KW-21 Collapse

I have a cunning plan.

I quite often start writing these things by looking back at where I was this time last year. Apparently, I was a bit miserable that someone who was supposed to be coming cancelled, I was worried that I was massively behind on planting and sowing, and I was reading some interesting books.

So, that’s the newsletter for Calendar Week 21 done. Copy - paste - goodnight.

The winter rye is really starting to shoot up. I also have 100m of winter wheat, which might get sacrificed to pumpkins. The rye, though, this is going to get big and strong and I am super keen to see how much straw we get from it. It would be something amazing to actually be able to harvest enough straw for the piggers to sleep on!

This week wasn’t without its interest, though. The film from Deutsche Welle hit the YouTubes. I still think that the journalist involved is almost irresponsibly optimistic. They dropped my best line - something about “4 billion dead not being something which you can call hope”, which I knew wouldn’t make it as soon as I said it - but I think that they cut the piece together in a way very sympathetically to me and to what I was saying. So, thank you, DW, it was a ball.

The thumbnail is awful, but if you want a watch of it, it’s here.

And if this newsletter is late today, it’s because I just went off to get the URL to paste in here, and spent far too long replying to comments! Which are overwhelmingly positive. Or at least, supportive!

A common theme of many of them is “Ben is at least doing something”. Well yes, I guess I am. But not what most people think. I don’t think I was ever really trying to make the world a better place, but I was trying to raise awareness. Now, it’s seriously time to try to help where help actually has meaning.

You know about this already, mostly, but I believe that the place to help is in the future. I don’t know exactly how to be of benefit to the people living in collapse, and I don’t know how to aid the rebuilding work which inevitably will happen.

But I do want to get people together to think about it. And you, my dear newsletter subscribers, get to hear about it first.

I am proud to present - The Collapse Laboratory. Three weeks in August, at The Barracks, dedicated to getting people together to explore these topics in a setting of radical authenticity. Bring your own research project, thoughts and ideas, or generate them while you are here through your interactions and exchanges with other amazing people.

Tickets for the full three weeks are on sale now.

In the garden, I have a cunning plan to get the vineyard dug. The monster in the form of a human being who is currently not fixing my cultivator / tiller, despite knowing the barracks, and knowing the consequences of his wilful inaction, has still done nothing. The rotovator remains kidnapped. The vineyard remains unplanted. All of which has been a good learning experience. I tried to fix Mr Rotovator myself, and I guess I just gave up too early. Now, I know how expensive a mistake that was, I am, you better believe it, damn well going to learn everything there is to know about fixing the machines that I have here.

But first: (and yes, everything is super late)

• Sow all the root vegetables.

• Plant out three fig trees, and possibly two pear trees. And an araucaria

• Generate literally tonnes of mulch

• Find imaginative places to put pumpkins

• Finish the last digging of the last beds in the potager

• Enact the “get the vineyard dug” cunning plan.

After talking about feeling behind where I should be for the last few weeks, I now actually am behind. It’s not all gloomy, but this week needs to be especially full of hard work.

Have some pigs in the morning sun.

And until next week, please be lovely to each other

Love

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo