A Frustrating Day

Monday 21st May 2012
Dawn over the Dyke
Cow Parsley decorates may of the dykes around here in early summer.
I think it's a plant of understated, delicate beauty.

This hare has been gallumping about in the orchard for the last three days. He (or she) is slow to scarper and seems almost nonchalant to my presence. (I only had a 100mm lens on the camera)


Frustration
At last the thermometers are set to soar in the UK this week. Just not quite here, not quite yet. Problem is, apparently, the North Sea is still only 9 degrees C and since we're only about 12 miles from the coast we'll be covered by cloud for most of the day. Mind you, at least it should be dry and warmer than the rest of May.

This will be a week to catch up with all that sowing. But before the sowing, the mowing.
April and May are incredibly busy months on the smallholding but, with the weather hindering so many vital jobs, it has been a difficult balance between maintenance and creation.

After visiting the immaculate garden, mine somehow looked even shabbier and more unkempt than before. Now these are qualities in which I take some pride when it comes to my appearance, but not to my gardening!

With the ride-on out of commission, it was time for Plan B. I decided to have a bash at the shorter grass with the second-hand mower I had recently purchased (only really intended for the verge, inaccessible to my other mowers.) It was hard going.To tell the truth, the grass was a little too long and a little too wet. But we struggled along, occasionally jamming up when asked to tackle the longer patches, until one time the engine stalled and refused to start up again. Presuming something was blocking the blades, I tilted the machine, only to hear a glug glug sound and an unhealthy dose of black oil emerge from the machine. And that was that. However many different techniques I used to pull the chord, however many times I primed the fuel, nothing.

So, Plan C.... the Strimmer
First problem, I seem to remember the spool of strimmer line unravelling itself when I investigated it at the end of last year. After endless attempts to sort this out, I eventually decided I might need to refer to the instruction book. Not the clearest (you always know you're heading for trouble when you get a thick manual and realise there's only about two pages of instruction alongside minute diagrams, just in every imaginable language going). Finally worked out the plastic line needed to be threaded through a hole in the plastic spool. This is where the next two hours disappears, for in the middle of that hole, and totally unreachable, had lodged a piece of masking tape! I poked, prodded, soaked in boiling water, poured washing liquid in. I may even have cursed a few times! After two hours a small graveyard of paperclips lay before me. One had managed to push through, but the tape remained. Then...and I wish I'd known this...my clumsy prodding caused a plastic cover to come off and there was the piece of tape, easily removed and the cover easily replaced!

Most of the day gone.

Not a lot achieved.

Start up the strimmer... no! Strimmer strike. Ignored over winter for too long. So I put the battery on to charge and gave up.

Tomorrow I'll forget the mowing and stick to the sowing.



Splitting the Hive and Blue Eggs

Sunday 20th May 2012
Nearly June now, though you wouldn't know it.

Two hives, brood chambers only.
Hopefully a successful outcome in a couple of weeks.

Too may queens
I apologise for the lack of pictures, but I had to concentrate on my bee-keeping and a camera would get in the way. The day started with a visit from a helpful fellow bee-keeper. Into the garden trudged the three of us in our space suits. We opened up the hive and had a good look at our buzzy friends. They impressed our colleague with how calm they were and how busy they had been drawing comb and bringing in new honey.

But what we were most interested in was the brood frames, which would provide a trained eye with vital clues about the state of the colony and the fitness of the queen. Many of the frames were full of sealed brood. This means that the larva inside the hexagonal cell has been sealed in by the adult bees, ready to turn into a bee itself. There were also fairly mature larvae, but a distinct lack of smaller larvae and it took us a long time to find eggs. The fact that we did meant that the queen is still laying, but the reason for so few was not obvious - maybe lack of space, the long spell of cold weather or a weak queen. There were some drone (male) cells, but not overly many.
There were queen cells too, some sealed with their giant larva sealed in a sea of white royal jelly. The first warm day next week would probably lead to a swarm. This could be followed by further cast swarms, each time halving the strength of the colony.
So, we had a decision to make. Whether to sacrifice the queen and hope that one of the new, virgin queens would be victorious over the others and find suitable drones to fertilise her. What happens is that the queen flies out of the hive high into the air in search of drones to mate with. If successful, she returns to the hive to begin laying and the colony continues with its new queen. However, that's not a guaranteed outcome, so we felt it better to take a second option, splitting the hive to create a false swarm.

