Review: Dylan Moran

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I went to see Dylan Moran at the Anvil on Saturday and I am still laughing. V good. Go see it now.

General Update

I haven't written for ages so I've got some serious updating to do!

• Honey harvest: our crop this year was disappointingly small. We got a fair wax crop but the bees had eaten 90% of the honey by the time we got to it, because the summer was so miserable. Next year we will probably take a spring harvest as well as an autumn one and just feed the bees really well. Even though there isn't much of it, our honey does taste divine, even though I say so myself. Things always taste better when they are home produced.

Uncapping

Sorting out the extractor (only cost a tenner!)

Honey!!!

• Unfortunately one of our hives died...probably of starvation. It was a hive we had set up this year, we didn't take any honey from it, and they had been doing so well earlier in the season. The cause was once again, that they'd eaten all their stores, and also our fault - we should have been feeding them. I was so surprised when we went up to the hive and we found out it was dead...it actually smelled like a dead animal, like a piece of roadkill or something. You wouldn't think that piles of dead bees would smell like that, but they do. Like one dead organism.


• Visit to Wales: we avoided the Abergavenny Food Festival like the plague and instead took a trip to the lovely village of Skenfrith. Unfortunately I was unable to stop my father having a scrumping spree. There was a German film crew in the High Street, filming Unter Den Hugeln Von Wales, which apparently means Under The Hills Of Wales. Rather surreal.


• Homemade pasta: we have got so fed up with eating endless spinach and swiss chard that we have been trying to come up with ideas of how to use the stuff...so we made pasta! V. good indeed.

• Chutney: have been making jars and jars of the stuff. We have even managed to make some sugar free stuff for my diabetic dad - the secret is to use eating apples; combined with the sultanas, they provide all the sweetness you need.
• Cidermaking: on my sister's birthday with some of our friends over. We made seven gallons of cider out of the bags and bags of apples we have been collecting....some from our own garden, others from the wild, some were given by friends, and some were "borrowed".... we didn't just stick to cider apples - we did eaters, cookers, the lot, and it made for a really lovely juice...just hope the cider turns out nice! We've got some more apples to do now and all....we might get another few gallons.


• Feeling arty: I've been doing loads of observation recently, and not much final pieceing. i have however taken some half decent photos of my work, and have tried out altering them on the computer...I love the effect! (NB: The following images are copyrighted).


• Geese: the canada geese are flying in thick and fast now; I have heard them lots of times but I saw them for the first time today. I love this time of year. They are so utterly beautiful, they take my breath away.


• Feeling the crunch: we are cutting back on everything and shopping at Lidl. One of my friends today said that he'd barely noticed it was happening! Alright for some...

Crafty Crafty and a Review

Well, it is nearly the end of the summer hols, at least for my sister and dad. The weather hasn't been great this year, although we had a great time in France, and have had a great time getting crafty this holiday.

Pops and I have been doing lots of potting and spinning and weaving this holiday. I love it! We've been to the Milland Pottery about five times now to learn from Angela Carter how to make pots. It's great fun, and really nice and messy. So far neither of us have produced the perfect pot (especially when you see them next to Angela's stuff...) but for a first attempt these ones came out really well, and our later attempts are noticeably less wibbly-wobbly.

We have also been to the Willow Close studio twice, where Pops is learning weaving and I am learning to spin under the excellent tutelage of Carol Keats. I really love spinning. The whole time we were in France I just couldn't stop.

This is the first yarn I spun, a thick and thin single of natural Corriedale roving, dyed Blue Faced Leicester roving, and uncarded natural Jacob fleece. It's really fuzzy and soft, and althougn it is by no means the perfect yarn, I'm pretty proud of it all the same. I like the fact that it is all the colours of Party Rings biscuits! It crocheted up pretty nicely into a headband/strange necklace thing.

This is the yarn I produced last time. Carol did a brilliant exercise on colour with us. I used her drum carder to make up 8 rolags in various colours of Merino roving and uncarded natural Jacob fleece, before spinning and plying. This yarn is much more even than my first attempt! There are about 8 different colours gone into each of the singles. The colours came from a stunning postcard picture of a hosta, but the darker turquoise reminds me of a kingfisher.

(The yarn pictures were taken on the sill of our new double glazing...they're really nice but there is still a layer of dust over the whole house from when they were installed). (Sorry to go on about something as dull as double glazing).

Here is a small section of Poppy's weaving...I reckon she's bloody brilliant at it!

Mum came along too (for she is the Lady with the Car) and made a plate with Angela and a beautiful little woven piece on a pegloom.

The garden is stunning but I don't have any pictures yet, so I will save that for next time.

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REVIEW: "iNTERTWINED" by Lexi Boeger (Pluckyfluff)

This was my holiday read and I love it. The instructions don't cover the basics of hand spinning but even if you are a beginner, as I am, this boko will be a really inspiration. It covers a load of techniques, has some beautiful patterns and some really good advice in it. It's a fun book - easy to read, colourful, and with a nice layout. There are also beautiful photographs and really clear diagrams. Above all this book is truly inspirational - the technqiues are really interesting and combined with some of the unusual materials used in the book the effects are STUNNING!! If you're a spinner, or even just like textiles and fibre, buy this book, and discover what yarn is really about.

An affliction

I think that the ferry journey on the way back from my summer hols in France has done me in a bit. It was a really awful journey: the boat was full to bursting with people, one of the engines blew up, and when my dad and sister went to the cinema it looked like they'd never come out again (the only good thing about their cinema trip was that my father managed to restrain himself from singing and dancing to the entire Mamma Mia soundtrack). I am afraid to say that motion sickness claimed me. And now I can't get rid of the blooming thing.

Motion sickness is the sort of thing that I have always thought was made up by people who wanted attention or were seriously mentally ill, along with allergies to peanuts, oranges, donkeys, etc. I assumed it was just plain moaning designed to compensate for people's weakness and stupidity. I suppose I have been proven wrong; either that or I am turning into a hyperchondriac. It could well be watching too much New Tricks.

Review: Grow Your Own Veg by Carol Klein

I got this book for my birthday, and I couldn't do without it. Not only is the book set out beautifully, but it's full of brilliant advice on all sorts of things - how to choose a variety, where and when to plant, pests and diseases to look out for...In short, everything you need to know. Carol covers all the usual vegetables, and some more unusual ones. My only problem with it is that it doesn't give any advice on celery! Although I do consult other books and research on the internet too, this is always the first book I turn to; it's clear and conscise, without being too basic.

And not only do you get all this, the book is also full with Carol Klein's own thoughts and experiences, which are sure to really inspire you to get growing.

9.5 / 10.

(I got the picture from Amazon.co.uk. Theirs is a good price).

Aha!!!!

I have finally discovered Willow's secret. I now know how she manages against all the odds to get into my celery bed and dig a whopping great warren. She leaps! She flings herself bodily over the top of 1/2 a metre of metal net, between bamboo sticks that could impale a rabbit, through the plastic netting and voila! In the celery!!! Well, now that I know this, there can be only one outcome. I will be victorious, and she will have to find somewhere else to dig. All I need now is a plan.....

Honestly!!!

I don't know. You give a queenless hive a lovely new Hawaiian queen, and next time you and open them up and are expecting them all to greet you by saying "aloha", it turns out that they must have stung her to death, and are making their own queen, who will of course turn out to be the most evil, angry insect ever to have waddled from frame to frame.

RIP Her Majesty

Oh well. The plan is now to set up another nuc with a nice, friendly queen and then unite the two colonies, after having squished the new grumpy queen.

The good news is however that everyone else is doing well, and most of the hives are in for a population explosion, which will be good once the summer crops start flowering. We are set for a brilliant honey harvest this year.

After Dad went to a disease recognition day with our regional bee inspector (turns out Hampshire is one of the worst counties in terms of contracting foulbrood, poo) we came up with several ways of improving our practice and ensuring that there was less chance of our hives contracting disease. These include:

1. Keeping the ground around each hive clear and clean
2. Removing all waste wax from the apiary in a bucket with a lid
3. Sacrificing several frames of brood to completely disrupt the varroa lifecycle at an appropriate time in the year
4. Checking for small hive beetle with our s.h.b trap

So far, we've forgotten all about all of these. However, we already do some good stuff, such as reducing drifting by spacing our hives far apart, using mesh floors, and disinfecting the old marigolds between each hive, not just each apiary.

We will probably be abandoning the smoker, as well, and using a water squirter instead. It has the same effect as using smoke, but instead of making the bees panic, it provokes a cleaning response, apparently. Which can only be a good thing. Also, as long as you remember to fill it up, I suspect that using the water squirter will involve fewer burned fingertips. Which would also be good.

The garden is magnificent at the moment. There is so much to eat. Whenever I go outside I head straight to the peas, becuase at the moment they are absolutely perfect; both the petit pois and the mangetout are just pure sugar at the moment. Delicious. I've planted a second crop now, so hopefully we'll have another few pods to eat in late summer. (I chose perhaps the least impressive one to take a pic of, btw).

We also harvested our gooseberries, which we beefed up a bit with some shop-bought ones. However, just being able to pick your own is so satisfying. Most of them went into a fool, but there are some left over which I may use to try out Hugh F-W's gooseberry icecream recipe. Yum.

My blackcurrants are ripening up, too, and some of them need to be picked. I can see them being mixed with some apples and turned into a crumble.

The courgettes are coming thick and fast, although the pumpkins and squashes keep falling off the plants...I think this may be lack of water or lack of nutrients, as they're all in pots. So some of them have been planted into the ground now, and hopefully that will sort them out.

Also, we have our first cucumber flower!! Hooray!! There are lots more on the way so hopefully we'll be putting our own cucumbers in the Pimms this year.

This afternoon my sister and I have been making a minestrone soup. I'm so excited about eating it tonight, coz it's full of homegrown stuff! The onions, carrots and potatoes we used in it were bought, and we used a veg stock cube instead of making our own, but apart from that everything else was grown at home. Here's a list:

1. Homegrown celery; a bit stringy but really intense flavour

1. Homegrown courgette
2. Homegrown cabbage; lovely waxy dark green leaves, brilliantly bitter
3. Homegrown swiss chard; just plain beautiful (not a v good pic, sorry)

Oh yeah, and bought tinned tomatoes. But you can't grow tins at home.

Next door's extension is under question a bit, but that doesn't stop the builders, who have broken our fence. Oh well. We won't be the ones paying for it to be repaired.