Weather With You

Oak tree down 

You know there’s a strong wind blowing when you can feel your beard tugging your chin around, a sensation that’s worth growing a good beard for, if a reason be needed. Another indicator of greater than average breeziness is when a huge old oak tree is blown right over into your field. We reckon that that single tree might provide us with a quarter of our annual firewood needs - a literal windfall.  Pilsdon has otherwise escaped fairly lightly from the February maelstrom, with only a few broken panes in one greenhouse and some cosmetic roof linings being ripped off a cabin. No floods here thankfully, apart from the occasional bursting of the banks of the stream onto our approach lane (but it tends to do that on the slightest provocation, and never stays flooded for long).

It could have been a couple of centuries old.

On Wednesday I made a foray onto the beach at West Bay, on a seaweed reconnaissance mission. Seaweed makes a wonderful natural garden fertiliser and I supposed that the recent storms might have dredged up large quantities from the ocean and deposited it on our shores. In this I was mistaken, but instead found the awe-inspiring remains of a recent cliff-crumble, the ancient layers of sandstone succumbing once again to the driving rain and gale-force winds. An impressive enough sight to get onto page 7 of last week’s Mail On Sunday, no less.

Not the best site for rock-climbing

A break in the weather found a group of us yesterday making a concerted effort to make a dent in our huge pile of firewood.  It had already been chainsawed into chunks but needed splitting and storing under cover, so three of us got to work with splitting mauls while the others filled wheelbarrows with the chunks, pushing them through the gate and the mud to the large multi-chambered wood-store out back. Some logs split cleanly with a single stroke, another sweet sensation that you don’t need to grow a beard to appreciate (but it helps). Other logs were made of sterner stuff, requiring several hard blows even to get the axe to begin to make a dent. At this point we tended to ask someone else to bring a mallet over and whack the back of the axe head (the splitting axe is designed to allow this) - a couple of fat whacks is usually sufficient to cleave the block in two.

A mighty swing about to be brought to an abrupt halt

The wet weather tends to bring out everyone’s favourite garden pest, so every night after supper I grab a torch and a fellow gardener (often a chap who would like to be known here as Max Dangerous) and head out to the large glasshouse to hunt slugs.  Each young cauliflower plant and broad bean stalk we carefully inspect for the slimy gastropod molluscs, as well as the soil below. All those that we find, whether tiny and large, are picked off and placed together on the doorstep. The garlic seems to offer no attraction for the slugs so is left out of our inspection regime. Any Jain Buddhists reading this should skip to the next paragraph now. We finally dispatch our daily collection of silent slithering munchers with the swift downward application of a brick.

In just ten days time I will be leaving Pilsdon and setting off back to my caravan in Wales. It’ll soon be the start of the veg growing season. I have no idea what I will find there. Will the river have burst its banks and washed my raised beds into flatness? Will trees have been blown down? Will the 100mph winds have knocked my caravan over? I’m wishing now I hadn’t raised up its stabilising legs to prevent rodents climbing in.  When I arrive I’ll be updating my mattswanoffgrid blog so keep an eye there to be kept abreast of news from a bog in mid-Wales.