Monday, July 30, 2012

Weeding fields and orchard care

Wes, Ruth, Tom and Bob on the tractor weeding the meadows
 A shot from a few weeks ago - weeding Treflach's meadows by hand before the harvest. There's a huge variety of plants in the fields which makes for rich haylage for winter feeding. There's also docks, thistles, ragwort etc which we don't want, very satisfying to remove these by hand rather than by spraying. Fortunately we've had a few rare dry days here and the harvest is pretty much in after much frantic activity.
Ducks enjoying our work in the orchard
We've also been busy in the orchard looking after the trees and also the forest garden edge planted during previous Forest Gardening courses. Very interesting to see how much the ducks are enjoying rootling about in the fresh mulch - I hadn't thought of them as woodland creatures at all.
Starting a bed for perennials around the base of one of the apple trees. 
PERENNIAL BEDS
This is an experiment we're trying, making a bed around the base of one of the apple trees for perennials starting with cardboard and horse manure. We plan to plant it up with herbs, maybe a small bush or two and also a climber, kiwi fruit perhaps, to build up diversity and yields and also to help to feed the tree. I'm wondering if this could apply to Janet and Clive's olives...

Friday, July 13, 2012

Courses and Events here at Treflach Farm

Lots happening here on the farm... I'm very excited to be teaching our first Forest Gardening course here, packing it full with talks, slideshows, film clips - including some jaw-dropping stuff on Forest Gardening's powerful application worldwide. Lots of hands on practise of the skills you need as well as observation of a wide variety of woodland here, from ancient Bluebell Wood to the orchard we are renovating. Not to be missed!
Also check out our ENERGY DAY - energy descent, solar, thermal, small scale hydro and an on site demo of anaerobic digestion by Methanogen AND our mini festival, FANDANGO FARM, if you've been rained off other festivals come here for family fun for all - hopefully in the dry!
FULL DETAILS & BOOKING FOR FOREST GARDENING - CLICK HERE

 FULL DETAILS & BOOKING FOR ENERGY DAY - CLICK HERE

FULL DETAILS & BOOKING FOR FANDANGO FARM - CLICK HERE

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Earth Sheltered Caravan - suggestions please!

EarthVan - warm air ducted from polytunnel/conservatory to heat sinks beneath caravan
We are hoping to get our caravan out of the barn here soon onto a patch of land beside the orchard. Then we are planning to use some of Mike Reynold's Earthship ideas amongst others to keep warm - it's the EarthVan. The ground will have to be levelled anyway so we thought we could do a bit more digging and make heat sinks to store warm air harvested from a polytunnel/conservatory/greenhouse structure to the front of the caravan.

HEAT SINKS, HELP PLEASE...
How big should we make the heat sinks? And what's the best material to use for them?  Rubble? Bottles? If anyone has any experience of anything like this any tips would be welcome.

FANS & DUCTS
Also, we are planning to use fans to duct the air from the top of the polytunnel section down into the heat sinks, powered by a PV panel - any tips on what specifications for the fans, panel and ducts would work best would be greatly appreciated.

THANK YOU!

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Treflach Polytunnel Renovation

Amongst many other jobs here at Treflach Farm, we've been really busy in the polytunnel. Back in January it was beginning to look as if "it had seen better times" as my folks would have said. We put on new doors and took out the old sleepers which gave off an over-powering smell of tar in any heat let alone any leaching. We're making the new beds so that they sit level on the tunnel's 1:10 slope in a kind of cascading terrace arrangement. Lots of stuff growing already...

"seen better days..."
New doors...
...and out with the old creosote-minging sleepers
Bye for now old creosote-minging sleepers - a new role awaits you in the pig field
The first new bed, much narrower for easy access
...and in a cascading terrace kind of arrangement on the 1:10 slope
It's always nice to get another use out of something - here an old drawer front fills up a gap
Lots of stuff growing already
with plenty more seedlings waiting for space
Wes and Ruth celebrating the first completed row

Orchard Renovation

 It's lovely to see the blossom coming out in the orchard and especially pleasing to see the tree in the middle of the picture below sprouting away happily as we gave it a radical prune in the winter and wondered if it would come away at all. Well done that tree!

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Life on the Farm...

