10 weeks in the polytunnel



The polytunnel today

 Growth in the polytunnel has been astronomical. I thought the best way to show this was in photos.

Potatoes    8 April

 

Sowing begins    12 April

 





Warming up

A new bed    15 April



Fast forward to mid May

The race begins

Bean seedlings ready for planting



  

Old pig bags always come in use



Brassica seedlings growing up



Cucurbits struggle to germinate



A greenhouse within a polytunnel
Tomatoes doing well, aubergines slow to get going

Another new bed and seedlings starting to grow

 



The potatoes are coming along    17 May



 

Potatoes    2 June



Tomatoes   2 June
Ready for planting as soon as flowers begin to appear

  



Oh No! Not another swarm

I remember last year toying with a pun between swarm and 's warm.
You can see why I didn't use it.

My point is, on the warmest day of the year in 2012, our bees decided to swarm, having been determinedly building queen cells for a couple of weeks beforehand. This meant that our hive's strength was halved and our queen had gone to pastures new.
We were relying on the bees to successfully make themselves a new queen and hoping that our efforts to intervene and prevent the swarm occurrence had not harmed their chances of holding a new coronation.

As it was, we managed to come out of it with two colonies, though one failed to make it through the winter.

Well, the queen cells appeared again this year. This is a normal process when the colony is doing well and bursting to the brim. Sue took all the preventative measures necessary, splitting the colony, taking out frames of brood and honey to give the bees space and to keep them busy.

So, on Wednesday  just gone, the warmest day of the year and incredibly muggy, yes, you've guessed...

I came round the corned from the stables at about half past nine to see a giant buzzing cloud hanging over the pathway which leads down to the animals. I wanted to run and get the camera, but needed to try to follow our bees. Sue had briefed me what to do if I could capture the swarm, but at the moment I would be needing a rather large net.

I quickly stopped Don from riding his mower and together we watched as the mass moved slowly over my veg patch and into his orchard. I was hoping they might settle here, preferably low down so I could box them up, but they began to move high and to speed up, across the road, high over Don's trees and across the Settlement Field.

I pursued them helplessly, with my eyes on a small copse in the middle of the field. By now they were moving so quickly that I could not pick them up in the sky.
I knew that they had passed the copse when the herd of cows beyond were clearly perturbed by the insect invasion of their airspace.

And that was it. Gone. Not even a wave goodbye.


Typically, this had all happened on a day when Sue was due to be going away on a conference for three days, but she managed to get back at lunchtime and have a quick look at what was left. 
The bees that were left were angry. They had no queen and someone had opened up their hive.
This made my job as official photographer rather tricky. I had to zoom in from about fifteen yards, and even then I had to leg it several times as guard bees buzzed me persistently.

Why can't we have the type of bees which settle in a mass close to the hive for a while before heading further afield? Ours just seem to up and go.

Not for the first time, our bees clearly haven't read the same books as us.

Three Sisters resurrected

Last year I attempted to cultivate The Three Sisters.

That's the system where you grow sweetcorn in small clumps, interspersed with squashes and pumpkins. Then you add the third "sister" - climbing beans, whose sole purpose is to feed the slugs and divert them away from the other crops... or so it seemed.

Well, that was last year.
As it was, the sweetcorn, squashes, courgettes and pumpkins did very well given copious amounts of rain.

This year is a very different year. So last week the three sisters were resurrected.

The sweetcorn is growing well now.
Time to sow the French beans.

I doubt the original growers of Three Sisters
surrounded their crops with electric fence
to protect it against rabbits.

Young sweetcorn plants, back on 27th May


The sweetcorn has been planted for well over a fortnight now. It always takes a knock back when it first goes into the ground outside and the weakest specimens don't make it.
After a tricky germination, where several complete trays just rotted away as they failed to spring into life in the cool conditions, I didn't really have any to spare. As it is a high proportion of plants have made it through and have begun to grow more strongly.

Various types of courgette, squash and pumpkin have now been transplanted out between them.

I decided to invest time erecting the electric rabbit fence around my lovingly nurtured plants. There is nothing as soul-destroying as the disappointment of finding your freshly planted crops nibbled or, worse still, uprooted and laying wilted on the surface of the soil.

And so to the third sister. While the cucurbits spread and shade the surface of the soil, the beans climb up the sweetcorn stalks, in the process capturing nitrogen and enriching the soil for next year.
I had some beans already sown, but they are about three times as tall as the corn and reaching rapidly for the skies. So I decided instead to sow fresh beans at the bases of the sweetcorn. I have plumped for French bean Blue Lake, a stringless variety which has performed well in our soil in the past.

And in honour of the Native American origins of the Three Sisters planting system, I have planted some wigwams of runner beans alongside!

But in all seriousness there are some very valid reasons for growing these crops in combination. Get the timing right and the plants aid each others' growth. They provide a good nutritional balance too.
There's some good information on this website:

http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/3sisters.html

One very useful hint I picked up from this site, so indirectly from the Native American Indians, is to use nature to time sowing and planting.
For early spring in the books is different across the whole country and from year to year. If you sowed seeds strictly by date this year, as I found out to my cost with the sweetcorn, they just sat in the cold conditions not realising it was time to sprout into life.
But if you sowed when, for instance, the cow parsley came into flower or the sowthistles started to grow, then nature would be your calendar...

Not that nature always gets it right.

I got myself a second Roller.

Sunday was such a good day that I failed to notice news of a Roller in Norfolk, found mid afternoon and remaining until dusk at least. I was kicking myself a little, as I have only seen one of these beautiful aquamarine birds in Britain before. Instead, I did see this fledgeling Whitethroat marooned  and all alone on the grass. As I lay on the ground to snap it, the poor, parentless bird took a couple of hops straight onto the top of the camera!

(Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending).

So, Monday morning I was keen to get over to Holt and bag myself my second British Roller.  But I had the small matter of a trip to the dentist first. With that successfully negotiated, I pondered the negative news from Norfolk. The Roller had been seen early morning but had flown off, only to be relocated a little way away before it flew off again. It had gone missing for a couple of hours, so I decided to pop into Frampton Marsh for a while rather than head straight home. A stunning Spotted Redshank, resplendent in full breeding plumage, fed daintily in amongst the throng and din of breeding Black-headed Gulls. There were plenty of baby Avocets around too. I can remember when this would have been a very rare sight indeed.

As I sat in the hide just taking in the scene, news came through that the Roller was back. So I headed over to Holt and was surprised by the crowd as I pulled up. There seem to be an awful lot of retired birders in Norfolk. As they usually do, the Roller spent most of its time perched up, performing occasional sallies before returning to its perch. However, it was always slightly distant and in heat haze.

After about forty minutes the Roller flew high over the trees and over the road. But this was becoming a pattern now so I followed it. Several of us headed towards another cleared area amongst the pines and scanned every protruding branch for a flash of aquamarine blue. After a few minutes I picked it up, sat on top of a heap. Although still distant, the light was much better. I chatted to some of the locals, enjoyed watching the Roller and then headed back through Norfolk and just across the border to the farm.

This was the end of a very good long weekend indeed.

Lambs meet pigs

Sunday was pretty much a perfect day.

I've already posted about taking our first honey. But the day had been pretty special even before that.

Limpy The Lamb no longer has a limp so it was time to take the lambs to their new home, further down the land. The followed Sue with gusto. In fact, Sue had to run to keep up with them. They went straight into their new enclosure and we quickly closed off the electric fence and connected it back up again.

Easily led.

Happy in their new home.

It wasn't long before the pigs realised they had some new close neighbours. They were straight over to the fence to investigate. What surprised me even more was that one of the lambs was equally as inquisitive and went straight up to them. It showed no fear whatsoever.

Of course, it wasn't long before one of the noses touched the electric fence. As it happened, it was the lamb's. It was enough to keep it from crossing but didn't seem to cause a great scare.

I spent a couple of hours just relaxing in the grass, watching the lambs, pigs, chickens and guineafowl.
Once I was happy that they wouldn't escape straightaway (I wonder how long it will take them) and that they were happy I turned my attentions to moving the geese into their old paddock now that it had been vacated by the lambs.

The first thing they did was to stick their heads back through the gate to get at the grass where they had just come from! But it wasn't long before they settled in and cleared the paddock of buttercup flowers. In fact, they seemed to enjoy these most, closely followed by the racemes of seeds atop the taller stems of grass. This is the advantage of mixed grazing, as different animals graze different plants in different ways. It's also advantageous to move grazing animals onto new areas on a rota as this stops parasites building up in the ground by breaking thier lifecycles.

Our first honey - a very special day.

Honey!

I've not blogged about the bees for a while.

We are still novices to beekeeping and Sue has taken over the mantle of head beekeeper. We had our first bees while we still lived in South-East London. Surprisingly the patchwork of urban gardens there is actually a very good place to keep bees. We did rather well for a while, but our hive failed to come through its first winter and got robbed and finally killed off by robber bees from another colony.

We kept all the gear, sure that we would start up again one day. Last year, now in The Fens of South-East Lincolnshire, we embarked on our beekeeping career again. The first year was an interesting one - very hot early spring during which bee colonies everywhere quickly became strong, followed by half a year of rain. Everybody's bees were swarming all over the place, including ours.

It was a fast learning curve and, although we collected no honey, we did end the year with two healthy colonies of honey bees.

Early on in this year's spring, both hives looked OK, but spring never really warmed up and ended up being the coldest in 50 years. Unfortunately we lost one of the colonies, but the second was (and is) still looking very strong.

So strong, in fact, that they have started building queen cells again, a sure sign that the colony is filling up and planning on splitting. This is  the bees' way of spreading and sending out new colonies. But it is not great news for the beekeeper. Effectively you face losing half your bees (more if subsidiary swarms occur) and won't be able to take honey from them this year.

But it also creates the opportunity to anticipate the departure of half your bees and to set up a new colony. I won't go into the ins and outs of how to do this, but Sue has attempted to achieve it and we have our fingers crossed.

This is all very exciting (and slightly worrying) but even more exciting action came on Sunday when Sue decided there were enough supers of capped honey to try spinning some off.

The way a hive works is that at the bottom lives the queen and there she lays her eggs which develop and hatch. Other bees tend the larvae and the foragers go out everyday to collect pollen and nectar. In the cells around the brood they store this food in the form of honey.

Above this brood box the beekeeper places more frames of hexagonal foundation cells, which the bees build up into storage larders for more honey. But there is one very important difference with this part of the hive. For the queen is excluded from here, which means there are no eggs and no larvae. This honey is there for the taking!

Once the honey has reached the correct consistency, the bees cap it with a thin layer of wax.  So the first step is to scrape this off. We have a comb for this purpose, though a special knife can be used too.



Uncapping the honey.



This was amazing as the honey just started oozing out. Next the frames go into a spinner where centrifugal force sends the honey flying out of the cells and against the side walls, whereupon it trickles down to the bottom of the spinner. At this stage, there will be wax mixed in too.

I was  a bit enthusiastic with the spinning and one of the frames disintegrated a little bit. Not a total disaster, as the frames go back in with the bees to be cleaned and repaired by them.



Draining the honey from the spinner.





A tap at the bottom of the spinner allows the honey to be drained out through a double spinner. At this stage we could really see how our honey was going to turn out. Of course, we couldn't resist dipping our fingers in either.

The honey was surprisingly delicate and light. None of it seemed to have crystallised in the cells and we are hoping that the influence of oil seed rape is not too great, as this causes honey to set rock hard.

In all we got nine jars of honey. Some beekeepers don't get this much in their first few years, but with a bit of luck it will just be the start of a very successful honey year this year.

Now to go find some honey recipes.

Egg tales

On Thursday morning, all six geese ventured out together for the first time in a very, very long time. Not before Tatty Anna had carefully covered the two remaining eggs with feathers and straw.


An opportunity missed.



I should really have surreptitiously removed the remaining two eggs but it didn't occur to me until it was way too late. The window of opportunity only lasted about five minutes anyway. Tatty Anna is no longer the prime carer for the eggs and it wasn't long before the new sitter returned to the nest.





 

But just when it looked as though all things egg-linked had settled down, I find this...

Thirty guinea eggs! The only reason I came across them was that Sue thought one of the girls may be sitting on eggs in the long grass which has shot up in the chicken enclosure.
As long as there are eleven guineafowl on the fence in the evening we know that none are sitting. If one evening we find less than eleven, it will probably mean that one of them has decided to sit.

Last year, Girl Guinea managed to lay a clutch of eighteen eggs, unnoticed by us or predators, before she sat tight and hatched the lot.

We don't really want another thirty guineafowl! So if Girl Guinea decides to incubate, we shall let her. But once they hatch then last year's birds will be freezer bound!
If any others decide to sit, we shall remove the eggs.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ed. As I write, we are up to 45 guinea eggs.

I took the last goose egg and fed it to Daisy. It stunk to high heaven, but Daisy didn't seem to mind.
This morning, one of the geese has built a new nest and laid an egg!

PACIFIC SWIFT!

Yesterday did not go quite as I had planned when I woke up in the morning.

For, as I was sorting out tree stakes at the bottom of the land, a text on my phone informed me that a Pacific Swift was present over a marsh in Suffolk. Pacific Swift is very, very rare in this country and usually hangs around for about 5 minutes. Famously, one in Cley in 1993 was the only one to be seen by more than a handful of birders. Tales abound of speeding along country lanes, getting stuck in traffic jams on the one narrow road through the middle of Cley village, abandoning cars... then there are the tales of those who missed it by minutes.

At the same time as I was pondering what course of action to take, Sue came running down the land waving my pager in the air to let me know there was a mega. Seconds later my phone rang. My friend who lives in Scotland, just in case I'd missed the messages in this communications backwater. Given the fleeting nature of most Pacific Swifts, he resolved to do the same as me, that is to wait for a second message. If it was still there in 15 minutes then the chances of connecting with it would be greatly improved.

And so I carried on hammering in stakes and clearing grass from the base of young saplings until the next message. Still there at 10:59!

That was it. There was just a 100 mile drive to the far corner of Suffolk then a 3 mile 'walk'.
The SatNav said it would take 2 hours and the dashboard said I had 67 miles of petrol left - at normal driving speed.
What ensued was a somewhat fraught journey across country until I hit the A14 and really put my foot down. An hour away from a Pacific Swift...Half an hour away...Fifteen minutes to go...And all the time I reined in the arrival time on the SatNav.
And so it was that after an hour and thirty five minutes I was parking up in a congested country lane. I decided to leave the scope so I could run most of the 3 miles. Now I'm no Olympic athlete but I do keep reasonably fit so a combination of jogging and resting to chat with others heading the same way had me within sight of the crowd in about half an hour.
Along the way I had been reassured by those leaving site "Don't worry, it's still there." Famous last words.
But even with just a couple of hundred yards to go, I was fully aware that those people I could see watching the bird might just be watching it head high into the sky and over the horizon. That can happen with swifts and I wasn't going to be the one telling the tale, in 20 years time, of missing a Pacific Swift by one minute.

As I jogged along the base of the seawall, someone beckoned me and a couple of others just arriving into the hide. I knelt on the ground and raised my bins to my eyes, desperately trying to control my breathing and stop my hands from shaking. Instructions were coming thick and fast about which way the bird was flying, how high it was, which birds it was flying over... And after what seemed like an eternity (in truth about ten seconds of frantic searching) there it was.

PACIFIC SWIFT

Skimming low over the marsh.

Elation. Relief. Joy. Success.

There are some birds which I know I'll see in Britain at some point in my life - provided I live long enough! But Pacific Swift was one that I suspected I may not.

I left the hide and spent the next hour or so on the seawall watching the swift as it kept loyal to one small area of the marsh. I caught up with a few old friends too.
For some reason, everyone seemed in a good mood.

Then storm clouds loomed and I decided to head back to the car with some friends. I just made it in time before the heavens opened.
Good news for the veg plot back on the farm. But bad news for those still on their way.

The downpour was the cue for the Pacifc Swift, in the company of our own Common Swifts, to depart. Fortunately for my friend from Scotland it came back late in the afternoon and he connected too.

He popped into the farm on his way back later in the evening, just for a brief catch up before making his way back to Scotland.

This morning I finished those tree stakes. Roll on the next lifer.

It's been a good year so far. Four already and there's still the autumn to come. But before that I'm hoping for a Bridled Tern, preferably somewhere near.