KW-01 It's the most wonderful time of the year

Happy New Year

As they say in Germany, I hope you slid well into the New Year. (They don’t say this, there are liberties you can take with bad / free translations, and there are out and out lies. This one is pushing it. I used to have a blog somewhere, a long time ago, called Denglish for Beginners. It was full of terrible / deliberately ambiguous translations. I wonder if I can find any of them again… )

This is the start of the area which is going to be cleared. I have big plans for this door this year!

Since we last spoke, we have been through a Solstice, a Christmas and a New Year. What an exciting time! In a very poor show of druidic norms, I pretty much missed the Solstice. I think I raked leaves. I wasn’t really going to mark Christmas, but I got a sudden rush of endorphines¹ from the passing idea of roast potatoes, so I did the pirate thing and roasted some potatoes. Along with parsnips and carrots. And there are still many many leeks and much much spinach in the garden, so I had that too. And a ratty old box of tofu quickly had its contents marinaded, slowly griddled and plated up with onion and mushroom gravy and a dollop of barracks cabbage on the side.

If you were to say I had a very enjoyable Christmas Dinner, you would not be wrong!

I really did just want roast potatoes. The rest of it kinda just happened.

In the last two weeks, there have been significant choppings of wood, some clearing of piles of things waiting to be cleared one day, cooking and eating. But mostly, I’ve been working on the Year In Review post. It’s coming along nicely, but it will be done when it is done. It’s quite long, and only available for paid subs, but I think it’s worth it, and if you want a piece of that literary action, you know what buttons to hit.

Firewood is not going to be an issue for this year or next. Or, as it turns out, a couple of years after that. Over the last weeks, I’ve been sorting the massive stack of 2 meter long logs into those which I can carry and those which I can more or less manipulate with the help of gravity. Anything under about 35cm diameter gets hoofed up onto a shoulder and carried to the wood shed for sawing up and storing. I like to saw it in the shed, because it keeps the sawdust all in one clean dry place. Doing it on the road makes a hell of a mess, and renders the sawdust useless. The big fat ones, they were destined for the sawmill, where we were going to make the raw ingredients of a library-full of bookshelves and most or all of the battens for construction work in the year ahead.

It turns out that none of the sawmills around here (of which there are more than there are restaurants) can take 2 meter logs. They need to be at least 3m long to be correctly secured before running a massively powerful saw blade through them.

This means a re-think of the entire wood strategy. Mostly, it means that I have a lot more firewood than I thought I had. Secondly, construction work is going to have to be done with roundwood. That is, uncut. Which means the thinner stuff is now construction wood and the fatter stuff is firewood.

One day this will all be clear and sparkly. Also, a pottery kiln, a charcoal burner (unless it goes down behind the pizza oven, which is actually likely) and a tree nursery. #plans

To be honest, I am ok with this. It means a lot more mess in the sawdust arena, but I can plan for that. And building with round wood sounds a lot more fun. Slower, more difficult, and needing some hand tools that I don’t currently have, but way cooler and more satisfying in the long run. And using the bigger logs for firewood also means proportionately less chainsawing and more splitting, so all round, considerably less fossil fuel usage, and way more manual labour. Which is exactly how we like it.

At least until we build a wind-powered sawmill. (This is planned for year 26!)

And that is also just about the summary of what is happening this week.

• Cleaning and tidying the outside, as long as the weather remains this ridiculously warm

• Moving trees from one place to another, making firewood.

• I might eat some more roast potatoes. They were really good.

So, from all of us here at the barracks, to all of you out there IRL, we hope you had a lovely Christmas / Solstice / New Year and would like to welcome you to 2024. It’s going to be crazy. I hope you are all ready!

Much piratey Love

from your Pirate Ben, Brunhilda, Tony, Marilyn Monroe

xoxo

I was planning on getting a new year photo of the piggers this morning when I went to feed them, but its still dark out there. Doh!

1. We all know that it was more likely to be the hormone ghrelin coursing through my system, or possibly serotonin, but for some reason, the poorly understood literary appropriation for powerlessness in the face of hormonal wants has become endorphins. I’m not convinced rush is a suitable descriptor either, but hey, language is as language does.