We found the queen easily (she is marked with a white blob to indicate that she is a 2011 queen) and moved her frame into the new hive, placed to face the opposite direction to the original hive. We then picked out some frames of brood, pollen and honey, in effect to give her everything she would need to build a new colony. We then shut that hive over and will leave it to get on with its own business for at least two weeks.
We then went through the remaining frames, leaving only the best looking queen cells. Hopefully, nature will take its course and we may end up with two hives. We'll find out what's happened in two or three weeks. Until then we leave well alone and just wait.
The worst scenario is that we end up with no queens and not a lot of bees. The middle scenario is that the two half colonies are not strong enough to survive as two, in which case we reunite them.

For the moment, fingers stay firmly crossed.

Overall though, it was fantastic to get the chance to look through the hive with the benefit of an experienced eye and we were very, very grateful indeed.

Blue Eggs and an Immaculate Smallholding
Then it was time to keep an appointment over in Donnington, where we had arranged to visit some fellow smallholders to have a nosey around and to purchase a dozen Crested Cream Legbar eggs (the blue ones) to go in the incubator.

Roger's smallholding yesterday was a smallholding on a shoestring, making excellent use of pallets, old bath tubs, second hand polytunnels and cardboard boxes. A smallholding which had evolved organically and very successfully. Today's smallholding was equally impressive, but it couldn't have been more different. Immaculately tidy and organised it was certainly ready for its opening to the public on 17th June as part of the National Gardens Scheme.
NGS - Garden

Colin and Janet concentrate on rare breeds and have their own website, well worth a look.
http://www.thehawthornsrarebreeds.co.uk/

Prize for cutest animal of the day had to go to the day old pygmy goat, though it was a close run thing with the various punk-haired chicklets and the family dog.

 

Once again, thanks to Colin and Janet for extending a warm welcome to us.

Pressing Matters of a Cider Nature

Saturday 19th May 2012
There's a sun rising out there somewhere.

Below a copy of the article I have written for the FGSC (Fenland Goatkeepers and Smallholders Club) newsletter on the cider making day run by Roger and Janet.

On the morning of Saturday 19th May a motley and disparate crew, rubber gloves at the ready, descended on deepest Wisbech, lured by the promise of bountiful apple juice.(Nothing to do with the potential for turning it into cider, of course!) But it wasn't long before Roger had them whipped into shape and working like a well-oiled machine.

After a quick briefing they were off, eagerly chopping, bashing and pressing. In no time at all the chopping team, Sam, Ed and Sue, were making headway into that truckload of Bramleys.

Bucketloads of chopped apples moved along the line to the scratting team, Charlotte, John and another Sue. Equipped with hoes, border spades and biceps, those apples had no chance.

Then onto Roger to feed them through the adapted shredder into nets where they queued to go under the strain of the press, a monster piece of evolution from which flowed, during the course of the day, 130 litres of juice.







Ruth was the first apple press trainee, ably helped by the expert, Keith (his red bobble hat kept popping up in my photos). After the first pressing, Ruth was a fully qualified apple presser ready to pass her knowledge on to the next young (?!) trainee.








And this was the delightful thing about the day. Everybody got to have a good bash at every job. Roger was always there to help smooth the production line and answer everybody's questions. 

He had put a lot of thought into organising the day so that nobody missed out on anything. We were even trusted with the monster that was the apple press.



To give our aching arms a rest, every now and then Roger stopped and gave us more snippets of wisdom. We learned how to make and store apple juice as well as how to turn the juice we'd so energetically squeezed out of those apples into something more potent, cider, wine or cider vinegar. For the technically minded, there was advice on how to construct an apple press and how to turn a cheap shredder into a most effective apple pulper.

Janet kept our thirst quenched with teas and coffees and organised a marvellous spread for lunch. Everybody had brought something along and it was wonderful to enjoy such a feast of home grown, home reared and home cooked produce.

And best of all, at the end of the day we got to purchase a good quantity of our freshly squeezed apple juice for the princely sum of 31p a litre.


















Oh...and we got to try a small tipple of cider too!

But happiest of all were these little fellows, who tucked in enthusiasticaly to the left over apple pulp - no waste here.



















Our very special thanks go to Roger and Janet for their warmest of welcomes and for sharing their wealth of experience. Also to Keith for giving his time, sharing his experience and helping us with the cider press.

This day was a great way to get to know new people and was a great community activity. I can see cider bashes really taking off!

Off now to check on that fermenting apple juice...

Magic Beans

Friday 18th May 2012

The chickens (and guineafowl) emerge one by one from their overnight lodgings.

Growing upToday was a big day for 'the teenagers'. In their short lives they've moved from the incubator into a plastic brood box in the lounge, then into their own chicken run outside, occasionally allowed out to play, but only when the other chickens were off roaming.

But today the teenagers got to explore the big wide world. These four are very friendly chickens, not just with me but with each other. They stick close together and look out for one another.

For most of the day they disappeared, weaving their way through the overgrown grass in the chicken pen. But early afternoon I looked down the land to see them jumping around in the meadow.

By the end of the day they had become baffled by the fence which surrounds the chicken pen. Two had got themselves on one side, two on the other! They were easily caught and passed over the fence to be reunited, only to find that their old home had been taken over by two French Copper Maran chicks - the product of the next hatching after the teenagers.

On the plus side, remember that lovely new chicken house we bought about a month ago. Well, aside from laying the occasional egg in the nest boxes, the chicken flock has decided to spurn it in favour of their old quarters ( a bit like the way I prefer my ripped old jeans to a smart pair of trousers, I guess). So, from now on, the teenagers will have their own safe and secure home for the night and will henceforth be free to roam from sunrise to sunset

Wigwam City
Plants were moving into new homes today too. I have bitten the bullet and planted out all the runner bean seedlings (some growing rampantly in their tiny pots). I have two varieties, seeds saved from last year. Painted Lady is a traditional variety with wonderful flowers to add beauty to their luxuriant growth. Czar is a less vigorous white-flowered, white seeded variety whose beans can be dried to provide butter beans for the winter store cupboard.
















Of course, I may be growing Painted Czars if the varieties cross pollinated last year!I put in more purple podded mangetout seeds today too, with sweet peas and nasturtiums to climb up the trellis with them. In the rest of this bed I planted Swiss Chard Bright Lights, breadseed poppies and some Cosmos seedlings.
In the bed with the Painted Lady I am trying landcress, which should enjoy growing in the shade of the runners. And in between the Czar wigwams, Sweetcorn Minipop and a smattering of pot marigold seedlings.

I'll wait another week or so before I plant my other bean seeds. By then three of the four vegetable groups will be virtually all in the ground and I'll just need to put out the brassica seedlings to complete the fourth quarter of the wheel.

Back to the beans'n'peas. There's just one task left, which is to clear the Swiss Chard which overwintered. But just look at it! Look how well it's doing. They charge a fortune for just a few of those leaves! So I may harvest some and, if it tastes OK, leave some in for picking until this year's crop is ready.

On a more frustrating note, I think I broke my compact camera today. I don't think I did anything terrible to it, but as I went to take a photo this evening the lens refused to pop out and I received a persistent error message. So it's on to the DSLR, which will take nice pictures but is too bulky to be carting around all of the time.

Are we sitting comfrey?

Thursday 17th May 2012

Comfrey.
The bees love it. The veg plants love it. I love it.


