Oh my! It’s Monday. Everyone who has spent time at the barracks will confirm that time does strange things on this pirate island in the forest, but this is the first time that I actually didn’t notice that it was Monday.
Last week, I had a conversation with friend and former colleague which went a little like this:
Hey. How are you? How’s your back?
Still fucked, thanks for asking!
Right. I’m coming up to help for a few days.
And she did! For the first time is as long as I can remember, I had a bit of a lie in while someone else fed the piggies, and it was very welcome to also have someone to talk ideas with. Especially ideas for the piggies. We worked mostly on moving them over to their summer residence, and just about got it all done and finished, until the electric fence started glitching. I’ve still not figured out what’s wrong with it, which is annoying.
When someone comes here with I car, I can exploit that all day every day! Most excitingly, we went to visit the nice garden centre to get some new trees for the orchard. Not a ridiculous amount - just another six, I think it was, but this increases the orchard to over 40 fruit and nut trees. Which is clearly excessive. Just the way we like it. They should be being delivered this week, so it looks like I have some hole digging in front of me.
I absolutely love the excessiveness of this, now I think about it. Hopefully, there will be a decent amount of fruit from the maturing trees this year, but they are all still very young and very susceptible to the weather. When they are fully grown, the apple trees, for example should be producing about 200 kilos of fruit each. So, we’re talking over 4 tonnes of fruit just from the apple trees. In a good year, and in total (in another 4 or 5 years time), it’s perfectly reasonable to expect 8 tonnes of fruit from the orchard. That should be enough for the pigs, the pirate and a whole host of other fruit-loving creatures on top.
Jobs for this week include:
Planting fruit trees
Figuring out the problem with the electric fence and moving the piggers
In the loft, I want to finish the pink wall, the white cladding and the seed tables
Choppy chop a whole lot more of the vineyard
It’s potato planting week. BEST WEEK OF THE YEAR!
Until next week, me hearties!
your loving Pirate Ben
(I would like to say hello to the three new subscribers to the newsletter this week, but seeing as I really thought that two of you were already subbed up (heheh), I shall just say hi to the new stranger - Hello Jacob! I hope you like it here!)