Who know’s?

I came across a post on Facebook recently – sorry I can’t remember where it originated or who posted it so I can’t acknowledge it properly. The gist was that when we read about, or watch a film about, someone travelling back in time the essential feature is that a small thing they change back then makes a big difference to the present when they return. On the other hand we all tell ourselves that the small things we do now are irrelevant to solving the big issues.

Maybe not every small action does make a big difference but how can we know which ones will and which one’s wont?

Today I went to a meet-up at the home of a couple who are members of one of the Permaculture groups I belong to. I chatted to P who was widowed suddenly a couple of years ago and who told me shortly afterwards that she looked to me as a source of strength because I had been widowed some time before and had made a new life for myself. I never saw myself in that light before. Now I offer other bereaved people support and empathy more consciously. Today she told me she is moving house and how sad she will be to ‘leave S behind’ but also excited at a fresh start.

The I spoke to L, a psychotherapist and yoga teacher about her experience of doing both those roles on Zoom during the pandemic. To C a former Climate scientist, now smallholder, about the strengths and limitations of climate modelling and the book his wife (another, still practicing, climate scientist) is writing on the subject. To a couple who recently moved to Wales and are now planting a garden and converting an outbuilding so they can work from home more. I was able to point them in the direction of resources they may find useful and invited them to come and see my garden in the hope that they can learn from some of my mistakes as well as my successes. To B who I met at Coppicewood College when he was a student and I was a regular volunteer and who is planting trees on his site which produce nuts and fruit. He has been thinking about a business making fruit syrups and I suggested he consider fruit vinegars – I will send him the recipe. And to the hosts who I know listened to me a while back talking about rewriting my will and setting up Lasting Powers of Attorney, took some of the ideas and used them. There were others I would have loved to chat with but time ran out.

Part of our hosts’ garden

When I came home I read a post from Jean who blogs as ‘one small stitch’ (https://onesmallstitch.wordpress.com/2021/08/21/ramblings) in which she wondered if her making and mending made any difference when the challenges of Climate Change are so huge. I imagine we all wonder that at times. Should we be doing more? if so what?

But Jean’s posts, like those of all the bloggers I follow, inspire me in so many ways. To make things and mend things, to think about the World and see it through different eyes, to go on learning and trying new things, to recognise the kindness and generosity of human beings to each other.

I have no idea which, if any, of those encounters I had today will change the world in the slightest. I have no idea if any of you reading this will find it useful or encouraging. I will never be a powerful politician or run a global company (for which may the world be truly thankful – I am not cut out for either role). I will go on doing what I CAN do – making the small changes I am capable of, making and mending, gardening and wooding, reading and writing, reaching out to others through blogging and meeting and offering them the help and support I can. I may be a ‘daft old bat’ but we are all connected, each of you to me and through me to the people I spoke to today, and in our various communities and conversations, urging each other on, our combined small acts might, just might, change the future.

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The Magic Roundhouse

Another thing which ha been taking up quite a lot of time for me recently but has again been great fun, has been helping to work on the Roundhouse at Dyfed Permaculture Farm.

Some years ago we were given an old yurt to provide another meeting space – somewhere smaller, more intimate, tidier and quieter than the Barn. For a couple of years it worked well although we knew that the timber was not in great condition and the canvas had been mended. Then one Autumn, just a few days before we were going to take it down for winter, a gale blew and when we looked the yurt had a very distinct lean to it! A couple who love the Farm and visit regularly but live in England offered us some money to build something that would be useful and enhance the facilities. We decided to build a Roundhouse to the same footprint as the yurt in the same spot. As far as possible we would use materials we had on the land (timber from managing the woodland, soil, straw and hay) parts of the old yurt, and reclaimed materials which we could collect.

Over the summer of 2019, with the help of a local man. Richard Sylvan, who has built many roundhouses, we got the circle of posts up and the roof on all using timber felled on site. Some of the work was done by our regular volunteers but we also advertised it as a course with people paying a modest fee to come and learn. The roof is a ‘reciprocating’ one – the radial rafter poles were laid in a spiral on top of an upright which was then knocked away – each rafter holds its neighbour up! it gives us the whole span without pillars. Very clever! The rafters were covered with the canvas from the old yurt roof, then a heavy duty pond liner (we had to buy that!), some gravel and then on the top turf which we scraped off the car park thereby doing two jobs in one. Over that winter 2019/20 even just having a space to shelter under was very useful. But building work stopped until Spring.

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Raising the roof – a hard hat job!

Then Covid struck. For a while only the 2 households who live on the farm could do any work there. Then in the summer, as restrictions eased a little our small group of regular volunteers began to have occasional workdays and we spent one of them doing some minor repairs to the yurt floor. We managed to hold a couple of management committee meetings in the shelter of the roof which kept the rain off but not the wind so we were essentially out of doors but not getting wet!

Repairing the floor pieces

This year, once things began to ease again we decided to make a push to get on with it. It wasn’t possible to run courses but having ascertained which of the regulars could make each date we were able to invite a couple of people who had been on the original courses, and lived locally, to come as volunteers for the wall building. The walls are lengths of cordwood from trees felled on the Farm land interspersed with bottle bricks (an empty wine bottle and a jam jar taped together) and all held together with cob which is a mixture of soil, clay and straw. We obtained permission to dig clay from an old pit a few miles away, Richard came back to show us how to do all this. The windows are all ‘found’ ones – donations of replaced windows or ‘wrong size’ panes. There is still a small section of wall to fill in once the fire has been installed and the flue put through the wall and there are a few other odd gaps to be filled in when we have another batch of cob made.

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Mixing cob!

Then we spent a long day putting the floor down. It was originally the gymnasium floor in a girls school and still has the markings for netball! It was salvaged and cut up to become the floor of the yurt and is now laid in the Roundhouse. The hole in the middle is the original space for a stove and will be filled with a mosaic – that will be the finishing touch!

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The original intention was to put doors on the three remaining sections but in the light of the pandemic we have decided that for now we will hang big curtains across there. That will encourage us and any other users to keep it very well ventilated. We had a meeting in there on Monday night and it was a magical space.

To read more about Dyfed Permaculture Farm and see more pictures go to http://www.dyfedpermaculturefarmtrust.org.uk or to their Facebook page

Plan Z and counting

When I had finished writing my last post on Monday I decided to go and visit a friend who lives just up the hill. The friend who did my washing when my machine broke down at the start of lockdown and who got her student daughter to do my shopping for me. She and her husband had taken a much needed short break and gone away – if they stay something goes wrong on the farm and he goes back to work to fix it. Whilst they were gone her Dad stayed in the house to supervise her teenage kids. We had a cup of tea and caught up on news.

On Wednesday her Dad was told he had tested positive for Covid 19 and so my friend and her family should self-isolate. The chances that it was passed to her AND that she passed it to me are very small (we sat 2m apart) but I decided that the responsible thing to do was to stay away from everyone. So instead of being at my daughter’s admiring her new home and catching up with her and her children I am here.

As it happened, when I got the news there were 2 men replacing the wooden outside doors in my house with uPVC ones – not a very sustainable choice but I was sick of draughts and high heating costs! I decamped to the bedroom to keep well out of their way for the 2 days the job took and emerged only when they had retreated to their van to eat their lunch, made a sandwich and took it back upstairs. I was able to walk the dogs and to come downstairs in the evening once they had gone home but it showed me how horrid it must have been to be cooped up in a small flat for the 3 weeks of full lockdown. I did finish some sewing projects though!

A pair of slippers based on espadrille soles – they are not quite right but I can improve. 2 small fish from a pattern by Ann Wood Handmade. Some granny squares for a blanket.

So why is this post called plan Z? Well a friend of my daughter asked a colleague of hers for some information my daughter needed and outlined what had been happening for her over the summer. His response was to ask if she was writing a soap opera script! He didn’t know that my son’s brother in law had almost died of Covid, that Rob (who lived in the cabin in the garden in return for helping me in the garden and woods) left suddenly leaving me with no help over the summer, that Laura moved in to replace him a month ago (she is delightful and a great help), that Matt came to fit out the utility room because it was work he could do without needing to be indoors and he needed to earn, that now I need to self-isolate…..And each of those has resulted in me revising my plans.

