Let’s get the fleeting moments out of the way. It references the very brief periods of blue sky and sunshine we’ve experienced thus far this February.

In the main we’ve had a lot of cold, grey, dry weather. And now it’s turning wet and windy.

However, very early in the month, we had a small window of sunshine for both me and even a few of our resident honey bees, so I whizzed around the garden, took a few still photos, and enough video to put together the short YouTube below, which I uploaded asap, on February 3rd. With the comment that:

If a week is a long time in politics, it also is in a garden – even at this time of the year. After what’s been a colder January than in recent years, there are still a lot of flowers and colour around in the garden – not just snowdrops, but wonderful flowers and scent from several Daphne bholua shrubs. Crocus, winter aconites and Cyclamen coum are also beginning to open. In another fortnight when we open the garden for the National Garden Scheme for the first of our 7 weekends this year, there will be masses more flowers appearing, even if some of the earliest snowdrops will be beginning to fade.

There’s so much more effort in producing a video than still images that, rather like a poem, the raw material often simply gets filed/abandoned and never makes it into a useable piece.

Just after this sunny moment, we spotted a rare weather window of 36 hours of sunshine, so having booked a 2 night stay at the local Lake Country House Hotel, at Llangammach Wells, we took the back road through Tirabad to enjoy the scenic views, and arrive in time for tea and a scone.

We thought this would set us up for garden opening, having not managed a break away since July. However, just before we’d left, our younger son had also spied the upcoming week of forecast dry weather, and booked three of our lovely grandchildren in with us for the whole week.

We dossed at the hotel for our only day and took advantage of the beautiful walks around 52 acres of wooded grounds beside the river Irfon, and their on site swimming pool. (Thanks to Fiona for these 2 images). For a relaxing stay it proved perfect, with 4 key assets – large, spacious, clean comfortable room; excellent cuisine with a balanced menu; no piped music and a clientele of an age who preferred quiet over-meal conversation in the lovely large period dining room with no mobile phones in evidence, and a staff without equal in our albeit limited exposure to such things. Everyone was not only courteous, and helpful, but prepared to make time to have a natter with us as well. We shall return, I’m sure.

No chances for listening to calming music would be possible for several days. But here’s another beautiful interpretation of Claude Debussy’s: Arabesque No. 1 (chosen to accompany my Mid-winter flowers video) played by the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires. Simply wonderful.

Invigorated, we headed up and over the Eppynt military ranges, where the red flags indicated live firing exercises were underway, so stopping and leaving the vehicle was inadvisable, and on through Brecon to our customary halfway handover/pickup point in Abergavenny. Noise levels increased for the journey home, and we nearly made it all the way before the twisty lanes induced a throw-up from one child who thought she’d grown out of the problem! Very impressively she came with her own cardboard sick bowl and managed to aim perfectly.

However, no sooner were we through the door than we had to respond to a request from a TV crew who wanted to visit us the following week on the day before the return of the children to their parents. This didn’t seem to faze either children or the journalist who was also undeterred when I mentioned we didn’t have a TV, so had no idea what their programme was all about. The week was a great success, undoubtedly helped by the dry weather, with lots of outdoor exercise. Our willing helpers even earned some extra pocket money with windblown stick collection, bringing in logs from the fields, filling hay bags for the sheep, as well as checking out the frogspawn, helping with a bonfire, kicking out molehills and searching for pottery fragments, and even finding a piece of broken glass in one of them! As always Fiona had organised a range of indoor creative challenges and games for them including a much appreciated first go at throwing a pot, at the nearby Gwili pottery.

Thursday came around surprisingly quickly, and right on time the 3 person TV crew arrived, from separate homes across South Wales. An action packed intensive day followed, and I’m sure they will have diverse footage from which to fashion an interesting piece. They had clearly done their homework and were focused and efficient in a mission to create a holistic storyline, rather than just concentrate on the garden, and this involved including the grandchildren, Fiona’s artwork and our Silent Space. Of course we have zero editorial input, or any sort of financial reward for sharing our home, ideas and environs in such a public way, but it adds another chapter to the story of Gelli Uchaf. And might inspire a few people and provide an upbeat item at a generally gloomy time of year. If/when it goes live we’ll provide a link, and of course we or indeed the children won’t be easily able to watch it, save online, since they also live their lives without TV in the home.

