KW-10 Chop firewood, make stock

It is just a wafer before 5o’clock, the one in the morning, and your otherwise equanimously even-tempered pirate is in a grump. Parked outside the front gate of the silent, often idylic retreat which we lovingly call The Barracks are three huge wood lorries, each kitted out with 750 horse power diesel engines, two 5m trailers, cranes, floodlights and shouting men.

Sadly, no banana for scale. I don#t remember how much of the tomato house had been done last time I reported, but I know that the status today is five front verticals, two rear and one roof truss. I need 5 of each and 8 cross-members. It’s too early for maths, but I am sure that that is more than last time.

Usually, this sort of inconvenience is all mill-grist and can be easily turned into a humorous, self-deprecating though fully-fulminating rant on the iniquities of existence. But today, it might have just made me grumpy.

This might also be because I am out of plant milk, and I was not ready to have a cup of tea at this time in the morning without milk. So I had a coffee. Also, my thoughts are a massively disorganised jumble of nonsense. Is this why people who wake up by alarms are frequently in such a bad mood in the morning? Being yanked from your unconscious form to the living human one, cradling a coffee, being grumpy about the fact of “Monday morning”. It does make a lot of sense.

What I do know is that the remainder of this chapter is going to be a pretty disconnected set of thoughts, badly curated.

Tony’s disposition

Tony is usually the grumpy one at the barracks. I have often said that he is motivated solely by his stomach and his interactions with me are more or less “hurry up human, my belly thinks my throat’s been cut here!”. He will give me a nudge if he thinks I am being too slow, nothing aggressive. Just a nudge. Humans can be so dumb, and need reminding of their role in service to pigs.

The other thing you should know about Sir Anthony, though, is that he is afraid of almost everything. Oh, and he is the most vocal of all the piggers. I have never really heard anything much from Marilyn, now I think about it. She purrs quite attractively when she gets a belly rub, but other than that, she is monastically quiet. Brunhilda can be quite grunty. But Tony barks like a dog. Most often, just as he takes off for a run. He can go from a dead start, lying in the mud even, to 40 km/h in an instant. Not for long. If you were ever to find him chasing after you, you would only need to outrun him for about 10 meters to be safe, but he does have a turn of speed on him. He barks once woof, springs to his feet, turning 180 in the air, and he’s off. Always in the opposite direction from which he was facing. Always.

Anyway, he decided a couple of weeks ago to be afraid of the blue bucket that I bring them their feed in. I don’t know if I had dropped it next to him some time given him a shock. I can imagine that happening, but I honestly don’t remember it. Perhaps there is no good reason, maybe he just took against the way it glinted blue in the snow? Who knows what goes on in the mind of a mangalitza?

Every time he saw it, he snorted a bark, and took tail. Some small amount of coaxing, and the smell of the food, would get him back again, but only if I had the bucket hidden behind my back. And so, the skittish fellow got plenty of rubs on his snout, right between the eyes where he likes it, and some gently mocking words and all was well.

Tony’s full name is Sir Anthony Marmalade Nutsless. He has lost almost all of his marmalade colour from when they were all very small and much easier to tell apart. But once a ginger, always a ginger!

But now he’s got used to it - that is both the bucket, which doesn’t bother him in the slightest, and the nose rubs, which he now demands every morning. He comes right up to the fence, when he seems me coming, gets a nose rub, and does his spin and bark and sprint thing and is off again, giving me that look of “come on then, get on with the food thing”.

The Compost Chapter. Part 2, New Adventures in Potting Compost

I have been experimenting with potting compost for years now. Last year, I introduced moss for water retention, and I think that it didn’t really work too well. It also introduced air pockets, which is a bad thing. This year, I will still be using moss, but this time it is very much desiccated and ground up. The biggest problem from last year, though, was the base. I think I want to be using a topsoil with good structure, but weak in content.

This year, the mix is something approximating

• 40% topsoil

• 20% compost

• 20% sand

• 15% leaf mould

• 5% dried moss

None of this is weighed or measured volumetrically or any of that fancy stuff, just lobed in by the handful, much the same way that I cook, but the question of topsoil still needed answering, until I literally stumbled on the answer.

Mole hills!

"The little gentleman in black velvet" has been chucking up finely sifted, top quality top soil into little mounds, perfect for combining with other goodness and calling ‘potting compost’. Well done, moley!

Why did I not do much on the tomato house this week.

Because I lost my favourite pencil. I am pretty confident that about half of you reading this will understand exactly why this is a valid reason, and the other three quarters will never make sense of it, no matter what I say. So I shall just leave it there.

I have subsequently refound my favourite pencil, and work can continue.

And, kid brother was here, of course. We did some bookshelving work. I’ll tell you about it another time, but here is a photo of our faces. He really was here! And he put a lock on the door of the Guardhouse!

This week in work

Later today, I am going to write three lists of Things To Do, under three headings. Woodworking, Spring Clean and Growing Things.

Woodworking will include things like the tomato house, heat exchangers, a roof for the toilet, and more.

Spring clean might contain goodies such as edging the soft fruit beds, sweeping up leaves, clearing a wood pile or two and sorting out seeds

And the list headed growing things will see entries such as taking cuttings, sowing seeds, making labels.

Each item will have a success metric (“six wheelbarrows of compost” or “120 bricks”) and each day, I will be aiming to do two items in total, one each from two of the lists.

I think I was hoping to have these lists ready for your perusal, but I do not. ;)

I did find a way to be comfortably warm as well. Chopping wood, we all know, is the best way to avoid the cold here. Coupling that with the smell of vegetable stock bubbling away on the wood burning stove is a hearty and heart warming double bill of induced cosiness.

This morning, it is properly cold again, so I guess I should get some boiling onion skins on the hob. I just looked outside. It’s frosty as heck, and the forestry people have not let up yet. Maybe you can hear their chainsaws on the voiceover. I don’t wanna go outside!

Until next week then, much love

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo

And finally:

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I saw a wonderful quote from Booker Prize winning author Samantha Harvey “All writers walk around in a huff thinking their work deserves more respect”¹ which is deeply embarrassing, as we’ve not even met, but also probably always true more often than most writers will admit to. I guess, if I am trying to imagine myself as a writer who pirates as much as a pirate who writes, then this is just another aspect of my chosen reality that I am going to have to get used to!

1. I saw it on another Substack, called Auralist. This is it: