The Downshift Project

Polytunnel & Fruit Trees

It’s a hot sunny day in mid-May and the polytunnel is finally up and ready for business! This has been an epic build by Dave using a lot of trial and error but it’s all turned out brilliantly in the end.

Polytunnel Exterior

The polythene was easy to stretch over the frame but it was a little tricky to wrap the plastic around the ends neatly and cut off the excess. After a long hot day an argument about the origami of polytunnels was not something either of us really enjoyed!

Initially we didn’t plan on having anything supporting the plastic except the water pipework that forms the roof arc, but when rainwater found a way to form a puddle in the roof it proved too heavy and squished one of the pipes. In response Dave added some additional internal support poles, which have had the additional benefit of providing a frame for shelving which I’m now using for my seedlings!

Polytunnel Interior

In the picture on the right you can see the shelves in the upper left, a few tomatoes below, and a row of peppers on the upper right. There are also some leeks still growing in pots, which are doing nicely. Unlike spring onions, none of the wildlife seems to like taking my leeks so they’ve survived to adolescence while every spring onion I’ve put in the ground or in pots has vanished within days of appearing. What you can’t see in the pic are the dozen or so tomato plants just out of shot. They’re hugely enjoying the warmth! I’ve been warned to keep good ventilation in the polytunnel though or the tomatoes might suffer from blight.

Also planted in the polytunnel are basil, coriander, parsley, beetroot, brussels and a few rows of carrots, which have been so far singularly unsuccessful on our outdoor plots. Not sure what’s taking them, but no point fighting it. So it’s indoor security for the orange roots for the time being.

View up to the Polytunnel

Down at the lower end of the garden, I’ve now finished and painted the steps that lead up to the polytunnel.

Veg Plots, Lower Level

I think they’ve turned out pretty well and I got to play with Dave’s circular saws into the bargain. Dave’s mum (a life long horticulturalist) gave us several pots of ornamental plants for the garden so I’ve given over a couple of plots to flowers rather than veg production. This goes against my self-sufficiency raison d’etre but I can’t deny it looks good. So it’s two plots of flowers and two of potatoes between the stairway to polytunnel-land.

The broad beans continue to flourish. Little bit of nibbling from slugs and insects but nothing that’s slowing the plants down. Actually I’m finding the slug problem isn’t nearly as bad up here above the house as it is in the tiny plot outside the front door. I’ve put in a load of cabbages and celeriac (kindly supplied as seedlings by our neighbour) and they appear to be thriving despite the odd slug slime trail appearing on their leaves.

We’re currently trying the non-lethal approach to slug prevention, mainly because Dave doesn’t want to cause problems for the birdlife or indeed our cat that might come from using poison. It remains to be seen whether we will need to escalate to more cruel warfare techniques. So far, I’ve lost entire crops of spring onions (twice), carrots and radishes (until they reached a certain size, after which the slugs stopped attacking the leaves and started going after the root instead). Curse their little slimy hides. Maybe we need to get some ducks. But to get ducks we need to dig a new pond, and so the work goes on.

The whole exercise has been one of pure joy so far, let me state that without any prevarication. In the last month I lost my job with the hedge fund after they got credit crunched, but I don’t really mind. I will need to find new ways of earning a living but for the time being it’s good to be able to spend my time on things that make me feel good about myself and the world. Both of us own narrowboats back in London which we’re intending to sell over the summer. This will give us the breathing space to build new lives out here in Ferryside. And I’m looking for short term IT contracts to tide us over. I don’t absolutely need to get one, but if I did, it would definitely help, and make big capital expenditures like fitting a woodstove, new water heating system and solar panels easier to manage. 

I wish I could say “I should have done this years ago,” but then I couldn’t have afforded to do it years ago, and I didn’t know Dave years ago, and what’s more I wouldn’t have been psychologically ready to give up my ‘career’ until I’d put my all into it. So I can only say I took the opportunity when I was good and ready and who can say fairer than that really?

