Beans 'n' Peas

Tuesday 22nd May 2012

Another dull start to the day, but eventually it warmed up and the sun shone all afternoon.

Today's task was to finish the beans 'n' peas quarter of the veg patch.











Peas
First, another sowing of peas to continue the succession. I've already got Early Onward and Kelvedon Wonder in, but I found some old collected peas from Twinkle, so I've tried these.
I'm not convinced by the virtues of growing peas. Yes, they're great fresh, but it takes so many plants to get a decent amount and the frozen ones in the supermarket aren't actually at all bad. Anyway, I'll trial these varieties and see which is best. It may be that I need them all to give a succession through the season. Again, I poked clippings of red dogwood into the ground to give the plants a framework to clamber over. But just look at the first lot of dogwood twigs - they're sprouting. By the end of the year I should have a decent crop of saplings.

Now Sugarsnap peas and Mangetout are a different story. Bountiful, delicious straight from the plant and at supermarket prices a valuable crop. I'm growing two varieties of Sugarsnap - Sugar Ann and Sugar Snap. The former I grew last year without much success, and so far this year it seems that the latter is growing with much more vigour. We'll see what the harvest is like before we make any snap decisions (see what I did there?) about next year.
As for mangetout, I grow a purple podded variety with an impossible name. It tastes as clean and fresh as the green, but adds a touch of interest and colour.

All my climbing peas are grown in with sweet peas and nasturtiums.

Beans
The runner plants are already transplanted outside and some have started to wrap themselves around their wigwam poles. Today was the turn of the more exotic beans. French beans, dwarf beans, climbing beans, Borlottis, Haricots (for baked beans), Butter Beans, Purple Teepee, Blue Lake, Canadian Wonder (for kidney beans).

The soil felt warm for the first time today. The water collected in old baths from the gutters was tepid as it trickled from the watering can over my fingers. I love it when beans push and shove their way through the soil and continue skywards at a staggering pace. If this weather continues they'll love it.

Now, if Gerry's daily catch is anything to go by, then there are certainly plenty of mice and voles around, enough to threaten young peas and beans. So I have elected this year to soak the seeds in paraffin briefly as a deterrent. But one of my bees took exception to the smell I think and buzzed me with annoying determination to the point where I had to scarper till it gave up.

Milk Carton Graveyard
If you'd looked in my veg patch mid afternoon, you'd have wondered what on earth was going on, with piles of dismembered milk cartons in piles on the grass. I've discovered that milk cartons are well designed to fit a cane tightly through the handle and to protect the young plants from the ravages of pests and the weather.

Some of my wigwams have wellies.

Bees
Since I mentioned the bees above, a quick update on the two hives. Hive A (the original, from which we removed the queen but left a few of the best queen cells) is buzzing well. In the warm weather the hive entrance and the surrounding air have been full of bees, many returning laden with pollen. Hive B (the new one into which we moved the queen along with frames of brood, honey, pollen and bees) is much slower, with just the occasional bee emerging or returning. But I still hope to find, when we can look in a couple of weeks time, that we have two colonies of bees.


Hive A - busy








Hive B - quiet

Asparagus Peas
I've grown this unusual vegetable for the last three years. Each plant forms a low growing clump and they carry the most richly coloured, delicate little flowers, much loved by bees. You eat the whole pod, plucked from the plant when it is only an inch of so long. I find the taste a little nutty, though it's supposed to taste like a cross between...you've guessed!...peas and asparagus.

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.

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.

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.

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.



Monday 30th April 2012
April finally comes good



A sunrise!!! A nice day! And a 14 hour day in the garden to make the most of it.

Daisy and the piglets have quickly turned their grassy enclosure
into something more akin to the trenches of WW 1!
Not long till weaning now.

Buzzing

The bees came out in force today and it was fantastic both to see so many filling the air and to smell that heady aroma of wax and honey which surrounds a thriving hive. They allowed fairly close approach, though my stripy jumper seemed to annoy a couple of them at one point, not even when I was close to the hive.

Mauled by a Guineafowl

But prize for brazen attack of the days goes to Guinea Guinea. The sunshine brought out his macho side and, as I plucked the flowering shoots from the sorrel bed, he was making a right racket. I realised after a while that, behind me, he was puffing himself up, spreading his wings, running madly in circles and making false charges at me! I tried to explain that I wasn't a threat and that, if this behaviour continued, he might end up in the pot, but all to no avail.

