When we designed the plot here and had it terraced we planted the top area with fruit trees as an orchard. One of the Permaculture ideas is that you try to keep things that need a lot of attention near the house and those you visit only at certain times of year further away. The path up tom the top is very steep which doesn’t normally matter but this winter has been very wet so when Laura and I started clearing around the trees ready for giving them manure to feed them, and a cardboard mulch to make picking easier in the Autumn, we found ourselves slipping and sliding on the mud. It got so dangerous that we had to stop – especially as carrying trugs of muck and armfuls of cardboard made everything harder. So I decided we needed to make the steepest parts of the slope into steps.
The fence pins are being used for at least the third time. John originally bought them to hold up stock fencing to grow peas over. I then used them to fence round some young trees to stop them being accidentally mown down. And now they are holding back the risers. The wood is a mix of offcuts and some lengths Danny used to make a former to steam bend handles round – hence the holes for pegs.
The second is complete serendipity. In one of the winter storms a piece of an ornamental tree in the lower garden broke off. I tidied it all up and put the twigs on a slow rot pile by the stream which will eventually raise the bank there a bit. To my amazement the twigs flowered! So I cut some and brought them into the kitchen.
Apologies for the poor quality of the photos – it is grey and raining (again!) so the light is very poor.
Scrap Happy is curated by Kate to showcase any project that keeps scrap from being thrown away. My fellow scrapsters are
We have had a succession of storms and each has brought disruption to this cottage in a remote part of SW Wales.
At the beginning of the month heavy rain caused a lot of flooding in the area. My friend Lindy’s house is near a river and the lowest part of her garden floods a couple of times most winters but this time it reached the concrete plinth on which her house stands and she moved her car to higher ground and packed a bag in case she had to evacuate. Luckily the rain eased and her house was not inundated. My stream was high but the bank on the other side is lower than on mine so it will always flood away from me. It did mean that for a couple of days I didn’t go out because of flooding on the roads.
A night of torrential rain a week or so later proved too much for the sagging gutters on the back house which my son and I planned to deal with in the Spring. I awoke to find the whole lot had peeled off taking the plastic fascia with them and were lying on the ground. I began the task of finding someone to put new ones up and luckily for me Lindy was able to recommend someone who had done some work on her roof recently. The job will involve scaffolding so it makes sense to repaint the wall whilst I can have good access.
The following weekend my Grandson, Sean, was coming to see me as he had to attend a course in Cardiff for his work mid-week and realised he could visit me and work from ‘home’ on the Monday before the course started on the Tuesday. He doesn’t drive so set off from Luton on the Saturday morning by train and I was to pick him up from Whitland at 5pm. He messaged me at lunchtime – more downpours had caused flooding all over the country so trains had been cancelled, delayed and re-routed – he would let me know when he got as far as Cardiff where he had to change trains and give me his revised arrival time. At 5pm he got to Cardiff Central and discovered that the earliest he could get to Whitland was 9pm and probably would be even later. He gave up and found a hotel for the night. After more delays on the Sunday he finally reached Whitland at 3:15pm! It was lovely to see him and be able to spend time catching up but I felt so sorry for his very frustrating journey!
Then on the Wednesday, whilst he was on the course, it started to snow and by Thursday I was snowed in. One of the disadvantages of living at the bottom of a valley is that whilst I am sheltered from the worst of the wind there is a steep hill to climb to get out whichever way I turn so it doesn’t take a lot of snow to make leaving impossible. We had a few brief power cuts but nothing too long so I was able to keep warm, cook and have light. But as the snow started to melt and slide off the roof the gutters on the front started to sag and pull down that fascia too. So I decided I would have to have the whole lot done! The scaffolding will go up right round the house tomorrow and the work should be done by Christmas – as long as the weather permits Mike to work.
Yesterday afternoon I drove into Carmarthen and as I was navigating Tesco’s car park the heavens opened – again! Getting into a bay was nerve wracking because all the car windows were streaming with water. Once I was safely parked I sat inside the car hoping it was just a very heavy shower and it sounded as if someone was chucking buckets of water on the roof.
As I was sitting there I realised that in olden times such a sequence of terrible weather would have been seen as signs of divine displeasure. We would all have been searching our consciences for the sinfulness which was the cause, repenting like mad and making offerings to appease God / the gods. Of course most of us know that we have abused nature and ‘upset’ it and that is what is causing the increasingly violent weather without needing a Prophet, Shaman or Wise man to tell us. But instead of repenting and changing our ways we grumble and increase our pressure on the planet. And instead of making sacrifices, sliding our smart TV or iPad or whatever into one of the liminal places as an offering or ritually burning them to send smoke signals to Heaven, we take them to the tip and ‘treat ourselves’ to a new, upgraded one on Black Friday. Progress?
Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will know that a few years ago I started planning to prepare for my old age. Yes, I am in my 70’s but I don’t feel old yet (well not most days!). I am planning for my 90’s and later and anticipating maybe less robust good health. But I have no wish to move to somewhere ‘sensible’, a bungalow in a village with a bus service. I like it here, I have brilliant neighbours but to stay here for the duration means planning for problems.