I feel like there’s another period of my life now beginning. I’m not so much different to who I was ten years ago, but I feel like I’ve walked a long journey, reached the end, and am now starting out on another trip into the unknown. Almost like having another life. It makes me wonder where and who I’ll be in another ten years.

For now, selling the narrowboat is my main objective. But first she needs to pass her boat safety test, and to do that I need to pump out the toilet, thus lifting her a few inches out of the water and emptying the gas storage locker which must be clear of water to pass said boat safety. All very convoluted. And then it’s off to the dry dock for bottom blacking. And then we need to give her a fresh coat of coach paint. It’s a good thing I’m unemployed otherwise I’d never have time for any of this stuff!

Dave is putting the final touches to the polytunnel frame.

Things are progressing pretty well at Limpets. Dave is putting the final touches to the polytunnel. The photo is actually from a couple of days ago. There’s a window and a door nearly finished now as well. It’s taken a lot of work to put this up and I’m really looking forward to getting the plastic over and starting to use it.

While Dave has been putting up the polytunnel I’ve been building steps so we can get up and down the garden more easily. Typically when it rains the whole hill turns to a slippy mudpile, but no longer! I’m actually pretty impressed with myself; it’s probably the biggest DIY job I’ve ever done.

The steps begin their march down the hill.

I did the sawing of the steps, the making of the pegs, and the laying of the gravel. You can see here how it used to look before I started. There about 15 steps in total now. Unfortunately they kinda look like a partly undone zipper and Dave is calling them the Y-fronts.

Emerging Ferns

Curious ancient life forms of the fern variety are appearing all over the garden. It’s creepy how they emerge from the ground all curled up like insects, then unfurl in one grand inflation. In a world of monocots and dicots, these things are the dinosaurs of plantlife. They belong in an older world.

Tomorrow Dave is heading down to Pembrey for a ‘track day’ on his SV650 bike. This is his birthday present from me. I just hope he doesn’t do himself (or the bike) an injury. It’s my job to take good pics of him getting his knee down.

Then on Saturday we’re off back to London. It’ll be my first time on the narrowboat for well over a month now. I need to clean up inside and get her ready for sale. And there’s the small matter of passing the 4-yearly boat safety test which may or may not be expensive, we’ll see. I’m actually quite looking forward to getting back to London as my bike is there and I haven’t had a good ride since well before Christmas. It was around this time last year that I took my first lessons on a 125 and I’m looking forward to a nice ride in the sunshine. Hopefully my body won’t have forgotten how to ride after the winter layoff.

I think both of us are feeling pretty content with life in Ferryside. I’ve gone very ‘part time’ with my job, and Dave is still unemployed until he passes his driving instructor exams, so we’re having to relearn a bit more frugality than I’d been used to in London. But I think that’s the goal. My central motivation used to be maximising my income – now it’s become maximising my free time, and living as frugally as possible immediately becomes a large part of that. I’m now on the lookout for ‘other things I can do to bring in a bit of part time income’, preferably things I’d enjoy. Two things immediately come to mind. One is writing That Novel. You know, the one I’ve started a hundred times. The other idea is to write a few iPhone apps. Objective-C and the iPhone sdk are still a bit alien to me but they’re no harder than the C#.NET I spent most of my career using. The nice thing about the iPhone right now is that as a development platform it feels rather like the ZX Spectrum did in 1984. People are only just starting to explore the power of the device and the bar is pretty low as far as applications goes. You really feel like you can write a popular application in your bedroom again, whereas on a PC or console you need several dozen developers to put out a game (that ultimately isn’t as addictive as the ones I was playing in the 80s…)

Anyway, enough geeking out. Well okay, one more thing. The TV show ‘Lost’ seems to be nicking my latest novel ideas. I had this beautifully convoluted plot line laid out about a woman who travels into her own past but can’t change anything that happened (and yet can be responsible for those things happening). And now Lost has done the same thing with its non-paradox time travel thingummy. I swear I thought of this a year ago. C’est la vie.

