KW-27 Getting greasy

And some thoughts on peas

The English winter - ending in July

Lord Byron

I know that farmers and growers banging on about the weather must get tiresome after a while, but by now it really should be settling into prime growing conditions and, I guess for potatoes it is, but this incessant 12 hour cycle of torrential downpour- followed by 28 degrees is not great for anything much else really. The weeds love it. The grass grows like crazy, but can’t be mown and the growers’ anxiety start to rise.

Still, in the sweltering heat between the thunderstorms, we tidied up the peas and beans, the greens and roots beds, and we got the potatoes earthed up. They are now all setting beautiful delicately pastel flowers and it’s looking to be a bumper year for the spuds. Let’s see about the rest!

Fixing Mechanical Beasts

Yesterday , I added a poll to my Instagram Stories. The mower needs fixing, do you think I fixed it? The options were yes, no and I’ll wait for the newsletter to find out. Which as we all know means probably not, but I don’t want to say!

Well, I am especially thankful for all of those of you who said Yes. But you are either life’s optimists, or you don’t know me that well. I have an almost debilitating intertia to overcome when we get to complex problems requiring multiple tools. Why do you think I do so well at gardening? Or programming computers? You get to pick a single tool and hack away until it is done!

I am definitely not mad at those of you who said no, or hedged your bets. I am delighted to have people who believe in me, and I am equally happy to have people who know me better than that!

Long story short. Inside the ride-on lawnmower there is an internal combustion engine. This powers a cam shaft which propels the beast forwards, and also a belt which rotates the twin blades at high speed, decapitating grass growth and slinging it at high speed out of the back to be caught in a basket.

These blades are sharp, heavy and rotating fast. They should rotate when engaged, and come to a dead stop when not. So, deep in the base of the machine, through a complex series of mechanical elbows and pivots, there is a mechanism which engages and disengages the tension on the belt driving the blades, and opposite to that, two rather robust brake pads. Right in the middle of this, one of the elbow arms had broken meaning the brakes were permanently engaged, and doing all sorts of damage to all sorts of things.

Dear pirate, through a rather lengthy process of kneeling by the machine and swearing at it until it submitted to my will, I successfully disassembled the entire thing, replaced the broken and worn parts, put it back together again in the correct working order and sent it out for a test drive.

We drove about 100 meters, and mowed around 40 until with a huge bang, the thing rapidly disassembled itself once more.

I had forgotten to bend a single bobby pin back on itself.

The system of linkages which mechanically engage the drive belt to the knives and to disenage the brakes is supported by a series of these bobby pins. In order to mount everything correctly, I poked them through their holes without bending them back on themselves until the whole thing was sitting correctly. And then I forgot to tighten one of them.

So, you were all right. I fixed the thing, but slightly incompetently. I shall be taking it all apart and starting again today. Luckily, I over-ordered on the pins. I have spares.

The Week Ahead

By the start of July, the first compost heap should be just about full. The pile should be a generous mix of grass clippings, weeds, broad leaves, straw, pig poo and hope. It gets topped off with 20 - 30 cm of grass clipping to keep the heat inside, and we’ll come back to this again in about 6 months. The second and third heaps will fill up quickly now.

Otherwise in this week, we are going to be focussing on:

• Checking out the orchard. Towards the end of the month, we’ll be doing the summer haircut of the fruit trees. It’s good to start looking at them early

• The soft fruits are going to get a lot of attention this week. They are starting to set a lot of fruit, but the weeds encroacheth. Without a few days of no rain, the fruits aren’t going to get sweet quickly, but we shall do what we can to give them a start

• We finally got the last two bags of cement. At the very least, I shall finish the base foundations of the tomato house. Optimistically, the whole plinth and the embedded course of angled bricks that will hold the whole structure in place

• The tomatoes are due another training. Pinching out side shoots should be a daily task, but there isn’t always time for that. Once a week is the absolute limit of enough.

• weed, water, mow.

Pirate Gardening Tip of the Week

Pirate gardening is mostly old man gardening. It was old man gardening when I started with my first vegetable plot 30 years ago. So, mostly, it’s just the ancient ways of doing things.

Maximum Peas for Minimum Effort

One of the great treats of the vegetable growing year is the first plate of mange tous. It’s been over a month since we had the last of the asparagus and although there has been fresh spinach from the garden, and the very end of the potatoes from the stores, the first real feed is the early peas.

We have two rows of super fast growing peas, sown optimistically early in the season, and four rows of main crop. The early ones are setting flowers like crazy, and we are picking them hard as petit pois daily.

Your gardening tip of the week to eat as many peas as you can from the early lot, until the main crop come. Then ignore them. Now, eat the main crop without pause. Every day if possible. Continue to do this until the first beans come a couple of weeks later. Now move on to the beans, and leave the peas alone.

Let the peas grow and die behind you. Because you picked them so hard, they will make more growth, and more peas than you can count. Let the vines go brown and papery, and the peas will grow, develop and dry in the pods behind you. At the end of the growing season, you can harvest probably 2 - 3 kilos per row of dried peas for popping into jars and keeping you all winter long. Far easier than picking them green and drying them yourself. And, I’ll bet, twice as big a harvest.

Five Years Ago

I still find it completely remarkable that I got the polytunnel in the first year of barracksing. Before the compost heaps, before even the first two sixths of the potatger had been proper dug.

The other main theme of the week has been the sprained ankle. It has its better moments, but the main story is still the quite unpleasant discomfort. I did try proper rest for a couple of days. Well, as much as a pirate gardener can stand anyway and that was helpful.

We are optimistic that another week of ice and tiger balm will see us through.

And until then,

Much piratey love and remember to look out for each other.

Your Pirate Ben xoxo

PS. I don’t know if you know how much I enjoy poker, but huge congratulations to poker star, everyone’s favourite 7 time WSOP bracelet holder and vegan Daniel Negreanu winning the 50k Poker Players Championship. That made me happy this week :)

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