Amongst those problems were the things over which I have no control like pandemics and climate change. And lately two things have shown up a hole in that resilience.
The first is that here in the UK elctricity prices have soared. They are predicted to rise again in April when the Government allows companies to charge more. That will mean the price has doubled in a very short time. The problem is that although there has been a huge increase in renewable generation the National Grid still needs to have gas powered stations on stand-by for the times when demand surges – the early evening when everyone gets in from work, breakfast time when showers, kettles and toasters all go on, even the ad break in a popular Soap Opera when lots of people make a cuppa. And Gas is sold on the global market with a current shortage of supply. Several electricity supply companies have gone bust recently because the price rises to them caught them out. Their customers had to be transferred to other providers which has given headaches to both the customers (they lost a good price deal and went onto a higher tarrif) and the companies that had to accept them. The upshot is that as I have an Air Surce Heat Pump to heat my home my bills have increased dramatically even though it is a pretty efficient system. I can pay them but it means cutting back elsewhere and losing some of the fun things. Petrol prices have risen less dramatically but filling my car takes more money than it did a few months ago. And transport costs going up means food and other things go up too. What is a girl to do?
My Heat Pump works well – but at a cost!
In the long term everything will even out, gas prices will stabilise, but I cannot imagine that energy in any form will be much cheaper. Except wood which grows happily without any cost to me and which I can, and do, cut without recourse to fossil fuels.
I have a small woodstove as back up to the Heat Pump but it is not very powerful and certainly cannot heat the whole house. Time for a rethink.
The second sign of trouble has been that we have had two major storms this week and a third is forecast for tonight. The Met Office gives storms names only if they pose a threat and we have had Dudley and Eunice so far this week and Franklin has just been named and is expected tonight. Warnings are issued to help us prepare – yellow means a low risk but that damage cannot be ruled out, orange that damage is likely and red that it is pretty much inevitable. Eunice warranted a RED warning which is very rare. On Thursday I had an email from my home insurer reminding me how to make a claim, giving me my policy number to make it easier to identify myself, and telling me they had arranged for extra staff in their call center; and another from Western Power Distribution who manage the power lines telling me they had cancelled all routine work, had all their engineers on stand-by with helicopters to move them if flight was possible and they too had extra call center staff to deal with queries. They were clearly putting their contingency plans for a major incident into operation! In the event my house was perfectly safe and my garden suffered very little damage – one dying Ash tree fell but hit nothing important and one door blew off one greenhouse. This morning there were two fairly short power cuts and as I have been writing this I have had a message that there are problems with the water supply in my area. Other people fared much worse.
Apologies for the poor quality photo – it was blowing a hooley and the rain was horizontal!
Whether you believe in climate change (I do) or not it is clear that extreme weather events are becoming more common. Which means power cuts will become more common. Understandably when there is widespread disruption to the electricity network the first jobs tackled are those which get most people reconnected. In this remote rural place we are at the end of the queue. I have a couple of advantages – Because I am old and disabled I am perceived as vulnerable (I can hear you laughing – I do too!) but they can deal with that by passing my details to Social Services or the Red Cross to check on me and provide help if I need it. My big scret weapon is cows. My neighbour at the dairy farm up the hill milks over 200 cows twice a day and no way can that be done by hand. So if the power goes off it is an emergency and, to be fair, Western Power always get them reconnected quickly even if it means bringing in a generator or other temporary equipment. And that usually means I get power too. But at present in a power cut I have no heating and no means of cooking.
So I have decided to invest in a bigger wood burner in my sitting room. Which means having the old liner in the chimney removed and a new one put in. Apparantly the old one will be coming to the end of its life and it is better to have all the disruption in one go. It has taken me weeks to decide on the best stove and firm and it will be May before it can be installed. I was dismayed that most of the firms I contacted just told me to choose a fire and then they would fit it for a fixed fee. Their advice on how big the new stove should be seemed to be plucked out of thin air. It was Mr Snail who pointed out that for most people these stoves are nice accessories for the sitting room, lit on Christmas Day and maybe other high days and holidays, nice to have in a power cut but very much an adjunct to the central heating. How it looks is then the crucial factor in the choice. Only one firm understood that I wanted to use one as my main heat source. And I wanted to be able to boil a kettle or simmer a stew on it on a regular basis. My Heat Pump will still be there and will be maintained. In very cold weather the fire may not provide enough heat to keep the chill off the bedroom or kitchen and I may want to supplement it with the radiators. Or if I am too ill to cut wood or keep the fire going I need another heat source. But for the most part I will heat my home on free wood and do some cooking with it too. That should reduce my elctricity bills to a more manageable level and restore my capacity to have money for fun.
A permaculture principle is ‘Every function should be supported by more than one element and every element should serve more than one function’. That is a definition of resilience. I am getting there.
Going Batty in Wales 