The best times to do structural work at the self sufficient smallholding are the depth of winter and the height of summer.
Spring is a constant panic of preparing ground, sowing seeds, desperately trying to catch up with where you think you should be whilst holding yourself back from doing things too early.
Thankfully, autumn has the best weather for long hours in the garden, because you’re going to need them. You have a few short weeks to harvest, preserve, can, bottle and dry enough for a year, whilst mega-cooking monster batches of sauces, ketchups, pickles and chutneys. And sterilising. There is a lot if cleaning jars in autumn.
In winter, we get to mend fences, do the interior stuff (I have a half painted wall which I didn’t manage to finish last winter, and when I downed brushes, I already knew it wasn’t going to get completed for another year!) and build things out of wood.
When summer is getting to the hottest, there is usually surprisingly little to do in the garden. Other than keeping things nice. This year, it has not rained. Not really. It’s our second La Niña year in a row (or third, depending on who you ask), and The Year That The Climate Became Real for Most People, so there has been a lot more watering than usual. Because I am now down to reserves of reserves in the water situation, and I can draw about 200 litres from the well before it has to refill, I am basically watering three times a day. There is no mowing of grass, obviously, because it’s not growing. It’s turning yellow and crispy. I think I have just about maxxed out the mulching.
All of which means, I do have some time to do the brickwork I have been planning for the last three years.
So this week coming up, I am planning on
Watering three times a day
Feeding pigs
Finishing digging the hole in the middle of the potatger.
Doing one more edge of brick work
Avoiding the sun between 11am and 6pm.
In “no-one reads down to the bottom” news, I started making solid “10 year” predictions about the future ten years ago. No-one was much interested in them then. Well, interested maybe, but not to the point of taking any sort of action. Anyway. I’ve been thinking a lot about the next 10 years lately. I’ve never really got down about my soothsaying before, but now that it’s clear that my mission (to inform through the process of absolute authenticity) has been a complete failure, the swingometer of current state of mind is not making for happy next-decade stuff. In short, there is a process of reconsideration happening at the barracks right now.
Right. Enough of that. See you next week, pirates!
Love
Your Pirate Ben
I hope to experience Autumn and Winter one day ☺️
I really enjoy these updates... Each Monday morning (or whenever I read your newsletter) I feel it in my bones...I feel a sense of I-need-to-go-spend-a-week-at-the-barracks-and-help brewing up inside of me... I really need to work that out in my calendar...