Finally, did anyone else secretly cheer when those RBS windows got smashed in the demonstration yesterday? My brother works for the company and I have nothing against the staff (except the senior idiot management), but in terms of vicarious bloodlust, it was a pretty sight. Futile, but pretty. The whole demo was pretty futile really. In fact it probably just gave an excuse for people like Gordo Brown to claim to be ‘responding to the clamour of the people’ while doing exactly what he was always going to do anyway, which is to replace silly bank lending with silly government lending. Gotta reinflate the economy you know. Gotta get the consumers spending. Gotta keep growth going at all costs. We can clear up the government debt mess later.

Well, you know, here’s the thing. Maybe growth ain’t the best way to go. Maybe we should be aiming for a stable economy – something we could rightfully use the word ’sustainable’ about. Typically the word ’sustainability’ these days actually means ’sustainable growth’, which is an oxymoron if ever there was one. We need to get away from this crazy growth idea. It certainly makes the rich richer, but we’re like bacteria in a petri dish – if you increase the food supply you just end up doubling the population and the same difficulties come back time and again – except that now there’s half the space and everyone’s working twice as hard just to stand still. It’s great that so many people can afford 42inch plasmas, but does it make anyone happy who’s not already found it in themselves to be content? I think not.

Economic growth is similar in nature to the mortgage. Initially it seems like a good thing because people who couldn’t afford a house outright can now borrow over a long period and afford one. But now, since so many people can afford to buy houses, the price of houses goes up. (Which is great if you’re already an owner, not so great if you’re not.) And now that house prices are higher, people who might have been able to afford a house without a mortgage after saving a few years, now find they need a mortgage as well. In other words, the very idea of the mortgage, designed to help people afford a house, has become primarily responsible for the rise and rise of house prices into the stratosphere. And thus we have the subprime debacle, when people who had no income at all were able to get ridiculous loans, enabling them to buy property and pushing the price of housing even further out of reach of those who were cautious and frugal and saved rather than borrowed.

Without mortgages, houses would be many times cheaper than they are today and reflect their real value, not just the crazy power of made up monopoly money; and people might actually have a hope of owning their home outright at some point in their life, rather than just paying off the interest until they die, or sell their equity back to the bank for a meagre pension.

Growth never pays off in the end. Stability is the only sustainable way. You can keep making up money to lend with but since it all depends on using energy to turn resources into stuff and then throwing the stuff away and buying more, when the earth’s energy starts to wane, anyone who still thinks they can keep on growin’ is going to find themselves sorely mistaken. Best figure out how to be content in the here and now. Don’t send kids to school to learn how to live from other kids unless you want a society of bullies and x-factor groupies. Don’t sell them on aspirations of greed and power. Teach them compassion and contentment if we must have schools at all.

Okay, rant over. But seriously, I’ve only just begun.

Steps to the Garden. I've been repairing a few of these as the wood has rotted.

We have a curious half-acre of land to work with here at Limpets Folly. The house is a small wooden bungalow at the bottom of a steep south facing hill. Managed sycamore, oak and ash woodland lies to the west, while our neighbours have a similar property, also bounded by woodland.

Neither of us are complete newbies at the veg growing lark, though Dave has more experience than I do, due to his mother having trained as a horticulturist in her youth. She still grows the vast majority of her own fruit & veg needs in a garden far smaller than ours. Personally, until Spring 2008, I hadn’t touched a seedling since I was a child.

Still, it can be quite addictive, watching a plant grow from the tiniest seed into something bearing edibles. For a city girl, that first home-grown radish can be quite an emotional experience.

But we have no particular expectation of self-sufficiency or anything close to it. If we have a goal, it’s probably self-determination, the desire not to be under the authority of bosses. We’ll live as frugally as we need to in order to be as free as possible from wage-slavery. Yes, there’s also the desire to live with a low environmental impact, but speaking personally, this comes second as a motivation. It probably shouldn’t, but it does. At least it comes second.