Here's a few photos of everyday life on the farm, (one of them has been photoshopped a wee bit, I wonder which one??)  Living and working on the farm is going really well, above all it's a great bunch of people to be with... with or without Billy Gibbons...
Billy Gibbons looks in at the farm butchery to give advice on how to make sausage rolls and wear two hats at once
Settling in to the caravan...
...and very comfy it is too
We've been spending time getting the polytunnel and veg garden going again
Polytunnel with its new door fiitted
Fixing up the gate into the veg garden... it's a bit different to repairing guitars
Ruth's been very busy working on the veg beds
Ruth's helpers
Great to be renovating the orchard...
...high level pruning by Wes
The oldest part of the farm, the farmhouse itself, dates back to the 1600's or earlier and the rest of the farm has been built up around it since then, so there's endless repairs to be done as well as new work re-rigging the farm for the transition to sustainable living
The endless repairs leave us with this kind of multi-material situation
Collecting sticks from around the edge of one of the fields so that they won't damage the grass cutters - just a few issues to think about there...
The guys putting up the massive solar array on the roof of what will be the bunkhouse - now generating about 17kw on average, about a third of the farms electricity usage
After all the work time for a party in the newly refurbished collecting yard/surf shack - thanks for the beer Ian :-)) !!

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Permaculture Design Course, Treflach May 2012

We're hosting the fourth full two-week residential Permaculture Design course with Steve Jones and the Sector39 team here at the farm 13th to26th May. The Treflach PDC's have all been brilliant, spaces are limited though so check it out and book soon!

SECTOR39 HERE
STEVE'S BLOG HERE 

Thursday Group - Meditation, Healing, Global Awareness

ALL WELCOME TO JOIN IN !!
If you don't already know it, I started this group a while ago now. I host it every Thursday evening from 9.00pm to 9.30pm, it grew out of my own extraordinary experiences of giving distant therapy treatments which I couldn't explain with current science and would often frustratingly be dismissed as "woo-woo".
The group sessions are a time just to chill out deeply and meditate or to receive some healing energy. Also, I want to explore the realms of intuition, global awareness and the evolution of our consciousness. I think answers to our world problems are most likely to come from each of us tuning in to an inner intuitive space where we are all connected. 
The group sessions get more interesting all the time, more about it all on the Facebook Thursday Group page. And have a look at the separate page for the group here on this blog. There's suggestions there of how to get ready to join in with the group.

Today's woo-woo is tomorrow's technology...

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Good news at Lammas re building control



from the Lammas newsletter:
It seems that there may be a solution emerging in the stand-off between Tir-Y-Gafel residents and Pembrokeshire County Council Building Control department.
Following much work from both sides, on Monday 23rd January at Haverfordwest Magistrates Court the Council agreed that Paul and Hoppi Wimbush (of plot 6) were now fully compliant with Building Regulations and all charges against them were dropped.
Schedules of works for the other two plots with legal charges against them (Simon Dale and Jasmine Saville of plot 7, Katy Taggart and Leander Wolstenholme of plot 2) have been agreed and should residents adhere to the timescales (aiming for resolution of all outstanding issues by May 2012) then the Council has indicated that charges against these two families will also be dropped.
It was recognised in Court by the Council that the Lammas project is pioneering new ground and that special consideration was required in how Building Regulations were applied to low-impact development given the use of raw natural materials and innovative solutions being adopted by such projects.
Great! common sense at last...