Comfrey grows at an astonishing rate and tolerates being cut right back four of five times a year. This gives a huge yield of greenery from the comfrey bed.


OK, I hear you say, but what do you do with it? Eat it?


The value of comfrey lies in its deep roots which are incredibly efficient at tapping into nutrients. It can be simply added to the compost heap or used as a mulch, or the leaves can be steeped in a barrel or bath of water to give a very good plant feed.

But I plan to produce something much more potent. So, for this purpose, today I cannibalised a broken old pallet and built my Comfrey and Nettle Juice Extraction Unit.
Into the bin go chopped up leaves, weighed down (and covered when I make a more suitable weight) and at some point a thick, smelly black sludge will start to drip out of the bottom into waiting bucket. This is plant feed liquid gold and a little bit goes a very long way.


Until now I had forgotten, too, that the wilted leaves can be fed to chickens. I must try that very soon.


Only half of my comfrey bed would fit into the plastic bin, so I have left the rest and as yet there is no room for nettles in there either. I will hopefully get into a routine of topping it up every week. Meanwhile I will let some of the comfrey flower for the bees and the nettles, as long as they're growing in the right places, provide a wonderful home for all sorts of beneficial insects. I won't let all the comfrey flower, as I believe that flowering takes up a lot of energy which would otherwise be put into the leaves.


And before anybody points out that comfrey can all too easily turn into a most unwelcome and ubiquitous weed, I purchased Russian Comfrey Bocking 14 variety, available from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. This was developed in the 1950s by Lawrence D Hills, a leading early figure in the organic gardening movement. Bocking 14 is sterile, so can only be spread by root division. This I will be doing next year, as I want to have little patches of this wonderplant all around the veg patch and fruit area.

And a big patch near the chickens too, so that I don't forget to include it in their feed.

Meanwhile the asparagus shoots reach for the skies.
So tempting just to eat a few, but not this year.

Oil Seed Rape

Wednesday 16th May 2012

Oil Seed Rape
I don't remember this crop from my childhood, so I guess that it has slowly and steadily worked its way up to being part of the English countryside. It certainly adds a splash of colour, but at the same time somehow symbolises to me the large monocultural fields supported by current agricultural policies.
I don't really know what the stuff is used for, but I do know it is part of the cabbage family. It's sometimes a bit wiffy, but nothing terrible, and I'd rather they farmed this next to my house than cabbages.

As a beekeeper, I look upon OSR with mixed feelings. It provides a great early season source of food, but the honey it produces crystallises solid, even when still in the hive. It probably won't be long before I go on a steep learning curve about extracting OSR honey from the honey frames.

As a birder, I must admit I have been slightly surprised by my neighbouring field of sunshine. I had heard that Sedge Warblers had adapted to breed in it. More than that though, the area of field in the photo above holds singing Reed Warbler as well as Sedge Warbler. Yellow Wagtails have been seen flying in and out of the crop, as does a Blackbird regularly. A Dunnock sat atop the rape singing its head off yesterday and the Whitethroat spends quite a bit of time in the crop too.
Of these, I am most surprised by the Reed Warbler. It mostly sings from near the edge of the rape field, but it is most definitely in the crop and not in the nearby dyke. Its progress is best tracked by watching the individual stems of rape twitching as it hops and flits, otherwise unseen, just under the surface of the yellow sea. A better name might be Rape Wobbler!

Swarm Cells!
This evening was a still one, perfect for a decent inspection of the bees. We also planned to make the brood chamber bigger by adding a box of super frames above the brood frames. The idea is for the bees to feel less overcrowded and so decide not to split into two colonies.
The inspection went very well, except that we found 14 queen cells. These are coccoon like cups which the bees build out so that they can turn the larvae into queens. They are a good sign that swarming is fairly imminent. This can be a good thing, if controlled, since we could end up with two hives of bees, but it could be a bad thing leaving us with half a hive of bees!
There also seemed to be a large number of drones, male bees which are easy to tell by their larger size. This can be another sign that swarming is firmly part of Plan Bee.

We will seek the advice of a more experienced beekeeper. Meantime, we hope the bees don't do anything rash!

Found this rather wonderful plant growing by the pond this evening. Some sort of Spurge I think.

Also glimpsed the Short-eared Owl again late afternoon, over by The Main Drain. Guess htis one may well hang around all summer now.

Pelted and Drenched

Tuesday 15th May 2012
Sunrise has crept forward and broken the 5 o'clock barrier.

Daisy likes a bit of company.
If only my arms were longer
I could have fitted both of us into this self-portrait!

Main job today was a total clean out of the chicken houses. I poo pick most days, adding new bedding material (wood shavings or hay) when needed, but gradually all the mess sinks to the bottom and needs a good clean out once in a while. What sparked this was a slight drop in egg productivity and a few soft shells and otherwise malformed eggs. The girls are generally very happy and have a luxuriously free lifestyle, but I don't think this spring has been the best weatherwise for them. They much prefer dry and sunny to wet and miserable - don't we all! Back to the point. I just wanted to check that everything was right for the girls and who knows what creepy crawlies might be lurking in the hidden corners of those houses.

As there was a fair breeze, I decided to empty out all the houses at once, scrape back to the wood, then let the houses air out before giving them a very liberal sprinkling of mite powder (diatomaceous earth - search for it on the internet and buy a big bag, then you can use as much as you want fairly cheaply).

My plan, however, was very much interrupted by a sudden band of the foulest weather. Initially I got absolutely pelted with hailstones. This seems to happen everytime I put some new seedlings outside to get some fresh air. I took shelter in the shed until it passed over, then carried on with the task in hand.

I don't know what made me look up, but I did so just in time to see a couple of Wheatears chasing each other in the meadow, then head off along the dyke. These were the first of the year, very much in contrast to last year when at least 9 birds passed through, most lingering for a good few days. But that had been in mid April. This is mid May and these delayed migrants are in a hurry to get back to their breeding grounds. In fact, I'm sure the only reason they dropped out of the sky was to avoid the hailstorm which had just passed.

The view from inside Daisy's shelter.
Neither of us were going back out in this.

Having cleaned and scraped floors, walls, perches and all nooks and crannies, I left the chicken houses to air out and took a stroll down the land to see if the wheatears might have settled down for a while. This was a big mistake! No sooner had I reached the furthest point than the heavens opened. Stuck out in the open with no shelter possible, I legged it back as far as Daisy's pen, where I managed to persuade her to let me in for shelter.

Rain turned again to bouncing ice bombs.

Not long after, this little rain cloud passed through and I was forced once more to take shelter in the shed.

View through the shed window.

To cut a long story short, I never saw the wheatears again, I eventually succumbed to being drenched through and then just carried on in the rain, the sun came out and I finished the chicken houses.

Go to bed guineafowl, go to bed.

Guineafowl are a little different from chickens in their nature. They are more predisposed to wander off and explore, they are a wilder creature and they prefer to roost high up in a tree without a roof over their heads. Ours, however, mostly see themselves as chickens! That is, until it comes to bedtime. In general, all the chickens have chosen one of their houses in which to roost. It's a bit of a tight fit, but they seem to prefer this. There's always one, and not always the same one, which chooses a different house for the night though. The chickens put themselves to bed. Mrs Brown, in particular, seems to like her rest time, often going to bed way before dark and always the last out in the morning.

In contrast, the guineafowl are still wandering around or roosting on the fence as it's getting too dark to see. We then herd them, one at a time, into the house with the other chickens. This is fairly straightforward with two people. Single-handed it gets more difficult, like playing a game on the terms of some mischievous child. Round and round the houses we go, stopping many times as if to go into the house, then heading off round the corner again. This slow stalking of the guineafowl can go on for 20 minutes. It's always the male who goes in first, but if Lady Guinea decides she's not going in, Mr Guinea Guinea comes back out to check up on her and it's back to square one. It's tempting to leave them out, but there was a dead young fox not far away on the road yesterday, so the daily ritual must carry on.

In at last!

Royal Jelly

Monday 14th May 2012
Sunrise (??!) over the new veg patch.

Royal Jelly

We may have made a mistake today. It was time to open up the bees and inspect what was going on. Good news was that they have started to store honey in the super, so we can stop feeding them sugar solution. More good news. We managed to see the queen, easily picked out due to her much larger size and longer body. A bit like trying to pick out a rare gull or goose in among the throng of others. (Birders will get this!)

We observed as much as we could, honey, pollen, capped brood, developing brood. Then, a queen cell! Just the one. We weren't expecting this and destroyed it to deter swarming. This is what we had been taught, but on further reading afterwards, this may have been a mistake.

We were surpised that the cell was full of white liquid - royal jelly. This means that the bees had plans for this to become a queen, and that it's hatching was fairly imminent. This was not what we needed on our first proper inspection. We lack the experience to know what to do about it and don't want to learn by making very expensive mistakes.

Further reading suggested that this may well have been a supercedure cell, where the bees are trying to replace their queen. We do not quite understand this and will read up and ask around as much as possible. 

In the meantime, we are praying that the bees do not swarm in the next couple of days. 

Comments most welcome from anybody who knows what we should do.

Our immediate plan is to inspect again soon to see if there are any more queen cells and to make the brood chamber bigger so the bees are not too crowded.

Mr Rotavator has been busy.

Sunday 13th May 2012

A magical, still morning and Mr Whitethroat was singing out loud even before the sun was up.

Daisy ran out to see me when she heard me coming, so I indulged her by racing her up and down her enclosure a few times. She is getting back into good condition now that she is not feeding her litter.

75%!

I got straight on with the work and had already made good headway when Sue came out to inform me that one of the eggs that seemed lifeless was tapping and cheeping. A little late, considering its first brother or sister was born all of 3 days ago. We left it to make its own way into the world.

Then, on with the main act.

Remember this??

Two days of tugging at clumps of grass, wrestling with Mr Rotavator, picking through the soil for grass still stubbornly clinging on with its roots.

Then stooping over to pick off the last of the weeds.

Wait for the wind and the sun (mostly the wind) to drive off some of the moisture, then another going over with Mr Rotavator and more weed picking.

In short, a LOT of hard work, and you get this...

This soil, for some reason, is much clayier than the potager, so a fine tilth is not going to happen. Maybe in a few years when I've improved the structure of the soil by adding lots of organic matter. For the moment, though, small clods are the best I can do.
I marked it out according to a basic plan, improvising as I went along. By mid afternoon on Sunday, after over 25 hours of blood, sweat and toil, the patch was all worked over and marked out.

Time for sowing, just to make sure my back was well exercised!
I had an envelope of Garlic Marco saved from last year which had no home, and another of Golden Gourmet Shallots. Also over a hundred red onion sets. I poked them into the moist soil, just covering them as best I could with clumps of earth - no point trying to crumble it, it just compacts into a sticky ball. Then the remainder of this bed was devoted to maincrop carrots, Autumn King, and a row of mixed Solar Yellow and Cosmic Purple. All these mixed in with what I had left of a packet of mixed annual flowers to confuse those pesky carrot flies with their scent and beauty!

Then I made a start on the laborious task of sowing the seeds for the fodder crops. The large cluster-seeds of Mangel Wurzels along with the delicate seeds of Chicory. I pushed myself to keep going but eventually, two thirds of the way through, I had to succumb to my body's need for rest. The reason I had pushed myself so hard to get so much done was that the forecast for the next couple of days is...well, you guess.

I've already heard it called Monsoon May. A bit of an exaggeration, but more alliterative than the April Shower. 

Inside before dark, and this little beauty (on the right) was just about ready to go in with the others. So that's 9 out of 12. 75% success!