I decided that ignoring him was the best strategy. That was until, crouched down attending to the sorrel plants, I suddenly felt a guineafowl on my back!!! And I don't think he was being friendly.

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.

The root beds were almost ready for sowing and planting when the rains came. I never thought it would be this long before I could reasonably get any seeds in.

I have ridiculous numbers of carrot seeds, each packet containing seemingly enough to fill a field. There are early ones, late ones, short, fat ones, long, skinny ones, orange yellow, white, purple, even some which promise resistance to carrot fly.

Ah yes, carrot fly.

I've never knowingly seen one, but I have seen the damage caused by their larvae, burrowing round the edge of carrots like a helter skelter, then going through the middle rendering them pretty inedible - though the chickens and pigs don't mind such imperfections.

Carrot flies find their favourite vegetable prey by smell, so it is important to sow the seed thinly to minimise the need for too much thinning later on. There are other ways to counteract these seek-and-destroy tactics, primarily by disguising the smell of the carrots, not with Febreze or Lynx, but with onions, spring onions, garlic and coriander. So my carrot beds tend to consist of rows of carrots interspersed with onion sets, garlic cloves and lines of spring onions. I like to plant coriander, probably my favourite herb / spice plant, in clumps at the edges too.

But even all these attempts at disguise do not always work. So this year I am introducing another tactic, mixing the carrot seed in with packets of mixed annual flowers. Hopefully a pretty way of confusing those pesky carrot flies.

All the text books say, too, that carrot flies are incapable of flying above about 2 feet off the ground, so surrounding the carrot bed with a barrier to this height is supposed to work. I have yet to find a practical or attractive way of doing this.

If all else fails, I am also planting resistant varieties, imaginatively named Resistafly and Flyaway. Hopefully they do what it says on the can.

Bee Action and Pig Pimping.

Saturday 28th April 2012


Bee Background
Bee-keeping is a fascinating hobby, but not a cheap one to start up. After you've bought a hive, there's the bee suits, the smoker, the hive tools, the honey extractors, a few things I've probably forgotten, and then ... then you find out it's always a good idea to have a spare hive too!
So you've been on a course, spent some time with some bee-keepers, and forked out a fortune. All you need to do now is get hold of some bees. Easier said than done.

Everyone's aware that honey bees are having a hard time at the moment, which means they are quite difficult to get hold of. The ideal is to get hold of a swarm, but everybody is after free bees and plenty of people are higher in the pecking order for receipt of such goodies.

So you have to buy some. They're very cheap to buy, just one or two pence... each. Problem is, that adds up to a small fortune when you consider you need them in their thousands.  A full brood box consists of eleven frames and lots and lots of bees.              

A full brood box complete with 11 frames.
We were lucky to be able to buy an established colony
with a proven queen. 



The normal way to buy them is to get a five-frame nucleus, which consists of a young queen and a core of bees. These are united to form a young colony which need to build up quickly in preparation for their first winter. We bought our first nucleus when we lived in London, joining the trend of urban beekeeping. However, due to a shortage of queens, we didn't get them till mid summer. Everything seemed to be going fine (judging by our very limited experience) until early the next year.

One spring morning we noticed an unusual buzz of activity around the hive entrance, with bees fighting and many emerging from the hive laden with honey.

Our bees were being robbed! Despite our best efforts, within a day the hive was empty, pillaged, all its occupants murdered or expelled.
Obviously they'd not had time to get strong enough the previous summer. We had fed them and the queen had survived the winter, but this one we just had to put down to experience.

When we had purchased the bees, we felt a huge sense of responsibility to them and we had let them down big time. Knowing that we would be moving at some point, we decided to hang up our bee suits for a while.

Planning for our new hive

We left replacing the bees until we knew we could give a new colony everything they needed. Primarily, I was worried that fields of wheat and sugar beet might not provide enough food throughout the year for them. This worry was soon allayed when our old pasture flourished into a clover filled meadow last summer. It was a bee bonanza.

My next worry was that bees appreciate a bit of shelter, but still need to face the sun so that the hive can warm up, especially early morning. Our site was so exposed that finding a suitable site would not be easy. The orchard would be ideal, in about ten years time!

The only decent shelter is afforded by the house, but we wouldn't want them living quite so close to us. The stable wall would give a good backdrop and the bees would fly straight out over the herb bed, but the prevailing winds put paid to that idea.

Eventually I used a line of transplanted laurels to afford shelter from the wind, tucking the hive in behind them but still exposing it to the morning sun.

So we dug out the old hives, scorched every surface with a blowtorch, and followed up the ad in the local paper. We were delighted to be able to get a two year old queen and a full colony, and at a sensible price too.





Sticks and leaves across the entrance
make sure the bees don't just fly off
before realising they're in a different place!



First Contact

We were up early to sort out the bees before they got active. We didn't yet know how they'd take to us. We dusted off and lit the smoker, though  a stiff north-easterly made sure it hardly touched the bees. At least the weather meant our feisty little friends were in a most subdued mood.

We prised off the lid, brushed the bees out of the way, and placed the queen excluder over the brood box. This is a plastic sheet which allows all the bees except the queen to pass through. This ensures that the stores of honey stored in the frames above the brood box do not become contaminated with eggs and larvae. Onto this went  the super, a box of wooden frames with a wax sheet of tessellated hexagons enclosed, ready for the bees to build their comb and store their honey, ready for us to steal!

Finally, another super into which we placed an inverted bucket of sugar syrup to welcome Swallow Farm's newest inhabitants.

We then left the bees to settle in, although they were in no hurry to explore given the continued cold weather and strong, icy winds.

Pig Pimping

Gerald is a good natured Gloucester Old Spot boar. He doesn't belong to us, but spends a lot of time here. He has given Daisy two litters so far, and in between fathered a couple of other litters. But the farmer who kindly lets us borrow him is never in a hurry to have him back! Food costs have to be considered and it is amazing how often that farmer's phone gets lost or is out of order! I don't mind too much, as it's not all about money, and I get lots of other favours from the farmer too.

Anyway, while discussing Gerald with a fellow smallholder recently, he was keen that Gerald pay a visit to see his two sows. I OKed it with the farmer, and arrangements were made for him to be moved at the weekend. Gerald would certainly not be complaining, as it was now quite a while since he had a lady friend.

So it was that, shortly after we'd finished dealing with the bees, Dave arrived and Gerald obligingly followed his food bucket out of the stables and up into the trailer. He'll enjoy his new surroundings and company, and should be back in about six weeks to keep Daisy company once again. Meanwhile, we've done someone a big favour and we're not having to feed a spare mouth. He's only just down the road, so we can visit him if we miss him.

The Nursery Area

Today's weather went from bad to worse to worser. I had the bright idea of using some old ground cover material and some old wooden decking to give my nursery area a refurbishment. Fed up with thistles and nettles popping up to bite me in every nook and cranny, even inside the greenhouse, I decided to starve them of light and at the same time give myself a proper surface to walk on and to rest plant trays on. Of course, this meant moving everything first, and as the weather worsened I eventually just accepted that I would be soaked from head to toe. (This often seems to happen in reverse, with the water permeating through my shoes and socks and up my trouser legs.)

No more spikes and stings.
A few pig food bags were used to
fill the gaps when I ran out of the proper stuff.



Access to the back of the bee hive is essential.
The straw bales are to stop the hive being
blown about, and to give it some insulation too.

A reclaimed perspex sheet supported by
straw bales provides an excellent
hardening off area for young plants.





By late afternoon it was necessary to take refuge in the house, as a storm raged outside.

Bizzzzy Times







Friday 27th April 2012



Thursday 26th April 2012







Well, the weather continues in the same vein, so after work it's been dashes down the land to check for eggs and throw some food at the chickens and pigs. Often, they're nowhere to be seen, the pigs all snug in their ark and the chickens huddled under the tractor. Some have even started going to roost very early, clearly fed up with being sodden and windswept.

If the weather were more conducive and the soil more friable, at this time of year I would be working the land until darkness made further exertions impossible. As it is, we're snuggled up by the fire instead.

30000 busy little critters
Last weekend we delivered the brood box from our old hive to the beekeeper in Long Sutton, so that he could transfer a colony of bees into it. We had to do an emergency order of hive carrying straps which were dispatched very quickly (http://www.simonthebeekeeper.co.uk/) - not a good idea to risk the bees getting out in the car!
So at 7 this evening, the moment we had been waiting for finally arrived. We called to pick up our new lodgers. They were in a very dopey mood and a few stragglers crawled around on the crown board. The chap who sold them to us was very friendly and helpful, and even gave us a tenner off, as the bees have struggled to build up a store of honey in this dank weather and will need sustaining with sugar syrup for a while.

We left the hive blocked up for the night, ready to introduce the feed and open up the front door in the morning. It will be good to don the bee suits again after a bit of a gap.