A Little Island

My First Foray into Mushrooms

2011-08-30T10:00:00.005+01:00

Where I walk the dog every day at the moment there is a large alder tree, and one day I spotted that it had a beautiful fungus growing on it. It seemed to have come up over night - unlikely, although I can't believe I missed it because it is so bright! I did some research and found out that it is Chicken of the Woods, aka the Sulphur Polypore, or Laetiporus sulphureus.

Apparently this is an unmistakable mushroom,even for the completely unexperienced mushroom-forager, like me. All the signs were right - the fact it was growing on a deciduous tree, its colouring (including the waves of colour around the edges), the shape and size, its suede-like surface and meaty, fibrous texture, the fact that instead of gills, it has small pores, and the time of year.

Not for nothing is it called Chicken of the Woods. It is edible, apparently very pleasant (although it is better to eat the younger parts of the fungus, as the older parts can be crumbly and dry). When I peeled off a few younger lobes I was surprised by how much its inner texture resembled cooked chicken. Anyway, I brought a small amount home to try, as apparently, although edible, it doesn't agree with everyone, and it is better to try a small amount first.

Anyway, Mammabert sauteed it in olive oil, with garlic, and made sure that it was well cooked. She didn't really want to try it, but she did. She said it wasn't unpleasant but I don't think I will manage to persuade her to sample it again. I loved it however. It was mild-flavoured, perhaps with a slight citrussy tang, and its meaty texture reminded me of Quorn. I don't eat Quorn because a) if I don't want to eat meat, it seems odd to eat something that is produced to almost exactly resemble meat in appearance and texture, and b) it uses battery eggs, and c) I don't really like it. But I really liked this Chicken of the Woods. Like natural Quorn, but nicer, with a lovely woody smell when raw.

Anyway, that was my first ever wild mushroom experience, and I haven't died yet. I did a lot of research, both on the internet and in books, before I even touched the mushroom. I recommend getting a book on Mushrooms - I've been using the Collins Gem Mushrooms, and Collins Complete Guide to British Mushrooms and Toadstools. The first one is a pocket guide with clear guidelines as to what is edible and what isn't. The Collins Complete doesn't tell you anything about whether a mushroom is edible/poisonous, but has really good descriptions and photographs to help you identify. The River Cottage handbook on mushrooms is also good, although I find the fact that it is split into two sections - one each for edible and poisonous mushrooms - a bit daft, as if your average person sees a mushroom, they have no idea which category it fits into. The Collins guides are more accessible in that the fungi are grouped according to family and appearance.

Anyway, that was my first wild mushroom foraging experience! I found it really good fun, but please don't use this blog as the only identifier for Chicken of the Woods. Get a good book or two, research on the internet, and even ask someone you know who is an experienced mushroomer. I'm a novice, so don't take my word for it on its own.

Disclaimer done. Enjoy mushrooming!

Pen y Fan Whimberries

2011-08-03T18:57:00.008+01:00

Mamabert lives in Wales now and I am down for the summer. Today we went to Pen y Fan to admire the scenery and also to indulge in a seasonal treat - whimberries. Today was our first time ever picking whimberries and now I feel properly Welsh ;)

Whimberries (aka whortleberries, in England, also bilberries, blaeberries, wild blueberries...the list goes on) are small and blue and taste kind of like blackcurrants but without being so sour and bitter. They grow on a scrubby little bush up on the mountains among the grasses and the heather. The juice turns your fingers (and your tongue!) a lovely purple.

Here are our whimberriesin what was going to be a traditional whimberry and apple tart (in Wales a tart is always a tart, even when it's a pie, or so I am told), but that turned out to have all kinds of fruit in it...it was delicious and the whimberries were little balloons of sweetness.

New Bee-Extracting Method

2011-07-02T14:07:00.008+01:00

The last post was apicture of us taking a wild colony from a barn wall cavity. It would have been a much easier experience if we had had our new piece of equipment which we tried out earlier this week!

We'd heard about people using a hoover to literally suck up bees before, but had never tried it. So when Dad got a call about a swarm in the roof of someone's 200-year-old originally-tiled bay window, he hopped onto the internet and knocked up this contraption out of a brewing bucket!

We took it round to the swarm on Wednesday and it worked really well. We found that using the lowest suck worked perfectly - it sucked the bees up without hurting them. In the end we couldn't get the whole colony - inside the roof was a maze of nooks and crannies and even home to an old wasp nest - but it's nice to know that the bee hoover works and we have thought about how to make better use of it next time. But for a first attempt - it worked really well!

Old Bee Video

2011-07-02T13:29:00.005+01:00

This is how we collected the original wall hive, who is now at Dave & Vicky's with its descendants.

Thursday 11 June 2009

Summer

2011-06-27T14:53:00.021+01:00

June has been quite an unsettled month here in terms of weather - we've had scorching heat and very cold downpours! So it hasn't been the best month for the bees, especially as it is the June gap, but our hives are all doing well fortunately.

This post is a catch-up session about our latest antics and a celebration of the English countryside in summer :)

To start with I should mention a fantastic microscopy workshop that my beekeeper's association organised at the beginning of the month. It was a really excellent day and we were led through the processes of identifying acarine and nosema by our regional bee inspector and two experts from the National Bee Unit - long way to come! It was a fantastic day. I learned to dissect bees in order to check for acarine - a delicate operation that involved removing the head, front legs and 'collar' of a dead bea to reveal its trachea. I managed to get a couple of good dissections and although I'm not sure how often I will have to use this skill I learned such a lot about the anatomy of the honey bee and the beauty of its construction. We also mashed bees up to release their stomach juices, from which we could detect nosema. Using the compound microscopes for this let us see not only the nosema but also some beautiful pollens! I think I was able to tell the very subtle difference between nosema apis and nosema ceranae at one point, although of course it could have been my imagination. Either way, a fascinating exploration of the honey bee and I learned s much about good disease management also. I now have a taste for microscopy, and have ordered a couple of books on the subject...who knows, maybe one day I'll get my microscopy certificate?

Aside from the bees, the countryside has been absolutely stunning this year. Below are some pictures of a poppy field and a field of what I think is flax, both near our apiary site and both absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful, the photographs hardly doing them justice.

A quick flit to the garden centre revealed some beautiful (and edible!) fuschias.

And finally, I took the dog on one of my favourite walks and was absolutely struck by the beauty of nature that day. The poor dog felt somewhat neglected as I looked around me carefully, trying to look at the landscape from a Permaculture perspective. I could see that the hedgerows and edges of the woodland are naturally scalloped, a design feature that permaculturists often use on borders, and I was amazed that nature just does it naturally! Also the beauty of the chalk stream we visited was amazing. It was alive with tiny shrimp-like creatures and amazingly near to the water the forget-me-nots were still in flower, even when they have finished everywhere else! They made a very picturesque tangle with the watermint. The field around us was alive with insects and other life: a spider who had build her web in a curl in an iris leaf; dusty-brown butterflies and all different species of bees feeding off the drifts of clover; flies and hoverflies in unbelievable colours; slugs and snails in an array of shades from speckly green to dark, shiny black; mole hills; ladybirds - native ones! - feeding off clusters of aphids on the thistles; grasshoppers of every shape and size; an ant colony who had colonised an old mole hill; and every type of grass and ground-cover imagineable. The complexity of this eco-system was just stunning and what's more, it was so beautiful and tranquil.

Bees again!

2011-05-28T18:39:00.006+01:00

When we were harvesting our honey, eventually our little extractor broke and so we borrowed our association's big elecctric extractor, and got the rest of our honey. We now have 4 gallons waiting to be bottled! The frames went back to the bees - we weren't very prompt and apparently they were quite grumpy for a day or two! They're full again now though, and have new boxes to fill with brood and stores and are getting on quite happily.

We went to the other apiary today, the one where we haven't harvested any honey but where earlier in the month we did a huge split, had all those queen cells etc. We had 4 busy nucs where all the news queens have mated and are laying! The nucs have all now been moved into full sized hives (OSB's). They were big and strong enough and now have plenty to keep them occupied.

As for the other hives, we have 2, including the big swarm we caught, that are requeening themselves. One is completely lacking in anything looking remotely like a queen, but still has a large population, so we will unite them with another colony. The rest are all doing splendidly, and one of them was so full that we had to give them an extra box today.

There's some lovely forage for them in their new apiary. Lots of clovers and wildflowers, and a huge field of beans and one with what looks like it might be phacelia just coming into flower.

Altogether a successful beekeeping session, lovely to know that our homemade queens are up and running! Definitely the most successful requeening - natural or otherwise - that we have ever managed!

Honey Harvest

2011-05-22T12:46:00.011+01:00

There is nothing better than enjoying honey made by your own bees!

We started our honey harvest yesterday! Dad has already harvested 9 frames from another hive, but yesterday we went up to harvest from the Four Winds bees, which are the ones that you can see living in a barn wall on the video blog (changing this soon, for the moment you can see it here).

One hive was queenless, so we gave it a frame of new eggs from the other so that they can make an emergency queen. Apparently there are lots of hives going queenless at the moment, possibly due to the very cold winter we've just had. However, we were still able to harvest a whole box from that hive, and two boxes from the other! (We don't use a super and broodbox system; we use One Size Boxes, hence why I say 'box'). Both hives have huge populations and are quite lively without being aggressive - very very lovely bees, and very hard working. The photos below show Dad and the bees' very devoted landlords/uncle+aunt Dave and Vicky having a look.

So, we have harvested 36 frames full of honey, and each box of 12 frames has so far given us a gallon of honey! We still have one box left to extract, and then when we press the honey out of the cappings using our cider press we may get a little more! But at the moment we have 2 gallons already, from one hive alone!

^ Uncapping

This is quite an early harvest, because the bees have been collecting from Oil Seed Rape, which is a spring crop and the honey of which crystalises very quickly - therefore, we have harvested early to make sure that we can actually get it out of the comb. It's a pale, light honey, not the floweriest flavour but pleasant enough and lovely and sweet.

So at the moment we are just spinning out the honey in our old extractor that is gradually falling to bits. Hopefully though we will sell enough honey this year to be able to buy a brand new electric extractor! That's the plan. And for the moment the old one is doing the job!

Giving Birth to a New Queen

2011-05-14T20:10:00.002+01:00

Shaking the Swarm into a Box

2011-05-14T19:13:00.002+01:00

Chasing the Swarm

2011-05-14T18:04:00.004+01:00

Sorry that it's the wrong way up, I will try and rectify this at some point!

Bees, on the day they went Beserk

2011-05-14T17:30:00.003+01:00

Bees

2011-05-14T17:12:00.007+01:00

Yesterday we went to see how the bees are getting on. We have one mating nuc that seems to be working, and spotted 4 new queens. At the moment they don't seem to be laying, but we're giving them a bit more time to get mated. All but one of the colonies are looking pretty strong!

Just as we were finishing up, however, I spotted a cluster of bees in the hedge. It was a pretty big cluster! Obviously a swarm. So we shook them into a spare box and now have another good sized hive! They'd begun to build comb in the hedge, and quite a bit of it, so had obviously been there a while. It's possible they're even the swarm we lost last time!

Bees gone Bonkers...

2011-05-02T18:39:00.008+01:00

Yesterday was my first time beekeeping this season! My Dad has been a couple of times before this and is crazily making up frames and boxes at the moment as we are still converting to One Size Boxes, and it turns out we need much more equipment than we thought we did, and here is why!

^ The apiary as it was!

We went to visit a couple of hives we have in our new apiary. Dad had already seen them and one of them he knew was doing really well. They filled a national broodbox, 2 OSB's and a super (and no queen excluder - don't need to use one when you're using OSB's). We were checking on our honey harvest when we spotted a maturing queen cell. We went through the whole hive, and found 27 queen cells in it, with around 14 on one frame alone. 27 in one hive!!

^ A queen cell

They were clearly on the brink of swarming, and with that number of cells could have swarmed in casts, and we don't want to lose most of our bees and honey, so we had to act quickly! Some cells were already emerged... We tried breaking one or two cells to kill the developing queens, but instead it turned out that the queens were pretty much ready to hatch and were fully formed and wriggly! We caught them in cages, luckily, while we decided what to do.

We began splitting the hive off, effectively doing an artificial swarm on a big scale. But we didn't have all the equipment with us, so Dad drove off to go and pick some up.

Meanwhile, I was enjoying the sunshine when the buzzing got louder. I looked behind me and there was a cloud of bees - they were swarming right before my eyes! They drifted slowly down the length of the hedge, 2 - 3 metres in the air. I was running frantically after them - I had no equipment and there wasn't much I could do anyway, but I was trying to make sure I knew where they went so we could catch them when Dad came back. It was an amazing experience, as several times I was right in the heart of the swarm! Unfortunately though they flew over the hedge and away after a while, and despite my graceful attempt at crawling through the hedge, we had to abandon that one.

However, when we got back to the hive the population size was still huge! We carried on with our splits, giving birth to a couple of other queens, and eventually we had everyone split off and with a few queen cells each and some stores. We went from having 2 hives in that apiary to having 9 there in one afternoon (including a little mating hive)! And they're all fairly decent sized!

We thought we'd done alright - pretty much averted disaster. But there was one nuc that was concerning - the one with 14 cells on one frame. We couldn't take out a few queens because we'd run out of cages. So Dad went back today with Pabi Bach to make a queen bank (the cells in little springy cages used for queen rearing and breeding) and to capture a few of the queens to put in further mating nucs. So fortunately, that nuc now has fewer queens, and we have lots of queens developing/getting ready to mate. We have offered them out to other beekeepers, to give them away. They're virgins but they clearly come from a hard-working, vigorous (and fairly docile) bloodline!

^ Frames of stores and some caged queens waiting for new homes to arrive!

It's been very exciting this weekend, and despite the fact that the last time I went beekeeping I ended up throwing up and unable to stand or breathe I'm no longer afraid. I didn't get stung but I was surrounded by clouds of bees with my veil unzipped...yes, I am reckless, but you only live once, and I do love my bees!

Permaculture Magazine and Flowers & Birds, etc.

2011-04-17T20:17:00.007+01:00

Thanks Crafty Green Poet for your kind comment on the last post.

Just been reading Rebecca Hosking's blog on the Permaculture magazine site (here). Very interesting article on holly. Lots of holly around where my mum lives in Wales, and we have a big shrub in the front garden, and it's nice to know that there are some brilliant uses for such a common plant that I once thought was only for decoration (and wildbird food - they love the berries, particularly the blackbirds). The Permaculture magazine site (here) is full of inspiring stuff. Check it out!

Also been reading the magazine, and considering whether to buy Sepp Holzer's new book about his permaculture practice. He's a self-taught expert, absolutely inspiring guy. But I have no money, and want to invest in a LegMaster (probably not terribly eco-friendly, but at least it doesn't plug in and waste leccy, like so much gym equipment), so it will have to wait. Holzer's hugul beds - big sloping raised beds full of organic matter - are a really interesting idea, and one that when (in a million years) I have my dream permaculture smallholding I will definitely try. Highly recommend Permaculture mag - always something interesting, and full of really inspiring articles by inspiring people, who are practising permaculture in all different ways and on all scales. Reading the magazine is like connecting with like-minded people and sharing good ideas and exciting news. Every issue brings a smile to my face and renews my optimism for the Big Scary Future.

The garden is looking lovely, I will post pics tomorrow. Birds singing at the tops of their voices - pigeons getting jiggy with it on our roof, and sparrows nesting under the eaves for another year. Things are in flower - forget-me-nots, violets, lilacs, the viburnums have just finished, aubretia, dandelions (NOT a weed, NEVER a weed! Tortoise fodder!), currant bushes, primroses, citrus bushes just forming litte creamy-white buds...and every apple tree we own (around 13, I think) is just popping its magenta buds to reveal beautiful snowy white blossoms. I predict a bumper crop this year.

Pabi Bach and I went for a walk today along a canal, too. Lovely weather. On our way there we saw a whole bank absolutely covered in cowslips, and along the canal the banks were studded with primroses and violets. I absolutely love these spring flowers.

Interestingly the blossom has all been late this year. It means that we've all been having to keep on surviving the winter for a bit longer, but there are up-sides. For example, the bees are well and truly buzzing now, especially with today's warm weather, and the blossom being a bit late has meant that they get all the benefit of it.

Sunny but cold...

2011-03-06T15:57:00.003Z

...but I have seen bumblebees, and yesterday even honeybees, all over the garden. They like the celandines, wild hellebores and crocuses, which are flowering at the moment. It's so nice to know that they are able to get out and start collecting.
This year we are leaving our spring inspection untl April, at the earliest! Our plan is to leave the bees alone much more this year. Dad has recently read Tim Rowe's 'The Rose Hive Method'. We have already switched over completely to OSB's (aka the Rose hive), but now we are going to adopt a bit more of his method, it seems. I haven't read it yet, but I have read a bit on the internet ages ago, when we first switched, and I know that Rowe's colonies are huge and never have to be fed on sugar. It obviously works for him, and it made sense to my dad, so we're going to try it! Watch this space!

The frogs' mating season seems to have finished. A long line of clumps of frogspawn spans the shallow end of the pond. All the goldfish are now dead too, so hopefully we will have a bumper frog crop this year too!

Yesterday we spent half an hour in the garden training our espalier apple trees. I have a feeling this might be the wrong time of year to do it, but they're such strong little trees, and doing so well - absolutely covered in buds - that I can't imagine it will do them any harm. They are beautiful, even when they aren't in leaf! And some are already meeting each other in the middle. And below them the primroses are in full flower....

Another sure sign of spring...

2011-02-25T20:46:00.004Z

Pabi Bach took these pictures this evening. The frogs have been singing very loudly tonight...

More Spring Stuff including Bees

2011-02-20T13:50:00.008Z

The viburnum bush that I photographed for the last post is now well and truly in flower. It's one of my favourite plants because it flowers so early and really heralds the end of winter. Also it has the most beautiful smell in the world, and is very pretty. And I love the fact that the blossom comes out before the leaves do! Here it is as it was when I photographed it earlier today.

Apart from this and the other little spring things I couldn't help but stick in above, the bees are being prepped for another year. I haven't been to see them yet, but Dad has. There have been a couple of warm sunny days recently when other people we know have seen their bees flying, but we haven't been to see ours on a warm sunny day yet. Therefore we haven't opened them up yet - still way too cold - but Dad has checked on all 3 hives. One is looking very fragile, and he says that it probably won't make it as it is so weak. He still fed it though, so they have a chance. The other two however - a nuc and a full OSB - are thriving!! Apparently they have wintered very well and are still very populous colonies! All three hives have had some runny syrup and some commercial pollen patty, and hopefully these will give them a really strong start to the season.

We have also splashed out on a new style of feeder that we think might work (we haven't yet found one that suits both bees and humans!) and a queen rearing kit....so it promises to be an exciting year.

But even more exciting is the fact that a while ago we went to a meeting with some other members of our beekeeping assoc to discuss natural beekeeping. It's really interesting to contrast different beekeeping methods, and some members of our association are even using Warre hives now. I'm very interested in all this. I reckon that the bees have been around for 6 million years doing fine, and it's only been the last century or so that they've started having real problems, i.e. with human intervention and our delightful inventions of pesticides, the rise of monocultures, etc. Coincidence? Probably not.

It was a really enjoyable little meeting, although I was quite surprised by the air of rebellion - it felt almost as if we were meeting in an underground bunker discussing a very embarrassing problem or a secret outlawed religion, which would be frowned on by senior beekeepers who practice traditional beekeeping! I learned such a lot though. We were discussing how Warre and OSB hives work, and comparing them to more traditional hives and methods of beekeeping, as well as the importance of temperature and air flow in a hive, and colony balance (worker:drone ratio, e.g). But what most interested me was the fact that different plants give bees different pollens and carbohydrates. This seems like common sense, but I had never thought of it before. So bees need a varied diet, just like us humans. No wonder beekeepers in America who do the almond crop are having so much trouble with supposed-CCD - their colonies are just not getting the right nutrition.

More evidence to support my suspicion of monocultures. Everywhere I look, particularly at this time of year, there is evidence that nature doesn't support monocultures. Everything is mixed up, and as permaculturists would argue, although it looks like a mess to us, it isn't to nature. Time maybe to start planning my horticultural purchases/indulgences for this year. I still haven't got my Nepalese raspberry... ;)

Spring is coming...

2011-01-30T12:43:00.008Z

Today we have done our second lot of essential garden maintenance this year. Last weekend the bees were checked on - they are all still with us (touch wood) and guzzling their fondant (homemade recipe now perfected and coming soon to this blog!). I have been clearing out the dead stuff to make way for the new stuff, and in the process it was impossible to miss the signs of approaching spring...

^ Chicken sunbathing

^ the ducks going crazy and twittervated. The other day they were even trying (and failing) to fly. Bless them.

^ Some himalayan Viburnum coming into beautiful flower.

^ Catkins on the hazel tree and a blue sky ^^

^ The first crocuses...

^ ...and the first snowdrops.

More recycled dress

2010-11-09T19:21:00.003Z

The dress has worked out really well so far, and I still haven't used most of the fabric - should be enough to make a nice poufy skirt.

The really great thing about recycling textiles is that there is so much you can do with them. Any off-cuts from the dress can be spun into a yarn, used to strenthen some felt or can go to Mammabert for her to hook into a rug. And if it all goes wrong you can use it to stuff a cushion or whatever.

Also it's so satisfying to be able to wear something different to what everyone else has got. It makes me sad when I see girls the same age as me slapping on make-up in the wrong shade and wearing ridiculous unflattering get-ups just because it's fashionable. They look like clones. Sometimes I honestly cannot tell them apart. I have certain style rules that I go by - I go for practicality (why are so many ladies' clothes completely devoid of pockets? Some of us have handbags that are too full of food and literature to fit our phones in!), elegance, and the hippy-ish quirky look that suits my personality best. If in doubt I ask my mum, who likes all the same stuff as me and whose style I admire, or my dad who (surprisingly, as he's a fairly blokey bloke - rugby, DIY, anything vaguely computer-related, cheffy chopping in the kitchen) who has unfalteringly excellent taste and always chooses amazing gifts - he just understands what makes women look nice. So they are my style gurus, along with Lord Bath - who else can work yellow and rainbow colours so well?

So yes. I am enjoying this project. Who knows, I might (eekk...probably won't though!) get it finished in time for the Winter Solstice or New Year.....? ;)

Cider Time

2010-11-07T16:14:00.010Z

Apologies for the long, blogless gap!

Today we have finally collected all our apples together (homegrown and scrumped) and have pressed them into juice, which we will then turn into cider!

Here are some pictures of the stages of the process that we have carried out today, and below these are some photos of the beautiful autumnal countryside behind our house, and my latest creation: what will hopefully turn out to be a Victorian-ish-style dress made from an old shirt and an old size 20 tartan dress. What you see there are the minute has been made simply from 2 sleeves. I'm making it up as I go along, pinning the fabric to the dummy and tacking it in place. Fingers crossed it turns out ok! Apologies for the quality of the photos, I took them on my phone.

Recycling Insulation!!

2010-09-08T10:17:00.007+01:00

My Mum has an elderly friend who buys readymeals made my a local company that delivers to her door. To insulate the food they package it with this - WoolCool, insulation made from wool.

Sheila never knows what to do with the packaging once she has got her delivery. The WoolCool is expensive and the p&p is expensive accordingly. Usually she would just throw the packaging away, but luckily for me Mum suggested she donate it to my spinning and felting efforts, so I have just been given a load of free fibre!!

The wool is clean - no dags or anything, except a bit of plant matter here and there - but uncarded. The fibres are quite short as it's off-cuts. It's all natural colours, with everything in there from white to black. It's coarse but not unpleasant. So I am experimenting with it...

^ Thick and knobbly yarn spun for Mum to try rug-hooking or peg-looming with

I suppose it's good that wool is now used for insulation, as otherwise it would just get thrown away - apparently it is now actually classed as a useless animal by-product!! What waste! So at least it is getting used. But there are still so many things it could be used for before being put to insulation. Even if it isn't nice enough to wear as clothing, it could be used for furnishings, rugs, bags, slippers, stuffing for soft toys...and then used for insulation when the item was worn out. But at least I now have my hands on it and can try making some woolly wonders.

On the plastic bag around the wool, it says "it is totally sustainable, recyclable and biodegradable". Well, they got the last two right, but sustainable? Really? Last time I looked current global meat (and therefore by-product) production was absolutely UNsustainable, and we are heading for a future where people will have to settle for eating less meat and meat production methods will have to change drastically.

So, I'm happy, I've got wool ^^. But it makes me sad how a useful commodity - a commodity on which so much of our civilisation has been built! (Just look at Britain's medieval wool economy!) - is wasted, or at the most mislabelled and used once, still probably destined for landfill.

Yarn Design

2010-09-07T17:14:00.006+01:00

I've been carrying on with spinning the yarn for my Blue-Faced Leicester wool jumper.

The first sample I spun was a little bit on the thick side, so I went on to spin a skein slightly thinner (below right). I spun it kind of worsted-ish, spinning with the fibres in a straight line. It's a lovely yarn, still a little thick in places, but fluffy and soft.

^ Newest yarn concoction on the left

However, it is a bit loose. The commercial yarn I'm trying to imitate is quite springy, and so this required me to change the way I was spinning. I change to woollen-ish instead, this time folding the roving in half so the fibres were also bent in two, and spinning from the fold. I find this makes it a bit easier to control thickness and doesn't blend the lovely oatmealy colours so much. It also produces a more dense and springy yarn, although it isn't as soft as the worsted-y one - I still need to find the perfect technique, or maybe I'll just alternate worsted and woollen throughout the jumper...don't know how this will work. But I'm really enjoying spinning a little every evening now (seems a more attractive prospect now autumn's on its way - didn't really want to be spinning wool in the summer!) so I am on my way...

A Nasty Experience

2010-09-05T14:06:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I had my first ever allergic reaction. And unfortunately it was to my own bees!

Dad and I went up to treat with Apiguard and put some solid floors on for the winter. Both of the colonies we looked at were doing great - lots of fliers still out foraging, huge populations but still plenty of room for them to be comfortable...all was going fine until we lifted the first hive up so I could slip the solid floor in underneath...

I have to say here that no, I was stupid enough not to wear gloves. Those bees had always been pretty docile, and the only gloves I could wear were sticky and horrible, so I thought I wouldn't bother. Big mistake! And I have swollen up pretty badly in reaction to stings in the past, to the extent where a doctor gave me an epipen, but I have always ignored her advice to "get a new hobby".

I don't know what made the bees unhappy, but as soon as I went to slip on the solid floor I was engulfed in a stinging cloud of them. I walked off quickly to try and get away from them, but there were still quite a few determined to make sure I stayed away from their home. I got stung 10 times - mostly on the hands and wrists, once on the head through the top of my veil! I've been stung worse than this before - 12 stings all up my legs one time - but never in such quick succession and in such a concentrated area. So my body reacted pretty badly.

I began to feel dizzy, my vision was going black and pixilated at the edges, and I started to find it hard to breathe. I sat down to try and stop myself from feeling dizzy, but it didn't work, and I still couldn't catch my breath. Eventually I started to feel nauseous - actually a relief, because it seemed to make my breathing calmer. Poor Vicky and Dave, the friends whose garden we keep them in! I ended up vomiting on their lawn, but atl least after that I began to feel better. The most stupid thing was that through all this my biggest fear was "oh God, I really do NOT want to have to stab myself in the leg with an epipen". Such a wimp!

Today I feel fine. Hands pretty swollen and itchy, but not as bad as they were last night, when I couldn't take the top off the peanut butter jar and appeared to have no knuckles, just podgy flesh. Feel a bit rough but I feel more sorry for the bees. When a bee stings you, it can take her two days to die, her insides falling out of her abdomen...I tend to try and squash bees that sting me to put them out of their misery, but I didn't yesterday. Poor bees.

But oh well, Mother Nature gave me what I needed - not only did my body manage to take care of itself, but I got a real stinger of a reminder to respect my bees for the beautiful and ferocious animals they are.

Fruit

2010-08-22T19:02:00.011+01:00

This week we've been doing a bit of fruit picking, and smacking our lips in readiness for the fruit that is yet to come.

Our earlier-fruiting crab apple tree was almost bent double under the weight of fruit this year. We picked the fruit slightly unripe to relieve the tree, and ended up getting over 25kg of apples! So far we have boiled the fruit and strained it through a jelly bag so we get only the juice and not the sour, bitter pulp. The pulp's now on the compost heap, and the juice will be turned into jelly, syrup and all manner of delicious things. You can see the colour of the juice is a really pretty pink colour. Although crab apples are quite sour and you wouldn't really wanna eat them, the juice is delicious when sweetened and processing them fills the house with their lovely fragrance.

Pabi Bach and I went on a long forage earlier this week to check our favourite damson, sloe and blackberry spots. None of the fruit is ripe yet! The sloes are blue and just beginning to turn, the damsons are hard as bullets and the ripest wild blackberries we could find were just turning red! Our domesticated bramble has already yielded a few sour fruits but it looks like Grandad John was right when he prophesised that the blackberries would be late this year... it was a lovely walk though, and Pabi found some elderberries - not so good for jam (they have absolutely NO pectin in them at all) but fabulous for homebrew...

The ivy is near to flowering. Pabi and I found 4 different varieties in one small stretch of woodland on our walk. Ivy flowers are a crucial autumn feed source for the bees.

We also took Dad to pick some more mirabelles. They're nearly finished now, although there are some real whoppers on the higher branches, shame we couldn't reach them... but anyway, Dad has worked really hard and today he made Mirabelle Cheese (like a really thick jam) and Mirabelle chutney. The whole house smells wonderfully of vinegar and spices now! Both the cheese and chutney began life as Mirabelle juice and pulp (fruits boiled and then sieved) with sugar, and then we just varied the ingredients, adding cider vinegar, an onion, and 1/4 tsp each of crushed allspice berries, mustard seeds, ground ginger, and grated nutmeg.

Pabi and I are off on holiday this week, but when we get back hopefully the sloes and damsons will be lovely and ripe...as long as the farmer doesn't (brutally and destructively) flail the hedgerows before we get home!

Watermelon Curry and other Culinary Adventures

2010-08-16T21:22:00.008+01:00

Dad went to a music festival over the weekend, and came back with a watermelon and some greengages he found in a hedgerow! Greengages are one of my absolute favourite treats; their season is so short and they're harder to find than other types of plums, but I think they have the best flavour. We used to eat them on the beach in Brittany, getting sandy and sticky with juice all at once. I can't believe he found them just growing in a hedgerow!

Anyway, there was this watermelon, and I had no idea what we were going to do with it. Then I remembered that at Christmas my grandparents gave Pabi Bach and I a book called 'The Modern Vegetarian' by Maria Elia, and that there were a few recipes for watermelon in it. So we chose the 'Watermelon curry with black beans and paneer' - only without the paneer, and with mixed beans and chickpeas instead of black ones.

It's a really delicious recipe - Pops found it a bit hot but the mixture of spicy and sweet is really refreshing and brings out the flavour of the watermelon (and I like it hot - as far as I'm concerned a curry's only good if it makes my nose run!). I know it sounds weird but as you cook it it starts to smell delicious. It's got a sweet edge but looks more like it's cooked with tomatoes than strange pink fruit!

It's a really interesting book actually; the recipes are so original and pieced harmoniously together from many different cuisines. It's a bit adventurous for everyday, but we've tried a few things from it and they've all been delicious. And if you have a sudden surprise watermelon sprung on you there are actually a total of 4 recipes for it. Definitely recommend it, and for everyone who likes their fruit and veg - not just vegetarians.

Anyway we made the curry. It was delish. And in the cooking process we discovered a couple of ways of eating raw watermelon which are delicious.

The first is to sprinkle your watermelon chunk with salt and tuck in. Yum! Try it with pepper too.

The second is to chop up your chillis for the curry. Then plonk a load of watermelon on top of where you've just been cutting chilli. Take a bite. Hot but heavenly!!

Apart from this we also stewed the more squooshy of the greengages. I stoned some more mirabelles and we had these fresh for pudding, along with some of the apple and blackberry mixture from Sunday lunch and then banana and Ambrosia custard. Lush.

Yesterday we had Grandad John (adopted, but nonetheless adored) round for Sunday lunch - roast lamb for the meat eaters, all the veg (including our slightly unusual family tradition of having spicy roast butternut squash and/or aubergine with the usual potatoes, peas, etc) as well as the first of our runner bean crop! And Pabi Bach cooked a delicious Blackberry and apple pie with a pastry lattice top. Everyone tucked in, but I'm afraid that yours truly ate it for a midnight snack before I could take a picture to show you all. But it was beautiful. And delicious.

^ no picture of the pie, so flowers from our garden instead ^^

Anyway, off round to Mum's tomorrow night for more culinary fun... ;)

Tarte aux Mirabelles

2010-08-13T15:37:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I made this mirabelle tart, according to Keith Floyd's recipe 'Alsatian Plum Tart' (from the book 'Floyd on France'). On top of the pastry is a layer of egg custard and on top of that the mirabelles with a little sugar. Personally I would have liked the custard to be different - sweeter and creamier - or perhaps would just have had the pastry and fruit! It was still delicious though...I'll perfect my recipe and post it when it's perfect!

This is from the second batch of mirabelles we have picked. The first batch I stewed in a little apple juice. They were delicious but a bit sharp - I find that they do need sugar or honey with them, when cooked. Unusual for me - I like my gooseberries and blackberries completely sugar-free! Raw though, they're so sweet and juicy, really lusciously delicious; I can't believe perople don't eat more of them! They're amazing! They're apparently good for jam too, and are used to make eau de vie....maybe another homebrew project is on the horizon? ;)

Honey Harvest and Scrumping Season

2010-08-08T17:21:00.010+01:00

Today we harvested our honey! I hadn't been to see the bees for ages, in fact the two hives that we harvested from today were practically unrecogniseable. Both had huge populations, whereas the last time I saw them they were two rather pathetic-looking halves of an artificial swarm. It' brilliant to see that they've built up so well, and hopefully with some TLC they'll go into the winter nice and strong. I shouldn't be too surprised though...these are the descendents of the wall hive (see video blog) so they can clearly take care of themselves!

^ The hives; opening up; bees on a frame of sealed honey; lovely docile bees

The honey is gorgeous and light, very flowery with a real citrusy tang to it...I thought it tasted a lot like elderflowers but according to F. N. Howes' 'Plants and Beekeeping' elder is nectarless and bees don't go near it. So it must have come from some other delicious blossom. We got a gallon of the stuff however - a decent harvest from one super. So not the stuff of beekeeping legend, but not bad considering we came into the season with 90% losses.

^ Uncapping - cutting off the wax seals with a warm knife; putting the frames in the centrifugal extractor; the end product!

Afterwards the frames went back to the bees to tidy up the remaining remnants of honey and to fill up again. The weather seems to have picked up a bit (touch wood) so hopefully they'll be able to get some more stores together. Otheriwse we'll just feed some honey back to them :)

And, as if our delicious honey wasn't enough, I can declare that it is the start of the scrumping season! We came home today with some little yellow mirabelle plums. They're a bit watery but lovely and sweet, and stewed up or maybe even dried in the dehydrator they should be delicious...I'm so excited now about picking more of them and the rest of the wildfood to come!

Holiday Knitting 2: Spinning The Yarn

2010-08-07T13:11:00.007+01:00

Today I've begun spinning the yarn for my Blue-Faced Leicester jumper. I only spun a couple of metres to make sure that a) I can still actually spin (the last thing I spun was my Corriedale hat, http://arfellian.blogspot.com/2009/09/mega-update.html, I think - but even after all this time I still remember it! It's like riding a bike...it just came flooding back!) and b) the yarn I spin is suitable substitute for the commercial yarn specified in the pattern. I think the yarn might be a little thick but boy is it soft and gorgeous!

I started by pulling off a bit of the tops and splitting it down the middle lengthways to make it into two more manageable chunks. I then took it to my Louet Julia wheel and spun two small bobbins of simple singles on the worsted side of things. One turned out a bit more thick 'n' thin than the other, but when I roughly plied them together on my drop spindle it came out pretty nicely. The oatmeal colours have blended into a lovely grey tone - I could keep it more oatmealy by separating the different colours in the tops I suppose, but I quite like this grey...i's really silvery and light.

So where I am up to now - I have spun a small skein of it. It feels great. I'm just going to finish it by soaking and setting and then I'll measure out the wpi and stuff. But I am in love with the fibre. It's so nice I think that whatever I do to it nothing could spoil it. Can't wait to wear it now!

Leave a comment, let me know what you think! Would love to hear about your own crafty endeavours ^^

Holiday Chips

2010-08-05T21:58:00.002+01:00

Here's a quick recipe that my friend McFrizz and I invented on our trip to Brighton - it makes the naughtiest chips ever, really delicious. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
potatoes and/or sweet potatoes (quantity depends how hungry you are!)
a little sunflower or other vegetable oil
a couple of tbl sp honey
a pinch of dried mixed herbs (or fresh; try thyme, oregano, marjoram, savoury, rosemary, or even a very little lavender maybe...)
a pinch or two of cayenne pepper

1. Preheat the oven to hot, about 200 degrees C. Place a large roasting tin therein with a little oil in to heat.

2. Meanwhile chop the potatoes into chunky chips. When the oven has heated, place the chips into the roasting tin, tossing them around in the oil. Replace in the oven at 200 degrees C still, and check after 25 - 30 mins.

3. When the chips are almsot done (they might take up to 45 mins, or will be quicker if you follow the tip below) drizzle and sprinkle on the honey, mixed herbs and cayenne pepper and toss again. Replace in the oven for another 5 - 10 minutes until the chips are cooked and just turning brown at the edges.

4. Serve and guzzle greedily!

Tip: the chips will cook quicker if you par-boil them for 10 - 15 minutes before roasting.

I think they'd be brilliant with a salad with a light honey and mustard dressing or could make a wicked chip butty ;)

Green Brighton

2010-08-05T13:09:00.009+01:00

I've just returned from a week's holiday in Brighton, a city that is increasingly leading the way in moving towards a more sustainable way of life and which has just elected the first ever Green Party MP to parliament, Caroline Lucas. My holiday was more of a fish-n-chips and tourist-souvenirs kind of affair, but driving (on the bus) past a community garden plastered with "Boycott Tesco" slogans every day inspired me to look a little deeper at the eco stuff going on in the city.

First of all, let's take transport, something which the authorities seemed to be working really hard at. The bus network is fantastic in Brighton, and as the side of each bus will testify, they seem to be seen as "essential transport" for the city. There are cycle paths everywhere also, all over the city and right up to the beach. The smaller streets of the centre of town are really pedestrian friendly, although crossing the roads was an absolute nightmare! Luckily though the Transition Brighton & Hove's Transport group are committed to changing this, and on the plus side getting around on foot also opens up the possibilites of visiting the many small local businesses and whole food shops and restaurants to be found. (In fact I was totally surprised by how many vegan restaurants I saw - it was really amazing, but unfortunately the friend I went with loves MEAT and so I didn't get to try any).

In terms of food, Brighton is bustling and it seems that local businesses really work together - there's a food festival, a market, and loads more...but on my trip I didn't see any allotments or much evidence of people growing their own. However, Brighton has plenty of green space and parks, so hopefully as the Transition movement there finds it feet we'll start seeing beautiful green gardens instead of parched grass!

However, best of all I think is the sheer number of individual projects and organisations at work in Brighton. The Brighton Permaculture Trust has a fantastic programme with events such as Open Eco Houses and family-friendly Apple Day, and projects to renovate orchards or involving local schools. There's also the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, which has a 'Scrumping Project' (sounds great to me!) and Harvest Brighton & Hove, which runs local courses in growing your own and eating locally. And just on my skin-the-surface trip I encountered a photographic exhibition near the peer highlighting conservation issues...even the most superficial of tourists couldn't fail to notice some of the city's many inspiring initiatives, events and projects.

In all, as a tourist town Brighton has to balance the needs of local businesses and tourism with their eco-aspirations. It has its problems - litter left by lazy tourists and no doubt huge amounts of electricity needed to power the pier and other attractions. On my visit I didn't see a lot of direct hand-to-earth action, but the atmosphere of cooperation and working together between local organisations and businesses was really noticeable (even on the pier, with the milkshake ladies providing cups of tea for the people in the henna tattoo hut) and the range of initiatives going on is enviable. Keep it up Brighton, you're an inspiration!

Holiday Knitting

2010-07-18T21:38:00.008+01:00

My holiday reading list is already stacking up, and in only 2 days I will be able to start it properly! Until the last couple of days however the weather has been so miserable (good for the garden though - I've been very neglectful of my watering duties so far this summer) that I've been thinking about autumn, and that of course leads me to the autumn clothes that seem to take up all my wardrobe space and never let the summer stuff shine through...and thence onto knitting. And from there we jump to my latest project-to-be.

Years ago when I was first learning to knit I came across this cardigan by Sirdar. Loved it from the start. It's knitted in Sirdar Clik. But I wanted to make it from my own handspun yarn. And so I set about doing the maths and got myself a lovely 600g of oatmeal Blue-Faced Leicester roving from Wingham Wool Work. That was last year!

^ mon pull de reves, as I have decided to call it ;)

^ Sirdar Clik, in a multi-coloured colourway

^ beautiful oatmeal-cloured BFL roving

Now I've got some spare time coming up (although it's already filling up with all sorts of things...I have a horrible feeling I'm not going to be as free as I'm deluding myself I will be!) I have trawled through the vast quantities of rubbish in my posession and have unearthed to pattern, found my lovely BFL fibre, and my spinning wheel is waiting impatiently in the corner of my bedroom. I haven't done any in months, what with college work, parties and a slight weakness for sitting on the sofa watching Judge Judy reruns rather than doing anything useful...but now I am determined! Come the autumn drizzle I will have a beautiful handspun BFL jumper!!!

So, where do I begin? Having looked at the pattern I can see that for my size I need 9 balls of Sirdar Clik, at 50g/75m per ball. 9 x 75m means I need to spin 675m of yarn for this, not including room for mistakes. 9 x 50g means I should be able to achieve this with around 450g of fibre, if i do it right ;) . I bought a bit extra cos I was originally going for medium, but I have decided I don't want to be swathed in extra fabric so I'm going for small, but at least this will leave me extra for experimenting, making mistakes, and maybe a hat at the end of it if I'm lucky.

Anyway, so now back to Sirdar Clik. It's a 3-ply yarn, soft and quite stretchy, but full of acrylic or something. Of course, using different fibres to those specified with give my yarn, and thus my jumper, slightly different characteristics, but as I'm using wool, which is naturally quite elastic, and BFL which is I think the softest British-bred breed, I'm hoping it won't make much of a difference. But obviously I need to do testers to check! The first stage of doing this is checking the wpi or wraps per inch. To do this, make a wrapping:

Cut a strip of thin or medium cardboard and stick some double sided tape on one or both sides of it, front and back. The cardboard should be a few inches long.

Get your yarn, and stick the end to the sticky tape on the back of the cardboard.

Now wrap the yarn around the card, making sure not to stretch it or allow it to bunch up - careful on the tension. Make sure the strands are sitting right next to (but not overlapping) each other. The sticky tape will help to hold it all in place.

Continue for OVER an inch, at least 2 inches preferably, depending on the yarn(s) you're measuring. When it's long enough secure the other end of the yarn to the sticky stuff.

Now, get a ruler and place it so that you're measuring 1 inch in the middle of your wrapping. Use the middle to try and get an average.

The number of strands of yarn that fit into that inch is your number of wraps per inch, or wpi. So, if, as for my Sirdar Clik wrapping, I counted 12 strands in that inch, I know the yarn has a wpi of 12.

I now know that my finished yarn must also be 12 wpi for it to be of the same thickness as Sirdar Clik.

^ measuring the wpi on my wrapping

Anyway, from hereon in I need to get experimenting with my own fibre, trying to get the right thickness, ply and texture to my yarn. It's all down to trial and error, and I'll tell you all about it when I've actually got round to it ;)

Trying (and so far failing) to entice a wild colony living in a tree into a hive...

2010-06-18T19:51:00.005+01:00

Since the last post, we have picked up a HUGE swarm from someone's hedge, and hopefully they've settled down now and will start bringing in nectar. In the mean time though, we still haven't managed to save that colony in the tree...any ideas, please let us know!

Another Swarm!

2010-06-09T21:27:00.003+01:00

Got a call this afternoon about a swarm in our village (actually from a lady who lives in what used to be the old church hall where I did ballet classes when I was very little - nice to see the old place again!) so went to check it out on our way home.

Inside Anne's beautiful little walled garden we found a cloud of bees swirling and buzzing around, 2 - 3 metres in the air and about 4 metres wide. It looked like a good sized swarm! As we watched they settled on the hive-shaped compost bin - it obviously looked like home! After a nice natter with Anne (she very kindly gave me 4 courgette plants when I said mine had been eaten - chickens and/or slugs to blame. As she said, "we gardeners must stick together! It's so nice to be able to share plants and know-how with people - perhaps the best bit about gardening/beekeeping), Dad put a nuc above them, did a bit of scooping, and we watched as they walked up and into the nuc, the cloud dwindling as they went. Quite an amazing sight, even though I've seen them walking up before - this time it was in a very beautiful setting.

Went back just now. They were very quiet. Nuc heavy with bees, hardly a bee in sight outside. We just covered them up in a sheet and away we went! We had a sneaky listen as we put them in the car though, through the ventilation holes - the low thrumming buzz of a calm hive. Not so quiet after the drive home, but they'll be fine when tomorrow we take them to their new home :D

Bees & Beans

2010-06-06T18:29:00.013+01:00

Yesterday we visited the bees.

Our friend Paul is a new beekeeper and now has one excellent hive going strong. When we arrived he had just captured another swarm which will be going in his Top Bar Hive. I've never seen one in the flesh before, and it was really interesting. The hive is certainly beautiful, and it will be interesting to see how it works out.

As far as our own bees are concerned, the swarm we collected that didn't seem to have a queen did have a queen, but there was still no brood (although they were working really hard - might even get some lovely honey of them this year). Judging by the length of her abdomen she wasn't a virgin queen, which means that she must have been the old queen from her original colony and had just grown old and run out of juice. So we squished her, closed up the hive and left them till the evening.

In the evening, we went to visit our other hives, where we had just carried out an artificial swarm. The idea was to donate a couple of queen cells from the artificial swarm to the queenless colony. However when we got there, we found an emerged queen cell, and that the other cells had been torn down! So our artificial swarm has given us a new queen, and as the weather has been good hopefully she will have mated.

^ Emerged and demolished queen cells

So we had to turn to plan B. This plan will take longer, but if necessary we can donate capped brood to the queenless colony to boost their numbers until the new queen gets going. We took a frame of eggs from our original colony (the Wall colony - now building up beautifully after the artificial swarm) and, trying not to joggle the frame around too much or to get it too cool, raced back to the other apiary and stuck it in the queenless hive. By the time we got there the queenless hive were quite agitated, and had obviously noticed they had no queen. But thankfully the frame of eggs went in smoothly, and so hopefully they will be able to grow one of those into an emergency queen. Of course, emergency queens aren't always as good as planned queens, but she'll be better than nothing and will give us time to make up plan C if we have to! Now we'll just leave them for a fortnight, come back and hopefully there will be an emerged queen cell, followed by eggs...

Today we spent the morning and early afternoon planting out the beans at last! Poppy also planted her brussels sprouts, I planted my squashes, and the greenhouse is full of chillis, salads and cucumbers. So after weeks of the poor plants wasting away in pots, they are at last in some beautiful compost-laden soil and perked up almost immediately after planting! Some of the lingua di fuoco (borlotti) beans already have their pretty purple flowers on them, and most of the beans are already happily spiralling up their supporting canes. So I'm hoping for a beautiful sunny summer and excellent crops of haricots and honey!

^ beans planted a while ago, and planted today :)

Some of our Front Garden Flowers

2010-06-05T20:43:00.004+01:00

Being Young & Eco-conscious: Re-using and Recycling

2010-05-31T14:37:00.013+01:00

I guess I'm quite unusual in being so interested in green issues at such a young age, and I've been pondering this lately. In many ways I'm a typical young adult in that I like partying, shopping and hanging around with my friends. But equally I somehow need to find the time to maintain my garden, look after my animals and bees and learn more about sustainability and permaculture. Unusually I know how to spin my own yarn and weave it, which local wild plants are good to eat and what to do with them, how to brew wine, beer, and cider (proper booze, not the chemical rubbish most people my age drink!) and how to make paper, my own cosmetics and to some extent, clothing. I see these skills as essential to my future survival - I am beginning to see that we cannot halt climate change, etc, and instead we need to focus on how to adapt to new living conditions. But at the same time I want to be able to go to electricity-rich gigs, enjoy foreign holidays and my regular Costa order, and buy fashionable shoes, at least while I still can. How to reconcile all these things?

In some ways the recession has helped me to do this, particularly in terms of re-using and recycling. Let's take fashion, for example (something that I'm very interested in, but can't afford and have doubts about in terms of green-ness). Now 90% of the clothes I buy come from the local charity shop. I'm lucky in that Mum volunteers there twice a week, and so I often get first dibs on any interesting bits and bobs that get donated. It's amazing what people will throw away - Aquascutum suits, beautiful Italian leather boots, Jaeger dresses, leather satchels...a large portion of my wardrobe now consists of perfectly wearable designer cast-offs from other people, some of them unworn with the labels still in! My favourite buy recently was a matching set of scarf, T-shirt and skirt in a wonderful Indian block-print fabric, good brand etc, no marks, tears, perfect condition.......and it all cost me £1. It seems that people will often throw something away the minute it gets a tiny stain or gets a bit too last week; the waste is unbelievable, but I certainly benefit from it. And anything too raggedy to sell still makes money for the charity shop, as they sell it all as rags. Recycling and re-using at its most basic perhaps, but I think it's fantastic!

^ Recent charity shop purchases; my wardrobe, full of second-hand goodies :)

Charity shop and clothing tips:

Go to more up-market areas - this is where you will find higher quality goodies
Support a particular charity or your local shop, or shop around to find a charity shop with the best selection
charity shops have got a little more trendy recently, and some have hiked up their prices. Good for the charity, so if you're feeling generous go for it, but personally, I wouldn't spend more than £10 on a posh dress, and for basic things such as jeans or a nice second hand top, I'd stick to the pound rail unless for something really special! If something has been sitting there for weeks, you may be able to get it at a discounted price, and if an item is out of season (e.g. you buy a jumper when it's summer) it's more likely to be cheaper, too. Don't be afraid to shop out of season!
it helps if you're a creative, quirky dresser who can see potential in seemingly redundant pieces. Think about combining and layering different things. If you're good at sewing etc, look for interesting fabrics - even if you don't like the item as it is, you might be able to transform it into something else.
don't discard an item if it has a stain or a rip - it could be easily fixed by you or a crafty friend. In my experience even things that say "dry clean only" can be washed successfully at a low temperature or by hand
don't donate disgusting items. Volunteers don't want to trawl through smelly, sweaty, cigarette-stinking, stained, grubby clothes, and nobody wants to buy these either. Wash everything first, and if something is a little too far gone, check that they have a rag bin, or go to your local dump and see if they have one there.
share clothes and other items between friends, neighbours and family. In this way we've been lucky enough to get a greenhouse, potential duck-pond, bins to keep animal feed in, furniture, clothing, books, etc.
keep a look out also for interesting jewellery and accessories, as well as furniture, knitting needles, books, DVD's etc...especially titles that are now out of print
try Freecycle, swapshops, car boot sales, and sharing/hiring shops etc. too! (particularly good for furniture, tools, plant seeds etc)
also - USE YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY for books, DVD's, even toys and games, and for finding leaflets about days out, local producers and events, and courses. My one even showcases the work of local artists and jewellery designers.

If you can't find what you want second hand, or want something special, then there are still loads of places you can go. Look at local producers' cooperatives, and sites such as eBay and Etsy. Supporting smaller and local producers is still a valid option, and many smaller companies still have better eco-credentials than high-street brands. I like Etsy for jewellery, and eBay is good for everything. Recently Dad bought an old stainless steel basin which we will turn into a solar wax extractor, and we even bought a whole greenhouse once. Look for unusual options too. We buy old blue mango chutney barrels for £10 each and convert these into vessels for growing veg and producing compost. And don't forget that you can learn to make and re-use different items for yourself - learn to knit, make your own furniture or propagate your own plants from a friend or one of the many professionals and teachers out there who are happy to share their knowledge.

Bee Garden

2010-05-26T20:39:00.039+01:00

After a kind request from Beth, I thought I'd give and overview of how we have (part intentionally, mostly unintentionally) created a bee and wildlife friendly garden, that also produces food and looks pretty.

We have 2 gardens, one large one at the back of the house (north facing, deep shadow cast by the house, south-facing fence, large nutrient-greedy ex-coppice ash trees that we're not allowed to cut down / coppice) and a long, narrow garden at the front (a real sun-trap, poor soil, shady corners, nice warm wall space). We live in a village that spreads over clay, chalk and sandy soils, and we seem to get the worst of all of these - mostly heavy clay, with loads of sandy ants' nests in the summer (it seems our whole estate was built on a giant ants' nest).

Over a number of years, the back garden has transformed. It used to be all lawn, with flower beds and 2 apple trees, and kids' toys. Now it has raised beds for our vegetables, compost heaps in a corner, room for the animals, a green house, and small trees and shrubs around the edges, including cider apples, hazel, crab apples, a hop vine, hawthorn, and ornamental shrubs such as lilac and viburnum. All of these plants produce flowers, and are usually teeming with bird and insect life throughout the summer, as well as providing food for us and our animals, and looking beautiful. But because we are lazy gardeners, there are also plenty of nettles and weeds, and intentional piles of sticks and logs - these too attract wildlife, as do the pond and compost heap. Some of the wildlife we've had over the years has included: hedgehogs, frogs, newts, butterflies, lizards, all kinds of birds, mice, rats (unfortunately!) and even a rare grass-snake.

^ 2007 - homemade polytunnel, raised beds growing squash, sweet corn, salads etc, ornamental and fruiting trees against the back wall

^ May 2010

The front garden however is my real baby. When I was younger, it used to be a strip of neglected lawn with a sparse hedge of rosemary bushes, with my mum's herbs and flowers growing between. There was a patch of wild (Alpine) strawberries, which were treasured treats for my sister and I on summer afternoons once we'd finished school, so sweet and soft, sun-warmed and full of spicy, tangy, sugary deliciousness. The ants tended to be in the front garden, often invading the house, and I remember my parents vainly trying to get rid of the nest right outside our front door by pooring boiling water down between the paving slabs, which formed the bumpy, uneven path I used to play hopscotch on.

However a few years ago, Mum was inspired by Beth Chatto's book 'The Dry Garden' and decided we should revamp the front garden. A couple of corners of it were already beautiful despite being very neglected, and chief among the plants were clematis, ceonothus, a Japanese quince and Phormium tenax. The rest of the garden was dug up and changed however. We had the path rebuilt, tried desperately to get rid of the perpetual weeds and improve the soil, and spent many hours building a wooden trough that ran around the edge of the garden. Although we deviated from the 'Dry Garden' inspired planting scheme eventually, we ended up with an ornamental garden that also gave us so much more - somewhere to sit and enjoy the evening sun, somewhere to grow vegetables, fruit, herbs and even green manure, and somewhere that would provide shelter and food for all sorts of wildlife.

^ June 2008

^ May 2010

2008 was the year that both gardens really came to life. I lived and breathed gardening for a while, learning about the uses of herbs from my mum, growing vegetables and gardening sustainably, eventually leading me to discover Permaculture. I created all sorts of plans for the gardens - useful plants to grow, pretty things picked up from my trips to garden centres, and planting schemes inspired by my new-found love of beekeeping, started by my Dad in 2007 (we got our first bees on May Day of that year). We got a greenhouse for free from some neighbours, allowing me to do some 'proper' gardening.

All our new ideas about gardening and wildlife, bees and animals, sustainability and Permaculture synthesised, and we have created a garden that is never quite the same from one year to the next, but remains a pleasant place to be and somewhere full of life. But onto how to create bee garden...

CREATING THE BEE GARDEN

When choosing to make a garden that is bee-friendly, it's important to consider the needs of any wildlife:

WATER. Bees, like any other wildlife, need water, and a pond or shallow bird-bath is a great way of helping bees and other creatures. It can be as simple as a shallow dish filled with a thin layer of water, or a huge pond full of plants and pondlife, but a shallow, sheltered area with stones and twigs for the bees to perch on are essential. Remember that some of the pond (usually about a third of it, at least) should always be in the shade.

FOOD. Bees feed on pollen and nectar (which they turn into honey), which both come from flowers. Bees are 'awake' from early spring to late autumn, and will be out collecting food as long as it is not raining, too windy, or too cold. They need lots of food in the spring when they have been cooped up all winter, and lots in the summer too, so they can provide enough stores for the coming winter. In Britain we have something called the 'June gap' where there is about a month when most common feed plants aren't in flower and the bees can starve. In the bee-friendly garden therefore, it's important to have plants that flower all year round.

Early Spring:

tree pollen and nectar - hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, fruit trees

crocuses, other bulbs, dandelions,

viburnum (Himalayan species - flowers very early)

Mahonia, berberis (also edible!)

Mustard

Primrose

Late Spring:

Horse chestnut (v. good source),

Comfrey (excellent green manure too)

Field beans (braod beans)

Oil seed rape (brassica)

Ceonothus (bees love it!)

Holly flowers

Gorse

Brambles

many flowering evergreen shrubs

Lupins, peas, legumes (for bumblebees)

June Gap:

sainfoin (if you manage to make it germinate, please let me know how!)

Summer:

Lavender, Golden Rod, Rosemary, Thyme

Beans (good for bumble bees), courgettes and squashes

Borage

Honeysuckle

Himalayan balsam (an invasive weed, so be careful)

Calendula

Cardoon

Sunflowers

Hibiscus

Sage (if it's warm enough for it to flower, the bees will be all over it)

Clover (and other flowering weeds found in meadows, etc)

Autumn and Late Sources:

Ivy (very important source)

As a rule, bees and other beneficial insects like aromatic plants and herbs, while pests tend to stay away from these.

Double-headed flowers (e.g. French marigolds, most modern hollyhocks, double roses, etc.) tend to be no good to bees - single flowers are more easy for them to access.

SHELTER. Dead wood, log piles and hollow trees can all provide shelter for many different species of bees. Holes in the ground and in brick work can also be bee-friendly places, particularly for solitary bee species. If you have a sunny, sheltered spot, this is the perfect place to plant your bee-friendly plants, as these are the conditions that bees prefer to collect food in. Hedgerows are good, too. If you want to keep your own bees, you need to find a suitable apiary site, and that needs another blog post of its own! If you find you have a colony of bees that are in an inconvenient place, or find a swarm has landed in your garden, call your local beekeepers' association and see if it is possible to move them to a more secluded area. At the moment we have a small bumblebee nest in the eaves of our house. Luckily they don't cause us any problems, and we're happy to have them there!

Other ways you can help the bees include:

support or join your local or national Beekeeper's Association. All you need is an interest and passion, you don't have to actually keep bees to join! The British Beekeeper's Association now have a "sponsor a hive" scheme that allows you to get involved even if you don't want to keep bees yourself, and can make a great gift idea
support local beekeepers by buying local honey
don't leave empty honey jars outside with leftover honey in - always rinse away any scraps of honey. This helps to prevent the spread of disease
seed-bombing. Mix up some seeds of bee-friendly, non-invasive plants with soil and water, roll into balls, allow to dry and throw them onto any patches of waste ground etc. that you see.
don't use pesticides, etc. in your garden
get to know local beekeepers, etc. If you have enough land you could even let a local beekeeper keep a hive or two on your land

This is by no means exhaustive and there is plenty more to be discovered through your own garden experimentation! But by encouraging bees and generally increasing the biodiversity of your garden by growing a variety of plants and welcoming a variety of creatures, you can do your own small bit in preserving species that are not only good for the environment, but good for the human spirit (and stomach) too!

More Bees

2010-05-26T20:10:00.013+01:00

Well, yesterday I visited the 1st swarm of the year (the one I didn't go and collect, currently the only one we have so far actually taken home to the apiary) and wow! HUGE swarm, as big as a good-sized whole colony, and boy are they busy! They have already built out about 4 frames of wax with no foundation to help them along. 3 whole frames are already full of nectar, with more throughout the rest of the hive. They're building up really quick and look like really hard working bees. The only thing is, despite the fact they've been there exactly a week now and are bringing in pollen, there is NO BROOD. So, either the queen hasn't got going yet, or she's not working, or she's dead/gone somewhere. But they look like they're doing good, so we're going to leave them to it for a while longer, and if there's still no sign, they will get a frame of eggs from another hive so they can make a new queen. We're having to breed all our own queens this year, as we don't trust the queens from last year's breeder, and Hawaiian queens have now been banned by Defra because SHB or something has been found in Hawaii...this isn't a problem though as we are really excited about breeding our own queens! Just hope it works!

And now onto a disgusting job that I had to do that I just had to write about! The other day Dad showed me that wax moths have got into some of our stored frames...this is not acceptable, as they can absolutely destroy frames and even whole hives! While Dad was working it was mine and Pabi Bach's job to squish as many adults and larvae as we could find...however Pabi Bach was too squeamish and so it came down to me (the vegetarian of the family...felt guilty and disgusted, but also got rather carried away). The larvae, when prodded in a particular part of their anatomy, explode like a zit (nice). If you don't get them there they carry on wriggling...it was a very gooey job, and not at all pleasant.

^ wax moth nest, chewed up wax and soft, spider's web-like stuff

^ adult wax moth - small grey moth with a kind of golden-brown spot on the thorax

^ a wax moth larvae in the nest

^ the picture isn't very clear, but the larvae create sort of tunnels through the wax, eventually destroying the whole lot if you don't gte rid of them.

^ More wax moth damage

Later that evening I also had to protect Pabi Bach from a cockchafer beetle that seemed intent on dive-bombing us...although harmless (except if you're a prized plant) these beetles are about 3cm long, brown, buzzy and seem to have no breaks, and so we found it pretty alarming when it flew through her window that evening and started uncontrollably whizzing around the room! (It soared menacingly over Pabi, she gave a piercing scream, I turned and started to bolt for the door when it hove into view in front of me. I stopped, it kept on coming, hit me on the mouth and went spiralling off into a corner. Meanwhile Pabi and I made a break for it). I think she owes me a few gruesome jobs now...

^ blurry pic of the mosntrous blood-thirsty cockchafer...

Bees & Garden

2010-05-24T19:33:00.023+01:00

We've had a while of miserable weather but the last few days have been very hot indeed, and this has definitely shown in terms of the number of calls we've had about swarms! We've had 3 in the past week (not all of them turned out to be honey bees however), and have carried out an artificial swarm on our existing hive, and so at present we have 3 colonies and possibly another 1 on the way...

^ Queen with long abdomen (sorry for blurry pic)

^ Artificial Swarm taking place

The first call we got was to a beautiful old house in the countryside which is being converted into flats. The foreman had spotted the bees clustered on a tree trunk in the sunshine. When we arrived the "swarm" had gone and what we were left with was a wild colony living in the dead tree trunk, with only an inch square hole for access. Unfortunately the tree is being cut down and so they will have to move, but fortunately the foreman seemed very reluctant to kill them. We pondered and pondered how we could possibly rescue the bees, as the queen will never leave her home and brood. In the end Dad constructed a cardboard box with a one-way bee escape in, so that any bees flying out would be redirected to a hive on a raised platform. That way we'll the get the flyers at least, and although they'll be queenless, they may be able to start afresh with a few nurse bees and a frame of eggs. The queen and her brood will have to be left there (and destroyed) but that's life, bees and humans don't always get along.

The second call I didn't go to, but I gather it was a straightforward swarm collection and the bees are now installed in the apiary! The third call turned out to be bumble bees, but if the weather continues to be as good as it is there should be plenty more opportunities for us to stock up on new colonies.

I'm a great believer in collecting swarms and the merits of wild colonies; not only do you get a new colony for free, but you can be assured that you're getting bees whose natural instincts are sound. Of course there is always the slight risk that they'll be hideously grumpy or carrying diseases, although swarming is often a good way to minimise disease, and swarming bees tend to be at their most docile. The only hive of ours who survived the winter and have made a good start this year are the wild colony we collected from the wall (see the video blog). And despite being moved fairly late in the year last year, they still made loads of lovely honey and laid down good stores for them and for us. This made me realise that bees that can survive without human meddling are the most likely to survive overall - if they can take care of themselves, they're less likely to produce dud queens, starve to death, be lazy or too grumpy, or freeze to death. They've done it all before in the wild, so of course they'll survive in a nice new hive where the wax is already started for them. Last year we bought a bunch of new mated queens from a local bee breeder. Every single colony failed, and in every case it was because the queen hadn't taken or had stopped laying, and I recently heard that another keeper in our association had the same problem with queens from the same breeder. And while this might just be that one individual breeder, it can't be denied that we humans breed bees that have the characteristics that are convenient for us (docility, good honey production, lack of swarming instinct). But the more I learn about bees, the more I begin to realise that these characteristics aren't good for them - is it any wonder that they're dying out if their natural instincts are being suppressed? With wild or swarming bees, you know that they're following their instincts and are doing what comes naturally to them, and this can only be a good thing. "Natural" bees should be resilient, self-regulating and completely uninterested by human activity. Perhaps by breeding bees to illiminate problems, we are creating more problems? Let me know what you think!

And onto the garden. The first beans have been planted out in a heavy mulch of homemade compost (mulching helps retain moisture, good plant food, no digging required, and also I was too lazy to prepare the ground earlier this year, woops!), but I've run out of canes so the others will have to wait; however, I am now watering them religiously and despite a tussle with the rabbits (evidence: white fur all over munched lower leaves and stems) they're making a good go of it. We've got a few lettuces and peas on the go too, as well as our tomatoes, chillis and peppers, but we need more! So now that I am on study leave, I'm hoping to be able to get out in the garden a bit more (when I'm not studying lol) and sort things out a bit.

As for compost, last year we tried an enclosed compost heap called the "Green Johanna" which allows you to compost cooked food and even meat, dairy and fish. As a result of this we had a rat infestation for a while, although this could also possibly have been because of the building works next door, as the rats disappeared after the building stopped...anyway, we stopped using the Green Jo' and have left it for almost a year...and now it is full of the most wonderful loamy, soft, fine, moist, rich, dark lovely compost! I can't wait to get using it. It doesn't smell at all and has the most wonderful texture, part of me wishes I could roll around in it!

Anyway, I shall leave you with a delicious recipe that Dad made up this evening - wonderful with a slice of toast or good nutty brown rice ^^

Dad's Leek & Bean Summer Stew

Ingredients:

5 dry red chillis, crushed (or your preference, we like things hot ^^)

3 leeks, chopped

2 courgettes, sliced

1 onion, chopped

1 tin of black eye peas, drained

1 tin of chick peas, drained

salt and pepper

It's easy - stick all in a pot with a little stock or water, and cook with the lid on until the leeks and courgettes are soft and sweet. Delicious!

Update 03.05.2010

2010-05-03T16:57:00.008+01:00

It's certainly proving to be a good year for fruit so far: the trees, both in the garden and in the wild, are absolutely laden with blossoms. I already have small blackcurrants forming; the beans are reaching for the skies and will very soon be planted out now that we have our canes up. The strawberries are in flower, the tadpoles are wiggling around the pond, and the garden is beginning to look beautiful and green again. Bring on summer!

Spring Inspection

2010-04-18T15:56:00.026+01:00

Today we carried out our spring inspection of our one remaining hive, as well as cleaning out some of the dead hives.

Looking through dead hives is always upsetting, especially as we worked so hard last year and we've lost a couple of decent bloodlines. But equally it was a relief - no signs of starvation, which would have made me feel very guilty indeed. In fact two of the three hives we looked at died in the cluster. Bees had died just hanging off the frames or digging into food, of which there was plenty. It looks like they just froze to death - no sign of any brood (the queen wouldn't have been laying if it was too cold - another good sign) and they were weak hives anyway. So it looked like it was just too cold of them. Of course we probably should have insulated them with a tarp or similar, but equally the winter was one of the harshest for the last 30 years or something. So it's nice to know that they didn't die just because of our own stupidity.

The other dead hive that we cleared out had only a very small volume of bees that were completely un-clustered. No brood. It seems the queen must have died, again maybe becuase of the cold (too cold to lay eggs > no new bees > population death > no bees to warm the queen up > no queen to lay new eggs).

However, our one remaining hive (the one we took from the barn wall last year - see the video blog) is doing absolutely splendidly! plenty of adult bees and 5 sides of brood - eggs, larvae and capped, and beautiful healthy brood it is too. They're bringing in loads of pollen and nectar, and they have stores left over too, mostly a mixture of sugar and honey unfortunately, but they still appear to be working hard. They're literally 2 feet from a 5 acre field of oil seed rape this year too, which has yet to flower, so hopefully they'll be able to build up their numbers even more to make the most of the harvest. They have plenty of room and were REALLY DOCILE - came as a bit of a shock after extracting them from the wall (they were rather angry - Dad got stung nearly 50 times on the same finger and it swelled up to the size of a golf ball just below the knuckle) but they were beautiful bees - absolutely unfussed and uninterested by the humans cooing over them adoringly!

So, after a rather large setback of massive losses, it looks like we've got off to the best start we could have expected. And fingers crossed for lots of big swarms this May!

The veggies we planted last week are up already! I'd better get preparing a space for them...

The ducks lay every day during all but the very deepest winter days. But at the moment the chickens are laying regularly too - an unexpected pleasure, as usually we spend half our lives trying to stop them being broody and attacking anything that moves in a fit of maternal rage. But despite the meat-and-dairy eaters of the house eating a lot of omelettes, we still ended up with a glut of eggs. So this week Pabi Bach made her wonderful Mexican chocolate cake (wonderfully moist every time she makes it, with spices to bring out the flavour of the chocolate. My favourite cake of all time) as well as over 40 meringues. But despite all this we still had loads of eggs to use up, so we decided to make some lemon curd. We used Delia Smith's recipe (too sweet but a good basic - next time we'll add more lemon) and ended up with 7 jars of lemon curd, some of which we've been giving away. It's incredible stuff, best eaten straight from the jar with a spoon!

However only 2 days since the great curd cooking session, the eggs are piling up again already. So I'll have to think of something else we can make this time. Any ideas leave a comment!

The Year of a Thousand Beans

2010-04-10T16:35:00.013+01:00

After a bit of a late start (not a bad thing incidentally, as the soil is still very cold) I have started planting!!

I feel that this year must be a bean year. I am growing 7 varieties this year and I got a bit carried away planting them today...about 200 bean plants I reckon. However none will go to waste I hope - most of the garden will be given over to them this year, friends will take some, and as a last resort I know some greedy chickens who will polish off a bean plant at the drop of a hat. The varieties I'm growing are:

French beans 'Cobra' and 'Blue Lake'
Runner bean 'Scarlet Emperor'
Borlotto 'Lingua di Fuoco' and a four-year old packet of a mystery borlotto
Dwarf French bean 'Tendergreen'
Kidney bean 'Yin Yang' - absolutely beautiful black and white beans!

not to mention the other things I'm growing, the usual tomatoes and lettuces etc.

The garden is going to be full this year, but I have cut back on variety if not on numbers of plants, sticking to things that are better home grown - e.g. tomatoes - are easy to grow - e.g. lettuces, chillis - and things that we just love too much to not grow - beans and squashes, for example.

Even so, why have I grown so many beans, you may well ask. Well, I think there was an element of insanity in buying endless packets of beans, but it's also because they store well (dried, frozen or bottled, like Madame Georgette, our French neighbour, does), are a good source of protein in the vegetarian diet, and because they're very ornamental plants that I hope to have climbing up every available vertical space in the garden. Also they're a piece of cake to grow - I remember growing them on a piece of damp tissue paper at school when I was 8 - and they taste GOOD. I expect that by the end of the summer we'll all be sick of beans, but hopefully we'll take the time to store them, meaning that we won't feel compelled to buy Kenyan imports in the winter in order to get something, anything, green and tender.

Anyway, I'm also trying out the Asparagus Pea this year. It grows sort of ridged pods that apparently taste like Asparagus. My Grandad used to grow it, and looking through his old gardening books and allotment folders etc, we seem to have been quite similar in taste when it comes to veg varieties. So this year I am following in his footsteps and planting this strange, short, bushy green vegetable.

As far as the rest of the garden is concerned, it's well and truly springtime now! We have blackbirds nesting in the clematis, the girls are laying so many eggs we don't know what to do with them, and my currant bushes have plenty of flowers this year ^^. Also the blackthorns in the hedgerows seem to be doing well this season, which should mean plenty of sloe gin in the autumn...

As for the bees, I haven't seen them yet this year! Dad has been to check on them and feed them to get them going, but as yet we haven't carried out a full inspection. We are very unfortunate to have only one hive left now, due to the fact that every hive had litterally pounds of stores but somehow couldn't eat it (easily solved, I hope, by feeding more liquid syrup later in the autumn this year). However in some ways this is lucky, as it allows us to build up again (always exciting) and we know that these bees can stick it when others just can't (and they're our best honey producers too). Fingers crossed for lots of lovely strong swarms this May however!

The Edible Garden, BBC 2, 8.30pm on Wednesdays

2010-04-07T20:30:00.004+01:00

Just watched the first episode of this new series presented by Gardeners' World's Alys Fowler. 5/10.

The programme had some interesting bits - the tour of Permaculture Magazine's Tim & Maddy Harland's permaculture garden for example - and I like the fact that Alys is intent on growing in a polyculture, even creating a forest garden on Gardeners' World. However I found the programme as a whole too cutesy and fashionable to be interesting.

If you're new to the world of gardening, permaculture and growing in polycultures this may be the programme for you, but there is more inspiring viewing and reading out there - just look at last year's BBC Farm For A Future - an indepth exploration of climate change, food resilience and alternative growing methods. The Edible Garden seems to only skim the surface, if that, of these issues, with Alys seeming more worried about the "prettiness" of her garden than its edibleness - of course there is a balance to be struck, but it annoyed me that she was spouting about the colour of her French Beans rather than the flavour, for example. And she told some downright lies about chickens!

In all, I think it's great that a trendy young TV gardener is bringing self-sufficiency, permaculture and polyculture to the attention of a wider audience, but hopefully this is just the beginning.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s1lc8

Compost & Other Such Things

2010-03-21T15:03:00.012Z

Yesterday we were cleaning out the animals, when it became clear the compost heap needed to be emptied a bit. There followed a fair bit of digging and removing half of the compost in readyness to put it on the raised beds next weekend. Last year we had a bit of a problem because the heap was smelly, a sure sign that we were getting the mixture a bit wrong. However I was reallly happy to find that now it has rotted down to the most beautiful loamy mixture and doesn't smell at all. It's beautiful, and absolutely crawling with life! Hopefully the grass snake will be back this year...

Recipe for excellent compost

copious quantities of each of the following:

- vegetable peelings etc

- paper, cardboard, and straw/wood shavings from cleaning out the animals

- animal droppings

- dead leaves

- worms, woodlice, etc, who should come of their own accord

allow to mix and stew. Serve on raised beds, dug in or as a mulch, and therein plant vegetables, fruits, flowers... Delicious!

The animals very much enjoyed the ordered chaos of rearranging the compost...particularly the ducks, who were slurping up every worm they could get their hands on.

And the good news is that despite a couple of days of wet weather spring is definitely here! The daffodils are finally out, having been late for St. David's Day :( ...there are nearly always bees in the park near my college collecting stunningly bright orange crocus pollen... and best of all, this week saw the first clumps of frog spawn!

Beekeeping Talk

2010-03-09T21:52:00.005Z

I've just got back from a talk by a bee farmer, our association's first event of the year. It was fantastic to see everyone again after such a long, hard winter, and the talk raised a few really interesting points. The bee farmer who spoke to us runs about 300 hives and this year has had less than 10% losses, with just over 10% losses last year. He revealed some hints and tips and snippets of interesting information to us.

Main identified reasons behind colony losses - starvation was top, with poor management, weather, failed queens, mites etc. behind. CCD and pesticides were last.
The temperature of feed and its placement in relationship to the cluster is very important, which may explain why some of our hives starved to death even with a hive heavy with sugar and honey.
Treat for varroa early in the autumn, even as early as August. If you treat later, you may reduce the numbers of mites but any viruses will have had time to build up, and won't be affected by any chemicals you stick in.
Thymol is a naturally occurring chemical (i.e. in thyme) that is used in treatments such as Apiguard. Ian recommended treating with it, saying that he knew one successful farmer who uses it as his only treatment against varroa and nosema. Ian suggested putting it in the feed, and I wonder weather treating hives with it, e.g. sealing them with linseed oil with thymol mixed in, would help also? And would lots of thyme forage be beneficial too?
Mesh floors should ideally be able to close (something I had no idea about), to prevent treatments and feed etc. just leaking away. Ian also mentioned how bees survive in old oil drums at 100 degree temperatures in Africa and are able to ventilate for themselves. I was interested to note that the hives he brought along had solid floors with small cirlces of mesh put in, much like a crown board - perhaps to get the best of both worlds.
I was glad to know that it's not just me that finds Eglu's Beehaus laughable! The Beehaus is based on the Dartington long hive, and interestingly these are said to swarm more often. It's interesting to note that in the wild bees tend to prefer to go vertically, so perhaps horizontal hives aren't necessarily the answer. However this could also explain why they are perfect for beekeeping in Africa, where the bees are migratory anyway.
The bee farmer requeens around every 2 years. Apparently a New Zealand lecturer says that he finds one of the effects of varroa is that it shortens a queen's lifespan, in the sense that when she's a year old she behaves/is in the condition more like a 2 year old queen, when she's 2 years old she seems more like a 3 year old queen, etc.
The importance of changing brood combs was stressed. I am determined to finally build a solar wax extractor now! I didn't know that apparently in some EU countries it is now a legal requirement to change brood combs every year. This sounds like a lot of cuffuffle but a simple rotation of frames (made even more straightforward by adding new boxes to the bottom of the hive - as in Warre beekeeping - rather than the top) makes this easier than it sounds.
The amunt of interesting research to be found on the internet was also stressed. I'll be investigating this from now and will let you know about any interesting finds!
Bees should be fed little and often. Keep checking your hives, even in winter - around Christmas maybe and as the spring starts to arrive. You can always check my hefting, without opening the hives up. Runny syrup can be fed even in early spring.
Poly hives - I assume he meant the double-skinned plastic hives - seem to be growing in popularity. Apparently Denmark has the lowest incidence of brood diseases in Europe and they keep bees almost exclusively in poly hives. Ian recommended household bleach, caustic soda or even the stuff they used to disinfect wellies etc. during the foot and mouth outbreaks for cleaning the hives, as unfortunately they can't be scorched. They build up quicker in the spring, but Ian finds that the queen start laying a little later for some reason.
Records can be kept by screwing a jam jar to each hive and keeping records in there. The hive can become a wooden record by colour-coding frames, being meticulous in marking queens, etc. Mark the queens when you first see them, don't (as we usually do) forget your pen and have to come back and do it later!
The convenience of using a nail gun for constructing hives and frames!

All in all a really interesting lecture with plenty of food for thought...I'm planning to try out lots of new ideas this year and certainly I'll be looking into some of the suggestions here. We're planning our spring inspection for March 20th or the first weekend of April, weather permitting. Until then I think we'll go and heft the hives and see if we need to boil up any syrup already!

Spring Has Sprung!

2010-03-06T17:13:00.025Z

The first snowdrops appeared about a month ago. In the last week or so the primroses have come up, and just this week the crocuses, which have been pushing up little buds for a while now, came into full bloom. Recently the weather has been almost summery. In the evenings when I walk back from college now the wildlife is still out and about, people are walking their dogs, there are bulbs everywhere in the parks, with great swathes of yellow and purple everywhere you look, and the kids are even playing outside well into the evenings now. Apart from the wind, which is still a little nippy, it feels like August. Everything is coming alive! Here's a look at what we've been up to recently.

^ I don't know what this evergreeen shrub is called, but the bees love it and when it's in flower it smells wonderful.

^ Hellebores

^ The garden today.

^ First Celandines

^ Cardoons sprouting up from the ground.

^ A forgotten Brussels sprout plant left over from 2 years ago!

^ Snowdrops

^ Some plants are already in full flower

^ Snowdrops again!

^ Crocuses emerging through a jungle of strawberry plants

^ First primroses!

^ Yellow crocuses amongst the wall flowers

^ Purple crocus buds

Below: Birds' nests from last year: in the climbing hydrangea (blackbird); behind the satelite dish (collared dove); an a nest from an unknown bird that fell out of the hazel tree, beautifully constructed.

Dad's Velvety Aubergines

Not exactly seasonal or eco-friendly but a great vegetarian option and perfect for evenings that are still a little chilly.

1 aubergine, cut into medium sized chunks

3 fresh tomatoes

fenugreek and coriander seeds

1 clove garlic

a little vegetable oil

salt and pepper

Fry all the ingredients together until the tomatoes have cooked down to a delicious pulp. The aubergines will still be raw and spongey, but turn of the heat and place a lid over the pan. Allow to sit for as long as possible, allowing the aubergines to steam. Reheat when you're ready to eat. The aubergines will be really velvety and melt-in-the-mouth, absolutely delicious!

NB: You can make the recipe spicier by adding chilli or cayenne. Allspice is also a nice addition.

I have been continuing with my ever-growing reading list. I recently finished Regeneration by Pat Barker, a really good read. I loved the style of the writing - simple and subtle but absolutely sublime - and the depiction of the suffering endured by both officers, infantry troops and the people who had to care for them during WW1 was incredibly moving, especially as I recently went on a college trip to the Battlefields and saw the enormous cemeteries left over from the war for myself. I'm not enjoying First Casualty by Ben Elton as much however. Although still an interesting storyline, the writing style feels clunky and crude when I compare it to Pat Barker's work. I also have a new, eco-related addition to my reading list: Whole Earth Discipline by eco-pioneer Stewart Brand. I haven't started it yet but I'm excited about reading this book as it looks like it's going to make me rethink some of my ideas about green-ness. I like the fact that it is centred on treating the Earth as a whole though, rather than just sorting out a few problems here or there. Should be interesting...I'll let you know how I get on!

Dad has visited the bees to see how they have been getting on. We are now down to 3 hives, which is fairly disappointing. Some of the hives seem to have emptied before the weather got too cold, others have clearly diwed out over the winter, and oddly didn't eat any of the vast quantities of honey and sugar we fed back to them. This is interesting though as it presents us with a number of opportunities. The first one is to learn more - I want to become a better beekeeper so that I know how to take better care of these fascinating animals who so kindly allow me to try and nurture them. The second is that we're planning to try out a number of different methods this year. We'll be giving some hives the Warre treatment - i.e. letting them make the choices for themselves - and treating others as we would normally. And thirdly, it's interesting to note that all the hives that survived are our grumpiest bees which we have captured from the wild...I wonder if this says anything about the genetically-engineered artificially produced blood lines that one buys from queen breeders or has imported from Hawaii? Dad has ordered a few more queens to arrive this year, and we're already on the swarm list. But I wonder whether angry, swarming, wild bees are better able to survive than cushy calm bees that are made by humans for humans...

And finally, I have been planning a project for when I leave college (and that will probably end up taking over my whole life for the next 50 years...hope so!). My plan is to research and experience permaculture and sustainable practice from across the world - the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australasia... in order for me to learn more about the ecosystems of the Earth and how to work with them. The idea is to make my way around the world (or as much of it as I can afford) using the most efficient transport possible, working on aid projects and learning from people who really care about working with the planet rather than against it. I intend to record my travels on the blog and maybe when I've learned from the world's best I'll be able to pass my knowledge on in other ways too. I'm beginning to look up possible places to visit but if anyone has any suggestions of places I can go or people I could contact, please leave a comment! I'll be writing more about this as the year goes on, and I hope you''ll find it as exciting as I am finding it already!

Thanks for all your comments and support through the blog - now that things are happening out there in the garden hopefully i'll have more to blog about! ^^

Morning Sunshine Throught Ceonothus and Rose Leaves, 30.01.10

2010-01-30T11:27:00.002Z

Looks like spring could be on its way ^^

Long Time No See!

2010-01-17T13:17:00.016Z

Well, this weekend I have finally found some time to catch up on the blog! I've missed it a lot but things have been extremely busy, and now that I'm at college I'm afraid homework and coursework have to come first! I haven't had much time to do much gardening etc. and the bees are all in bed for the winter...just as well, as we have had a really cold snap and almost a month of snow! Our village was on the news with some of the heaviest snowfall in the south, and oddly enough my Mum visited Toronto recently and for once we had more snow than they did! It has been absolute chaos, roads blocked, lorries jack-knifing...we've had nearly a foot of snow and everything has come to a standstill. Schools have been closed, and even when they're open some entrances have to be blocked off because of huge, dangerous icicles...it does have some benefits though: everywhere looks so beautiful in the snow, and when you can't get your car out of the drive it means you have to walk everywhere...good for our health (provided you don't slip and break something, of course) and the environment. Although I have to say I'm slightly relieved now it's thawed! We spent 8 1/2 hours in a traffic jam when we went to get our Christmas tree, and although there was a great spirit of comradeship among all the stranded travelers, I'd rather not repeat the experience. And there's even a luscious hint of spring in the air today.

^ The village early one morning, in the snow

^ Our Christmas this year. Peeling sprouts, our tree, and chocolate pudding and syllabub with Christmas dinner!

^ Up until last February when we had snow, I had never seen icicles. The past few weeks they've been everywhere!

Anyway, as I have mentioned, things are rather quiet here in terms of gardening at the moment, although recently Dad and I did harvest and blanche our celery crop, by washing it, plunging into boiling water, cooling in ice cold water, and then freezing. I grew enough celery to last us 6 months this year (21 plants) so I'm looking forawrd to using it all in soups, chilli, stews...all the warming food you need when it's cold outside.

The animals are all doing really well. The ducks and chickens had been moulting in the autumn, which made them look rather scrawny, but they're now resplendant in their plumage. None of them have really enjoyed the wather recently, although the ducks are enjoying the mud now that it's thawing. Willow however loved the snow and took a lot of persuading to get back in the hutch every evening. And we now have a cat called Lucas, a stray that sheltered in the greenhouse at work after the storm and who has become part of the family. He'll probably go back and live in the greenhouse but we have been taking care of him at home recently. I'm not really a cat person at all - there are way too many of them in the UK, they kill the wildlife and think of all the energy that goes into producing cat food, not to mention the fact that what goes in and out of them absolutely honks - but I have to admit that it's great fun having a cuddly, fluffy animal running around the house. We keep him well away from the other animals however.... Alfie the tortoise is still hibernating in the fridge but we will wake him up sometime in the coming fortnight.

Anyway, something that I have been doing lots of at the moment is reading. It's one of the most enjoyable things you can do on a cold winter night, I find, and it's definitely useful for my Literature AS level too. A new string to the blog that I am adding for winter is a reading list - books I have read, am reading or want to read. Sorry to keep adding more and more things! But I need something to do apart from building new frames when the bees are in bed (and my English teachers are shouting at me).

Anyway, the subject of my course is First World War literature, and I am getting more and more interested in history, so this year so far I have read:

The Accrington Pals - a play by Peter Whelan.
Birdsong - a novel by Sebastian Faulks.
Up The Line To Death - selected war poetry
The Runes - non-fiction by Horil Svensson. I got a set of runestones for Christmas. I'm not sure if I believe in all the "mumbo jumbo" around things like this but the history of it all is so interesting and the runes provide a different viewpoint on life, so I am finding out more.
All Quiet On The Western Front - a novel by Erich Maria Remarque.

My favourite of these have to be All Quiet On The Western Front and Up The Line To Death. Up The Line was written during WW1, by people who could actually hear shell fire etc. while they were scribbling down the poems. The anthology features work by the greats such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and my personal favourite Isaac Rosenberg. It's so interesting because it takes you from the beginning of the war, when the poets all believed the jingoistic propaganda going around and that they'd all be home by Christmas, through to the work that describes horrific individual episodes in unflinching detail. I love Sassoon's work becuase it just drips sarcasm, but Isaac Rosenberg is my favourite. I love his poetry but even more I just can't believe how unfair it was that a talented, pacifist but poor, wheezy and short lad from the East End had his life cut short on April Fool's Day 1918. And he wasn't tall enough to be a medic, only for cannon fodder. Poor bloke.

All Quiet is fantastic because it was written in the 20's by someone on the other side - a German veteran. It's an amazing book about the power of the human spirit, and reminds me that there was suffering on both sides - when you study the English literature, that is always going on about the Hun and the Bosch, it's easy to forget that the opposing troops didn't have it any better. I also love it because it was banned and burned by the Nazi's in the 30's - a sure sign of a good philosophy. It's written from the first person too so you really feel like you're there, and the detail...the reported stories of men continuing to attack when both their feet had been blown off, or crawling back to safety holding their intestines in with one hand, and the inimitable Katchinsky...it's a really short book, it only took me a day to read, but it's one of the best books I've ever read.

Birdsong is one of my set texts, and I didn't enjoy it quite as much for several reasons, but it's still an amazing book that I would really recommend.

At the moment I'm reading:

A Small Sound of the Trumpet - non-fiction by Margaret Wade Labarge - all about women's roles in the middle ages. Really interesting and shows that there were powerful and influential women even in a society dominated by men and religion. And my village's castle is mentioned twice - I had never realised that the old pile of flint down the road was so important!
The Rune Primer - non-fiction by Sweyn Plowright
Mslexia issue 44 - women's writing magazine, absolutely inspirational. I have already had work rejected by them, which made me feel like a proper writer, haha! Poetry, short stories, flash fiction, articles...if you love literature, you'll love this, no matter what your gender or background.

And I'm planning to read (for the time being. The list gets longer every day):

Goodbye to All That - memoir by Robert Graves
Regeneration - novel by Pat Barker
Life Class - novel by Pat Barker
The Middle Parts of Fortune - novel by Frederic Manning
Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man - memoir by Siegfried Sassoon

Nice to be back blogging and hopefully the next post will be along much quicker!

Putting the Bees to Bed

2009-10-25T22:09:00.011Z

Today Dad and I went and visited all 11 of our hives. At the height of the summer we had 15. A couple were very weak splits and didn't make it or were united back. But luckily our current 11 all seem to be doing really well! I was so surprised by how big the populations still are and how much stores they have. Luckily October has been very mild so far. But today we went and put the girls to bed - I will miss them so much this winter! We fed them some sugar syrup and have just about closed them up. I'm sure we'll go and visit again soon but our summer jobs are over now and soon it will be too cold for them to even venture out. So onto the winter and building endless frames etc!

Last weekend we spent forever making up our own sugar syrup. It was meant to come out as fondant, and this required a very long and tiring process. When I went into the kitchen it smelled like Dad was making chutney, but it turns out he had added vinegar to the sugar mixture to "invert" the sugars. I haven't researched this yet but it's something to do with unlocking fructose from the sucrose or something. After that came a lot of heating it to an exact temperature, cooling it down to an exact temperature, and then whisking it until the electric mixer died! After that we put it in bottles ready to feed the bees. It isn't quite thick enough to be called fondant but it's so much thicker than simply boiling up sugar and some water!

After tasting my Grandpa's delicious tomatoes I harvested all ours, even the green ones. I put them in the airing cupboard to ripen - this must have been ages ago now - and forgot about them. Then when we were doing more de-cluttering yesterday we found all these ripe tomatoes in the cupboard! Unfortunately the Brandywines were a bit mushy but the Roma were divine...but even the mushy ones wills be great in my Mum's tomato sauce!

Mum's tomato sauce

Mum used to live in Italy. She's always telling us stories about her old landlady who hid Italian Jews in her attic during the war, strange past Italian boyfriends who had nose jobs, ridiculous superstitions about odd numbers of nuns...English people just don't seem to know how to cook Italian food, putting cream in their carbonara and god knows what in their tomato sauce. Don't do it! This sauce is only 5 ingredients and it really doesn't need anything else! Use it on pizza, with meatballs, on pasta, with chickpea croquettes...anything. Makes 1 quantity.

Ingredients:

1 x tin plum tomatoes (whole, not chopped)

glug of olive oil

pinch of salt

good grind of pepper

a clove of garlic, crushed

and you can add a couple of basil leaves or a pinch of dried oregano or marjoram if you like ^^

Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the garlic for a minute or two. Add the tomatoes. Break them up a bit with a spatula. Cook until it starts to thicken slightly, perhaps for about 20 minutes. It will smell wonderful. Add the seasonings if you want them. Savour.

Thanks everyone for all your comments recently! I'm really interested to hear what you all think about the plastics - maybe one of us will come up with a cunning plan and save the world! See you soon ^^

Clear-Out

2009-10-10T16:55:00.002+01:00

Recently we've started having a huge clear-out. We've been living knee-deep in pointless clutter for ages and it was starting to get us all down, so we are taking steps!

We've tidied up and rearranged the garden a bit, and have got rid of lots of the pots we don't use. Inside the house I'm in the process of going through all my textiles and crafts items and chucking out the stuff that I don't use any more. We're getting rid of a few books here and there and I'm slowly redoing my bedroom too (hopefully going to be using reclaimed timber furniture!). But until now I have never really realised just how dependent we are on plastics.

Everything we use is plastic. I always thought I was quite careful about avoiding over-packaged goods but everything we eat and buy comes in plastic, from crisps and oven chips to health foods and fruit and veg. Even the stuff packaged in metal, glass or plastic is still printed in a plastic-dependent process or stuck together with plastic tape. I've been rifling through plastic beads, acrylic yarns, nylon pipecleaners and even the bags I use to store them or throw them away in are plastic.

We have always reused our plastic shopping bags and use "bags for life" but even then there is always the odd occasion when you've forgotten a bag and so have to use a new one from the shop. We buy a lot of stuff from the co-op in the High Street, and they use only potato-starch biodegradable bags, but is it really better to use food crops for plastics? I worked at the nursery on Thursday when I had a day off from college and Jim showed me some new very expensive pots he was trialing. He says he wants to give up plastic pots, and these ones were made from rice. He insisted they were made from by-products such as husks etc. but I'm still sceptical: one of these days, we will have a food crisis, and if there's no rice, he won't be able to buy any rice by-product pots either.

The fact is that we are utterly dependent on plastics. The things we use that are not made of plastic are more than likely produced in industrial conditions, and guess what - those industrial conditions rely on plastics. Everything from our cosy jumpers to kagouls and wellies, windows, furniture, and our food packaging is made from plastic. It's pretty scary to wonder what if we woke up tomorrow and all the plastics had gone or had never been invented. We wouldn't have anything.

But I'm also sceptical about the alternatives. If we justs topped using plastics, what would happen to all those plastic goods that are already in existence? They'd either be incinerated (can we really capture all those harmful gases?) or put to landfill. I like using natural fibres in my textiles work, but would it really be better to rely on wool for our clothing, house insultaion, etc? And could we really put precious land down to fibre plants without struggling to produce enough food, and would many of them grow without petrochemical fertilisers? Would, for example, rice by-products really be a realistic option in a world without plastic parts for aeroplanes, ships, and machines?

I'm still not sure what I think about all this but I think the best thing we can do is continue to use plastics, just not make so much of them. I think we're in too deep to stop using plastics, and look at all the good things they do for us - medical supplies, for example. I think we just have to reuse and recycle all the plastic we can. So I'll be trying to throw away as little as possible during this big clear out. Someone out there on ebay or Freecycle will have a use for all my junk, and hopefully that will keep it out of landfill.

Catch-up

2009-10-04T16:54:00.007+01:00

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't blogged for a long time yet again, and I can't believe how much I've missed on my favourite blogs!!! Things seem so buys round here that I haven't had much time for gardening, and we haven't seen our bees for a month! But this week is our catch-up week and thankfully the October weather has been kind to us so far...long may it continue!

Today we went up to see my Grandpa and Grandma and Grandpa gave me a tremendous gift - the first ripe Brandywine tomato from the plant I gave him earlier in the year! It was a whopper and I've cut it up for our supper's first course, along with a couple of Grandpa's other tomatoes (I expect Ailsa Crag - he's always recommending them to me, and Alicante too) and some of ours too: our Alicante, Gardener's Delight and Sungolds. I've had a little nibble and wow...so many big flavours on one plate! I love tomatoes! I literally just cut them up and put them on a plate - no salt, no oil or vinegar or herbs - they really don't need it.

^ My Brandywine tomatoes still ripening up

Yesterday we went to the Farnham Food Festival. We didn't stay long because Pabi Bach didn't feel well but I managed to buy some proper baklawa! Baklawa is a Middle Eastern sweet full of delicious things such as pastry, nuts, sugar/honey, spices...it's absolutely delicious and one of my favourite indulgences. I have two other treats that I look forward to and those are greengages (a cousin of the plum) and chestnuts. I literally get a tingly feeling when it's the season for these! I didn't get any greengages to eat this year but I still remember the ones we ate on a beach in Brittany on the only sunny day of summer 2008...and the chestnuts are just beginning to fall now! I went for a weaving lesson with Carol on Wednesday and she has a chestnut tree opposite her drive and they all looked very small and weedy...but hopefully when we go to France around Halloween the French trees will be faring better.

My Style Challenge didn't fare so well in September so to make up for it I'll be making TWO style-related projects this month. I think I'll try making a cosmetic of some description and maybe get going on the cheong-sam dress I've been meaning to make myself for a while...first of all I've just got to persuade my sewing machine to relearn the art of winding bobbins correctly!

We have something like 15 gallons of booze fermenting away now and soon I'll be collecting rosehips to make soothing rosehip syrup with! I've also found that our homemade green tomato chutney has quite a good effect on a sore throat.

Anyway. Supper tonight is our lovely tomatoes followed by my Moroccan chickpea soup with rosemary focaccia and some crispy sauteed potatoes. I leave you with some pictures of how the garden's looking and hope to talk to you all again shortly!

Mega Update!

2009-09-13T18:24:00.019+01:00

I don't seem to have blogged in ages, probably due to the fact that there has been loads going on recently, not least my starting at college! I'm studying English Lit and an art course that lets me try everything from painting to pottery to patchwork to photography. So far it's all going really well!

Anyway, here are some of the other things that have been going on lately:

^ Dad and Pops in the canoe, picking blackberries from the canal bank.

^ Poppy suddenly decided that she liked jam, so we made some Blackberry and Apple.

^ Blackberry wine and Blackberry and Apple jam.

^ Apple wine. The key difference between cider and apple wine is that with cider you crush the juice out of the apples and ferment that. With apple wine you crush the apples and soak them in water. Then when the apple flavour has permeated the water, you ferment that.

^ Dad beekeeping.

^ Worker bees eating up some spilled honey.

^ Some of my handspun yarns soaking in hand hot water to set the twist. The grey-brown stuff is my weaving teacher Carole's corriedale fibre from her own sheep! I spun it very slubby and textured, and it's a 2-ply. It came out at about 8 wraps per inch.

^ I knitted my Corriedale handspun into a nice slouchy hat! Here I am with my new hat and some of Mum's clay jewellery that she made me. Sorry for the poor picture quality! I finished the hat on August 31st so I had better think of something else to make for my September Style Challenge!

^ Honey bee on golden rod in the garden yesterday.

^ Brandywine tomatoes fattening up - can't wait to taste these beauties.

^ Today we planted pretty pansies in the garden for winter colour. They're really amazing plants - some that we planted two years ago were still going by last summer. They flowered the whole year except January! The name pansy comes from the French "pensee" which means "thought" (n)...so here are some very happy thoughts.

^ Pabi Bach digging up and rehoming strawberry runners.

^ My first (and as yet only) Blue Hubbard Squash! I harvested it yesterday and am now allowing the pale underside to cure.

^ Bear's Britches fading flower heads. Mum likes to dry these and have them in a vase. When the seeds are dry they go pinging all over our living room.

^ Apple blossom on the trees. If a fruit tree hasn't set (enough) fruit in the spring, sometimes it will try again in the autumn when the weather cools down again. Luckily we have a few apples to enjoy as well as the lovely blossom.

^ Purple verbena flowers - been going for months! - in front of Mum's pink rose.

^ The garden, with a purple cotinus and golden rod in the foreground.

So that's it. It's well and truly autumn now. Although we still have sunny days the Canada geese fly over our house every morning and evening and I'm already pining for hearty lamb casseroles and savoy cabbage fried with lovely streaky bacon.......shame I'm veggie really!

Style Challenge 2009/2010

2009-08-18T16:33:00.003+01:00

I had an idea today that I would set myself a "monthly style challenge" for a whole year. I'm still planning how I'm going to go about this but here is the basic gist of it:

Every month I will make (and finish) an item of clothing/accessory/cosmetic.
It will be made from scratch.*
I will try and use recycled or natural materials wherever possible. I think I'll allow remnants from the fabric shop too - if I don't buy them they might go to landfill.
The things I make must be finished and useable by the end of each month!

*I'll allow myself to use existing clothes but the rule is if it's a top I have to change it into a skirt, i.e. I have to use it to make something else, rather than just decorate it.

I'm pretty excited about this. It might seem a bit of a departure from my usual topics of bees and vegetables but the textile and clothing industry is a huge contributor to all the things I don't like: environmental and human degradation, irresponsible consumerism etc. So if I can make just 12 fashion/style related things this year whilst harming the planet and people as little as possible it can only be a small step in the right direction.

Hopefully it will also push me to learn some new skills! Every time I flip through a fashion magazine I find myself thinking "I could make that" and then I get to my sewing machine and find that actually I can't. And of course money is pretty tight this year so being able to make clothes that actually last for a fraction of the price they'd cost in a shop would be fantastic. So this year I will learn to make clothes etc. and I will go to the ball!

I've decided that my first project will be a hat for winter. It'll count for September as we're already halfway through August. I'll knit it from my weaving teacher Carole's homegrown Corriedale fleece, handspun by me, according to the instructions for the Slouch Hat in Lexi Boeger's "Intertwined". I don't think you can get much more handmade than that.

So wish me luck...I expect that in a month's time I'll really be wishing I'd set myself something easier but oh well...it could be fun ^^.

Blackberries

2009-08-18T15:30:00.008+01:00

On Saturday Dad, Pabi Bach and I went blackberry picking. It was gloriously hot weather and luckily in the fields behind our estate there were already plenty of blackberries for the picking.

After just an hour of lazy picking we had 2.5kg of berries. 2kg of this went to wine, and the other 500g went into a blackberry and apple pie, made with some of our own windfall cooking apples too! Despite being diabetic-friendly (i.e. no sugar, even in the pastry) the pie was still deliciously sweet. I can assure you that it looked most impressive when it first came out of the oven but by the time I'd got to it with the camera there wasn't much left!

^ Pabi Bach drinking milk and stirring the wine

^ The foam on top of the wine

^ Pie!

And Sunday's supper was a barbecque, which included some rather delicious vegetable kebabs made with aubergine, mushrooms, red onion, green pepper, red pepper (Jim's* homegrown ones), and our homegrown tomatoes.

*Jim is my boss at the bamboo nursery. Last night he managed to randomly find the blog and all this morning was quoting the things I wrote about him. So I'm going to have to be terribly complimetary about him now, at the expense of The Awful Truth. Apologies. Although he did give me a hydrophobia unknownii to take home today (some kind of ginger, I dunno the name).

PS: I seem to be having some trouble with Blogger at the moment with putting the picutres in nicely, so sorry that all the gaps are a bit wonky. I'm working on making the blog pretty again.

Victory Dance!

2009-08-18T15:16:00.006+01:00

We had suspected one of our hives of having foulbrood - this is the colony that we took from the barn wall (see the video blog http://alittleisland-tv.blogspot.com/) and is now residing in Dave and Vicki's garden. Last week we opened them up and there seemed to be sunken cell cappings everywhere. When I uncapped them there wasn't any of the brown goo characteristic of American foulbrood but the larvae were dead. There also seemed to be one or two larvae here and there that were lying on the sides of their cells - classic European foulbrood. We didn't know what we had so we called in the Bee Inspector.

Well, I have just got back from the inspection and am over the moon because the hive is HEALTHY! The Inspector gave us the all clear and actually complimented the sheer loveliness of the colony. So they are alright. That's a huge relief becuase I was preparing myself for having to burn them all to death! In fact they are so healthy and happy that they need another box, and they might even be able to collect enough honey to last them the whole winter if the ivy is good this year!

So all our hives are doing pretty OK! We're beginning to wind down now. The entrance blocks have gone in to help ward off wasps (one very weak colony has already been robbed to death between inspections - there seem to be loads of wasps this year) and we're beginning to feed the colonies that are really short on food. Soon we'll be counting and treating for varroa and organising our hives to minimise the possibility of woodpeckers and mice attacking. Then it will be sealing the hives up against the cold and making equipment over the winter!

So yes, I am now off to do my victory dance becuase our bees are the bees knees! (Excuse the cheesiness but I'm so relieved I don't care).

A New Life

2009-08-13T14:38:00.008+01:00

One thing I forgot to post about yesterday was our trip to the bees yesterday afternoon.

This year we've been converting to OSB hives and yesterday we finally made a huge leap forward. We had 2 colonies still in 14x12" nucs and at last they have made the move into OSBs. As they were both big, busy colonies it was about time that we pulled our finger out and moved them!

Becuase the frames the bees were on in the nucs were much bigger than OSB size we cut them down - that way they'd still have some existing brood in their new home (the rest of the frames used to fill up the hive were a mixture of drawn, partially drawn, feed and foundation combs). Cutting them down involves sawing through the wooden side bars and cutting through the comb with a breadknife. Of course this means that you get covered in honey and "larvae juice".

^ The bees clean up some of their comb for us.

The best thing was however, on one of the off-cut pieces of comb there was a worker bee trying to emerge from her cell. I needed to get the comb into the bin bucket but I hated to see her die just when she was about to start life as a full-grown bee! So I very gently pulled back the capping and one of the sides of her cell. She was still caught up in her chrysalis so I had to VERY carefully wiggle that off her too...however eventually she was out and it was amazing! I can't describe what a cool feeling it was! (Perhaps a bit like giving birth, I suppose). Anyway, I put her down on the roof of the hive and she was wonderful. She started walking around immediately but was unsteady on her feet, her legs kept slipping out too wide under her. And she was covered in soft grey velvet...amazing!

Because we have to keep our bees in out-apiaries (away from home) we never really sit and just watch what's going on with the hives - we're always lugging equipment to and from the car and by the time we've finished inspecting I'm hungry, Dad's tired and we want to go home. We never just sit down and watch how the bees behave and how their society works...and as I learn more about Permaculture the more I realise that observing nature at work is the best way to learn about it and how to help it (I've also noticed that forcing myself to really look at things has so helped my creativity - my art and writing are improving so much just because I look at things more. So I have been well and truly won over by this Permaculture principle...as well as the rest of them, but this one in particular). Seeing that baby bee take her first few steps was absolutely lovely...so perhaps I will start taking a folding chair with me so I can just sit and watch!

Amd finally, I have another couple of recipes for you (again, I'm afraid, without a single picture). We seem to have been doing a lot of cooking recently but Dad's Sweet Potato Bread is definitely one of our best inventions to date, and my Moroccan soup never seems to last long.

Dad's Sweet Potato Bread

Ingredients:
1 batch of basic bread dough - enough for a nice big loaf (Dad used Jamie Oliver's recipe from "The Naked Chef")
12 oz left over roasted sweet potato chunks (we used mixed sweet potato and squash, cut into chunks and roasted with cumin and black mustard seeds).

It's easy - mix the sweet potato into the basic bread dough. Put into the oven for 20 mins at 225 degrees C. This made a medium-sized loaf and a few rolls for us. The bread browns wonderfully on top and the crumb is the most beautiful sunny orange, with a lovely moist texture. We served it with my Moroccan Soup (see below) and is lovely to mop up the juices of the vegetarian Moroccan tagine with apricots Mum made last night.

My Moroccan Soup
This one started out as a recipe in Good Food magazine but I've adapted it to suit our taste. I usually make double. The lemon juice makes this soup really zingy and special.

Ingredients
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
600ml hot vegetable stock
red pepper - perhaps 2 big shopbought ones, or lots of little ones from the garden ^^
1 tin tomatoes
1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 sticks celery (with leaves if home grown!)
1 carrot (optional)
1 - 2 tsps chilli powder
1 - 2 tsps cumin seeds
1 - 2 tsps cayenne pepper / Ras-el-Hanout spice blend / cinnamon
olive oil
juice of 1 lemon

Heat the oil in a heavy casserole dish. Fry off the onion, garlic, celery and carrot if using until starting to soften. Throw in the cumin seeds and fry for another minute or two to toast. Add the peppers and cook for another couple of minutes. Fling in the stock and the tomatoes and cover, leaving to simmer for 20 minutes. Add the chickpeas and stir. Simmer for another 10 to 15 minutes. Break up the tomatoes a bit, and add the spices and a good grind of black pepper too. Taste and season with salt if you think it needs it - I never do. You can serve it up immediately or save for later - 5 minutes before serving, squeeze in the lemon juice and stir, and allow to simmer for a couple more minutes. Serve beautifully hot with a Sweet Potato Bread roll. You can also add the zest of the lemon with the cumin for extra zing.

The Best Shades of Purple...

2009-08-12T17:16:00.008+01:00

A couple of weekends ago we all went on a walk together to see how the hedgerow fruit was doing. Nothing was quite perfect then, although Dad and I did taste a couple of damsons (small plums) that were close to ripeness. Well, this morning as we were on our way to work we passed the same damson tree and at its feet lay a small puddle of little indigo spheres. When we came back the same way this afternoon there were even more on the ground. So an hour ago we set off with a brewing bucket to go and pick some up!

We started off just picking the ones on the pavement, but soon had all the good ones. Dad went up the drive and asked the owner if it was alright for us to pick the windfalls on their (very long) drive, and they said yes! So in the end we came back with a 23 litre bucket 3/4 full of damsons - and those were just the windfalls we picked in 1/2 an hour!

We're going to put them down to wine. But the best thing is that as we were picking a couple of other people drove past and offered us their fruit - apples and what I think were possibly cherry plums! So there is more picking to be done! (And I think that after our allotment campaign has been successful I may start another one for a community allotment/forest garden...so hopefully there will be bountiful harvests well into the future!).

My next shade of purple is the purple of the cardoon flower. The cardoon is my Mum's pride and joy. It's a member of the artichoke family and in Italy they eat the blanched stems (we don't bother - Mum tried them when she lived there and says they are nothing to write home about). So we grow it purely because Mum likes it! Dad is always insulting it, though I can't think why as it's a terrific bee plant and the flowers when they arrive are truly magnificent. We're planning to enter some stuff in our beekeeping association's Honey Show this year. Dad tells me that there is a photographic category this year, so I've been trying to get some good snaps on bees on this unusual flower. Here are some of the not-so-good ones (I'm keeping the best ones under my hat for now...).

And to conclude, it's not a shade of purple but here is a pic of the fields behind our village when I went on a walk there yesterday afternoon.

Summer Nibbles

2009-08-11T14:26:00.004+01:00

Here's a recipe which my Mum made up last week - I've been making it ever since to use up our glut of cucumbers!

Ingredients:

1 cucumber (makes quite a bit)

1/2 lemon

a couple of good pinches cayenne pepper or ground black pepper

1 pinch salt (optional)

Cut the cucumber into thin rings and arrange in layers in a serving bowl.

Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the cucumber (or use a whole lemon if you like things really zingy).

Sprinkle over the cayenne or black pepper and a pinch of salt if using.

Eat!

We also do the same with thinly-sliced onion: slice 1 onion, put in a serving bowl, add lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper. However you may need more lemon juice as it needs to cover the onion to sort of cook it. Prepare it in advance and it will be even better. Great with curries!

Thinking About Autumn

2009-08-05T09:51:00.005+01:00

I know it's only August but autumn will be upon us before we know it! Although I'll miss the summer weather (yes, who could do without rain, rain, and a bit more rain?!) the excitement of the harvest is already making me fidget with anticipation.

The first blackberries are just beginning to ripen, heralding the beginning of crumbles, pies and lovely warming puddings for the darkening evenings. Last year was an absolutely amazing year for apples and haws (hawthorn berries) - this year they aren't doing quite as well, but we'll still be scrumping away and making apple wine, cider, and endless apple sauce and puddings. I can't wait for our kitchen to be permeated with the smell of slowly disintergrating apples - yellow, green, pink-blushed, red...

It's a good prunus year this year though. There are sloes everywhere, so dense in places that the hedge appears blue. They're not quite ripe yet but it won't be long. Their big sisters the damsons are already ripening up - we all went on a walk at the weekend and found one bush where the damsons were already soft and sweet enough to eat raw...with these fruits we'll be making alcohol - damson wine, sloe gin and sloe sherry...these are my favourite drinks. The sloe concoctions are too sweet to drink in any great quantity but they make the perfect apperitif for a cold winter night...it's just a shame that they have to age for at least a year before they're drinkable!

I have my list of foraging spots ready to go, and am hoping to get out in the canoe soon to sample the wild raspberries that nestle in a very secret spot on the canal bank...if I told you where they are, I'd have to kill you.

My squashes are now really fattening up. They've still got plenty of little fruits left to form but the existing ones are really soaking up any sunshine that manages to peep through the cloud. The Delicata is now bigger than my fist and the Blue Hubbard is actually beginning to turn blue-grey. I can't wait to be eating my own recipe spicy squash soup with parmesan croutons, and the roasted spiced squash that we always eat with Christmas dinner!

The sweet corn is flowering, as are the sunflowers, both of whom will be setting seed as summer turns to autumn. Beetroot and parsnips are swelling under the ground. The late flowers, such as lavenders, dahlias, goldenrod and agapanthus are flowering too. White clover covers the fields like snow. It smells like honey!

As far as bees are concerned, the queen will begin to slow down laying through the autumn, perhaps even stopping completely in the depths of winter. At the moment however it is still all hands on deck; the girls are bringing in nectar, propylis, and pollen in preparation for the cold months ahead. It's been so interesting this year to see how the colony changes throughout the season. For example, earlier in the year when we allowed them to build some comb without foundation, they were putting drone brood everywhere. Now even the drone traps are bursting with worker brood.

This year we have expanded our number of hives by more than 300%. Next year however we will be focusing on maintaining our current numbers and encouraging them to produce honey. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's now time to turn our attention to preparing the bees for winter. We'll be feeding them sugar and honey to increase their stores and to help them build out the new foundation that we've given them. It takes seven parts of honey/sugar for a bee to produce one part of wax, so giving them some extra food will allow them to build comb without depleting their stores before the winter even arrives. Getting the bees through the winter healthy and happy is now number one priority.

This autumn I'll be making a few changes to the garden. We have lots of room to plant new things. I want to cover our fence in Japanese Wineberry, rambling roses, passion flowers (and fruits!) and Clematis. I want to grow some Camassia quamash, Houttuynia cordata (orange bush, used for flavouring in Vietnamese food, aparently) and all sorts of other oddities. I also have my eye on zingibers (gingers) and musas (bananas) for inside the house...the zingibers at work are in flower and they smell like lilies, only better! The citruses are also in flower, their heavy neroli scent hangs like a cloud in the Old Glasshouse. That reminds me that in a few months the oranges and clementines will be in season, and we'll be studding them with cloves to make pomanders! And soon after that we'll be racking our brains to think of a way of making diabetic-friendly marmalade for Dad's delectation and delight! (This year we tried setting it with orange jelly...a complete disaster! But we might try gelatine again).

It's hard to believe that in a few short months I'll be gagging for spring to come so I can get planting stuff in the garden. Most of the plants I've grown this year are annuals so they'll all be gone, but next year I'll just start again and have an even better season than this one (I'll be sowing my peas direct!!!). I also have some new experiments I want to try next year - I want to try growing chickpeas and lentils, and some unusual chilli and tomato varieties too. And who knows, I may even have a brand new allotment for my late crops to colonise!

Oh well, I suppose it was inevitable...

2009-08-05T08:59:00.012+01:00

Omlette, the company that brought the ridiculous Eglu chicken house have now come up with the Beehaus hive.

It sounds a lot like the Dartington long hive - basically a horizontal hive, like a top bar hive, but with 14x12" frames.

The Beehaus costs £465 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RIDICULOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and you can also buy a starter kit with equipment (including "liquid smoke" - aka tepid water!!) and bees.

Well, if this gets a new generation of beekeepers going, particularly in cities, then I applaud it, but I am v. worried that bees are now availible at the click of a button. So now people can just buy bees without even knowing the name of "that mite thingy"!

The Beehaus kit includes "Beekeeping Guide: a complete guide to beekeeping packed with useful advice". I hope that those daft enough to spend £465 for a hive are not so daft as to read only this one unnamed book on beekeeping.

I think my dad summed it up perfectly just now when he grumbled very gloomily "at least they've gone for frames instead of bloody top bars."

Read the BBC article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8184655.stm

If you do want to keep bees and are considering buying a Beehaus, my advice as a beekeeper with a few years experience is to go along to your local beekeeping association's next event and find out more there - most beekeepers will be happy to answer all your questions, and you might even be able to put on a suit and see inside a real working hive. Go to country fairs, bee auctions etc. where you can learn more about the equipment that every beekeeper needs. Visit the nearest Thorne's, the main beekeeping shop in the UK, and have a look at the stuff they sell (this year they've had a complete beginner's kit for an absolutely fabulous price - see http://www.thorne.co.uk/).

Most importantly, go on a course or find an experienced beekeeper who can act as your "buddy", and read up on all the diseases and pests that we're having problems with at the moment - beekeeping is no walk in the park, and requires even more dedication than keeping chickens becuase you can't just ask Mrs Next Door to pop over once or twice a day and and throw food at them!

Information is the most important thing you will need to start keeping bees. You also need to have had contact with bees, equipment and the beekeeping community before you buy - plenty of people think they really want to keep bees until they stung. You only know if you'll be able to keep bees once you've been engulfed in a buzzing, stinging, angry cloud of them! You also need to know that you'll be able to handle the equipment you're thinking of buying, e.g. I've always used 14x12" brood frames like in the Beehaus, but have now swapped for smaller ones becuase I find them very ungainly and too big and heavy. However, they might be perfect for you.

The best advice I can give you is try before you buy. If you decide that a horizontal hive like the Beehaus is for you (certainly they have advantages, e.g. less lifting) then go ahead, but you need to know about all different ways of keeping bees, and their price tags and consequences for the bees, before you make a choice.

Oh yeah, and get your bees locally and from a trusted beekeeper. Apart from the obvious problems with unknown stock (you don't know if they have a disease, what their temperament is like, etc. unless you can trust the person you're buying from) there are other problems you may come across, e.g. this year one of our friends ordered a five frame nuc from one guy and it never even arrived!

For more info on bees and beekeeping see the BBKA's website (http://www.britishbee.org.uk/). You might also want to look at the Basic syllabus (for beekeeping exams - not essential, but it's stuff that every beekeeper should know anyway - http://www.britishbee.org.uk/files/syllabuses/basic_all.pdf).

Vegetarian Supper

2009-07-28T14:28:00.005+01:00

Recently I've turned vegetarian-bordering-on-vegan, due to a number of reasons:

Animal welfare. I don't really see anything wrong with eating free range local meat, especially if you're supporting local business at the same time. However it's just so easy to use chicken stock cubes etc. which of course use the cheapest possible chicken. And I don't want to eat animals that haven't ever seen the sunshine.
Disgust. For some reason the idea of eating animal products disgusts me. Pork chops turn to dust in my mouth, eggs I can't stand (unless they're in chocolate cake or something ^^). I've always been fussy but recently I've just really gone off animal products, even my mum's shepherd's pie and my dad's butter chicken! I still eat honey though, of course.
Health. I lost 2 kg in my first week of being veggie!
I like it. I just like lentils and beans and veg!

Anyway, last night I had what can only be described as a vegetarian feast:

Okra with lemon, my dad's recipe
Mixed veg curry
Rice
Fresh peas
Fried mushrooms
and the others had a pork chop each as well.

So here are some recipes!

Dad's Okra with Lemon

I just love okra, and I think it's in season at the moment. My plants haven't done anything yet but who knows what August may bring? The ones we used yesterday were from Thailand (eek, food miles!) but I just can't resist okra, the minute I see it any green principles fly out the window I'm afraid.

Anyway:

Add a bit of oil to a large pan and heat. I used organic rapeseed oil.
Top and tail the okra, and wash. I used 2 smallish packets to feed 4 of us.
Add the okra to the hot oil and move around the coat them in it.
Continue moving the okra around the pan for around 15 - 20 minutes. They'll release a sort of clear goo. Keep cooking until the goo stops and the okra have gone soft. They should still be green but the smaller ones will be tinged with brown in places.
When the okra are cooked, add the juice of half a lemon to the pan, and stir. Chuck the squeezed lemon half into the pan too, for extra flavour. Cook for another couple of minutes to infuse the okra with the lovely lemony-ness.
Serve nice and hot. I think something crunchy, e.g. toasted sesame seeds, would be nice sprinkled over the top.

Mixed veg curry

We just used whatever was in the cupboard, fridge and garden yesterday! You can use any sort of veg you happen to have lying around. This is how we made last night's version:

Chop an onion fairly finely, and crush a clove of garlic.
Heat a glug of organic rapeseed oil in a hot pan, and add the onion and garlic.
Chop up 2 carrots and a couple of celery sticks - not too big and not too small. Add to the pan.
Add French beans (topped and tailed) and runner beans (topped, tailed, de-stringed and sliced) chopped in half widthways.
Add some fresh tomatoes straight from the garden.
Add some tinned tomatoes too.
Tip in a can of chickpeas.
And stir in a sachet of curry powder,
Leave to stew until everything is soft and lovely, but hasn't lost its colour.

And another of my favourtie vegetarian foods:

Sweet Potato chips

Chop some sweet potatoes into thin chips. We use 1 tuber per person (though I could quite happily munch on more, to be honest!).
Add some oil to a deep roasting tin. Tip in 1.5 tsp of cumin seeds and 1 tsp of black mustard seeds, or the herbs and spices of your choice.
Heat the roasting tin in a hot oven (200 - 220 degrees, I reckon) until the mustard seeds start to pop.
Bring the tin out of the oven and tip in the sweet potato strips. Mix around a bit to coat them in the oil and spices.
Put back into the oven and cook for around 20 mins or until soft and just beginning to char and caramelise at the edges.

There you have it! Sorry there are no pictures, but there's never any left for me to photograph!

2 Grey Weeks Later...

2009-07-21T14:41:00.012+01:00

We've had about a fortnight of rotten weather. I'm just hoping it clears up by the weekend so that I can practice taking a sample of adult bees in a match box in preparation for my Basic exam on Monday 27th!

Luckily I have now learned how to get the smoker going: DON'T USE THE RIDICULOUS HESSIAN SACKING WE WERE USING BEFOREHAND. I have never been able to light the smoker so I was doing some practice the other day. I used our spare smoker in case the main one was broken, and it had a roll of cardboard in there already, so I used that and I lit it FIRST TIME. So fuel choice is important, and thankfully I'm not completely incompetent! :-)

There have been bees out and about but it's mostly bumbles - most of the time it's been only just warm enough for honeybees to venture out, and way too wet. However, we did get some beekeeping done at the weekend, and it was fantastic!

We only inspected 2 apiaries out of our 3. In the first one we have 2 hives and 2 nucs. Everyone is getting on amazingly well over there. The nucs need to go into full sized hives ASAP - they're building up so quickly, despite the weather. We also harvested our FIRST EVER FULL SUPER! We haven't done anything to it yet but we'll be getting our extractor cleaned up etc. soon.

In the 2nd apiary we have the hive that we collected from that barn wall (see the video blog, http://alittleisland-tv.blogspot.com/) and they're doing OK. We thought that they might have EFB, but have seen no signs of that on second inspection. However, they're now quarantined and we'll call the inspector in the moment we see signs. In the mean time I may buy in a tester kit just in case. We now also have separate hive tools for each apiary, and a new record-keeping system, all of which should help us to avoid diseases like that from now on.

The new record keeping system is one that I devised myself. It's basically record sheets where you tick the boxes, e.g. queen seen, tick. Eggs seen, tick. etc. etc. You can buy record cards from beekeeping shops but making your own has several advantages: a) you can design your own layout, e.g. I like to have room to jot down notes and draw apiary layouts as well as tick boxes, b) you can just print out more as and when you need them and c) you don't have to pay for them! I might put mine on the net available for download, not sure yet, but I'll let you know if I do :-)

Chicken news: just over a week ago we unwrapped Cleo's bandaged leg and found that her infection had got much worse. It smelled bad, and it looked worse. There was no way she could have survived an infection like that, so we put her out of her misery. We disposed of her last night, and this River Cottage forum snippet should explain how: http://community.rivercottage.net/users/NJ/forums/poultry/viewtopic/topic_id:462

Since the last post we've harvested our first couple of runner beans and first handful of French beans...they were absolutely gorgeous!

My American corner has gone absolutely haywire, especially the Delicata squash (actually an Italian variety) climbing up the bronze elder bush. There are now some small sunny yellow fruits on there. And my Blue Hubbard squash is fattening up nicely, I just can't wait to eat it!

^ Delicata squash; below, the American corner

In the latest edition of Permaculture Magazine (essential reading!) there is an article about Warre beekeeping, an alternative beekeeping method that claims to be more bee friendly. I'm really interested in non-conventional beekeeping methods, such as top bar hives etc. so this was really interesting to read about. One principle behind the Warre method is leaving the hive sealed up all season...I'm really not sure about that. The theory is that bees leading a more natural life get fewer diseases, but I'm a paranoid beekeeper and like to know what's going on with my bees, so I won't be doing that just yet! However I was interested to read how they add more boxes to the bottom of the hive instead of the top, something to do with airflow and maintaining the temperature...now that we're converting to OSBs (One Size Boxes, aka Rose hives - another alternative beekeeping method where supers and brood box are all the same size - just such a common sense idea!) this is something that we could experiment with too. If you're interested in finding out more about these beekeeping methods I've put some links at the bottom of the post.

Did I tell you that I've got a job at a bamboo nursery? It's only part time but it's really good fun! Boss is nice, pay is terrible but we do get some perks. In fact to date we've had 7 perks at the least...FREE PLANTS! The nursery doesn't just do bamboo, it's also other exotic stuff, but now the boss has a website so he's branching out into other stuff too. The things is though that if a bamboo etc. isn't big enough to be saleable after he's had it a while then he just THROWS IT AWAY. Perfectly healthy plants, just too small! I think he should have a discount section on the website and sell them to other silly sentimental people who don't like to think of sweet little plants being confined to the scrap heap, but in the mean time it means that fairly often we rescue poor little plants (and not always little at that) and get to put them in our own garden! So we now have a garden full of hardy palms, bamboos, bottlebrush bushes and a North American trumpet vine. None of them have been planted out yet but have been given a little TLC. Today we were moving citruses too, and they were in flower and they smellt just so WONDERFUL, so I'm secretly hoping that he neglects them so I can take a few home ;-)

^ Bottlebrush flowers

^ Campsis radicans, American Trumpet Vine flowers

This is an exciting week for our family. It's my Grandma's birthday on Thursday, my Dad's birthday on Friday, and my auntie should be giving birth around the same time! I'm really excited and hoping to have lots of delicious home produce for my Dad's birthday meal...I dunno what yet but I'm sure I'll be able to dig up something!

Anyway, I leave you with the promised links:

http://warre.biobees.com/ Warre beekeeping

http://www.rosebeehives.com/ OSB hives

http://hirschbachapiary.com/default.aspx Top Bar beekeeping

http://www.worldgardenplants.com/ and here's the nursery's website.

Garden Update

2009-07-08T20:59:00.008+01:00

The garden is in full flood. I'm really behind on jobs to do, there are just so many! (Especially now I work at a bamboo nursery 3 mornings a week - I get pretty fed up with watering). Here are some pics I took this afternoon.

^ The alliums are slowly but surely coming out.

^ Fennel flowers.

^ Lovage and purple verbena flowers.

^ Lilies.

^ Himalayan Balsam flowers. This stuff is apparently a real nuisance, blocking up the UK's waterways (it's what Boris Johnson was clearing when he fell in a river recently. Personally I think we should conserve clumps of it purely for that reason). It grows along the Usk where we go in Wales and although it's a pest it's beautiful walking through a forest of it! Bees love it. I think that providing you can keep it under control (admittedly difficult, as the seed pods pop and the seeds go everywhere) there's nothing wrong with this lovely plant.

^ Tomatoes ripening up.

^ Honeybee on a pretty borage flower.

^ My "New World" corner: squashes, beans, tomatoes, sunflowers, sweetcorn.

^ First French bean!

^ Pretty bean flowers.

^ Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco pods, fattening up...

^ Blue Hubbard squash...I'm really excited about these ^^.

^ Greenhouse: cucumbers and you can just see the loofa. They're getting so big I couldn't fit them all in one photo.

^ Aubergines and a couple of peppers, just beginning to put on flower buds.

^ A flower on one of the okras?! This seems a bit odd as the plant is still only 5 cm tall...it's the first time I've grown okra though so I don't expect it to work! But I'm not complaining!

And finally I leave you with:

Gardening Tip:

Members of the curcurbit family (i.e. anything remotely courgette-like, including cucumbers, pumpkins, squashes, melons, loofas, etc.) tend to be very prolific, producing lots of fruits in even a short growing season. Often you'll find however that some fruits rot on the plant, particularly at the beginning of the season. This is because these plants produce more fruit than they can ripen. Some fruits inevitably have to drop off. This shouldn't stop them from going on to produce a bumper crop! I occasionally remove a fruit or two if a plant seems covered in rotting ones but otherwise, as you can probably glimpse in the photo of the squash above, I just let the plant do the work!

Poultry Problems and Tortoise Trouble

2009-07-08T18:31:00.006+01:00

A brief blog about animal care and the problems we've had so far this year!

We keep a range of animals, mostly for fun. If they make eggs or honey that's a bonus! Our menagerie consists of 3 chickens, 2 ducks, 1 budgie, 2 rabbits, 1 tortoise, assorted fish, wildlife and of course our bees. Most of our animals are free to wander around our garden which I think makes for a very happy life.

Earlier this year though our tortoise, whose name is Alfie, was losing weight and being very inactive. He'd stay burried in his sleeping box all day and wouldn't eat at all, even when offered his favourite, dandylions, and treats that he wouldn't normally have, such as strawberries. We took him to the vet who told us to keep him warm and give him plenty of baths in nice warm water, but this didn't seem to make any difference. We trimmed his beak (it overgrows) to make sure that he actually was able to eat, and fussed over him daily, to no avail. It looked like he was going to die.

However, for a few months now, Alfie has perked up. The reason is, I believe, simple: tortoises just aren't designed to weather our cold climate here in the UK. The weather just wasn't warm enough to induce him to move around or eat, and his heat lamp could only do so much. My advice, if you find yourself in a similar situation, is to take your tortoise to the vet, and if nothing seems to be the problem, give him baths at least twice a day in hand hot water, leave food out for him just in case, and just give him all the love and care you can. Hibernate him well in the winter as this keeps his body clock ticking over, and keep an eye on his weight just in case. But apart from that, just make sure he rebuilds his strength over the summer and keep him otherwise healthy. Alfie perked up as soon as the sun started shining. He now eats every day and is often allowed out in the garden where he chases the chickens.

Now then, this week I spotted something really concerning. One of our ducks seemed to have broken a toe. She was sitting very still and determined to keep her foot off the floor, but when the chickens came a bullied her and she had to move off, she was limping really badly. Pops and I examined her closer and it seemed that one of her toes had broken - it was bent out of shape. The picture doesn't really show it, but it was pretty clearly snapped.

We had no idea how she'd done it or what to do, so Mum emailed the breeder, Nicki Janaway from the Warrawee Duck Farm, for advice. Nicki said that as long as she was eating, drinking and preening we shouldn't worry and should just leave her. Sure enough, within a day, she was on the mend, and limping much less. I think just the act of walking clicked the bone back into place. So, if your duck has a similar problem, just make sure she's taking care of herself, keep an eye on her, but don't worry too much.

And finally a problem with one of our chickens (yes, we named them. The chook in question is Cleopatra). Cleo, unlike her sisters, has two stumps on her legs which we assume are the remains of the spurs that I guess her ancestors had. For a while now she's had a lump on her leg. We think she may have damaged her spur stump and it may have got infected. At any rate, it looks as if it went haywire when it tried to heal herself as she now has a large lump on her leg. It doesn't seem to affect her very much - she's still top of the pecking order and bullies the other two a fair bit! But obviously we are concerned that it may get worse and seriously damage her health and happiness, so we've been trying to make her better.

I expect that other people (with more sense and money, I expect) would have killed her or got the vet to chop it off but unfortunately we can't bring ourselves to do the former and we can't afford to do the latter. We've been treated her leg therefore with surgical spirit and antiseptics. They seem to do the trick . We treat her every day and the lump began to crack off and the skin began to start healing not long ago. Thankfully because we've been doing it every day for a while she seems to get quite comfy and stays absolutely calm throughout her treatment.

Last night however we went outside to treat her and discovered that she was pouring blood. The lump must have ruptured, got snagged on something or just cracked off a bit more. Anyway, we bandaged it up (and no, we didn't pull the lump off. It was pretty loose and she was healing in some places, but I think we would have just made it worse doing that). We managed to stem the flow it seemed, and she still seemed completely unflustered! However we were worried that her health might have declined and that she might be dead by morning.

I'm pleased to report that Cleo seems fine so far. She's been limping a bit today - whether that's because of the lump or having a huge bandage round her leg I don't know, but she's still been bullying the other two and seemed well enough to try and eat my courgette plants! We're not out of the woods yet, but our plan is to keep the bandage on for a few days to give her time to heal. Eventually the lump will break off and the skin will heal. We'll keep treating to make sure the infection doesn't come back. So she seems to be doing OK, so far, I'll post again to let you know how she progresses.

It's hot!

2009-06-30T17:51:00.002+01:00

The weather here is now VERY summery, in fact it is hot! However, this means that our cobbled-together solar wax extractor is doing its job!

Here's a new picture from new beekeeper Paul taken during our inspection at the weekend. The bee with the red blobs on her back legs (find the middle, then go left and down a bit) has been collecting propylis! Propylis is tree sap which the bees collect and use like glue, to fill in gaps etc in the hive. They use the same part of the body that they use to collect pollen but with propylis other bees have to clean it off and take it away to be used...it's too sticky for the bee to clean off herself! Summer is the only time of the year when bees can collect propylis so they'll be working hard and cementing up hive bits and bobs right now.

2009-06-26T14:20:00.002+01:00

So here is Flo's new business card.

I've got a similar one.

Now we are all set to start selling our honey and wax products!

Exciting Stuff

2009-06-26T13:21:00.023+01:00

Don't worry, I'm not in a ranting mood today, you're safe. Thanks for your comments Beegirl and June though, I'm glad you're enjoying the blog!

Instead I want to show you how my garden is coming along - I've been neglecting it a bit for the last fortnight or so but it seems to be getting on fine without me!

Above: first flower buds on the loofa!

Above: first pods on the dwarf beans! And the peas are podding too.

Above: flower buds on one of the cucumbers - the other plant has flowers open already, but this plant is literally dripping with flower buds, it's completely covered. So both cucumbers look like they're doing well...

Above: the squashes are flowering, and the first fruit has set! In the past my squashes have always produced lots of leaves and one or two fruit, but they've been very disappointing in size, and have usually gone mushy before I get round to harvesting them. I've done my research this year though, and have thus cut back on the number of plants and varieties, given them lovely rich soil enriched with comfrey leaves and put them in a nice sunny spot. Fingers crossed!

Above: I just love allium buds, they're even prettier than the flowers!

The main problem now is aphids in the greenhouse. I've planted chives in there but things are still getting attacked. They were on the peppers, and after giving up on the amazing power of chives, I used the bug gun. Now, however, they have moved on to my aubergines! I need to act quickly, but I appear to have damaged my rotator cuff (shoulder - my dad is prone to the same injury) so typing this blog let alone gardening feels like a huge painful effort right now. It'll have to wait till the weekend when I have my minions to help me! We did sow some marigolds this year (supposed to repel just about every bug you can think of, but not as good as chives!) but they've been a complete disaster.

Above: just look what aphids have done to this pepper! Luckily the new leaves are coming through nice and healthy, and the plant will recover.

And let me share with you this beautiful picture of one of our apiaries - it's part of a 360 degree pic and we haven't quite got it matched up right, but it still shows what a pretty spot our bees live in.

And let me show you my latest craft project. Beadweaving used to be my thing, before I ran out of the special thread and sort of gave up on it, but I have now rediscovered it...and this time I'm just using normal sewing thread - it seams to work fine! (I know, that was really terrible, but I couldn't stop myself). The pattern is one I just scketched out on some graph paper. I really love all those Native American crafts - I just love the use of pattern and they're made so skillfully it's unreal.

Recently we've also been harvesting some of our beeswax using a solar extractor. But this isn't any solar extractor, oh no! This is a special homemade cobbled-together one, made from 2 OSBs, a cooling rack, a collander and an old sheet of glass. It's quite a sight, especially as it's right outside our front door.

We put a load of really old black comb in there and just look at the result! The purest golden-yellow beeswax! When you compare it to some beeswax bought from Thornes (on the left) you'll notice the huge difference in colour - but then again, home produced stuff is always better! I can't wait to use it in my homemade cosmetics...I just need a bit more of it before I can start experimenting!

And I leave you with a portrait of our house guardian, a small clay gremlin Mum made at pottery one time. Despite the creepy yellow eyes he's quite cute ^^.

Foulbrood Inspection

2009-06-24T15:20:00.007+01:00

As you'll have read in the last couple of entries, both American Foul Brood and European foul brood were found in our area recently. It was a local bee farmer who has apiaries all over the place and who moves his hives around a lot that first contracted (or first noticed) the diseases. Both diseases are notifiable, i.e. it's an offence not to report them, and can devestate colonies. In fact if your hive is found to have American Foul Brood there is nothing to be done and the hive - boxes, combs, and bees - must be burned.

This morning our communal apiary was inspected by a Bee Inspector. Only Dad and I, our neighbour who is new to beekeeping, the Inspector and our association secretary turned up. We started off going through Jayne's hive - everything OK. We then moved on to the nucs and hive that Dad and I keep in the communal apiary and we came across a few hitches - one of our nucs was a frame short, so they'd built a lot of brace comb; one nuc had some chalkbrood (easily sorted by keeping them on mesh floors and making sure the hive is well ventilated); another nuc is queenless (well, a while ago they hatched out a new queen but she didn't get mated). There was one heart stopping moment when the Inspector found a dead larvae in one hive, but fortunately it didn't "rope" like AFB does, and as the cappings looked healthy and there was no other sign of disease we were given the all clear.

Jayne then left but Dad and I stayed on to help out and learn from the experts as the Inspector and our secretary went through the other hives in the apiary. It was fairly nosy of us, but it was a good opportunity to see how other people manage their bees. Here and there we saw queen cells that needed knocking down; someone had put their frames together wrongly; another hive swarmed right in front of our eyes! I'd never seen anything like it before - the bees clustered on the front of the hive to start with, before flying around in a huge cloud all over the field, and eventually they moved upwards and clustered on a branch - too high up to catch, but hopefully they'll relocate and populate one of the new beekeepers' hives - I know one or two of them are desperate to get on with keeping real live bees!

There was one colony with a heavy chalkbrood infestation but otherwise every hive seemed healthy - I worry a bit that if your bees swarm and you don't know about it, you aren't checking them regularly enough, but fortunately there were very few problems. That is, until we had worked our way down to the last few hives.

Up until now the Inspector had been complimenting us on the temperaments of everyone's bees and the condition of the equipment. The boxes were shocking. Old, black...they just looked unhygenic and unloved. One of them was just a atsack of empty boxes but it was open to the bees and being robbed out. We also found a whopping great hornet inside - we definitely don't want to encourage those! Our secretary chopped it in half with his hive tool and the front half ran off into the grass.

The other two boxes, apparently all owned by the same person (who was conveniently anonymous) were just as bad, if not worse. The bees were really angry, the angriest in the apiary. The coverboards were NAILED DOWN (so presumably they haven't checked for disease etc. once in who knows how long); everything was propolysed up and was so old the propolys was black; the entrance had been nailed up on one of them too and so the bees were getting in through holes at each corner. There was no QX in one of them and not enough frames, so there was just wild comb everywhere...in short, it was absolute chaos. There was no way for the Inspector to inspect them properly. Evetually he managed to take a sample and test it for EFB - luckily (and it was 100% luck - the care of the beekeeper was non existent and had nothing to do with the fortunate outcome) it was negative. Personally I would have torched the lot then and there.

Above: knackered old box full of wild comb - absolutely impossible to inspect in any detail.

So. At the end of the inspection, we know that we're currently in the clear with regards to fouldbrood. But it looks like our secretary will be implementing some new rules - not being able to identify the owner of each hive really hampered the inspection. And the last three hives! Urgh, I feel another rant coming on.

What I think is where a lot of people fall down - and this goes for small scale beekeepers like the owner of those appalling hives at our apiary and for the bee farmers in America who are always moaning about "CCD" - is that we often see bees as different from other animals. We don't see them as pets, we don't see them as livestock. We often see them as a separate thing, because they're not cuddly (though I would argue that they're still cute). True, they're not fully domesticated, and so they're slightly different to the cows, sheep and chickens we keep (though I would argue here that Exmoor ponies etc. are not fully domesticated yet they are treated with the utmost respect and enthusiasm by the people who monitor and care for them). But to me, the beekeeper has the same responsibility to his bees as the farmer or smallholder has to his pigs and poultry. They're livestock. We keep them to make useful products - and whether the animal produces milk or meat or wool or honey, we still have the same duty of care. All these animals need safe, waterproof places to shelter; they need food and water; they need to be kept in social groups; and they need to be looked after so they don't get ill. So many beekeepers fail to provide one or more of these basic things, whether that's through letting the bees starve during the June gap (something which yes, even I have been guilty of, but I like to think that I've learned from that now) or keeping them in the crappiest old woodworm-ridden rotting boxes that aren't even fit for firewood. To me, if you repeatedly abuse or neglect the animals you're supposed to be looking after, and take no steps to improve your practice and knowledge and alter your behaviour, the RSPCA can come along and prosecute you. And I think this should apply to bees too. End of rant.

New video

2009-06-19T21:07:00.003+01:00

The video of us collecting that wild colony is now on the video blog at http://alittleisland-tv.blogspot.com/. Take a look!

I've just found out that both AFB and EFB have been confirmed within 3 miles of our association apiary. Our regional bee inspector will be having a look on Wednesday. This weekend we will be inspecting as usual, but being particularly on the look out for signs of any kind of disease, and we will be scrupulously hygenic. I'll be blow-torching my hive tool often, using disposable gloves, disinfecting between hives and changing gloves between apiaries. Our suits are freshly laundered, and we might even wash them between apiaries. Any waste wax, dead bees, anything waste, will be going in the bin - we do this usually, but inevitably the occasional speck of wax escapes. Not this weekend. No signs of foul brood last time we checked, but who knows how fast these diseases spread.

Bees & Beaurocracy

2009-06-19T11:26:00.006+01:00

Recently American Foul Brood has been found in our area and now we are keeping a careful eye to see if it arrives at our association's apiary. In the meantime, I am praying that it doesn't.

AFB is a bee disease caused by a bacterium and it affects the bee babies, the brood. The brood are turned to brown goo - literally. If you uncap a cell in an AFB-infected hive, you'll see something similar to the contents of your nose when you've got a bad cold, but brown. Because the brood dies colonies cannot replenish their populations and so they collapse.

AFB is deadly, and even worse, there is no treatment. We are just checking our hives regularly and being extremely hygiene-conscious, because if an apiary is found to have AFB the bees must be shut in their hive and the whole lot burned: hives, combs, even the ground underneath the hive, and yes, the bees.

AFB is a notifiable disease, ie. if you find it in your hives you are legally obliged to report it. The apiary cannot be used for years afterwards as the bacteria can live on in the soil. European foul brood is similar but not quite as dire; if it's caught early enough, it can be treated. But unfortunately the stuff found just a few miles away from us is the untreatable AFB.

This leads me to the subject of this post: bees and beaurocracy. As a beekeeper I find it frustrating sometimes the number of hurdles there are to jump through. If you want to sell your honey, the label must conform to exacting standards. The weight written on the label must be at least 4mm high with one space between the "numerical value" and the unit. You must have the country of origin written on the label separate from the beekeeper's contact address. You must have a batch code and best before date (best before date on honey? honey is antibacterial, antiseptic, anti this and anti that - why it needs all this hoohah I don't know) etc etc etc. Fortunately there aren't as many regulations as this in other areas of beekeeping, but there are still methods of best practice etc. often set out by old men stuck in their ways, and often I don't agree with them.

However, now that we're threatened with AFB, I've come to realise just how important this beaurocracy is. In our association this year I believe there is a new member who has been keeping bees for a while but has only joined this year. I am sure there are many beekeepers across the country who are still going it alone. They may not even be members of the national BBKA, let alone a local or regional association.

And for me, this is a problem. In being unconnected to other beekeepers through some kind of association, these beekeepers risk having to deal with their problems alone. If one of their hives catches AFB, who do they tell? Everything I know about notifiable diseases has come from my association. Without an association, beekeepers need to keep up to date by themselves. And in a busy world, I'm guessing that lots of us don't have the time to do that. So if they don't know who to phone up about AFB, or even what it is, how do we know that there aren't hives across the UK cultivating this and other serious bee diseases? And vice versa; if members of an association find foulbrood in their area, how would an independent beekeeper find out about this so they could take steps to protect their hives?

Recently in an article I read in a beekeeping magazine, someone had written about the huge fluctuations in the quality of beekeeping courses. The writer mentioned a course he had heard of that didn't even mention varroa in passing. This concerns me too. Beekeeping is growing in popularity, and we need to be able to support new beekeepers. They need to know about all the problems the bees face at the moment in detail, so that we are protected, and so are they. If a course doesn't even mention varroa, which we kow how to treat and has now been in the UK for about a decade, then what else doesn't it mention? Chalkbrood, sack brood, foul brood, nosema, small hive beetle, Asian hornets? I really believe that there needs to be some kind of system to ensure that these courses deliver up to date information and offer sound scientific advice.

Then there are those who don't even take courses; I'm one of them, and so is one of our neighbours who has started beekeeping this year. Luckily, my Dad was serious about beekeeping and took a course, and he taught me. We're now mentoring our neighbour, and we still ask the more experienced beekeepers of our association questions fairly regularly. But unless you have this kind of close mentorship, how are you going to know about bee health, and who will you go to when you hit a problem?

Another factor to consider is the exam system. This year I'm sitting my BASIC exam, as are Dad and some new beekeepers. When Dad and I attended a practical session with some of the new beekeepers, it was clear that they hadn't handled real live bees much in the past. Of course everyone needs time to learn, and I'm just soo happy that our association is growing in size every day! But I was really surprised that they felt ready to take the exam. I think the exam system needs to be a bit more controlled, even a bit more beaurocratic. I think that the BASIC should be something that people are encouraged to achieve, but that it represents a tangible level of expertise and experience - "the candidate will have kept bees for at least 1 year" as an entrance criterium would help with this. I don't like to see people doing a course and rushing to gain a qualification for the sake of doing a qualification; what's wrong with getting to know bees, to really understand how they behave and how to handle them, and to prove the extent of your knowledge only when you can back the theory up with real experience? Courses need to be more practical, and should, in my view, encourage new beekeepers to continue learning for at least 1 whole beekeeping year.

Naturally, well-rounded courses and association membership cost time and money, but I would argue that so does beekeeping; if you're able to keep bees, then you're definitely able to do it properly and go down the necessary routes to make sure that you are keeping your own and others' bees safe. Bee health really is a serious issue. Despite what celebrity farmer Jimmy Doherty would have you believe in a recent article in Country Smallholding mag ("the bee health situation isn't really that serious", or words to that effect) bees are crucial to the world's ecosystems. There's a saying amongst beekeepers that if the bees die out, we would follow them within four years. And whether this is just an old wives tale or not, myself, I definitely don't want to find out.

So, if you read this blog and think that all our beekeeping antics sound fun, then good for you! It's really fantastic that so many people are getting interested, as we've got a real opportunity now to save the bees. But please, do it properly:

Look things up in books (try your local library) or on the internet.
Find out where your nearest association is, and go along to an open day - lots of associations have them, or similar events, and will be over the moon if you turn up and say you're interested in starting to keep bees.
Take a course to find out more (there are even distance learning courses you can do!) but subscribe to a beekeeping magazine such as Beecraft to expand your knowledge of the bees. Subscriptions only cost a few quid a year.
Make sure your course has a practical element - you don't know whether you're going to be able to cope with having angry bees flying at you until you've experienced it!
Join the most local association you can - we pay for membership to our local one and are automatically members of the regional and national associations. If you can affford it, you could even join more than one local association. We're on a county border, so this could be particularly helpful if you're in a similar situation.
Go to apiary meetings, honey shows, open days etc. to find out more about beekeeping and to meet more of the beekeeping community.
And befriend an experienced beekeeper(s) who can offer advice and support.

And if beekeeping isn't for you, but you still want to save the honey bee, there are some really simple things you can do to help. Find out more about honey bees at some of the addresses below. Grow bee-friendly plants in your garden, balcony or window box. Buy local honey, and talk to the beekeepers who produce it - ask them about the health of their hives, what they think is going on with varroa, CCD, etc. You can still be part of the beekeeping community even if you aren't a beekeeper.

For more info on bee diseases, joining associations, etc. see the links below. I hope this rant has been helpful and motivating. I don't want to put anyone off keeping bees - I have never done anything so fun, fascinating and relaxing as beekeeping. I think it really does keep me sane! But when my bees are threatened, I want to be able to trust other beekeepers to look after their bees with the same level of dedication I show to mine. This doesn't have to mean more beaurocracy - beekeeping can and should remain a relaxing, accessible hobby - but I do think standards need to be kept high. And that calls for a more integrated, connected system.

http://www.britishbee.org.uk/ - The British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA). Loads of info on what it's all about, exams, where to find courses near you, etc etc.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/ - DEFRA - the government body responsible for all things countryside.

https://secure.csl.gov.uk/beebase/ - National Bee Unit - DEFRA'S bee bit.

http://www.bee-craft.com/ - one of the best beekeeping mags

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/newhome.html - Dave Cushman's site all about beekeeping, with a section dedicated to New Beekeepers, and just about every aspect of bees and beekeeping imaginable.

A good book to start out with is "Guide to Bees and Honey" by Ted Hooper - a must have.

Update

2009-06-18T18:09:00.010+01:00

We've now eaten the first homegrown courgette of the year - totally without the bitterness that you get with shop bought ones. Delicious!

Things are really going in the garden now. The cucumbers are absolutely covered in flower buds; the first Gardeners' Delight tomatoes have set; the dwarf borlotti beans are now in flower (the ones in the post before last are runner bean Hestia - sorry about the mistake, I must have been operating on autopilot); bees are buzzing, birds are singing...in fact, we have wood pigeons nesting on our North facing wall, collared doves living in the nook behind our satellite dish and now blackbirds raising their second clutch on our front wall!

Above: gardener's delight toms just set.

Above: Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco (dawrf) flower - what a pretty pink.

Above: I just loved the way this butterhead lettuce glowed in the sunshine the other day.

Above: the greenhouse. Cucumbers and the loofa at the back, aubergines in pots waiting to be planted out down the left, peppers and okra with seed trays of Italian beans down the right.

Today I made a lemon pudding according to Sara Buenfeld's recipe in this months Good Food mag...unfortunately for my figure it's worked a treat and is delicious! (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/11258/luscious-lemon-pudding-with-summer-berries)

Yesterday afternoon was spent at Geoff Galliver's house. He's the secretary of our beekeepers' association and a very experienced beekeeper. Dad and I will be taking our Basic exam this year (bet you didn't know beekeepers sat exams!) and fortunately after talking it over with Geoff it sounds like we're already pretty up on it all. Just one or two things to check, but most of it is stuff that every beekeeper knows. But I haven't done it yet so we'll see how things go.

Here's a pic of the honey we collected from that wild colony - luckily, we haven't had to melt it! We have filtered it but I think it's still saleable...not as good as ours, which is beautifully floral, but this stuff has a smoother, deeper flavour and beautiful ruby colour.

This weekend we're busy socialising but I'm hoping we'll still be able to go canoeing (elderflowers!) and to transfer one of our nucs into a full sized hive...I'll keep you posted!

Bees, bees and more bees

2009-06-14T19:39:00.006+01:00

This weekend has been seriously bee-y. On Thursday we got a call about a swarm, and it turned out to be an entire wild colony living in someone's cavity wall! It was a big operation to move it. Below are a couple of pictures, and you can see a video of some of the action on our video blog at http://alittleisland-tv.blogspot.com/ (or at least I hope you can...it is taking an age to upload. I'll be 102 before the time it gets there by the looks of it!).

Despite Dad's finger being stung so many times that it swelled up like a golf ball (he even had to take his wedding ring off for the first time in 20 years...my mum didn't seem to mind but I think he found it a bit odd) it was a successful operation - we took all their honey as well, and it fills up our 5 gallon brewing bucket. We may not be able to sell it as we might have to melt it out of the wild comb, but it will still make good feed for the bees in winter, Christmas presents, honey for our own toast etc.

Yesterday we inspected the hives at our main apiary. We had left a stack of empty boxes there and amazingly when we went back this week there were bees living in there! A swarm had settled! And it didn't look as if it had come from any of our hives. Anyway, they obviously came down from the top, as the queen was laying in one of the spare supers we'd left there, but we marked her and moved her down into the brood box and now she'll be off to a flying start. We donated the brood in the super frames to our triple nuc colonies who appear to be struggling. But a new generation of house bees will get them going.

The good news is that one of our queenless hive has requeened - she looks healthy and fertile, and it's so satisfying when you can breed your own queens. We did buy 5 new queens this year, but next year I'm hoping that we'll use our own stock for a while. We've been quite successful at it this year and we've got enough new blood in now that we should be able to breed them ourselves for a while.

Our main honey-producing hive was looking swarmy, so we did an artificial swarm. Luckily however they're such a strong colony that I doubt our honey harvest will be effected much. We still aren't doing as well as we'd like this year on the honey front, but now we know about the importance of VENTILATION in a hive if next year is nice I expect we'll do much better.

Today we inspected the bees at the association apiary with Jane and Paul, two new beekeepers that Dad's mentoring. Jane collected a swarm 3 weeks ago and they're now covering 4 frames - not bad! We marked the queen today, although she was hard to spot because the bees were abnormally long in the abdomen - Jane's workers are about as long as our queens! Paul is still waiting for bees but his hive is all assembled and ready to go, along with a very snazzy alighting board of a type I hadn't seen before. So I'll be looking those up sometime.

We got a call from the Dave, whose garden the wqild colony is now in. They have already stung a neighbour, but no one seemed that bothered and I think Dave and Vicky are too excited about having bees at the bottom of the garden to worry about things like that! The bees were quite active when we turned up but they're just finding their way around a new place. Eventually they'll settle down. They were doing beautiful circular flights tough. I'll see if I can get it on camera to show you.

Another batch of elderflower wine is now on the go, 75% of my tomato plants are now in the ground and are beginning to flower and even set fruit; I planted chives amongst my celery a while ago to ward off aphids and I think it's working, though I may have to put more chives in; and we finished off the weekend with the perfect barbecue, topped off with homegrown salad, homemade garlic bread, rude bananas and chicken & lamb kebabs with a marinade that included pollen! Our first barbecue of the year and it was probably the best one I can remember. A good summer so far.

First Fruits

2009-06-12T14:56:00.018+01:00

Today I picked some of the first fruits from our garden - the first gooseberries, white and black currants and some strawbs. We've been picking the strwabs for about a week now but there are still loads more to come. Our ones don't have that perfect balance of sharp and sweet that you get with the best strawberries, but they have such a flowery honey taste - they're just so fragrant, I can't believe that strawberries can actually taste like honey!

So far my phormium fruit net appears to be working! I don't think the blackbirds have had any yet so it's looking good. The strawberries are doing so well this year because although they're in the ground (lots of people prefer to grow them in containers) Poppy, whose plants they are, has tied them so that the plants are raised well above the ground. This stops all the creepy crawlies getting to them first and I think it helps them to ripen too.

The rest of the garden is looking good too. I'm fairly late planting out my tomatoes - the first couple of fruits have set now, with more flowers on the way, although the plants are pretty pot bound so I need to get a move on. The rest though is looking promising - the loofa has gone beserk, we're harvesting the first batch of turnips now, the peas are flowering and out the front...the sweetcorn is making good progress (it literally doubled in size with the rain last week), I've got the first couple of courgettes getting bigger every day and the beans are beginning to climb and even to flower!

Above: dwarf Lingua di Fuoco borlotti bean flowers.

Above: Dwarf beans (French & runner), sweetcorn and climbing beans (French, Italian & runner) growing with a couple of sunflowers, ppurple elder, foxgloves, snapdragons and other pretty things.

Above: First courgette!

The comfrey has more or less finished flowering now so I'll be chopping that back and making nice things with it - everything from liquid manure to luxurious hand cream with any luck! There is still plenty of stuff in flower though; take a look.

Over the past fortnight we've been doing a bit more alcohol too. We racked off our Damson Jam Wine - it's lovely, almost like a liqueur! Because it was made from jam however the sediment included solids that looked like this (below). This is what happens when your wine has pectin in it. When you make jam you need pectin to set the jam to the right consistency; in winemaking you try and kill the pectin off with an enzyme called pectolase. It looks like we didn't put in quite enough pectolase, but it was easy to rack the liquid off and we'll see what the wine's like when it's matured!

We also made some elderflower champagne a couple of weeks ago, and racked it off into demijohns earlier this week. We used Hugh F-W's recipe from River Cottage Spring...smells great, but at the moment it just tastes like sugar water. It's bubbling away now though so the magic will be happening. We'll be going out in the canoe this weekend (great for reaching all the wildfood that you can't reach from the bank!) and picking another batch, as well as looking out for other goodies...on a very small strecth of canal we can pick blackberries, hazelnuts, watermint and even wild raspberries...

Elderflower wine. See Hugh F-W's recipe at this link here: http://www.channel4.com/food/recipes/chefs/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall/elderflower-champagne-recipe_p_1.html

We were called out to a swarm yesterday and it turned out to be an entire wild colony living inside the cavity wall of a farm shed. So we have a major operation on our hands tonight. It's really important that we get this colony - a) it's nice for us to have more bees (and to get them for free) and b) wild colonies in the UK are very rare now, due to varroa, and they almost invariably die out over winter. So we need to save these honey bees and take them somewhere safe and warm.

There have been a lot of bee thefts in our area of late - a few up in Shropshire, I think, but most of them down here in Hampshire. So we're keeping the location of our apiary sites under our hats! The really sad thing about it is that it's definitely a beekeeper doing it - you can't steal bees without knowing how to move them safely! There are two theories: as bees are very expensive now, they may just be stealing them to make a bit of money, or, even sadder, it may be a bee farmer who has lost so much stock that they don't know what else to do.

Our bees are looking OK at the moment, apart from some new nucs we made up and gave new Carnolean queens. They were fairly small to begin with but a few are even smaller now. The queens have been released now though so soon their populations should start building up. We had to rescue one queen though when she was more or less abandoned by her colony and left to freeze to death. She's living on top of the stove at the moment with some workers to keep her warm, and this weekend we'll find a home for her, ASAP!

Legal Drug Cultivation

2009-06-05T21:12:00.000+01:00

This evening Dad and I went up to see some old neighbours who moved into a new house with a bigger garden, and have very kindly offered it to us for veg cultivation and apiary! Vicky was asking us if we knew what the weed invading her new area of wildflower meadow was so we brought some back to look it up.

It's sort of thistle-like, with some fine hairs, serated edges and almost dandylion shaped leaves...and it turns out that it is a type of wild lettuce, lactuca serriola, which apparently has some of the same properties as opium! I tried some and it was alright - a bit bitter but more or less edible. I'm not sure I'll be consuming it in any great quantity any time soon but if I end up deciding to "expand my mind" I'll know where to go!

(I think I'd better slip in a small disclaimer here as we live in a mad world: if you do something stupid or pick the wrong plant and poison yourself as a result of reading this blog, it's your own bloody fault and nothing to do with me!).

Dave and Vicky's garden is amazing. They obviously love gardening but as Dave has MS it is of course difficult. But it's so cool that they've offered to share their garden with us and I can't wait to get going. People are beginning to operate schemes like this up and down the country, and teamed up with the increase in demand for allotments it looks like more and more people will be rebuilding their communities through growing their own. Exciting times!

Phormium Fruit Net

2009-06-05T15:57:00.000+01:00

We have a garden full of Phormium tenax (New Zealand flax). It's a plant with flat, broad, spiky leaves and my mum loves it, so a while ago when one of our neighbours was getting rid of 5 small phormium plants Mum couldn't say no. It grows fairly large - we have a mature one that takes up about 1m x 1m x 1m, but it's worth the space coz it's so blooming useful!

I think I've already mentioned in an earlier post that I used Phormium fibres to train our espalier apple trees. Well, this week I've gone one step further and made my own Phormium fruit net.

Phormium is such a useful plant, I think everyone should try and grow a bit! I've used it for string, I've woven place mats out of it, and now I've made a fruit net...and the Maori of its native New Zealand traditionally use Phormium to weave stunning ceremonial cloaks. It's all done by hand - no loom - and it's so intricate and delicate...if you look it up on the internet you'll be astounded at the stuff they can do with it!

In our south-facing front garden we have a cluster of fruit bushes - a red currant, white currant, black currant and gooseberry. They're planted very tightly but so far are doing well. The problem is that last year Mr and Mrs Blackbird beat me to it and I only managed a handful of blackcurrants. Well, this year we have several baby blackbirds too and so this year action must be taken.

Last year we used a plastic net. It was bright green, and broke where you didn't want it to and stayed strong when it would have been more helpful for it to be easy to break. It was also completely useless at keeping Willow out of my celery. It is just the sort of stuff that I hate to see go into the environment. So, while I'm deciding how to dispose of it, I'm opting for a more natural sort of net this year.

To begin with, I cut quite a few phormium leaves at the point where they become stiff, pithy and traingular, rather than flat. I then slit them in half - they're very easy to split along their length, but you need sharp scissors to cut across the fibres! I then split each half into smaller strips - a maximum of about 4mm across.

Next I tied them together using a simple double knot until I had lengths that were approx. 2 armspans long. I made lots of lengths like these.

I then used my bean poles as a frame, tying a long strand horizontally at each end of the frame. I then tied more lengths onto this base length at regular-ish intervals, again with a simple double knot.

I had an odd number of vertical strands.

I then tied the strands loosely into pairs, leaving gaps to give the net and open structure. Of course, as I had an odd number, when I got to the other end I had one left over. I simply tied it onto the strand next to it and worked my way back along the row, so that this time the strand I had started with was the one left over.

I carried on working until I got fed up! And now the net is over the fruit bushes. It might be a bit small but I'm hoping it will act as a deterent in any case.

This is by no means the quickest option, but it only took me an afternoon and in my view an afternoon of tying knots is a lesser evil than that horrible green plastic stuff that will take millenia to rot down. So I'm happy :-) .

Just got to see if it works now!

Campaigning for Allotments

2009-05-27T14:12:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd write a post about our campaign for allotments. Allotments are a hot topic in the UK right now. For years nobody's wanted them; so many sites have been nearly empty, and lots of sites have been or are being closed down for new development. (A well-attended site in London is being bulldozed for the Olympic village (something that our country can't even bloody afford)! I read that some allotmenteers' grandfathers used to grow on the same site. Now they have been moved to a new site and have lost the beautiful soil that was built up after generations of cultivation!).

Luckily however, demand for allotments has shot up recently and new alloment sites are being created all around the country. Add to that guerilla gardening and schemes such as Hugh F-W's Landshare, and it seems that half the country want to grow their own! Fantastic!

I first started hankering after an allotment last year, and luckily I eventually managed to get my Dad interested and motivated, and he has worked wonders. There is no allotment site in our village. The nearest ones are miles away in busy towns, and the waiting lists are huge. So we set out to try and get a new allotment site in the village.

When I first started out I was making posters etc. that were all very demanding and pointed the finger at our local councils. Then I read the Transition Handbook, and my outlook entirely changed. I realised that if we were more positive and were nice to the councillors we'd be more likely to get what we want! I think this was crucial as otherwise our campaign would have gone a very different way indeed.

The first thing to do was research legislation etc. about allotments. I found several organisations with great advice (see below for details) and the entire Small Holdings and Allotments act of 1908. Although several later acts added and tweaked bits and pieces of the original act, the 1908 one is the one that has some key information in it: apart from in London, if 6 or more tax payers ask for allotments, the council is legally obliged to provide them. They can even force land owners to sell or rent out land for the purpose of allotments.

Of course, this is no guarantee that it won't take another 15 years for them to get round to it, but it's very useful information to have!

The next step was to find our six. That was easy, as we simply asked friends and neighbours. I don't think we know anybody quite as mad about growing their own and green issues as we are, but several families were pretty interested and agreed to sign our petition. Dad delivered it to the council, and the rest is history, as they say.

We've been really lucky that we're in a rural area with plenty of green space, and that our council have been really positive and proactive since we submitted our petition. Dad frequently emails the clerk to check how things are going, and it's clear that the council are just as keen to make this work as we are. Even if your council is a bit slower however, there are still things you can do:

Write letters to your councils. For us, the parish council is the most important, but write to your district or even county council if you need to. I'd recommend being positive and persuasive rather than accusatory. Outline why you want an allotment, the possible community benefits, and offer to help.
Visit your councillors! Dad turned up at a parish meeting one evening (apparently they seemed quite surprised that anyone turned up) and meet them face to face. Again, be nice, positive and inclusive. Introducing yourself helps people to put a face to the name and just generally feels friendlier.
Get advice from some of the people at the bottom of this post. The National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners has some template agreements etc. that are really helpful and can really get the ball rolling.
Write to your local paper etc. and tell people about what you're trying to achieve and why. Tell as many people as you can what it's all about.
If your council is unhelpful, why not go to a local landowner directly? Again, there are organisations (see below) that offer template agreements, and organisations such as Landshare can help match landowners to people who want space to grow.
Alternatively, consider joining or starting a garden sharing initiative. Landshare is also great for finding people open to this, and schemes are already in place in several areas. Transition Town Totnes is a prime example of how these sorts of schemes can work.

Our council were really proactive recently and included a piece about allotments in their newsletter. They invited people to come to the annual parish assembly and register their interest. Even before the assembly, I think another 10 people had registered their interest! According to the latest email from the clerk, we are now up to 30 people wanting allotments, and everyone's starting to think about sites and access, etc. Of course, there will be people in the village who won't be too pleased about having 30 allotments outside their back door. However, with an inclusive approach there should be ways round this. For example, the authorities can always impose rules about sheds, use of old carpets etc. and bonfires, and I think these could make a huge difference to the way an allotment site looks.

After we'd already started our campaign, Mum found an old dossier of my Grandad's from the 1970s. It's the Friends of the Earth "Allotments Campaign Manual", and I wish I'd had it from the start! Apart from it being incredibly precious for sentimental reasons (it's a great feeling when you find out you're basically carrying on the work of your ancestors) it's full of useful information. It mentions the relevent acts of parliament and ways to get round stifling legislation, as well as facts and figures about food security etc. It amazes me that we knew about all this stuff in the 1970s, but still managed to get into the mess we're in today! Luckily however, it seems that growing your own has become a lot more mainstream today, and isn't just the haunt of communist pensioners! So who knows? This time around we might actually achieve something and get all the things that allotments can offer:

Rebuild communities
Personal development
Include marginalised groups
Offer food security
Promote exercise and healthy eating
Reconnect people with the natural world
Allow people to save money, make friends and generally have fun!

So, we still haven't got our allotments, but things are moving along and it's pretty exciting. Hope this helps anyone else trying to get an allotment! Best of luck and remember the most important thing about campaigning for things like this: be positive and inclusive and you're more likely to get results!

Useful things to look up:

National Society of Alloment and Leisure Gardeners (NSALG): http://www.nsalg.org.uk/

Allotments Regeneration Initiative: http://www.farmgarden.org.uk/ari/

Allotments UK: http://www.allotments-uk.com/

Eastleigh Allotments: http://www.eastleigh-allotments-association.org.uk/index.htm (the website of a group of allotmenteers who have been forced to abandon their allotments in Eastleigh, Hants. Despite a 5 year battle and a long waiting list, the allotments will soon be turned over to development).

A government report on allotments: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmenvtra/560/56014.htm

Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1908/cukpga_19080036_en_1 (according to Grandad's dossier, other relevent acts include:

The Allotments Act 1922
The Allotments Act 1925
The Allotments Act 1950

Tales from the Allotment: http://allotmentplots.blogspot.com/2007/03/allotments-and-law.html (good summary of allotment law)

More on allotments: http://www.warwickdc.gov.uk/WDC/Leisure+and+culture/Parks+and+recreation/Allotments/More+on+allotments.htm%20(notice(notice the Permaculture principles quoted word for word under "Allotments and Sustainable Development"!).

Allotments Law Broken?:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/7655556.stm (a BBC article about allotments in Wales).

and of course, the Transition Movement:

Transition Town Totnes: http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/

Transition Culture: http://transitionculture.org/

Transition Network: http://www.transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork

Update

2009-05-26T16:44:00.001+01:00

I've got a bit behind this week, so excuse me for racing through things so unthoroughly!

Last weekend we didn't go to the Smallholder's Show at Builth Wells like we did last year. Instead we stayed local and went to an open day at Sparsholt Agricultural College. It was a totally different experience, but very interesting! Whereas the show at Builth naturally focuses on small-scale producers, at Sparsholt we got to experience mechanised milking, aquaculture, forestry...all sorts. I can't say it's the sort of farming/gardening/self-sufficiency type thing I'm interested in, but it really gave you an insight into how commercial farmers operate - interesting, but also kind of sad when you think about all the stuff they're up against today!

Piglets in the agriculture section of Sparsholt.

The last of our overwintering crops has been harvested now. The carrots, although knobbly, were spectacular. And the tops make good animal fodder!

Recently I've also looked at spinning waste fibres. I took some loose fibres from some fraying fabric scraps in my stash, and tried carding them with some silk waste and merino wool. The resulting rolag was very light, with polyester and lurex threads giving it a lovely shimmer. The lurex didn't stay in the spun yarn so well, but I plied the yarn with black cotton thread to create a wiggly yarn, and this seems to make them more secure.

Friday saw me cooking - quite a rarity! I made Good Food magazine's Moroccan chickpea soup (here's a link: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1499/moroccan-chickpea-soup ) although I added a carrot, half a red pepper, harissa, cayenne pepper and a bit more lemon. Came out brilliantly, definitely one to add to my repertoire!

Pops and I also made some delicious chocolate truffle swirl ice cream - basically the most chocolatey ice cream you've ever eaten with ripples of even chocolatier stuff thrown in! Mixing the cream into the chocolate custard made lovely swirling wood-grain patterns.

On Saturday Dad and I took our neighbour Jayne to an apiary meeting with our association's swarm coordinator, Keith. It was a fantastic day - absolutely baking, with the bees working hard. It was a fantastic day for the newbies, and really nice to see so many people turn up! It was great for us too, though. We've been beekeeping three years now, but the advice on queen rearing from some more experienced beekeepers was very much needed!

As far as the bees are concerned, things seem to be going quite well. The hive we had to artificial swarm at our main apiary is a bit shaky - we've reunited most of the splits back together, but none of them seem to have a queen. We're going to let them try and re-queen themselves. They have a strong population so things aren't desperate. But I'm glad we've got some new queens on order! The split we did at our other apiary has been very successful. The artificial swarm has already filled half a super with honey! We have now have three strong nucs too, made up from splits. We've seen the queen in one, and she looks like she's mated, though she hasn't started to lay yet, and the other two we haven't seen the queen, though it looks as though they're there. All three are very strong colonies however, and so there will be no harm in waiting a while before coming to a conclusion on the state of the queens.

The weekend also saw us take a canoe trip on the canal. We took a bucket to collect elderflowers with, but they were only just coming out - we were just a week early! Oh well, better than going too late! We'll go again next week and hopefully come back with enough for wine, sparkling wine and cordial. One of the recipes we'll be using only requires 1 pint of flowers to make 1 gallon of wine, so hopefully a little will go a long way!

We also let our tortoise, Alfie, romp around the garden for the first time. He's been off his food a bit lately, but with the warmer weather seems to be perking up. The other animals are curious but a bit nervous about the strange "moving rock", except for Willow, who bounded straight up to him, sniffed him a bit, and promptly rubbed him with her chin (or chins) to mark him as hers. Sweet!

Alfie stalks the ducks.

Yesterday we visited my grandparents in Hertfordshire. It was really good fun - my Grandpa and I swapped tomato seedlings, so I now have 6 more tomato plants to find room for! They're a variety called Roma. I haven't looked it up yet,

Sorry, I had to break off there when an enormous hornet flew in through the window and buzzed around my head! She's gone now but unfortunately she lives to fight another day and chomp her way through bee after bee...I got one spray in, but she looked distinctly unfussed about it. Bummer.

Anyway, my Grandpa and I swapped tomato seedlings, and my sister and I picked his strange salad leaves...I think they were chinese veg - definitely some pak choi in there, maybe mizuna, but I'm not much of an expert. My dad and I also got to look around his workshop, where he used to do wood carving. He can't do it any more because the wood dust affects his lungs, but it's an absolute Aladin's cave, with all sorts of tools, papers and blocks of beautiful wood in there. At a few of the shows we've been to this year, there's been people green wood working, which I find very intriguing - just as well I have a Grandpa who knows all about wood!

Green wood work demonstration at Sparsholt.

Our neighbours across the road from us recently noticed a bumblebee nest right by their front door and asked us to remove it for them (I think the husband expected us to spray them with something nasty, but luckily the wife if very fond of wildlife and a lot more understanding!) so on Saturday that's what we did. I stood back and let Dad do the work, but I needn't have worried; even when he had found the nest and was digging them out, the bees were weirdly calm!

This pic is a bit blurry; it shows the queen. Large abdomen full of eggs.

Bumble bee brood; much bigger than honey bee brood and in clumps.

We rehomed them in a large plastic pot, lined with straw, and placed that on the site of where their underground nest had been. One night this week, when all the flyers will be home, we'll remove it to our apiary, which is nice and wild, and where the farmer is very wildlife-conscious.

I leave you with pictures of the garden as it is at the moment.

Victoriana Chic Gone Too Far

2009-05-19T18:22:00.001+01:00

Now, I have to admit that I do like a nice antique or vintage Victorian mourning veil etc. as much as the next girl, but this is taking it too far!

Our heating has been broken for ages but now we have no hot water. So we are bathing like Victorians!

I.e. we boil the kettle and take a bucket of hot water up and try and get washed as quickly as possible to avoid getting cold (us and the water).

All I can say is that it really makes you appreciate having hot water on tap - and convinces me that solar hot water would really be a good idea. The sun is more reliable than the bloke we've employed to fix it!