Some of you may have noticed that I have said very little about the Diploma in Permaculture Design I embarked on a couple of years ago. That is because I have given up, another change of plan. I intended to design ways to stay alive, well, active and living here into advanced old age and write up the designs as my portfolio. I really enjoyed doing the thinking and planning. The last stage of implementation is to turn the old garage and its loft space into habitable rooms including a shower room, all with wheelchair accessibility in mind just in case I need one and that is well underway. Meanwhile they will be additional bedrooms when family visit. I am really pleased with the results of it all. Lockdown was a good test of the strategies I had put in place to increase my resilience and I survived very well. However the writing up nearly drove me nuts. It took ages and each tutor I spoke too had their own pet ideas about how it should be laid out. I could have spent a lot of time cutting and pasting and editing, dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’ but decided that the things it would enable me to do were too few to justify the work. One of my tasks over winter when hopefully life will be less fraught, is to decide what, if anything, I do next. Somehow I doubt if I will be bored! Plan Z+1 coming to a blog post near you soon!

Blessings # 22 – V is for Vision

I may have poor hearing but luckily my vision is pretty good. I have a pair of prescription glasses for distance but don’t actually NEED to wear them for driving. The optician recommended I have them for driving after dark or if I am tired. So they live in the glovebox and come out very occasioanlly. Similarly I wear ready readers if I am tired or doing close work or reading small print. Because I only use them for a few jobs and they are quite cheap I have a pair by my bed, some by my chair in the sitting room (for unpicking knitting!) a pair in the workshop and another in my studio. The Welsh Government funds more frequent eye tests for me than for most people – I would like to think they do this for me but I suspect it is as much because if I lost 2 senses I would be more demanding of services!

But vision is also about having a vision, envisioning, not in the religious sense of seeing angels or saints but imagining how things might be, how problems might be solved, being able to ask ‘What if..?’ (which I talked about in a previous post – you might like to go back and read it here if you missed it).

I am intrigued by the way some people are very good at creative thinking and others less so and how it can vary over a lifetime. I think it may be to do with our attitude to change. It seems particularly pertinent now when we have all had massive changes forced upon us. Do we long for ‘things to go back to normal’ or do we contemplate a ‘new normal’ or hope that that this is ‘pressing the reset button’? Response to change seem to lie on a spectrum from ‘bring it on’ to ‘over my dead body’.

You may already know that the chinese character for crisis is Wei Chi. It is a conjoining of two smaller characters Wei means danger, Chi is the life force or, in this situation, perhaps better translated as opportunity. And therein lies the conundrum. Are we more aware of the danger? That leads us to dig our heels in, retrench, try to grab control, resist change. Or do we major on the opportunity? Can we envision something better rising from the ashes, become energetic and enthusiastic about a new future? Either extreme is unhelpful but somewhere in the middle – the cautious optimism point – lies a way forward in relative safety.

The colleague who introduced me to the idea of Wei Chi was particularly interested in it’s connection to grief. In order to move to something new we have to give up what was, accept that it has gone. That is as true of breaking a plate as of losing a loved one – the process may be longer or shorter, stronger or weaker but it has to be gone through. If we try to avoid it, circumvent it, deny it it will come probably back to bite us on the bum.

I have long been a change junkie! Or to put it another way I have a low boredom threshold! I am always trying new things, new ways of doing tasks, new arrangements of furniture, new hobbies, new recipes…. I need my less flighty friends to restrain me and help me face the loss of what was before racing on to the new.