Thursday, February 23, 2012

A Gentle Revolution


"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong." (Lao Tzu)
Amidst all the trouble and turmoil in the world, there's a gentle revolution that’s been growing for a long time.  I guess it’s a personal individual revolution for all involved, for me it’s about:
Respect for all life and all things.
Developing our intuition, thinking for ourselves and making our individual choices inspired by a global understanding – no more “us and them”, just “us”.
Going against the flow, peacefully: giving as little energy as possible to all the top-down power structures we have allowed:  the corporatocracy, the religions and all those authorities who tell us what to do, to think, to buy... The only sensible progress is going to be made from the roots up. 
Earth profit, does the Earth profit in anyway from having us humans around?
Frugality – there’s an extraordinary period ahead as we move into a world of less and less abundant and more expensive energy and materials. The more frugal we are the more resilient we will be and the easier it will be to recreate local abundance and share our Earth’s resources fairly.
Access to land – you don’t have to own it! Farmers and growers, particularly those operating on a small scale, really need your help and you can share in the harvest. Or do some guerrilla gardening on your local waste land.
Quality – and another thing... here comes a rant... I’m so fed up of the general poor quality of the stuff people are conned into buying, eg furniture that is made so shoddily out of such poor materials that it can barely hold together long enough to be taken to the skip. I fixed up a chest of drawers yesterday that was probably made fifty years ago and is now good for another fifty – how much of that chipboard and MDF rubbish will last that long? It just isn’t repairable or fit for its purpose, in fact its just crap.
Open mindedness – looking for the potentially positive in unexpected places – I’m surprised at how dismissive some people are of some of the phenomena I’ve experienced myself, energy work such as homeopathy, distant healing, working with the body’s energy, chi kung and so on. Our understanding of the world is continually developing, nothing is fixed, yesterday’s magic is tomorrow’s technology.
Working together effectively involves a deep inner journey towards a deeper understanding of ourselves and how we relate with others, understanding the influences that shape our lives, family life, astrological influences. If you have the opportunity to do any inner work, like CranioSacral Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Shamanic work - grab it and grow.I've seen enough projects flounder because of clashing personalities.
And don't forget to have fun!

Thursday, February 16, 2012

INTUITION

I’ve realised recently what good advice my intuition has been giving me all my life, a shame I haven’t listened to it very often. It’s as if there’s been two forces acting on me, the pressure to conform to expectations and the status quo’s definitions of success, worthwhile ways to spend your time, the world of competition, materialism and consumerism – the other force is that inner voice gently insisting that all that stuff is bollocks. Now I’m wondering if intuition and the development of a global awareness go hand in hand. I have a vision of a world where we have an intuitive insight into what’s going on for everyone in the world and for all forms of life and make our own decisions about what to do with our time based on that global understanding.
If you feel something similar why not join in with the Thursday Group this evening.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

The Way of the WWOOF

If you want to explore the eco world, volunteering is an excellent starting point. I don't know of a better way of getting to know people than working with them. It's easy to get going, the best known eco volunteering organisation probably being the excellent WWOOFing network, (used to be Willing Workers On Organic Farms now Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms), with over 500 active hosts in the UK and a worldwide network beyond that. It's a long established organisation and works well. The deal is that you help the hosts, typically on a small farm doing organic and other interesting stuff in return for your board and lodging. You meet some very interesting people and can experience varying degrees of low-impact living. It's good to have a useful skill or two to offer, obviously experience with plants is useful but your hosts may be glad of other skills as well. I always end up doing woodwork on projects and often give therapy treatments for sore backs etc.

Student volunteers working on Nigel and Cassie's roundhouse at Lammas, 2009

Lammas again, fresh air washing up - the plate rack was blown away later...

Nigel and Cassie's roundhouse looking good two years later
I'm very interested in how people can learn to cooperate and in alternatives to the harsh unreality of growth at all costs economics, so have been very interested to visit and work at various communities and cooperative ventures. If that interests you too, the Diggers and Dreamers site is a good way in to this world, it's how I found Chickenshack and went on to work with Steve Jones of Sector39 fame. Having also visited the Crab Apple Community at Berrington Hall and the community at Canon Frome Court I have to say I admire what all those people are doing but it's not for me! mainly because of the lengthy meetings of the decision making process. I struggle to stay focused on what people are saying for any length of time being much more of a practical person. (The decision making process is different here at Treflach - more about that in another post soon).
One of the most interesting places I've worked at is the Lammas Eco Community - it was also the most challenging! I arrived there, over two years ago now, just at the beginning of three weeks of very wet and windy weather. Back then it was really hard core, a sort of cross between a building site, a refugee camp and a failed squat, all flapping tarpaulins, mud and cold. I almost turned tail and headed off that first night, I'm really glad I stayed though, it was great experience for low-impact building of roundhouses etc. and I have some great memories, like reading stories to Nigel and Cassie's kids by the light of a wind up torch and a candle inside a yurt swaying from side to side in a storm. Volunteers have put in a huge amount of energy into this wonderful project and made an important contribution for which the Lammas residents are always very grateful, as are all the other hosts I've worked with.
So if you have the time and are interested why not treat yourself to a volunteering adventure this year!
A chance to visit beautiful places too, Ben Lawers from Tombreck on Loch Tay, Perthshire

Sunday, January 01, 2012

!! HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012 !!

Best wishes and good luck to all of us who are exploring a lighter way to live together on the planet - may the winds of change blow us towards deeper friendships and deeper understanding.


2012 - Year of Transformation?
The pace of change seems to be speeding up alright - and ideas spread around the world in an instant. Maybe this is the year we realise we must look after the Earth for her to continue to nourish and support us - and we learn how to do that as one.


photos from joanocean.com

Do check out the Joan Ocean site, this lady has been swimming with dolphins for many years and believes they have an awareness of dimensions beyond our familiar world - they don't fight a lot either do they?



...and they're more evolved than us - they're mammals who've returned to the sea...

They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.

They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.
They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.



Sunday, December 18, 2011

Treflach Farm, November 2011

Misty sunrise
I've had a busy few weeks since starting to work at Treflach Farm, doing a lot of woodwork amongst other farming stuff. There's always loads to do, frames and doors to fit, ceilings to be insulated and panelled, a kitchen to fit... It's good to be doing plenty of practical stuff and very interesting to be doing it at Treflach where we are actively working on transition solutions. We have an engineering workshop on the farm and will be making space for a woodwork area too. Farmer Ian is interested in making things as well and has an engineering background - I'm sure we'll come up with some great ideas. I'm really enjoying working with everyone on the farm - what a great team!

The same morning a bit earlier
 The piece of land where Ruth and I were planning to build our yurt-in-a-polytunnel-rocket-powered home is a sea of mud at the moment since being dug up for some recent cable laying so we haven't even made a start with that. Friends of mine in Scotland, Alex and Mick, who kindly put me up for a few great days on my way down from Perth - see Bronze Age in the Borders - lost their polytunnel during Hurricane Bawbag a couple of weeks ago which made me think that the whole idea needs a rethink anyway. Ah well, I'm learning not to keep my ideas too fixed - as John Lennon said, "Life's what happens when you're making other plans."
Busy green woodworking session at Treflach on the October Permaculture design course - what a great experience that was!

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Walking the low-impact talk - Access to land

ANOTHER NEW CHAPTER!
From November Ruth and I will be exploring low-impact life for real, living in a yurt and caravan combination based at Treflach Farm. Ian Steele, farmer at Treflach, has been very friendly and helpful while we have been running Permacuture courses at the farm over the last year so I'm looking forward to working with Ian and all the others there. It's an amazing three years plus since I started making my yurt in the garden at Debi's house near Brighton (making the thing turned into an epic Icelandic Saga all of its own, check out some of the many posts about it here, hereherehere and here), so it will be truly wonderful to be using it at last. There's lots of stuff we want to explore, like putting the yurt inside a polytunnel so we can get some solar gain and put lots of insulation on the outside of the yurt without it getting soaked. I want to try out Lucia stoves and a rocket stove/thermal mass combination rather than the usual log-burning variety and we'll be growing some food of course. I'd like to try using a fan to take warm air from the top of the polytunnel down into a thermal mass store under the yurt .... and lots more .... will be getting in touch with some of the great eco-boffin types I've met for advice on developing all that stuff.
ACCESS TO LAND
We have the sort of arrangement which I hope will help many other people gain access to some land in this transitional phase, swapping some work on the farm in return for living space - so I feel it's all an important as well as fascinating process. Farms will inevitably have to use more human labour as we are all forced sooner or later to make the transition away from oil dependency. I feel Treflach will be an excellent place to be as the farm is already confronting transition issues and adopting Permaculture principles. I think access to land is the key for peoples' future security, in cities as well as out in the countryside, and learning to live a simple land based life as much as possible, regenerating local Earth capital and abundance instead of being a consumer-unit cog in a global Earth-destructive corporatocracy. I hope some of the solutions we develop in the farm will help people everywhere.

Permaculture Design at Treflach Oct 2011

This was Sector39's third Permacuture Design Course at Treflach and what a wonderful event it turned out to be. I felt I already knew everyone on the course when I met them - extraordinary feeling! Our team has been working together for a while now and the day's programme rolls along like well oiled machinery; Richie, Kev and Ruth and on the cooking, Steve, endlessly passionate teacher and knowledgeable on all aspects of sustainable living (difficult to get him to stop for meals sometime in fact...)
Steve also organises visits to interesting projects and people, while my role is to get the day started with  a Tai Chi/Chi Kung/Energy Work session in the mornings and to help out generally with anything that crops up from getting the compost loo "going" to treating a headache here and there. I also gave some lectures on the course on patterns in nature, people patterns and on design - this last one with reference to guitars, eg the Fender Telecaster, a fascinating tale and lovely to be able to share it. The course is after all a design course and studying how guitars have evolved shows brilliantly how the process works.
As well as all that, we had an ongoing Green Woodworking practical run by Richie and Kev and a teepee and two yurts on site, with music sessions late on into the night round a fire in the teepee. It's a packed programme alright.
Treflach is a family farm managed by Ian Steele and his parents, they are always tremendously welcoming and appreciative of any help we give. At the end of the day the course is all about our transition away from fossil fuels towards a life which respects and regenerates the Earth; it feels good to be part of that process and to see previous PDC students' ideas already being put into practice on the farm. I haven't processed any of my photos for ages but Ashley from the course has put a wonderful album together which you can see here: Ashley's photos - really worth a look, he takes photos from the heart and the album really captures the people and feel of the course.

Monday, October 31, 2011

A Permaculture year with Sector39

From November I'm moving on from Steve's flat in Llanrhaedr-Ym-Mochnant to live and work from Treflach Farm. I've had a fascinating time since August 2010 working with Steve helping to develop Permaculture courses and projects and learning all the time about Permaculture and sustainable living. Steve is exceptionally well informed and thoughtful, passionate about his work and has been a wonderful inspiration for me and the many students we have had on the courses and people we have worked with on projects such as the Cwm Harry community garden. I'm very keen to keep working with Steve, Sector39 is an excellent team now, the last course ran like clockwork and was a wonderful experience for me just as much as the students - one of them was kind enough to say that it was the best and most informative educational experience of his life. But it's becoming more and more important to me personally to adopt sustainable, low-impact living principles in my everyday life so I am moving to live and work from Treflach Farm, more about all that here.  Interesting that the world situation is heating up so much just as I make the move... will we tackle the real issues before they tackle us?

Raised Bed Season

It seems to have been Raised Bed Season recently - last time I was up in Scotland I helped a couple of my friends make beds for their gardens only to find that Steve had got an order for 800 beds when I got back down South. It's all been very interesting...
Steve Jones, Sector39 colleague Richie and I worked out a prototype for our customer, who was an enthusiastic student on a Sector39 Permaculture Design Course recently, "Steve! You're blowing my mind!" he is reported to have said. Using some guitar making knowhow, I made a jig to assemble the beds and then a team of us got together to complete the order. I found making the prototype and the jig really interesting but have to say the mass production side of the project just confirmed for me my intuition from way back in the 1970's that I want as little as possible to do with mass production... To me it has a de-humanising effect on people, tasks are broken down so that they take as little skill as possible, there's pressure to work as quickly as possible leading to pressure on quality and I have misgivings about all the transport we've got involved with. All the same they are really good, robust beds made from naturally weather-resistant larch and make the garden centre offerings look like so much junk. They're being sold as Radnor Raised Beds (site under construction) and will be well worth checking out if you're developing your food growing potential at home.
It is interesting that all of a sudden these different people have felt the need to start growing some food, I think they are at least partly responding to world change at a sub-conscious level, which is a nice lead to another post I'll be writing soon on the subject of Intuition.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Stop Believing, Start Perceiving


We're awash with opinion, articles, news and it's very easy only to read the stuff that confirms your current beliefs. I've been trying out the idea of not believing anything and I'm finding that it really helps. I think of my current understanding of the world, life etc as just that - an understanding which needs constant input and tweaking. There seems to be a lot of really shallow stuff out there, for example here's three articles on the same subject, Shale Gas, one from the Financial Times: which is all for Shale Gas exploitation. If you read it and believe it you'll probably think all our problems are solved. But then if you go on to read the Oil Drum or George Monbiot on the same subject you might wonder why such a worthy organ as the FT has printed such an un-informed and under-researched load of rubbish... Let's draw our information from wide and far and keep our minds open to fresh understanding. Is there an Ultimate Ttruth anyway?