KW-26 The Last Potato
Garlic, nettles and a belief in Goodness
The hungry gap is that part of the year when the stores have run out and the garden is not yet producing anything to eat. It is usually between about March and June and this self-sufficiency thing is all about reducing that gap to as close to nothing as possible.
This year, it has just kicked in. In the last week of June. I’m pretty pleased with this, and in the lifetime composite world of the ideal barracks year, the earliest I have ever harvested potatoes was in the first week of July, so maybe, just maybe, I have cracked it. In the anthologised version of life, anyway.
I’ve been snacking on strawberries most mornings, and the asparagus was fun while it lasted. There is some spinach in the garden, and I was eating kale for a time, but that’s all gone to seed now. As far as a damn fine basket of food goes, I do only eat the expensive stuff, but this week, I ate the last potato from the stores, reaching further into the calendar than ever before.
The crop for this year are all brewing under the surface in the potato break quite nicely. I got them into the ground at the right time, mostly, but I wasn’t pushing it for super early crops, and then we had that weirdly spud-specific frost which knocked them back a couple of weeks. I don’t expect any edible fresh new potatoes for at least another month, but I will continue with the programme of watering one row to try and coax it along. This will not make the tastiest potatoes, but it might mean getting a few plants out of the ground and onto the plate in maybe a couple of weeks.
I knew that there wasn’t going to be enough stuff in jars last year. I didn’t put the hours in in the kitchen, so we’ve not had any tomato-based sauces for a while, and I made a massive oopsie with the beans. Or rather, keeping it honest, I may have made two oopsies with the beans.
For no reason that I can remember, I didn’t label the dried beans, and white dried bush beans and white dried climbing beans all look exactly the same. I think I might have eaten the last of the climbing beans, and sown the last of the bush beans. This should have been the other way round. Last autumn, I put them in identical containers. Sure, they were on different shelves, but that is hardly foolproof. I am staggered that last year’s Pirate thought that I would just remember? Have I met me?
As I was cooking one half of the last beans, and as I was sowing the other half, I knew that the wrong ones were going in the pot and the other wrong ones to the ground. Yesterday, they started sprouting, and again, it’s too early to tell for sureses that the little dark green leaves poking out of the ground should maybe be a little bit lighter and a little bit bigger, but my subconscious knows.
Being hungry isn’t all that bad, and honestly, just writing this has made me feel better. Before I started typing, I don’t think I had realised that I had actually been eating well already this year. I still have onions and garlic from last year. That sounds like a delicious nettle soup to me. Newslettering as therapy. Who would have thought it?
It has been a tough week, though.
I’m the guy you come to when things are looking rough, and you need a bit of perspective. You’ll get a francophonic shrug of the shoulders and a let’s see what happens. You know I’m not going to tell you that everything is great, but I’m not going to let you slide into depression without some perspective first either. Happy and Doomerism, with strong emphasis on both parts. This was one of those weeks when I could have used a Pirate Ben of my own. Now, I had a little pop at geopolitics last week, and I’m not going to make a habit of it, especially when we should probably see what happens, but it all feels a bit dangerous out there. I usually end this thing with a look out for each other. This week, let’s look out for everyone who is on the bad side of a bad relationship.
I’ve always had the strongest of abilities to imagine something better than what you can see. It’s more of a pig-headed, stubborn refusal to believe that things are not actually good. People are misguided and sometimes selfish and inconsiderate, moulded by a world that they simplify through their egos and desires, but only the very, very fewest of them are actually bad. I started here with stony ground, couch grass and weeds. Now, the barracks is one of the most beautiful and productive places on earth. Maybe there is even a version of myself who remembers to label beans properly, and maybe there is world that hasn’t yet given up on kindness, or decency, or the possibility of change. Imagining something better doesn’t mean pretending things aren’t hard. It just means not giving the hard parts the final word.
Take care of yourselves, your loved ones, and strangers in any part of the world who need it
Your loving Pirate Ben
xoxo
Come to the Collapse Lab. If you believe in the Barracks, this is our purpose. It’s not intellectual, it’s not for green or vegan or environmental climate collapse specialists. It’s for people with open minds and open hearts to genuinely attempt to do a thing.
If you want to come and help out, if you have questions, if you can’t afford the ticket price, get in touch, and we will work something out. But you should definitely come.
❣️
I do like your caption for the tomato house. Rings very true for most things. There is built, and there is not built. Great to see it going up.
I also enjoyed the parable of the beans. Is “label the beans” a future idiom in the making?