One lesson that I have learned recently is to be clear about my vision for the future. When I started the work of planning to live long and well as I reach my later years (some people would say I have already reached them!) my friend Jasmine Dale encouraged me to draw a picture of what that old age would look like. Although I sometimes ‘Open mouth without engaging brain’ I generally have a pretty nifty censor on my words even if they are only spoken in my head. Being no artist my pencil censor is much less experienced so a drawing was more likely to get at what I really wanted rather than what I thought I ought to want. I drew it with coloured pencils – washed out and hard to see – then did it again in felt tips – better, stronger, more convincing. I saw that I had drawn THIS house so was assuming I would stay here. It made me question that and seriously consider the pros and cons of staying or various other places I could live. As you may have gathered I decided to stay here! But it revealed what the disadvantages of that decision were likely to be and what I needed to plan to avoid them.

It still looks a bit wishy washy!

That drawing has become my lodestar. All my big decisions are measured against it – do they take me towards it or divert me from it? Without a vision I would wander aimlessly and how would I know if I had arrived? I may even be ready to ‘ink it in’ by re-doing it bolder and more permanent!

I am so grateful that I can allow myself to dream big dreams and have the loving support of people who will restrain my wilder flights of fancy, help me think through my plans, make suggestions, and support me as I try to turn them into reality. Thank you to you all.

Blessing # 3 – C is for Challenges

I have a low boredom threshold! To keep doing the same things in the same way drives me nuts! It is why I have accumulated so many hobbies and activities and am having to reluctantly admit I can’t do them all. But still I need new challenges.

Sometimes the challenge is to learn a new skill or extend an old one. A month ago I found a book of knitting patterns in the library – Viking knits & Ancient Ornaments by Elsebeth Lavold. She describes a whole series of interlocking designs, gives patterns for the motifs and some very elegant garments with the motifs on them. I am a sucker for celtic knots so I borrowed the book. The yarns she suggests are not ones I can source locally and before I could go into the wool shop in Cardigan market and find an equivalent we were all told to stay home. But I was itching to see if I could cope with some new techniques and keep track of a complex sequence of cables so I picked one of the motifs and knitted a cushion cover using yarn I already had. I finished the knitting last night but have not had time yet to stitch it up. I was going to make buttonholes in the back to allow me to take it off for washing – the cats drop hairs all over my cushions so they need regular washing – but dedided to make some loops on the edge instead using a technique I adapted from the hair of the glove puppets I have been working on. read about them here if you missed them

Sometimes it is a bigger or longer one like working for the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. I have to write up and submit ten designs I have done. In my case these are all about designing my life so that I can live as well as possible into advanced old age. The designing is great fun but the writing it all up with detailed explanations of the choices I made is proving very tedious! Why am I doing it? It has no practical use to me since there is nothing I want to do which requires me to have it. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could, that my designing skills were good enough, my understanding of Permaculture was deep enough. And now I am too stubborn to give up! My amazing, wonderful daughter found this poster to sum it all up for me and it will form the cover of my portfolio.

A blooming lovely day

When you have spent every penny you can lay your hands on buying 30 odd acres of land in Pembrokeshire what do you do to start making a living from it as soon as possible? That was the dilemma facing Linda and Steve when they put in a sealed bid at auction on part of the old Picton Castle Estate and found, somewhat to their surprise, that they had been successful. Half was woodland which needed taking back into management and half was pasture but there were no buildings so not only could they not live on site, they could not keep livestock easily either.

The answer they came up with was flowers. Linda had trained as a landscape architect and grower and Steve had toured as a musician teaching himself photography as he traveled the world. Both were good at using social media to promote their work. Flowers can be grown in a single year, need regular attention but not live-in care, and arranging them, which Linda is very good at, adds value. With Steve’s photographic skills to showcase the results they had the skill set they needed to make a success of the enterprise.

See more wonderful pictures on their website here

The obvious place to site a flower garden was near the hard-standing where the access track ends. But this was a bit exposed for growing. So using poles and brash from the woods they built a ‘dead hedge’; posts driven into the ground at intervals and twiggy branches roughly woven through them. That gave shelter in the short term but will slowly rot away. So either side of the ‘dead’ hedge they planted a live one. Over time the rotting wood will be replaced by the living which it will feed as it goes. The double row will make it strong and dense and if any of the shrubs fail there will not be a gap. Even the gates are works of art!

Inside this boundary are a polytunnel for propagating plants and to grow a few more delicate blooms and houses and runs for chickens, ducks and guinea fowl which are allowed out to keep slugs and other pests under control.

Weddings have proved to be the biggest part of the business. Sometimes Linda is asked to do all the arrangements and bouquets, sometimes just the trickiest bits with the families buying buckets of flowers and doing the simpler stuff themselves. The couple now have a barn designed to keep flowers cool and fresh until they can be arranged and delivered and with space to dry some for winter use. And of course it provides somewhere to store all the paraphernalia Linda needs to make her designs. These days much of the business comes from one bride recommending her to another.

And the rest of the land? Well there is a young orchard where we helped fill ‘eyelid’ swales to help the trees keep their roots moist in dry summers. I had come across the idea of swales before. They are ditches dug almost but not quite level to collect water and channel it around the site very slowly preventing it running off before plants have a chance to use it. In drier areas of the world they make the difference between being able to grow things and not. Here in West Wales where rainfall is high, the problem is more often how to get rid of water quickly without it scouring the land! However Steve and Linda had noticed that some of their land, including the orchard, drained quickly and decided that digging a short ditch uphill from each tree and filling it with large logs then smaller brash and topping it with turf would provide a ‘sponge’ that would hold water. A sort or personalised drinking trough! As the logs rot away they will feed the trees just as the dead hedge will feed the live one and when the fruit trees are well established they should be able to fend for themselves more.

A stand of Sweet chestnut trees has been planted and each year Steve brings another section of the old woodland into management. He has just learnt how to make charcoal in on old-fashioned kiln to make good use of the wood he is extracting. Unmanaged woodland rarely yields wood suitable for milling into planks and firewood is so much work to cut, chop and deliver that it makes little profit so charcoal is a better option.

The pasture is allowed to grow long and then cut for hay by a farming neighbour. He beds his sheep on it in the lambing sheds then returns it, nicely enriched with sheep dung, to be composted along with garden waste and chipped brash. The huge heaps are turned with a small JCB! Once worked most goes onto the flower beds to grow the next crop but some is diverted to a pumpkin patch where Halloween lanterns were ripening nicely when I visited!

At present Steve and Linda live in nearby Haverforwest with Linda’s young grandson who was orphaned when her daughter died tragically young. They hope to get planning permission soon to build a new home on their own land to reduce their travelling and to make charcoal burning easier – the kiln takes all day to load and then needs to be monitored closely overnight. Steve has already given a great deal of thought to the best way to design and construct it so that it is both beautiful and efficient to run!

The woodland Farm is a fantastic example of how using the principles of Permaculture it is possible to create a thriving business and make a decent livelihood from an unpromising piece of land whilst at the same time creating a haven for wildlife.

Where did it go?

Did you notice I had not blogged for a while? Did you fantasise that I was soaking up the sun somewhere exotic? On a retreat where all access to the outside world was banned? Nope! Nothing so exciting or unusual. Just busy. You know what I mean – one minute it was early July and then the next it is October!

So where did Summer go? I actually had to check my diary!

There have been visits. I went to stay with my daughter for a weekend so we could go to IKEA for inspiration. I want to turn the old utility room into spare bedrooms. It was originally the garage so is big enough to attract a lot of ‘might come in useful one day’ clutter. 18 months ago I had a new shed built on an existing concrete slab to make a replacement utility space and am waiting for a local builder to come and fit it out for me. Meanwhile I am going through the old one getting rid of things – there is space on the shelves no as you can see in the picture! – and will eventually turn it into 2 spare bedrooms. I wanted to see what ideas I could pick up and knew that IKEA has a reputation for clever small space solutions. The nearest to here is Cardiff which is a long haul so I decided to visit my daughter and go with her to the one in Reading. To make it more of an adventure we got the bus into Basingstoke, the train to Reading and then another bus right to the door of IKEA. No navigating, no parking, we were able to look out of the windows and enjoy the journey whilst chatting as much as we liked.

My son brought his 3 young foster children so there was an excuse to go to the beach and picnic in his camper van. And we went to a friend’s smallholding to pick damsons and see the animals. No pictures because as looked after children I am not allowed to publish their pictures.

My daughter came to stay and we visited another smallholding where I had a go at milking a goat. A bad idea that – now I want one!

And of course there were meals with friends – at their homes, in cafes and here. The deck really came into its own this summer.

The utility room is not the only space to be de-cluttered. I am on a roll here. The house has been purged and now needs decorating (if only to get rid of the marks where I have taken down shelves!)The workshop is next.

There have been visits with the Permaculture networks which will get posts of their own in the next few weeks. And a lot happening at Dyfed Permaculture Farm Trust which I will also write about separately.

I went on a course at Stiwdio 3 in Cardigan (find out more here) to learn how to make a pair of espadrilles with the lovely Nia Denman and had a fantastic day. C & M Organics held another market – just one this year – where I spent more than I should have but got some really good plants as well as food. The Golden Thread Theater Company, normally based in Cardiff put on a performance at the Small World Theater in Cardigan which was a fascinating evening. They invite members of the audience to share very short stories of moments in their lives which the players then turn into improvised performances. The theme of the evening was ‘belonging’ which resulted in a huge range of stories and emotions. (you can find them on facebook)

In between all those things I have tended the garden, continued to write up my Permaculture Diploma and foraged for blackberries, elderberries and sloes which I have bottled and made into jam. Now the weather has turned wet and windy, the nights are drawing in and hopefully I can get back to blogging.

A little piece of Heaven

Last Sunday morning found me driving through the back lanes of North Pembrokeshire. The sky was that perfect blue you only get on a May Morning, the Hawthorn was starting to flower in the hedgerows and the verges were thick with wild flowers. In places the cow parsley was so thick that it was almost as if I was driving along the beach between two breaking waves. Then my first glimpse of the sea which was a stunning turquoise blue as if trying to emulate one of those posters of Greek islands!

I would not normally go to a meet-up all the way over on the West coast but I had wanted to see Brian and Dot’s place for a long time and also this was the second meeting of the newly re-launched Pembrokeshire group so I wanted to do my bit to make sure the turnout was good.

My destination was a small farm on a little back road high up above Strumble Head just West of Fishguard. Brian and Dot live in an old farmhouse which has been cleverly divided to provide two homes, one for them and one for their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. Stone outbuildings have been converted into three holiday cottages and a house for their son and daughter-in-law. Each resident family has their own outside space and a piece of garden for growing food though there are no fences so it feels very open and joined up. The rest of the land is managed co-operatively. And everywhere there are views across the fields to the sea. Bliss! Find out more about holidying there and see more photos here )

The turnout was good, two people brought children and there were three visiting dogs which all added to the fun. I had left my dogs at home – the rescued lurcher would have panicked and it was too hot to leave her in the car.

After excellent coffee and a chance to chat and to meet a couple of new members we set to work. A field is being turned into a forest garden with space in the middle for a yurt. Brian and Dot had put posts in to mark where they wanted trees to plant trees and mown a circle of grass round each. Our first job was to put down a layer of cardboard on each circle and then pile mulch on top. Some of us took the sellotape and plastic labels off a large stash of boxes they had collected from local businesses whilst others laid it on the cut grass or barrowed mulch from a huge pile at the edge of the field.

Lunch was a chance to sit outside and admire the view as well as continue chatting and sharing ideas and up-coming events. Then it was back to work.

I had to leave early because of having left the dogs at home but by then all the circles were ready for planting and work had begun on putting new trees into the old hedge to improve the shelter belt. The others stayed to get the yurt frame up ( definitely a job for several people!) and Dot very kindly took photos of that for me.

What a perfect way to spend a glorious day in May

A Little Bit of Magic

Regular readers will know that I belong to both the Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire Permaculture groups and am a regular at their meetings. (You can read about previous visits here here,here,and here

Last Sunday I was the host. The sun shone so we were all able to sit out on the new deck (more about that here). With 16 adults and two small children it felt comfortably full but not a squash. After cups of tea and coffee plus cake (my nickname is Sue cake!) and a chance to meet up and chat we spent a few moments remembering one of our group who had just died suddenly and sending loving thoughts to his wife. Linda from The Woodland Farm (the woodland farm)had brought a beautiful bunch of her flowers and I lit a candle for him.

Then I explained my how I was going about the designs for my Diploma in Permaculture Design which focuses around planning how I can continue to thrive into advanced old age despite living in such a rural place. We toured the garden so they could see how I had begun to implement those plans and the changes since their previous visit.

Everybody brings something to share for lunch and it was laid out on my kitchen table. What a spread! Almost all the dishes had been grown or made at home – beautiful salads, home made breads, fermented veg from Phil and his partner Lauren at Parc y Dderwenfind them on facebook here. Most people also remembered to bring their own plate, mug and cutlery so there was hardly any washing up for me to do later.

Usually everyone helps the host with a job in the afternoon – a chance to have a lot of hands and, in my case, some younger muscle on one of those big jobs which are daunting for one person on their own. This time I decided that what the garden needed most was appreciating! I work on it but do not make enough time to just sit and enjoy it. So I invited everyone to wander, sit, enjoy and chat. I am so glad I did because watching them relax and find pleasure in what I have created was hugely rewarding – a little bit of magic indeed!

My grateful thanks to Brian for taking photos whilst I was too busy to manage a camera and to Phil for the picture of my mindmap.

Getting creative with rubbish

Some time ago Dyfed Permaculture Farm Trust acquired an old caravan which was certainly past its best but had a bit of life in it yet. The intention was to have somewhere that could be hired for holidays (we get groups camping but not everyone can cope with life in a tent), accommodation for people who come on courses, volunteers who exchange work for accommodation and that Phil and Michelle could also use it for visiting family and friends.

The first job was to do some repairs and fix some leaks then spruce it up a bit. It needed some kind of heating so it could be used in winter so Matt, who replaced the barn kitchen (see pictures of it here) worked on it in exchange for parking his van in the car park. He reinforced a rather weak section of wall around the door with battens, took out the shower room and chemical toilet and installed a small woodstove. To replace the toilet we organised a course on building a compost loo beside the caravan. The fees covered the cost of the tutor and much of the material came from our store of ‘stuff’. With a new gas stove and a water tap outside it became a warm comfortable space for some ‘not-too-wild’ camping. Phil even rigged up a wifi extender so that Michelle can use it as an office if she needs some peace and quiet for paperwork!

It was only when we had a couple of very wet spells that we discovered another problem. Or rather an unintended consequence. Where Matt had screwed the reinforcing battens to the wall rain collected on top of them, then found its way inside through the screw holes making some damp patches. If the caravan was occupied regularly this would probably not be much of a problem since the ventilation and heat from the stove would dry it out quickly. However with only occasional use something needed to be done.

Michelle had the idea of constructing a porch around the door to protect that wall from the rain but also provide somewhere to hang wet coats and leave muddy boots. A job for a workday!

So six of us gathered one Saturday recently for some head scratching, rootling around in the stores and creative building. Luckily for us Lindy, our new volunteer has just gutted her house and reconfigured it so she was in her element with this project! Two lengths of laburnum cut from an overgrown hedge beside the main track a couple of years ago gave us the two front uprights which we stood on reclaimed pieces of breeze block. (Laburnum is incredibly hard even green as I know from being involved in felling the trees! you can read about that here) Some offcuts of studding from work on the cabin were screwed to Matt’s battens to hold the laburnum posts up and a longer piece of studding spanned the front. There were some big pieces of aluminium sheet from an even older caravan which had eventually fallen apart to cover the top and sides of the frame. It is attached to the roof so that water is shed away from the wall. It is not the most beautiful porch ever built but once covered with climbing plants will be much nicer. It cost us nothing, was fun to make and is a useful addition to the caravan as well as , hopefully, solving the damp problem.