The following day, after a session of sitting inside cardboard boxes – something the children have done several times overnight on the streets of their home city to raise funds for charity – we completed the return handover, amazed by how fast the week had flown by.

Then came completing the final titivations before welcoming the weekend’s bookings of lovely garden visitors. Some familiar, many visiting the garden for the first time. All of whom seemed to enjoy themselves, despite less than brilliant weather, and the offerings on the snowdrop table thinned down quite a bit.

Two days later we had another small, local group visit us, and given the date was arranged several weeks ago, they struck lucky with the weather, enjoying enough mid-morning sunshine to get many of the Crocus tommasinianus flowers to open for the first time this year. However, it was bitterly cold with a brisk easterly wind, and whilst they were walking around, well wrapped up, I even resorted to some hand pollinating of the flowers, since no honey bees have been foraging for most of February, and I’ve yet to notice the first bumblebee queen of the year. We thoroughly enjoyed meeting all these lovely people, admired their hardy determination to trek around the garden and up the hill in such chilly conditions, and were fortunately able to revive them with tea, coffee and cakes afterwards and tell them all a little bit more about what a special place Gelli Uchaf is.

Here’s another short video to show how, in just a fortnight, with the bonus of some more intense solar radiation from a visible sun, the garden had changed significantly.

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And so to trees. And power. I also managed to complete a short video on the local damage from Storm Darragh, back in early December. Here it is:

At the time I wrote about the impact of this, and the strange, almost visceral effect it had on me, and I felt the local landscape and birdlife. I mentioned then that I was acquiring this book “The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature”, by Peter Wohlleben (author) and Jane Billinghurst (translator). I finished it quite quickly, and can recommend it, although the writing style is quite informal, and the book lacks knock out scientific conclusions on some of the most interesting aspects of tree biology and ecology. I suspect in part because insufficient research money has been ploughed into this field. As a retired commercial forester Wohlleben’s comments that any, particularly evergreen, tree over about 80 feet is likely to be vulnerable to the increasingly strong winds we’ve experienced lately, stuck with me. I’d never thought about this before, but it makes perfect sense when one considers the leverage that a very tall canopy will exert on a shallow root plate during wet ground conditions. And makes me worry about the long term viability of many of the trees which we and others have planted in the last few decades.

I’d mentioned in my previous post about the backup Anker Solix F2000 battery inverter we now own. We didn’t expect to have needed it so much, so soon, but we’ve suffered, so far, 3 additional power outages. The worst of which happened when we had our garden visitors on Sunday, who’d just come inside to warm up and enjoy a hot drink and cakes, when all power went. With no particularly strong wind gusts. Strange. Fortunately our small 1 KW kettle and the Anker battery came to the rescue, along with pre-warmed larger kettles which we always keep on our Klover Smart, or older Morsø Dove pellet/woodburning stoves.

We’ve now had the Klover pellet stove re-wired so that we can also run this from the battery bank, (clear display shown above) should we need to. I’ve included a few photos to illustrate just how little electricity is needed to keep the stove running. But without a grid independent power backup, should the mains power fail, it would sit there, inevitably turned off, just when needed most. The maximum draw (as above) is just under 300W for the start up phase of ignition when a glow plug has to heat up pellets in the crucible to the point of spontaneous combustion. Thereafter, the power consumption falls to barely 100W (above) once the fire is burning, with the simple fan, mechanical augur for the pellet supply to the burning crucible, and water pump for the central heating all having minimal power requirements.

We’re fairly certain that power outages will become more frequent and have already had an insight that the National Grid’s ability to maintain stable voltages might be being impacted locally, by both ageing networks, extensive storm related repairs, and increasing local ( and very unpredictable) renewable electricity supplies being fed into the grid. Our PV inverter began to play up and display unusual error codes, which seem to have miraculously resolved after the latest power outage was restored. 18 months ago, having suffered repeated tripping of one of the ring main circuits, which we were unable to isolate to a single piece of equipment, I did notice a strange flickering of the small light on a gang socket extension lead, which I thought was unusual. We were about to call in the electrician, when across the valley, a team of National Grid engineers arrived and changed a couple of poles, and replaced cables. Miraculously, the tripping circuit hasn’t re-occurred since then. Coincidences? Maybe, I’m just recording what’s happened.

