Most mornings, between coffee and yoga, before feeding the piggies, I start the day with a little bit of a wander around. And, as the soft fruits are right next to the loft, and get the best of the early morning sun, I spend a few minutes there, just enjoying the quiet. Now, I go there and pick fruit for my breakfast.
In weather-watching news, it rained twice this week, doubling the number of times it has fallen all year. The forecasters were warning of extreme weather events all week, with apocalyptic premonitions of ark-building deluges and winds to tear down the very fabric of existence. We had about 4mm of rain in total. It was a little bit windy.
But, it did rain for a reasonably long time, even if it was not in any great volume, so it had a bit of a chance to soak into the ground. A neighbour complained two days later that her soil was bone dry again. I spent six weeks this year going overboard with the mulching. It seems to have helped.
On Thursday, I went through my seed box to throw out the old packets and see what I forgot to sow this year. I discovered that there were quite a few seeds still left. I decided that most of them would probably not last another year in storage, so I might as well get them in the ground. I figure that most of them will still germinate, some of them will grow, and the especially brave ones will get all the way to making new fruits and vegetables. Almost certainly not enough to eat, but maybe enough to save seeds from. So in the best worst case, I will have turned the old seeds into new seeds, and next year we can make it up, and there will be a whole bunch of green stuff to either go down the throats of piggies, or be chucked on the compost.
Plenty of compostable material and fresh seeds seems like a better outcome than stale seeds. So I sowed quite a lot of spinach, pak choi, peas, kidney beans (very old seeds, highly unlikely to do much), sunflowers undersown with feuerbohnen (beans - which, if it all works, will use the sunflowers to climb up!) and - an entire row of watermelon in the vineyard.
The watermelon seeds were a gift two years ago. They are coated with something, which gives me hope that they might still come. I can’t imagine them making watermelons again this year, but if they germinate and do something, then I have a entire row in the vineyard - 35 meters long - cooling the ground, suppressing weeds, keeping the moisture in, and bringing the total vineyard under cultivation to well over 50%. This is a Good Thing For Next Year.
I’ve been thinking about Community. The dream has always been that the very existence of the barracks will be enough to attract people to come here and do Interesting Things. What sort of things, I don’t mind so much, as long as they fit in with the general barracks vibe. I have a thousand ideas (well, 50), of what sort of enterprising ideas could take shape here, but am not doing very well at manifesting them. So I have decided, to make the barracks more attractive. Look out for that. I think I shall start by actually writing down somewhere the why of here. I don’t think I’ve done a particularly good job of communicating that up until now.
Pig update: They’re so cute at the minute :)
And with that, another week has gone charging by. I hope you all have a good one, wherever you are. And, thank you for the shares and the recommendations. Four people shared the newsletter last week, and told other people about it, and we got four new subscribers! It really does work. Thank you!
All the best, and I hope to see some of you here sometime
Love
Your Pirate Ben
x
PS: I keep forgetting to note what I am reading! More than one and less than three people have asked me to add this feature back in again, and this substack post in particular triggered me to make sure I include it again (whenI remember!). So this week, it has mostly been this:
Just one criticism - I think it’s Corporatism, not Capitalism which is (more) to blame, but other than that, I feel almost exactly the same amount of sad about it as when I read David Wallace Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. It seems insane that this stuff needs to be written down. Surely what we are doing is so obvious, that no books are required. Anyway, it’s very well written, 8 years old and therefore some of the punch may have gone out of it a bit, but the contents are probably still way outside of the mass consciousness. And that’s what makes me sad.
Your close... Makes me sad too. The rest of what you wrote about and what you're doing as a human - that makes me feel a tiny bit more hopeful...
The rain situation is here (near Fulda) terrible too.
The forecast said for last week it will rain 15l/m, at the end it rained a liter...
Fingers crossed for some rain this week🌧️