Week 38 - Rain and shine
If you’re a metrologist, Autumn begins on the 1st September. For the rest of us, it’s the equinox. Which this year, was on the 22nd September, not the 21st. It happens sometimes.
Either way, the weather has taken on a distinctly autumnal disposition. 20 degrees yesterday, and about 10 today. Inside the safe enclave of the forest clearing in which nestles the barracks, we tend to hear the wind rather than feel it, and these last couple of days, we have been hearing it loud and clear. I am sure that those living in perfectly sensible houses in the villages around about will have been losing roof tiles and chicken coops and little girls called Dorothy and anything else blow-away-able . Those of us who live in Soviet barracks don’t really have these problems. The Russians build for permanence, not beauty.
So, in the heat of yesterday, I spent the day laying bricks to edge the potager. I shall write a longer post about it soon enough (get my multi-media cross-fertilisation!), but for now some pictures of bricks and sand.
And today, it rained. So I tried hand-threshing the oats harvest. If I do oats again (unlikely), I am going to need to find a better way of doing this.
I also started on the noisy, dusty, unpleasant work of turning the peas into pig food. It looks it’s going to be about 4 bags full. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s good quality, highly nutritious food, and it gets soaked for 24 hours before the piggies get their snouts on it, so I think it’s fair to say that it’s about the equivalent of 12 bags of the bought-in food. I am super pleased with this, but honestly, it’s hardly anything compared with what they eat over winter.
Next year, I’m going all in on sunflowers and sweetcorn.
(Edit: This post seems not to have sent to everyone. Apologies if you are getting it twice)