KW 45 Reality is the mediator between hope and despair

Rocks and hard places.

I’m not sure that if in last week’s newsletter I actually wrote a list of things that I would be doing this week. By which I mean last week. I think I mostly hinted at it through the vehicle of a Pirate Gardening Tip. And that was to clean up everything before the snow comes.

we are getting into the hard frosts in the mornings, incredibly skies in the evenings part of the year. This year, the night sky seems darker and more brightly speckled with stars than ever before. Memory, I guess, but the Milky Way has been very clearly defined every night this last week.

And that is what I mostly did. I made a good bunch of progress with the wood store, tidied a whole lot of stuff (bean poles, windows, bathtubs) off the road, and brought all the hoses inside for the winter. Leaving them outside tends to freeze the plastic, and that then tends to shatter it. Shattered hoses are not efficient at transferring water from source to need, so we don’t let them do that if we can help it.

I emptied the leaf mould container for the first time in two years - it takes two years to make leaf mould the pirate way - and I started to create a hand-out on leaf mould and compost in preparation for the practical gardening courses that we are going to have at the barracks next year. Lead mould will be in the Spring session when we learn how to make own potting compost for free. I was really pleased to get 5 whole wheelbarrows of beautiful, crumbly fine textured and dark brown leaf mould from the heap. That should definitely be enough for all our potting needs next year, saving the purchase and transport (and packaging) of about twenty forty litre packs of the stuff next year. I’ve always wanted to make a compost-plug maker as well. If I actually get around to that, then I will never have to acquire a seed pot again either. Not that we are in any danger of running out any time soon.

But the majority work done last week was raking the leaves up again. I filled the leaf mould container four times. It’s too early to do the maths, but the container is cylindrical, about 1m40 high, a little less in diameter. The bag I carry the leaves around in has an internal capacity of 1 cubic meter. I don’t assume it is perfectly full each time. Intuition suggests that three to five times emptying the bag into the container should fill it. Well, leaves are very compactable, and I have so far emptied 12 bags into , and it is still less than half full. Witches, clearly.

I might have mentioned that this year was awful for fruits. The horse chestnut at the front gate didn’t have a single conker on it this year. and the ground under a spreading oak tree near here should be thick with acorns. If you zoom in, you can see a handful, but this is not what this picture should look like.

The Week Ahead

• Continue with the general clean up - mostly focussing around the old compost heaps. I am planning on moving them next year and in the space they previously occupied, we have thick, rich, worm populated dirt. I haven’t decided what to grow there, but options seem to be

  • a pineapple house

  • kitchen herbs

  • cut flowers. I think more cut flowers would be nice. Also, I had yet another awesome business plan for the barracks (co-founders required). Floral displays grown to order. There is so much waste and ecological nasty in cut flowers, but who is going to have a wedding without them? Tell us by March what flowers you want for your event, and we will grow them for you.

• The tidy up in the wood store ends with a set of shelves and a selection of lovingly restored old round wood hand-working tools. Any movement through this sequence of events will be good this week.

• Very much weather dependent, although it most definitely needs doing: rake up the rest of the leaves. There’s less than one day’s work, but they are currently covered in a really hard morning twilight frost. This needs to melt without rotting everything!

• More detailed planning of the Collapse Lab (and other events for next year!) This is the page to watch for updates: https://www.thebarracks.de/post/year-7-community-events

That should be enough, to be honest. My back itstwinging quite unpleasantly. Better stay off the bike this week, and probably try not to overdo it too much with all the rest of the heavy stuff.

And finally, a request. The world seems to be getting stranger and more complex every day, and the pressures of living a decent life in a backdrop of existential threats and war and US elections seem to be overwhelming some times. The Barracks exists to try to think about some of these things and we are broke. Stony, existentially broke. We know that by far the best way to get paying subscribers to the newsletter is to provide writing that people like. Almost every paid sub started off on the free programme. So please, tell a friend, ask them to sign up (to the free version - which is the same as the paid version, but free!) and one day, a small percentage of them convert paid, all on their own.

That isn’t marketing spiel. We still can’t even cover the costs of the pigs every month. Some months we can, these are the good ones. It would be great to not have to worry about them at least.

Until next week then, pirates of the garden, please look out for each other and I sign off with much piratey love

Your

Pirate Ben

xoxo

Currently Reading:

It’s been a while since I read a chemistry book for pleasure. Far too long. I am really enjoying it. I got caught in something of a rabbit hole trying to discover the science of leaf mould, and decided to just say sod it and become an expert on lignin instead.