pilsdon with the late afternoon sun making everything glow warm, it was wonderful to be greeted by so many familiar and friendly faces, each asking how I had survived the last six months in my Welsh bog. I am back in a world where floors don’t tilt, toilets are inside, walls keep the heat in, taps work and gush hot water, meals are (mostly) prepared by others, and the internet does not require a long bike ride. I’m going to make the most of these next few months.

Matt Swan is no longer in Dorset

I've gone off grid. 

Find out what's happening at mattswanoffgrid.blogspot.co.uk

Disclaimer : I obviously have to clamber back onto the grid occasionally to post these blogs. Don't judge me.

Movin' On Up

Stuff for going off grid

So this is it. In three days time I will be leaving Pilsdon and setting off with my caravan into uncharted territory.  No more bells to bring me to the dinner table. No more weekly task rotas. No more waking at 5:40am to milk cows (although they have got me doing that on Saturday and Sunday as they know I so love waking up early.) And perhaps most significantly, no more others.

Rollin' Home

I’ve bought my first home. It cost £3000, or 1.8% of the average house price in the UK1.  There was no need to get a mortgage out on it. It’s single storey and was built quite recently, in 1997. I’ll be moving in on 15th April. Admittedly it is on the small side, being twelve foot long and six and a half foot wide, but more than makes up for it by having wheels, thus allowing me to choose my neighbours.