Polytunnel under construction. It's actually a lot further along than this now. Nearly ready for the polythene sheeting.

So far, since we moved in after Christmas, most of the work we’ve done here has been outside the house. Inside, Dave’s put up some shelving and installed the plumbing for our washing machine, but it’s outside where most of the effort is going. The shed was falling apart due being soaked in Welsh rain, so Dave weatherproofed it and redid the felt roof. We have a new water butt for rain collection, with plans to install a pump to take the water up the garden (about 10m head to the polytunnel). The polytunnel itself is Dave’s primary project right now. He’s nearly finished it – the structure is up, it just needs some final strengthening and then the plastic sheet can go on. I’m very impressed with it.

While this has been going on I’ve been digging the veg beds and repairing paths and adding steps. Some garden archeology reveals olde steps winding their way up the garden (which shows signs of serious cultivation in the distant past), but these steps are now overgrown and moreover are partially obscured by a patch of raspberries, which we’d rather keep in situ. So I’m making some new woodland steps, which I’m rather proud of. And in front of the house another patch of ground has been reclaimed for a herb garden. I had to cut down a eucalyptus tree to get light onto that particular area. This was particularly tricky as the tree was quite large with many stems, and was quite interwoven with the power cable feeding the house, which had me nervously checking the lights inside every time I sawed off another branch.

The small herb garden / radish plot in front of the house.

Two veg plots have been planted so far. The aforementioned front-of-house herb plot has thyme and rosemary and sage and parsley. I filled the rest with radish seedlings. I am a big fan of the radish. I can eat them like sweets. The second veg plot is full of onion sets. You can never have too many onions. They go in just about every meal.

The third plot is just about ready for planting. This will be split in two I think. One half will be broad beans, while the rest will be leeks and spring onions. I’m not an expert yet at the proper rotation of the four main crop types, nor do I know much about which vegetables like to be close to others, and which dislike it, but I figure best just to get the stuff in the ground at first and figure out how to finesse the system later. I am an optimiser by nature. When I was a software developer, everything was done by gradual iteration, and I still like to work that way. Try and design it all perfectly up front and either nothing will ever get done, or something will go wrong anyway.

Veg plots 2 & 3, part way through the digging.

I like the idea of permaculture. It makes sense to me to take the waste of one system and turn it into an input into another system. I sometimes wonder how many of the clever permaculture ideas one hears about have actually been proven to be efficacious in practice, but it’s the thinking process that counts. Once you start to think along those lines, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. I figure, the more experience we get, the more naturally we’ll start to develop and enhance the way we lay out our garden for optimal food yield.

And it’s not all about food of course. I may have a fascination with small scale food production, because of the possibilities it holds for escape the dominion of The System of owners and wageslaves, but I’m not without an eye for the pretty. There are some obvious areas of the garden which are just begging for flower beds. Most notably the raised bank that the polytunnel sits on would look stunning in flower, especially from the bottom of the garden as one looks upward. I can imagine putting a bench up there, and maybe digging a pond just below. We have a tiny pond already, not much more than a bath, which is presently full of tadpoles. Such wonderful wildlife could do with a more salubrious home methinks.

Before I go, I’d like to recommend if I may, an article by Charles Eisenstein called, “Money and the Turning of the Age” which is a long but interesting analysis of the role of money in society. I particularly like the following quote:

No matter how highly paid, if you lack the opportunity to fully apply your gifts toward a purpose that inspires you, any job eventually becomes soul-destroying. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires and we cannot be fully alive otherwise.

This kind of post-modern critique of civilisation intrigues me a lot. I imagine the people around Marx felt the same way about his ideas, as if the whole damn elitist kaboodle had just been laid bare for everyone to plainly see. Still, more of the philosophical side of things in another post I think.

~Tess