We were also contacted this week by an ‘Ofgem’  appointed third party marketing organisation (Ofgem – Office of Gas and Electricity Markets – a “non-ministerial government department and an independent National Regulatory Authority”). An employee of this independent marketing party asked Fiona to rate National Grid’s responses on a scale of 1 to 10 to certain specific questions. But only as far as communications relating to the power outage were concerned.

However, they weren’t interested in the 5 day plus power cut in December – only the most recent 1.5 hour one. So no doubt a glowing endorsement of National Grid’s customer satisfaction ratings will result from this customer satisfaction survey. The researcher showed no interest in what we thought about how the situation was handled when the power was off in early December. In our previous 30 years here, before National Grid took over Western Power, we ALWAYS had a personal courtesy phone call from an employee of Western Power after nearly every outage to ask about satisfaction levels with the company’s handling of the problem. Which was always exemplary. Anyone for DOGE, or an equivalent, eh?

We’ve been personally committed to trying to minimise our energy consumption for very many years with personal lifestyle choices. However, I’m increasingly aware of the limitations on a national scale to the pace of change currently being proposed by the current massive drive to decarbonise our economy by 2030. I’d suggest anyone with any doubts about how this might impact our economy, and how we compare with other nations might like to watch/listen to the short presentation below. The speaker is Sir Paul Marshall, at the recent London based Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.

Perhaps in years ahead, our small portable Renogy 400 Watt PV suitcase style panel will allow electricity, and all that can be powered by it, as a special treat, after those relatively rare sunny days during the autumn and winter. I always thought that this panel will probably produce 80% of its output from 20% of days. And most of this will be in the months when less electricity is required. So far it’s only been worth setting it up on 2 days since we acquired it at the end of January. Maybe given the obvious challenges and costs of supplying electricity to remote populations in rural areas, we’re being subtly (or not so) re-educated to come to terms with the fact that if we desire the luxury of reliable continuous electric power, we’ll have to work out how to provide it for ourselves. A bit like medical therapy, on which I could wax lyrical, but won’t, at least for now.

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What3Plants 10 – This is my latest featured combination of intermingled plants which seem to thrive together and which we think achieve more visual impact this way, rather than grown in isolation. All of the other combinations can be found on this page.

About 3 years after tweaking the idea, I’ve made the following short video about a gorgeous naturalistic planting combination for this early in the year. Which for us can light up areas of heavy and quite dry shade, even right up to the base of mature trees like beech and pines. It’s based on the large leaved Chinese woodland plant Chrysosplenium macrophyllum, which has (as its name implies) large and quite fragile evergreen leaves which hug the ground. It spreads by above ground runners and once a plant has settled in, it’ll send out a few of these each year, which will extend the plant’s coverage by about 50 cm annually. We’ve never seen it growing this successfully elsewhere so it probably requires our high rainfall and  consistently high humidity to thrive in this way. It hates full summer sun, or prolonged dry spells.

I added in snowdrops – mainly Galanthus nivalis, but also the taller, earlier cultivar G.’Atkinsii’ which seem to cope with pushing up through the Chrysosplenium leaves, and then finally trialling the spring ephemeral Cardamine quinquefolia, which adds its low growing purple flowers and bright green leaves to the mix in mid to late February. This is also when the large and honey bee appealing white/pink flowers of the Chrysosplenium appear. By June the Cardamine leaves have died and disappeared completely, along with the snowdrops, leaving the Chrysosplenium as interesting ground cover for the rest of the year. Many visitors assume it’s a Bergenia, since the leaves can take on similar red/green hues over winter. Although it spreads well, it’s very easy to remove, so easily contained. Probably more so than the Cardamine, whose underground white roots are much more fragile and difficult to locate. Many view the Cardamine as a thug, but in such tough locations, we view it as a valuable early season asset. Cyclamen and Epimedium are also planted in association in some of these areas.