I’m still at it. Another bed in the main veggie plot done today, plus most of the strawberry bed, one of the raspberry beds and the flower beds. It’s really getting a bit tedious now, but at least I’m over halfway at last.
I may have a break tomorrow and do some planting out instead.
Our digger started running oddly, dying when the throttle was opened, but idling quite happily. At first I couldn’t work it out, but decided that perhaps an air and fuel filter replacement might be a good start. The air filter was a bit of a fiddle but eventually got sorted. Then I had to go looking for the fuel filter.
It was buried in mud and took me a while to dig out, but after finding a few bolts and various other stuff binding the mud together I finally made sufficient clearance to remove it and then the nature of the initial problem became clear. Here’s a new filter (on the left) and the old one (on the right)
I’m not even sure how any fuel was getting through that at all. Let’s just say it’s running an awful lot better now.
Kind of…
I received a message this afternoon saying that there was a large swarm by the road in our nearest town. I didn’t see the message immediately (I was fighting weeds at the time), but when I asked about it later the swarm had already disappeared into someone’s chimney. Looks like they’re in for a less-than-pleasant surprise tomorrow morning.
This isn’t an uncommon occurrence and makes me think that perhaps it would be a sociable thing to do to offer to site bait hives at a few places (in peoples’ gardens, say) around the town from April to the end of July. Might save a few people ending up with an expensive bill for removing them later on.
I’ve almost completed painting my bait hive brood boxes now. At least, I thought I had: six of them.
I was sorting through them in the apiary after the bees had gone to bed this evening and found at least one more brood box with ½” thick walls. It’s full of old brood frames at the moment, but I was pushing the light and couldn’t really tell what sort of condition they were in. They were narrow top bars whereas I now prefer wide ones, so I don’t think I’ll be using them in hives again, but if they’re in good enough shape they might be ok for more insulated dummies.
Having more bait hive boxes is not a major issue. It means that I can swap the complete box out to move it if necessary, rather than having to shift the frames to a new box straight away. Gives me a little bit more flexibility.
I swear I don’t know how they grow so fast. This is the third time I’ve had to week the plot this year! It was slow progress, but I got another bed done today, including removing leeks and volunteer potatoes. Not as much progress as I wanted, but not bad thanks to an early morning airport “taxi” drive meaning that I didn’t actually get to bed until 5am 😀
So, three and a half down, far too many to go.
The jobs are stacking up faster than I can get them done at the moment. Hopefully by the end of this week things will be in a bit less of a mess.
When this happens I have to fight the need to go and check all the hives in my apiary to make sure they’re not swarming. Once the sycamore starts flowering they go crazy for it and the volume of their buzzing around the apiary and veggie plot, both of which have quite a bit of sycamore in the hedges, is astonishing.
(Just noticed that there appears to be some garlic mustard in flower there too. I’ll have to check that out at some point.)
I’ve decided that I’m going to use only boxes that aren’t in quite good enough repair for permanent hives as bait hives now. Ones that aren’t perfect, but can be repaired to be reasonably close. Or in some cases, home-made ones I’ve inherited that aren’t quite the right dimensions. Some aren’t quite tall enough whilst others have thinner walls than started.
But how to tell them apart so I don’t confuse them with “proper” boxes? Well, I’ve bought five litres of Cuprinol “Garden Shades” in “Wild Thyme” (because it reminds me of my youth) partly because it has a good reputation amongst beekeepers who have tried it, and partly because it was on sale 😀 It’s a lighter blue/green than the paint I use for my poly boxes so it’s easy to tell them apart once painted and hopefully I shouldn’t get them confused.
Finally it appears that the weather is picking up a bit here and I was able to spend all of this afternoon weeding the veggie beds. It’s crazy how the weeds are growing. I managed to get two and a half beds done, including lifting all the volunteer potatoes I came across and separating out small “new potatoes” from the plants (some of which I then had for dinner 😀
It’s going to be a fair bit of work to get the rest of the beds done, but it needs doing before I start planting out everything that’s waiting in the greenhouse — there’s so much to go in. I even still have compost to spread because it’s been so wet for so long.
The asparagus is doing well though. We’ve had several more picks of that. On the not so good side I think the perennial kale has succumbed to the combined attentions of the deer and caterpillars late last Autumn. I guess I’ll be replacing it with something later in the year. And it’s now time for the remaining leeks to come out I think. They’re starting to go hard in the middle where the scapes are forming now they want to flower, so I don’t think there’s much more eating there.
It’s time for all the “old stuff” to come out of the veggie plot now and make way for this year’s plants. Onto the compost heap it all went. Up and up went the compost heap, up and up went the temperature. This one seems to be working very nicely now.
I was hoping to spend today in the veg plot, but the weather was back to its usual appalling self again today. I hid in the workshop and finished off my current set of fat dummies. First up was to trim down the last piece of insulation and fit it.
Still no blancmange flashbacks?
Then glue and nail the second side of the dummy into place.
I’ve done eight of these though I have sufficient top bars for another two — I just don’t have wood sized for the sides and bottoms yet. The eight will be sufficient for two colonies, as I’m moving them to “nine over nine” configuration this year — a little more brood space than brood-and-a-half, but a lot less of a pain in the bum.
