KW-38 It was not a good fruit year

Though we will be full of beans.

This has been a quiet, meditative week at the barracks. Also, a very wet one. I spent most of the night in water torture, listening to the three leaks that sprung in the roof of the loft. It’s the third week of September and I have already had to light a fire in here. More to dry out the air a bit than for heating, but both are very welcome.

There was a really nasty frost at the end of May which knocked the fruit trees backwards which did not help at all. But the swarms of absolutely massive wasps feasting on the half ripe fruit was the real problem.

Last week’s newsletter promised the hope of bringing all the wood inside, stacking it beautifully and getting cracking with some cut ‘em up and stick ‘em back together again projects. This isn’t what happened. I still haven’t got all of the wood inside. Now even that is rather more positively styled than is actually true. I strongly suspect that we have managed to bring a little less than half of the wood inside.

Not for the first time has the scale of the barracks and all things in it lead to an overly optimistic take on time required for a thing.

It looks like we have two, quite possibly three times as much sawn wood as we have ever had before. The stacks of the future bookshelves are done, and as the most important lumber for next year’s projects, it is indeed a Good Thing that it is all inside and really rather attractively stacked at that. (nothing else needs to be quite a straight and true as the bookshelves - all the other projects can happily be a bit more wistfully cut and assembled, but the library furniture really does need to be of quite high squareness, or it will all fall over).

Wood. Stacked. There are 60 of the big fat planks, enough to make a lot of really solid bookshelves. If you were to buy this wood (and the rest of it, not currently stacked) in the hardware store, it would cost an easy 10k. Wood is expensive.

But, almost nothing else from the list got done.

We did also go and do some work on the guardhouse. Daughter #2 is here until probably close to Christmas time, and she is determined to overwinter in the guardhouse, so we should at least make sure that she doesn’t freeze to death. This week, we will acquire some furniture items and carpets and maybe a lick of paint, and see about getting her in there before the week is out. We have ordered carbon monoxide detectors from the internet, because it’s probably a bad idea to go round slowly poisoning the youth (outside the obvious microplastics, PCBs, PFAs, lead particulates, diesel particulates and background radiation from 1950s nuclear testing, which are all of only fringe concern, of course)

This week’s writings might, to some ears, sound a little down and depressed. I hear it myself. I know, I get like that sometimes and some of you worry. I don’t really like the rain so much, other than with a gardener’s satisfaction, or a foresters joy, but I really do love Autumn. Today is a grey day and I didn’t sleep well. Putting the fire on for the first time this year seems weird AF in the middle of September, but there is also a cosy joy to the ritual. If anyone knows a better way to spend a winter than reading books with a metal kettle on an open fire¹ , then do that. Me, I am going to do this and be blissfully happy about it. Also, I am actually feeling rather more positive about my life in general than I have done in a while. So, all is well at the barracks. Except maybe for the lack of interesting winter food.

Ok, we did have a success. I decided to grow and harvest grass seed this year. We have four different varieties, all doing well in seed production.

We have a field full of green stuff which will last well into next year. Potatoes are abundant and beans have outdone themselves. And I grew twice as many as usual, which helps! But, the fruit has been a comprehensive disaster. We took an early harvest of the soft fruits, but only the one round. Total fruit from the orchard (60 trees) has been a couple of kilos of not very pleasant apples, and the wild crafting that we were looking forward to doing so much resulted in a handful of blackberries and zero raspberries. There do appear to be a lot of rosehips, though. We shall take some of them for sure. Tomato sauces will be heavily rationed this winter. I have never had too many tomatoes. Around 60 jars is the target. We will be lucky to have 12 this year. Maybe it’s just better to eat a whole bunch of Italian sauces and curries now, and know that there aren’t going to be any over the winter, rather than endure the enforced forebearance of too few. And maybe, when I look at it like that, we are actually just fine for food. I will miss the tomato sauces though!

Pigs!

Now this newsletter is already crazy late, and although we are missing many of the elements of the modern round up, including the Pirate Gardening Tips and the Jobs for the Week and even the Photo from Some Years Ago, I think I am ok with this. It’s not bad to hark back to the newsletters of the past which are more a flow of consciousness from an under-rested, insufficiently caffeinated, barely awake Pirate, I think. I shall try to do better next week!

Which gives us seven days and seven nights to look after each other. I hope we can all make the most of them

Much piratey love

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo

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1. It’s not an open fire, it’s an enclosed cast iron wood fire. Not a cooking range like an Aga, though it does have a solid metal plate on top which serves well for boiling water. But “metal kettle on an open fire” sounded so much more pleasing than “metal kettle on a wood fire”. Please forgive the factual inaccuracies inherent in the poetic license!