KW-31 Bounty in the garden

Gonna be eating kale this week!

This has been such a crazy week of comings and goings - volunteers in and out, friends new and old, and torrential rain and the hottest day of the year - that I decided to get up early this morning, and work out some serious planning for the weeks ahead.

Kale. Gonna be eating it!

The Collapse Laboratory is almost upon us. I think there are going to be about a round dozen of us, but tickets are available! The Hot Showers project goes into full swing this week. The Tomato House is rising from the ground, and will probably start to go quite quickly now (if I can find time!). There is much afoot, and having a good daily and weekly set of plans would be of great help.

So, I have written a daily schedule, a weekly schedule and a sort of an outline for the next month and further.

What I didn’t do, amongst all of this calendar action, was recognise that the most important thing about Today (being a Monday) was that I had a newsletter to write. So this meta-newsletter, full of handwringing about the impossibility of its own existence, and yet, being extant, is what we have to work with today!

an Tomato House rises!

I just popped outside and took some snaps. Normally, I spend the week looking out for interesting photos for the newsletter (believe it or not - there is some thought that goes into it!), this week I have literally nothing. Except a brace of excreta. I found a very large deer poo down by the lake, and recorded that for posterity. And the other, that story will remain a sketch at best. A very good friend of the barracks, of this newsletter, and of the pirate, sent me a picture of an apparent dirty protest. We know not what the protest was about. It does not need sharing further.

The Week Ahead

Drill holes in walls. The shower block (in the basement) needs to be connected with the solar collectors (on the roof). The loft will be similarly bored, for connection with the internets.

Daily, new potatoes will be consumed. They are so large in mass and number that we really do need to start making more of an effort to allow them to fulfil their purpose of being eaten. Also, replanting some earlies for Christmas new spuds.

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 really, it’s just the ancient ways of doing things.

Replant your early potatoes.

I’m still working on “perfecting” this one. But, it is hard to keep early potatoes as seed for next year. They are all out of the ground by the end of July, start of August, and do not want to be sown again until April next year. That’s borderline too long to store dirty big maincrop potatoes, but it’s definitely not a thing that you can do with the delicate and tender first earlies. So, I am experimenting with replanting them. Last year, I just popped them straight back in the ground almost directly after harvesting. That didn’t really work. This year, I shall try to chit them first

many potatoes

.The idea being, that they grow and mature until Christmas, wherupon many of them will be eaten, but enough will be left over to go into storage where they only now have to stay for 4 months before going back out again for next year’s early potato harvest.

Those pesky gardeners. Always living in the future. We have a lot of potting and drying and chutney and jam making to get through before that.

So let us focus on the week ahead, the day on hand, and wish each other a lovely and mindful one, look out for each other all the time, and say until next time,

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo