KW-04 Barracks excelsior

It’s around half past six on a Monday morning at the barracks. I’ve made the fire and put a kettle on for the first cup of the day. I’m sitting in the freshly refurbished, but not completed, office. Now, I have a little bookshelf with all my favourite gardening books, a money plant and two little very unhappy looking cinnamon plants on it. They might survive the winter, but it’s going to be a close thing.

My phone won’t do the beautiful skies of the early morning or late evening. If anyone wants to donate a modern phone to the barracks, I’ve had my eye on the Ulefone Power Armor 18t for a while now. It has an infrared camera, which would be invaluable for discovering why the loft is still so damn draughty!

I went briefly outside just now and was met with a warm blast of air. The weather station says 2.3°C, so you could say it’s getting pretty hot around here. We’ve just done another week of pretty spectacularly chilly, and I think that we might be approaching the first day above zero since the first week of 2024. Certainly for a while.

We have had a lot of blue-pink-purple-orange skies, though, and it’s just beautiful. I wish you could all come and stay for a week in the winter and see it for yourselves. And the sky at night? When it is especially cold and cloudless, the unforgiving expanse of stars above is almost too beautiful for one human to be existing underneath.

I will never regret learning the scientific names of trees. I’ve always enjoyed being able to talk trees with the foresters without needing to know local names. Picea excelsior was a new one on me, though. It sounds terrifically exciting. Turns out, it’s just an old name for Picea abies, though, aka the Norway spruce or the “common as muck Christmas tree”

This week, other than the standard wood chopping, I’ve been planning the planting for the year. Sitting at my desk, flying around the barracks in my mind, making detailed maps of the place from memory has been quite an experience. Yesterday, after an extended session with the pens and pencils, I went to feed the pigs in the evening, and realised I had spent more time roaming around outside than I have done in a while - despite being desk bound the whole day.

Possibly even more excitingly than sitting making my own maps of the place, hidden away in an old chest, I found a bunch of original maps and plans of the barracks. Actually, I knew they were there, but I’ve never really had the time, taken the time, to go through them. I’m definitely going to look through them more closely soon, but when I found the original tree-planting plans, I sort of got stuck there.

I never imagined that someone had to actually plan the trees here. It’s obvious, of course, just nothing I ever thought about. There are a very impressive number of species on site, which I have been actively trying to increase ever since I moved in, but to see the thought, and the beautiful drawings, that went into the original construction of this amazing location is really something. Maybe my thought of creating a secret arboretum amongst the more obvious planting here was not quite the original idea I hoped it was. Maybe it was incepted by the unknown hand of the original invisible landscape designer.

hunting for buried bread

Maybe at some point, I’ll take them to a copy shop and get them nicely digitised. Maybe something for the shop, even.

This week will be the last week of proper hardcore wood chopping. I have enough inside for probably the rest of January and the whole of February. I’d like to have March and April covered, but I won’t be bringing it all inside just yet. I should get it all chopped in the next few days.

After that, I am going to sit down and read a book. It’s a rare day where I don’t do a few pages of something, but it seems like a long time since I wasn’t doing anything much but chopping. But also:

• Make my first oak roof shingles.

• Maybe take some hardwood cuttings. I am planning lots of hedges this year

• More planting drawings

• Finaly finish the 2023 In Review post. I know what the external demands on my time are going to be this week, and they are very few. This means some actual proper writing time!

And that should be ambition enough for the last week of January, I think. Let’s see if the snow melts today, and until next week I shall wish you all much pirattey love from

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo

PS: Two lovely surprises came in the post this week. Thank you very much Kel and Kev :)