KW-43 Happy Doomers on the tellybox

looking from a window above, it's just a story of love

It has been quite a week at The Barracks. I can’t quite say what the cause is, but I am feeling good being here at the moment. Sometimes, I look around in quiet desperation with the sheer overwhelming impossibility of building a community here, the future I am trying to bring, the message that I want to shout out, and some times, like now, I am just comfortably being.

I do go on a lot about how *big* everything here is. Here are the 6 quarters of the potager. Can you spot the teeny tiny pirate, pushing a wheelbarrow in the middle somewhere? Also for the Captain Eye Spys amongst you, there is the mahossive fire pit and the outdoor kitchen (pizzaoven!) to be seen

The impossible stuff doesn’t disappear from my view or my consciousness, but somehow, the acceptance of things as they are is a greater source of comfort than the promise of brighter futures.

I don’t know what has brought this sudden rush of tranquility to The Barracks, though the air is particularly clean and breathable at the moment. It may have something to do with the relief that the tellyshow was actually quite sweet and nice. I wasn’t expecting anything different to be honest. They were nice people with good hearts, doing a job. I didn’t really expect the radical message of Here to be at the forefront of the show - I understood what my role in the machine was - but it was definitely included, to the extent that a daytime magazine programme can go down that path.

It was most lovely though to get the drone shots. The new perspective, especially the ones over the potager were particularly pleasing. These are all screenshots from the programme. I’ve already put them on IG Stories, and no-one from the telly company complained, so I figured it was worth posting them in here as well!

I really do have a lot of carrots this year. Eight 8 meter rows, one carrot every few centimetres. And I really have been eating them a lot lately. Time to can as many as possible, I think!

In short, this week I finished the pizza oven, mowed lots, made progress with the power situation in the loft, got on with drying a load of seeds for next year (beans and sweetcorn all done), continued the experiment with the drying of spinach, ate my first savoy cabbage from the garden, installed the weather station, picked calendula again, took delivery of the bottles for the infused calendula oil for pirates, fed quinces and acorns to the piggies, forgot to take photos, (acorns, as correctly identified by A.A.Milne are indeed the favourite food of Pig(let)s), opened the tee-shirt shop and sold seven tee shirts! If I had any lime, I would have weeded and limed the orchard as well. But, obviously, as we all know, I have no lime (where would I even get any??), so I probably just weeded it. Probably.

The weather station. That pole is 2.6m tall. As is standard for weather stations. I’m properly obsessed with it. I was hoping to be able to put the live weather data on the website, but you gotsta buy another 200 dollar piece of hardware for that, so it is just for my own pleasure right now. Maybe I should manually tweet the weather every morning? Would anyone be interested in that? Comments below!

The tee shirt shop wasn’t meant to be a tee shirt shop. It was meant to be the barracks herbal shop, but seeing as I only have calendula oil (and it’s not even really ready to go - maybe next week - definitely in time for Christmas), and seeing as I made the first attempt at writing the Manifesto For The Cult of the Happy Doomer - the word’s first user-defined cult - I thought I would pop in some tee shirts as well. And, amazingly, they have been selling! Perhaps I should put some more actual effort into this. Rolling with what the people want!

Talking of which - if you were to buy some Happy Doomer merch - and why wouldn’t you? - what would you want? The fulfilment company I am partnering with can make just about anything. Let me know in the comments, and we shall see what can be done!

Oh, and in excellent news, I also got all the winter wheat in, and the rye is continuing to do well, and I also sowed 100m2 Phacelia. A sort of borage / weed / winter cover crop which is also nitrogen rich, grows fast, suppresses other weeds and provides an early source of nectar-rich flowers for the first pollinators of spring. In other words, an almost perfect green manure. The last green manure to go in will be spinach, once I have cleared the beans bed. We are nearly done with the garden for the year, and this is by far the most I have ever done for winter cover, and the best prepared I have been for next spring. I told you things would get easier and better every year!

I know I have missed something. Oh yes. It was about pigs and quinces. I might save it for next week now.

Amongst the more interesting jobs for the coming week are:

• Fix some newly emerged holes in the fence before the winter rabbits come looking for food

• Canning things in the pressure canner. This is a new thing for me

• Also new - you know those little pots of spreads-for-breads you can buy, and which are very delicious, and far too expensive? I’ve been trying to make those for years, without success, and I think I have hit on a plan that might work. So I am going to try that.

• I have an idea for overwintering shelves in the loft. I want to make these

• Collect acorns from the forest. These get very heavy very quickly, but the pigs really do love them

• Extensive raking of leaves

• Extensive chopping and stacking of wood

I’m sorry, no, I can’t get them to pose for the camera. I have tried. But hey, don’t they look good? They have been very sweet all week, and deserve a special hug.

And that, I think is quite enough for one newsletter. I seem to be in the mood to just keep on blethering, but I don’t want these to get too long and annoying, so that will do for now.

And so, until next week,

Much Pirate love from your

Pirate Ben

xoxo

PS. If you didn’t see the TV thing, and you want to, it’s here:

https://www.rtl.de/cms/ohne-fliessendes-wasser-oder-heizung-englaender-lebt-autark-im-saechsischen-wald-5012310.html