What I Did in the Long Dark Winter Evenings

Roz Brown tells her story...

Last winter I went potty... No not actually round the bend – I finally got to grips with my potmaker. A potmaker is a simple 2-part wooden device that enables you to make pots for seedlings out of old newspaper - or all those sheets of paper that came out of the printer and are no longer needed. You can easily make two pots out of one A4 sheet. The method is simple and strangely restful: you wrap the rectangle of paper around the wooden cylinder, tucking under about three quarters of an inch of paper all round at the bottom. This bottom end fits into the cup-shaped second wooden section, and you push down and twist. Hey presto – you have a nicely secured pot.

Now, I’ve had this little turned wooden piece of kit for a few years, and have never really got into it properly. Make a few pots, get bored, forget it. But last winter necessity forced my hand and it finally came into its own.

I found myself, in a mad moment, volunteering to grow plants for a new wildflower meadow at The Living Willow Theatre – a delightful open air venue, modelled on The Globe, made entirely from living willow, and situated on an organic farm. It puts on fantastic Shakespeare and other dramatic events each summer, and is becoming quite a hub of community activity. They wanted to establish a wildflower meadow adjacent to the theatre, with flowers that are mentioned in the Shakespeare plays, and they needed people to grow a lot of plants for it.

I was just getting into this wild flower lark in our garden too, and having a large greenhouse that is fairly underused in the winter, I said I would lend a hand.

At the time I had no ideas what a gargantuan task this would turn out to be. I had eight varieties from Emorsgate Seeds to plant. The Willow people had no idea how tiny wild flower seed is when they ordered the packets – most contained hundreds if not thousands of the tiniest seeds you can imagine. The 8 half size trays and the small bag of peat-free compost provided hardly made a dent. I sowed another full size tray or two of everything, and soon the staging was overflowing with them.

Guess what – the germination rate was rapid and on a massive scale. Triffids had nothing on these babies. And the root systems were something a Permaculturist can learn a lot from. They were tiny plants with massive spreading roots that got all tangled up with one another - really hard to separate if you left them to get as big on top as domestic herbs like Rocket or Basil at the seedling stage.

You are probably ahead of me now – so what to do with the mass of seedlings that threatened to engulf an eight by sixteen foot greenhouse already bulging at the seams? All trays were in use. There were no funds for lots of cell inserts and not enough actual small flowerpots, and anyway I’d need what I had for my own plants soon.

The answer – the trusty potmaker. Night after night I made paper pots and chucked them into big paper carrier bags, trying not to squash them. You can get about 24 or more of these paper pots into one seed tray. And best of all, they’re free, and can be directly plug planted into the ground when the time comes without disturbing the roots – the paper just rots away.

The activity never stopped on this project. When everything in the garden was frozen for weeks, I suspended fleece over everything in the unheated greenhouse. They all survived the extreme conditions. When we were getting desperate for space, my husband finally got cracking on the new triple wooden cold frame I’ve been wanting for 2 years – anything to absorb the proliferating wildflowers in their natty paper jackets.

By spring we had more than four hundred plants ready to make the trip in the back of the Willow Theatre Landrover across to the other side of the Wye to their new home, and most of them in paper pots, raring to go, with their roots coming through the bottoms.

I won’t bore you with the story of the backbreaking plug planting in the meadow, in little drifts. In the end a small army of volunteers was drafted in to help, and the result – pretty as a picture all summer long.

The task for this winter – more paper pots for my own flowery mead (bee forage to you and me), sadly neglected in deference to Shakespeare, but interestingly – a spin-off project has emerged: a series of wildflower studies for cards that the Willow can sell to visitors, with notes on the language of flowers in Shakespeare’s plays – not to mention their role in medieval herbalism and alchemy. That should keep me occupied till spring comes round again - and the long winter evenings are just a memory.

Roz Brown

Roz Brown lives in the foothills of the Cambrian mountains, and coordinates Mid Wales Permaculture Network.

What Do YOU Do On Long Dark Evenings?

I spend most of my life in front of a screen in my day job as you would expect. It’s not all bad. This morning, for example, I was directed to a brilliant and hopeful article on indigenous fruit trees in Africa* by a long-term PM reader and supporter, Michael Lane, plus an article about selling up and buying a 10 acre woodland, besides corresponding with various lovely people like Patrick Whitefield and Emma Cooper who both write books for us. I love my job and I think I am very lucky to be PM’s editor as well as Permanent Publication’s book editor.

After work, for most of the year, I can go home and have an hour or two outside, planting, pottering, weeding, mooching around my garden. There’s plenty to do in half an acre full of native hedgerows, 70 fruit and nut trees, some within a forest garden design, raised perennial and annual veggie beds, ponds, wildflower meadows and herbaceous borders. It’s taken 20 years to get it established and it is a joy to ‘play’ in. I fantasise about building a shed with a woodburner out there and abandoning the house to the kids. They do too!

My difficulty arises in the depth of winter on short dark days. I know I am meant to be hibernating but there is a gap after work and bedtime. I confess, I do look at flickering screens but after a day in cyber media world there must be more to life than the internet and the telly. I haven’t the energy to start some wonderful DIY project and the light is low for painting. I need ideas for end of day energy levels. What’s to do?

I have asked around – and this blog is my invitation to you to share your cunning and inspirational ideas. Here are a few to start with acquired by Emma Cooper through her contacts::

“For the first time ever I'm going to order seed catalogues and spend ages poring over them picking next season's veggies!”

Great idea. I already have the Agroforestry Research Trust Catalogue plus Real Seeds and Chase Organics. What other suppliers do you favour?

“Watching movies, eating chestnuts and crumpets. Making stew. Shivering also.”

Favourite movies anyone? Favourite recipes? Last night I made cinder toffee – because it is so easy – and mushroom risotto with home grown spring onions and perennial kale (highly recommended low maintenance plant) picked by Tim by head torch. What grows well for you in the depth of winter?

“Write, whittle, read..”

I like whittling. A good knife is essential. A good book is the best, even after a day reading on screen. Any suggestions?

“Crochet, seed catalogues, rice pudding, watercolour, mulled wine, garden plans... not necessarily in that order!”

I think my best attempts at sewing are stringing chillies together to dry in the window but OK I’ll get on with recovering those chairs. I have had the material resting in the cupboard for over ten years.

“Plant/seed catalogues, a cheeky whiskey, sit by the open fire, watch Champions League, make a liddle lurve... oops sorry.”

Irish whiskey and a liddle lurve is a great idea. We get population spikes when we have powercuts. Could have serious implications for powerdown. The Irish Whiskey combo may scupper that spike trend!

Finally, “How about making peg loom rugs out of sheeps wool.” Well, he would say that, he wrote the how-to article!

So it’s over to you. What do you do on long dark nights that is publishable?! Please tell us and brighten up our lives with your inspiration and ideas.

Maddy Harland is editor of Permaculture Magazine

* Here's the brilliant article on fruit trees in Africa.

CELEBRATING THE MARGINAL

Long-term readers of Permaculture Magazine, please bear with me while I ask, What exactly is permaculture? In the 1970s, Australians Bill Mollinson and David Holmgren observed how soils were devastated by the imposition of a temperate European agriculture on the fragile soils of an ancient Antipodean landscape. Like the dust bowls of Oklahoma in the 1930s, an alien agriculture has the capacity to turn a delicately balanced ecology into desert. Bill and David’s response to what they saw was to design a permanent agriculture with tree crops and other perennials inhabiting all the niches from the canopy to the ground cover and below. The soil is left untilled to establish its own robust micro-ecology. Key to this is that the land must be biodiverse and stable for future generations.

Mirroring nature
From permanent tree crops, permaculture has evolved into a thinking tool for designing low carbon, highly productive systems; gardens, farms, buildings, woodlands, communities, businesses – even towns or countries. The key to permaculture is observing nature and learning what makes natural systems endure, establishing simple yet effective principles, and using them to mirror nature in whatever we choose to design. Permaculture is essentially about creating beneficial relationships and its application is only as limited as our imagination.

The bedrock of permaculture is its three ethics: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares (i.e. sharing surpluses and trading fairly with other people and nations). Then comes a set of principles that help guide permaculturists in creating systems that integrate these ethics.

Valuing the edge
I will not attempt to write about all the principles here but to give you a taster of one of my favourites: this is the principle of valuing the marginal, the ‘edge’. Examples of edge in nature are: when canopy meets clearing in the woodland, inviting in air and sunshine and a profusion of flowers; where sea and river meet land in the fertile interface of estuaries, full of invertebrates, fish and bird life; where the banks of streams meet the water’s edge and fertility is built with deposited mud and sand in flood time, giving life to a riot of plant life; where plains and water meet, flooding and capturing alluvial soils. Edge in nature is all about increasing diversity by the increase of inter-relationship between the elements: earth, air, fire (sun), water. This phenomenon increases the opportunity for life in all of its marvellous fertility of forms.

In human society edge is where we have cultural diversity. It is the place where free thinkers and so-called ‘alternative’ people thrive and new ideas are allowed to develop and ageless wisdom is given its rightful respect. Edge is suppressed in non-democratic states and countries that demand theological allegiance to one religion. Edge abhors monotheism in all forms, be they cultural, religious or economic. Mainstream America with its economic and cultural orthodoxy and China with its religious persecution of the Tibetan people share an intolerance to ‘edge’.

To colonise an edge with fellow pioneers is much easier. Rather than being a marginalised voice, sharing ideas creates community, as supportive and abundant as the lovely ecology of wildflowers we see on the coppice floor of a woodland in springtime.

Nurturing creative thinking
If we humans are allowed to find our collective edge and form supportive networks, we thrive and bloom. So this permaculture principle is all about valuing the marginal – what mainstream ‘monocultural’ thinkers often deem as wacky – because that is where the fertile, creative thinking is nurtured. It is rarely found in the orthodox, materialistic world.

There have been times when I have been criticised as an editor of Permaculture Magazine for encouraging ‘unorthodox’ thinking. Yet in order to change the world, we have to ‘colonise’ edges – like birds in estuaries – and not stay in our prescribed comfort zones because this is where new ideas and visions are found. Although my feet are firmly in the compost heap, my heart and mind are still unfolding and I thrive in the unexpected, the marginal. I want to speak to anybody who will listen about permaculture and ecological and social change, regardless of their belief systems, so critical is the state of our planet.

Progressing sustainability
I know too that the mainstream is taking climate change and peak oil so seriously that they are looking outside the box for solutions. It is no coincidence that last year the publishing company that I co-founded, Permanent Publications, has was awarded The Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Sustainable Development Category for ‘continuous achievement’ and ‘unfettered commitment to progressing sustainability’ internationally for nearly two decades. I haven't exactly learnt to curtsey but since we won the award I have been inside palaces and other seats of power. Don’t worry, we still remain edge species, challenging orthodoxy, and valuing and celebrating the inspiration of the marginal.


Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine