Memory Lane, 20 July 2022: Spuds’n’onions

Posted on February 25, 2024 by james

Early harvests from this season:

New potatoes ready to go.

Red onions, spread out to dry in the Sun.

I know that looks like a lot of onions, but they won’t last us the year. I shall plant more next year.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Damn! It’s heavy!

Posted on February 25, 2024 by james

Yesterday…

Today…

Still to do is the installation of the motor and bolting everything down. After that I think we’re good. I might have to have a glance through the 1969 copy of “Know Your Lathe” that came with it, too. Odd that, given that the lathe itself was only manufactured from something like 1978 to 1986 (I may be a year or two out with the dates there).

Health & Safety have clearly given it their attention at some point in its life.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Single use plastic for seeds? Really?

Posted on February 25, 2024 by james

My wife gave me a packet of petunia seeds that she’d like me to sow for her today. I was a little confused because there was clearly something lumpy and hard inside the packet. When I opened it I found this:

Do we really need such a container for seeds? Of course there’s no indication of whether or not it is recyclable nor any explanation on the packet to explain the change from traditional paper packets.

Even worse, stuck to the back of the packet is a pre-printed plastic plant label, so that’s effectively single use as well.

I’d kind of hope that companies that do business selling plants and seeds might be a little bit more sensitive to the environment 🙁

Posted in Random | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 17th July 2022: I can see you!

Posted on February 24, 2024 by james

My next little tablesaw/woodworking project: clear, insulated crownboards for beehives. More box joints for these, to make up a box about 60mm deep. Then a sheet of clear polycarbonate on the bottom, held in place around the sides by a 10mm wooden strip, giving a bee-space over the tops of the frames below.

Into that goes a piece of 50mm thick PIR insulation board (commonly found in skips apparently, though I had some left over from a building project), with a little handle glued on.

And the roof will go over the top completely.

The insulation stops condensation forming on the underside of the crownboard where it can drip down onto the bees, meaning there’s no top ventilation required to remove it. Any condensation on the hive walls can be re-used by the bees for diluting honey. It also helps the bees keep the humidity up inside the hive, which allegedly helps with varroa.

In retrospect, I may start making the clear crownboards with a 10mm rim on both sides and then fitting the insulation into the roofs when I build them. That may be slightly more efficient and use less materials.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Having a bit of a turn

Posted on February 24, 2024 by james

A few weeks back I picked up a new (to me) lathe: a Boxford ME10 (which is not even remotely new; more likely an antique) converted to single-phase. Fitting it into the workshop in its final place is going to require quite a bit of shifting things around, so today I started on that; moving the bandsaw that I’m going to need to find a new space for and dragging the chopsaw out of the way to leave more space to manoeuvre. I also swept up two large sacks of sawdust from under each of the saws 😀

I’m hoping that tomorrow I can at least get the cabinet into place and the lathe mounted on top of it. Then I’ll start re-arranging everything else.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged , | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 24th February 2024

Posted on February 24, 2024 by james

Sowing day again! Not that much this weekend though: calabrese, red cabbage, more antirrhinums and more ammi majus. The rain has reached quite depressing levels here. I think we’ve had at least double the long-term average rainfall for February, even with most of a week left to go. Today however, it was bright and sunny, if a little cold, or rather, more like the temperature February ought to be. In the greenhouse it was so warm that I had to take off my coat. Hopefully that’s a good sign for the plants as temperatures are forecast to be close to freezing this evening. I was looking at pepper seedlings in the propagator and thinking that they need to be moved out, but I think for the next couple of days they can stay where it’s warm. It’s supposed to bucket down tomorrow according to the forecast, too. There’s no getting away from it 🙁

Elsewhere in the garden the strawberries seem to be settling in well and the new raspberry canes that I planted in December look to be producing shoots. Not all of them yet, but it’s early days yet.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 6th July 2022: Ouch!

Posted on February 23, 2024 by james

Ahem.

Beekeepers may find it easy to guess how this happened 😀

I have a couple of colonies that are, shall we say… a little feisty. I shall be doing something about them as soon as possible. I normally wear an Oz Armour suit which has an unzippable veil so it can be folded out of the way to have a drink. Only I didn’t realise after using it that I’d not completely closed up the zip 🙂

One darling little worker from one of the feisty colonies found the hole and got inside my veil and after a little bit of mental torture stung me on the left temple. The photo above is from the same evening. The next day my left eye had almost entirely closed up. Surprisingly it really wasn’t that painful, but I couldn’t drive or anything useful like that. It took a few days to return to something resembling normal.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Fun (and irritation) with Qt Designer

Posted on February 23, 2024 by james

I’ve been lining up a possible new project today, thanks to stalling a bit on the work I was doing on Deep Sky Stacker. It’s more C++/Qt development, but in this case I thought I’d try to create the entire UI using QT Designer.

After several false starts I discovered that if I have, say, a main application window and want to put a QTabWidget inside it, the new widget doesn’t shrink or grow as the main window size changes (when the user resizes it, for instance).

It took quite some time to reach the understanding that some widgets, in particular the central widget of a QMainWindow and the main part of a QTabWidget require a layout widget to be associated with them before their contents will expand and contract with the outer window. But much of the time, Qt Designer doesn’t allow such a widget to be added.

I have discovered that what can be done to work around this is to start with (for example) the tab widget, add some random widget such as a pushbutton to it. After this is done it appears to be possible to set a layout for the container widget, add more widgets that I actually want, and throw the pushbutton away afterwards.

I had to take a similar approach when I wanted to add a layout to the layout of a tab widget.

I assume this must be some sort of bug in Qt Designer as it’s perfectly acceptable to create such things using code, even if it doesn’t allow them. I did wonder about editing the .ui file by hand, but hundreds of lines of XML? I’m not really up for it. I suspect that I might have found one or two other issues with the Designer too, but I haven’t put the time in to confirm those yet.

Meanwhile I shall get back to my design, now I have a clue how to beat Designer into submission.

Posted in Computing, Linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 22nd February 2022

Posted on February 22, 2024 by james

More dark, windy, rainy weather today, and cold with it, too. So no actual progress in getting stuff done. Lots of seeds are making progress however. Chiles and peppers are starting to appear, together with (I think) antirrhinums and busy lizzies (at the front).

Aubergines (back right) are looking pretty good, too.

It won’t be long before the broad beans need to go out in the ground.

And possibly not the sweet peas either, though I can’t say I’m that impressed with the germination rate in the tray nearer the camera.

Finally, peas for shoots will be wanting to be in the ground soon, too.

I discovered some saved seed today. Looks like I could be getting a lot of calendula this year 😀

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 3rd July 2022: Floors in manufacture

Posted on February 22, 2024 by james

Next job for the new table saw…

My bees tend to fill mesh floors with propolis, suggesting to me that they’re not very keen on them, so I’ve decided to move back to solid or sealed floors, and to kick things off I decided to make some new ones using timber from my “probably waste” pile. I didn’t go with the common design though, opting instead for an “under-floor entrance”. These are becoming more widespread as beekeepers find out about them and should prevent issues with mice because they don’t have an entrance large enough for one to fit through. They’re also claimed to be less attractive to wasps because there are more opportunities for them to encounter guard bees before they actually get amongst the frames. Potentially I guess they’re also less draughty because the breeze can’t blow straight in.

So here’s my first batch after being given a coat of preservative. The bees drop down onto the landing board (which doesn’t need to extend beyond the front of the hive — I just like watching them sometimes) and come up through the 8mm wide slot into the middle of the hive. In these ones, the back rail is not full depth, so the landing board of another floor can be pushed in behind for transport.

I’m thinking of modifying my mesh floors to have the same style of entrance (and a slot-in base to seal the floor from the wind and cold) and I may also add something like a 20mm high rail around the tops of these ones to make room for a hole through which I can vape oxalic acid. I’ll see how it goes.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment