KW-46 Winter in Spring clothing

Tomato salad with all the trimmings

Last night, for my supper, I had a tomato salad. With broad beans, spinach and fresh green pea shoots. As in, fresh from the garden.

Fresh green pea shoots (and cabbage family). I’ve been thinking a lot about peas lately. I had just about decided to grow far fewer next year, to make more space for climbing beans. And then they went and decided to give me pea shoots in winter. Little green freaks,

I picked three kilos of red tomatoes from the polytunnel, and in the potager there is more growing at this time of year than I have ever seen.

Quite a lot of this is because I am making a serious crack at overwintering produce - winter rye and winter wheat, and I’ve sown green manures everywhere I can chuck them (alfalfa, clover, spinach) but also, because the the winter onions (4 rows) and garlic (2 rows) are all doing great as well. These are all firsts for me, so I’m enjoying watching all of them come up, but because it was so dry all year, a whole load of plants seeded really early, and those seeds are now germinating and doing quite well.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to hustle winter into getting here any faster than it has to, but all this mental preparation for the short, cold days and long, dark nights is going a bit to waste when the garden is trying to convince me that it’s the start of spring.

what’s in the stores? Sounds like another blog post that I really should be writing!

Winter will come, though. That is for certain. The meteorologists are saying that our first ground frosts are coming soon. I said last week that I had good reason to think that it would be short, and if we are going to get an early start to the year next year, then believe me, I am going to use all this extra time to get the vineyard really up to scratch.

This year in the vineyard, I was learning what it is like up there, and getting just as much croppage in as possible. I did the absolute minimum amount of weeding, to find out what grows up there, but also not to shock the ground. It’s been covered in wild long grasses for decades, suddenly stripping it would do no good, and anything that grows up there will be cultivated right back into the ground as green manure anyway.

The vineyard after the sorghum and sunflowers have had their heads chopped off. A scythe would probably be handy, but I did just fine with a machette! Apologies for the photo. Apparently I had the camera on the “add random blurry patches to the shot” setting.

To be honest, nothing really did extremely well up there this year. But, I did harvest one sack of potatoes, 8 sacks of fodder beet, 2 or 3 of sweetcorn and an as yet unknown quantity of sorghum. Next year, I’m going to crazy up there with mostly sweetcorn and fodder beet. I harvested the sunflowers this week, and they are very disappointing. Apparently, they need decent ground to grow in. I hope that it will be decent ground up there one year, but we are going to need to go through a bunch of green manuring cycles before it’s anything other than glorified wasteland.

mood lighting shot. Where the mood is “I think I will go to bed early tonight”

The main learning has been, ironically, that it really would have been the perfect spot for growing grapes!

I haven’t really planned the week at the barracks yet. If you were here for last week, you will know that I was supposed to do many things with wood. Well, I did some of them, but not all, so I should finish those off.

I have a great excuse. I knew that I would be leaving the barracks for Berlin again. (Yes, that is twice this year). I thought it would be for one night, but I managed to secure stand-in pig feeders for twice as many feeds as I was hoping for, and I absconded for TWO nights. Which is some sort of record. I’m sorry that I didn’t come and see anyone from my former Berlin life, but I was there on a mission to say hi to the granddaughter. She is, to over-quote Poppins, positively perfect in every way.

Whatever I do decided to do this week, I shall try to remember to take photos, and I’ll tell you all about it next time

Until then,

Much Pirate love

your

Pirate Ben

xoxo

P.S., please, celebrate with me! This newsletter is now going out to over 400 people every week, and nearly 20 are paid subs! I might not be hitting the super big time yet, but I love watching those numbers creeping up - thank you so much to everyone who shares this to socials, amongst their friends.

P.P.S. - Up until now, all subscription money has gone straight into pig food. I have decided that when we get our 20th paid sub, I am going to buy myself a potato chipper! I have a lot of potatoes, and I like chips. I decided that making chips (fries, for those of you who speak American English!), will improve my winter considerably. Yes, I could use a knife, but I want a potato chipper, ok? 🤩

P.P.P.S After that, all subs go straight back to pig food. Is that ok? Let me know in the comments if you think it’s ok to get a potato chipper? Or should I maintain the purity of subs = pig grubs? Damn. I’m conflicted now!

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