KW-28 Home dentistry

It's a sign of the times.

Good morning, all. I was just about to type let’s start with the good news, but there really isn’t any bad news this week. At least, not at the Barracks scale. Just about everything else outside is going to pot, but that’s ok. Or at least, it’s not a surprise. The best news is that the nerve in my tooth finally died, and will never hurt me again! Huzzah!

The froggers were being very vocal this week. But also very shy. This is the littlest pond on the Barracks. It doesn’t have a name, but I thought it was looking quite pretty

Oh yeah, and Substack, so it seems, have introduced the ability to colour your text. It’s still not possible to add a table, which would be actually useful, but at least the kids can do some colouring in now. I don’t think I’ll be using it again.

But to touch on the toothache thing again. Pain is a very strange thing. At the time that we can feel it, especially if it is bad, it is your whole perception, your whole life. If you’ve ever hurt yourself a quite badly, you’ll know the standard pain question - rate it on a scale of 1 - 10, where 10 is the worst you can imagine. I’ve never answered above a 6 before. I’ve always been able to imagine quite a lot worse. The dying of a nerve in your face, though, especially this time, this was a 10. Actually an 11. It was beyond my imagination.

And then it stopped.

When pain stops, all memory of it is instantly wiped. I can remember staggering around the loft at 3am, with a mouth full of stale old cloves, filling the freezer with bowls of water, and sipping on them to numb the white hot pokers in my mouth, but I can’t recall the physical experience. Everyone knows this. What is it they say? If we had a memory of pain, no woman would ever have more than one child? I guess that is a powerful evolutionary marker right there.

So when I say that in the potager, at the typewriter and in the workshop, it was a suprisingly productive week, maybe in reality I am talking about the sudden cessation of a week of horrific agony. What ever it was, it was easy to get into the garden and get stuff done.

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In either my first or second year here - a while ago anyway - I planted 600 trees. I’ve been sticking 50 - 100 in the ground every year since then as well (and people still get cross with me for cutting one down!), but that one year was the big year. Down by the lake, the proper one with ducks on it, not the frogger one, that is to say in the swampiest part of the Barracks, I put a mix of maybe 100 common and black alders, willows and others. The hope was to try to draw some of the water out of the ground and kill off of the horsetails which are the only thing that grow down there. Not all of them, I kept some swamp for the good old biodiversity thing. But I shrank it a bit. On the other side, where it is a little dryer underfoot, I put maybe 20 or so black alders. There are now uncountable hundreds of them.

many, many beans

This week, I went down there and cut 26 of them, each 8 meters tall or more, and dead straight from having grown so close together. I should probably go and thin them way more extensively, but these 26 I needed to make another bean frame. Many of the bean seeds going into the ground this season got a bit more dried out than I really would have liked under perfect conditions, so I sowed a considerable number of back-up beans. Well, they pretty much all germinated, so I decided to squeeze them in anyway, and this year we have a world-record 84 bean poles all doing their thing.

Last week, I mentioned the huge number of brassicas going down. I forgot about the Tuscan kale. That needs planting out this week. Sadly, though, it appears that the favourite food of the local deers is not cabbages, but red orache. The lazy beasts don’t even have to bend their heads to eat it. Maybe that’s why.

All those stubby little twig bits should really have leaves on them. The reason they do not is because they are all inside deer.

How much did it rain on Monday night? Half a wheelbarrow.

The Tomato House:

The tomato house is not finished, but it is at Version 0.8. That is, it needs some corners and it is missing a side and a door, and the south-facing windows need to be properly positioned. The roof won’t be completed before quite a few other things happen, starting with cutting down some trees, and there is much to be done on the back wall. But, it has tomatoes in it, and the tomatoes are in many many wheelbarrows of compost, so we can forget about the plans for the mass thermal storage and the fancy floor and even the trimming for the beds - that is all V1 and V2. Version 3 is when it achieves it’s status as best place in the world for raising seedlings in February, and is unlikely to be even next year. But, look! Tomatoes in the Tomato House! That is worth at least a minor version number increment!

I also weeded the sweetcorn and sunflowers, almost everything in the roots bed. I finally got the celeriac out into the field. It was surprisingly not showing any distress from being in a seed-tray for so long, and I am sure it will take off now. I know there is something else to go out, but I can’t remember what. I earthed up about a quarter of the potatoes, and will finish the rest this week. And the pumpkins have finally taken! There are a few scary weeks after the gourds get planted out where they don’t so much other than sit there and look pathetic, but temptingly tasty to the slugs and snails. Under the ground, they are obviously doing something significant because as soon as they start to set new leaves, they take off quite quickly. Well, they all set new leaves this week, so here’s hoping for some visible signs of action out of that particular break this week.

And there we go. We got to the bottom of the page again before 7:30. Some weeks are more philosophical, other are more garden reports. It looks like this one was the latter. Let’s see what next week brings. Either sunshine and cabbages, or the Thwaites Glacier collapses and Trump presses the big red button because he was bored and insane. Always something to look forward to, eh?

Take the very best care of each other that you can, and this week I shall leave you with the thoughts of modern philosopher Styles who in fewer than 4 short sentences handily summarises the last half a million words of this newsletter:

We don’t talk enough, we should open up. Before it’s all too much. Will we ever learn? … We’ve got to get away.

With all the pirate love this ship has to offer

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo