KW-29 The scope of the summer
à la recherche du thé perdu
It’s almost 6am. I got up at 5, brushed my teeth, put the kettle on, watered a Christmas tree, made a cup of tea, and fell into a selection of mismatched and messy clothes. After twenty minutes of unsuccessfully trying to locate the cup of tea, I made myself a new one and stared off into space, wondering if I call call this newsletter à la recherche du thé perdu. I think I probably didn’t. By the time you get this, we will both know1.
We’re half way through July - 50% of summer is behind us. As is more than half of the year and, this being 2025, we’re closer to the middle of the century than the start of it. I’m not sure why temperatures have regressed to too young to drive degrees Celsius in what is supposed to be the warmest part of the year, but I’ve been very grateful for the rain. The popcorn grass has survived inappropriate adjectives - yellow, crunchy, bare - and returned to more familiar ones - fragrant, lush, verdant.
When summer arrives, things slow down. At the start of the season all the seeds have been placed in their garden rows, and hundreds of young plants have been depotted and relocated to permanent homes. We enter the cycle of weed-water-mow and as the harvesting makes its slow start, we gradually begin the transition from garden to kitchen.
This week, we made 15 jams. I already know that I will, as always, make far too many pots of fruity delights. If we brew up the same quantity again,mthat would be enough to see us through the winter, but volunteers and guests do like some of the home made sweet sticky fruity stuff, so maybe 30 more and we’re done.
Things are moving quickly, in part because there are currently 6 people at the barracks, all beavering away at the potager, the plants and the pigs. Yesterday, I had taken the notion to get them all to pose for a fake toiling in the fields photo for newslettery publication, but they had scattered, mostly to the forest. I found one in a hammock reading a book, two were having a tea ceremony, one was cooking risotto and one had taken herself off for a hike. We run a pretty tight ship around here!
With so many hands around, we have an ambitious week in front of us. Some of the highlights are
Pigs
The pigs need to get to their summer residence. I need to clean out their house. With some luck and hard work, we should get that done this week. First up, reinforce, rebuild last year’s pig house and fix the solar electric fence controller. I don’t know that it is broken, but it is going to be, isn’t it? There is no reason for it to mysteriously stop working while it was perfectly stored all winter, but it obviously will have done. There is a good chance that this week ends with happy pigs, a clean winter house and a massive pile of pig crap on next year’s potato patch, smothered in large quantities of grass clippings to moisten it all up a bit, and give the bugs something to mix into it.
Vegetables
Really, almost done here. The last of the beans are just about ready to go out, under the bean gate. Transplanting them, and stringing them up is not a big job, but it is a satisfying one. I had to re-sow a bunch of pumpkins as well. If they get off to a start, and if the autumn is reasonably long, and if we just let each plant make one, possibly two fruits, this should be a worthwhile exercise.
Earth up potatoes, train tomatoes, continually harvest peas. Water the greenhouse twice a day. Eat courgettes.
Projects
Tidy the wood store. Cut up a load of wood for later chopping for fires in the winter.
On the question of the hot showers, we have been given an opportunity to improve the set up of the heat exchangers quite significantly. We are not so much going to be correcting a design flaw, as working around an unfortunate glitch in the implementation. It’s a minor annoyance, but I do believe that it ends up in greater heat-storing capabilities, and a more likely path to achieving the 70 C required by the system2. I think it will only take a couple of days, by which time the sun is due to come out anyway. After that, there is a chance for some time to work on the fabled, gabled tomato house again!
Things in the garden are looking, almost unbelievably, as if they are all going to work out. I try to make sure that the peak of the interesting harvest happens around the time of the Collapse Laboratory. It is the one week of the year when we have the most mouths to feed, and also when it is most satisfying to have everything looking maximum beautiful. If we are going to spend a significant amount of time trying to find new and unexpected ways to answer impossible questions, then why not do it surrounded by a vision of countryside idyl. Tickets are, naturally, still available, and the discount code of NEWSLETTER25 is still yours for the taking as a thank you for being here with me every week.
And if you can’t come, please tell folks about it, and about this Book of the Barracks. A few words and a link go a long way. Maybe you have a message board at work, or an email list for non-work stuff? It turns out that talking about what I am trying to do here really is helpful. A former volunteer at the barracks posted a little something about his experience on Reddit this week and today, I get to say hello to two dozen new readers! An absolutely remarkable leap forwards, so thank you to him, and welcome to the new intake, each and every one of you. It’s lovely to have you here.
I made a page on the barracks website with some pictures and words on it which might be quite helpful when you do spread the word. It’s here, and I will probably try to improve it over time, and with feedback.
https://www.thebarracks.de/marketing-department
If you do have the time for that, then thank you as well, from the deepest recesses of my heart, it really does mean more than a lot.
And so, until next week, I hope you have a satisfying one and I shall see you next time,
Your loving Pirate Ben
xoxo
I went for the subtitle! But you know that already!
Although… heating engineers will often use Kelvin when talking about the differences between temperatures, or when refering to the heat requirements of a system as a whole. But, I thought that misquoting Proust in the first paragraph was confusing and pretentious enough for one day. I’ve already used C once in this newsletter and switching to K all of a sudden seemed like a step too far!