Sunny Wales

Despite the fact that everyone we've talked to has mentioned that Wales is a wet place, we've had wonderful weather for our first week here. Our hosts claim that the farm is located in a coastal microclimate that gets about half of the average rainfall as the rest of Wales. It's been mostly sunny here, though we did get a day where the weather did that weird UK thing where it alternates between rain, hail, or sunshine every half hour. The ground is usually quite frosty when we get up, but by 10:30am it's warmed up a bit, the frost is gone and I've shed at least one layer that stays off until after 3pm. It's probably not as warm as it feels, but Josh and I have been doing tasks that include digging a trench and hauling wheelbarrows full of leafmould up a hill--you know, the kinds of things that really get your blood flowing.

The work may be hard, but I am having quite a good time here at Gerallt. Our hosts, a middle-aged couple, serve us delicious meals (always accompanied by pudding!), are great conversationalists, and have an interesting collection of gardening books. I've been reading quite a bit about permaculture, which seems like a brilliant gardening system. Permaculture focuses on building agricultural systems which require minimum labor to maintain while producing bountiful yields. I encourage all our gardening readers out there to do a little research on Permaculture, I think you will like what you learn!

I suspect that you looked at the name of the farm and assumed that it was pronounced "Jeralt." Boy is that wrong. The G is a hard sound and the LL is pronounced like "KHF." Yes, you read that correctly. The correct pronunciation is Ger-akhft. Or something like that. It's ok if you can't make the sound. Most non-native speakers can't either, but somehow it just rolls off the tongue of every Welsh speaker we encounter. The town we are in is called Llechryd. Good luck trying to say that.