KW-44 The dude abides, but the forest must flourish

Pigs love spaghetti.

Autumn; the year’s last, loveliest smile

William Cullen

Well, dear pirates, that was a week that doesn’t need repeating. Three different vectors conspired to travel the universe and connect in the same time and at the same place, and at the vertex was a pirate. Honestly, I’ve never come closer to opening the gates, letting out the piggies and walking into the forest. Not quite Captain Oates style, but this last week, jacking it all in has never been a more realistic or a closer option.

nothing if not good at piss weak visual metaphors

That was the middle of the week. By yesterday, the haze of memory had already started to profoundly do its thing, and looking for the blue skies on the horizon is as good as finding them.
If you have a dream, the only way to get it is to get up, pull on your boots, pick up your tools and go and work for it. So that’s what I did.

In the first year of the barracks, with no water, no power, no internet, it was a lot easier. Distractions might be the death of a dream, but complete isolation is the death of connection. Maybe, just maybe, I am beginning to find a fairer path between the two.

did you know that the pigs’ favourite food was spaghetti? It is!

The second biggest news of the week is that I did nearly all of the things that I hoped to do in last week’s newsletter, and took down all the bean poles as well. Every year, I cut new bean poles to replace old ones which didn’t make it, and to add to the number of beans. Somehow, I don’t think I am going to need to to that next year. We grew a spectacular quantity of legumes, they have nearly all been podded, and they are on drying racks now. Hopefully out of range of mice. I have woken up more than once in the past to a slipper full of beans. They like to hide them in dumb places.

The thing I didn’t do was the raking of the leaves. The biggest of the maples is still stubbornly hanging on to its own. I looked back through last years, and it seems that it tends to do that until the middle of November. And then a week after that, we get the first snow. I knew it was coming quickly, but that seems just crazy talk!

The first biggest news of the week is that I spent a few hours at the computer, and have been designing the events calendar for next year.

I decided that it’s finally time to offer some gardening workshops, so we have a year of once-per-season weekends to come see the pirate way of doing things, and pick up some tips for your own garden. It’s called Growing for Self Sufficiency, which is quite a bit different from growing for summer goodness.

We’re going to have a timber framing weekend, writing and reading retreats, much more and of course, the highlight of the year, the Collapse Laboratory.

Details of all the things are being fleshed out, but the basic run down, as it is now, can be found here:

https://www.thebarracks.de/post/year-7-community-events

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 ancients ways of doing things.

Winter is coming

With the winter comes the snow. If you live somewhere where snow means a light dusting, the collapse of infrastructure, an afternoon of mushy snowball fights and back to work, colder and wetter two days later, then it’s hard to imagine how complete winter can be around here.

Four to six months of constant snow cover plays havoc with all of your senses. Everything sounds, smells, looks different. All is a consistent, even white. Beautiful and harsh.

But then, it breaks. Spring returns and the snows melt. And you get to see what an awful mess has been left underneath the frosty carpet.

Todays pirate gardening tip is to do yourself a spring favour, and tidy up absolutely everything. Anything which is sorta kinda lying around a bit, because it’s been there for a while needs to go. Tidy up, sweep, rake and mow everything that you can. That pile of flower pots, the hose in the grass, leaves stuck over drains. Get rid of it all. You can trust me when I say that the work that you have to do in spring next year is far better painted onto a joyous canvas of colour and smell and warmth that the melting, half rotten flotsam of incomplete jobs from the year before.

And now, if you don’t mind dear reader, I am going to go and feed the pigs. Then I shall wake up the daughter. We will have breakfast together, and then get to making dreams come true.

Until next week then,

Your Loving Pirate Ben

xoxo