Maybe 😀
I was amused to discover that not only are Curaçao represented at the World Cup this year, but their manager is called Advocaat. I’m just hoping that they also have players on the bench called Armagnac, Sambuca and Tequila who can be brought on late in the game to liven things up a bit when everyone is getting tired.
After multiple retries due to the weather and medical issues, our bee inspector arrived today to check over my hives for signs of EFB.
She had to do all the heavy lifting unfortunately. By the end I was struggling just to continue standing up (and in fact I had to have a sit down on an empty hive stand for a while). The good news is that my bees are EFB-free. The not-so-great news is that two of the colonies appear to be about to swarm, so I need to get back to them, ideally tomorrow, and split them. I’m not surprised by this, if I’m honest. My beekeeping routine has been pretty chaotic so far this year for reasons that are probably quite clear from my other posts.
The surprising news is that we found a queen with a scrap of red paint left from when I marked her in 2023. She was easy to spot because of the walking frame 😀
I dropped by to check on the vines at the weekend. Hopefully this means we’ll get a harvest of some sort.
It does look like a few vines didn’t survive Winter, but overall things aren’t so bad and there are replacements available that could be moved at the end of the year.
Had to take a sneaky photo of these whilst my daughter wasn’t looking. She’s made them to go on the bags and other accessories that she makes from scrap denim that charity shops aren’t able to sell. I’m so impressed 😀
This is my resting heart rate, early afternoon.
This is about the limit of what I can stand at the moment. If my blood pressure goes any lower than this then I really can’t cope. As long as it doesn’t drop too far below 180 systolic then whilst I feel a bit shaky I can usually overcome it. (Note also the high heart rate.)
I’m wondering as well if diet doesn’t play into this somehow. Last week I mainly ate salads for lunch, often with a little cheese and things didn’t feel too bad. However, on Friday in an effort to use up some bacon that I found in the fridge I had BLTs with spicy mayonnaise. Within about half an hour I felt as though I was really struggling.
My understanding is that after eating the body directs more blood flow to the gut whilst contracting arteries elsewhere and causing the heart to beat more strongly. How much blood is redirected seems to be dependent on what is being digested as far as I can see. Quite what the interplay is with drugs that restrict contraction of the arteries and limit the power of the heart I really don’t know. It doesn’t sound like a sensible situation to me, but my understanding could be completely wrong.
Finally got the next compost bay empty today. Just as well, because there’s very little space left in the current one.
I also used some of the water pipe hoops that I cut a couple of days ago so I could temporarily put netting over the sweetcorn plants to prevent the deer eating them without any risk of crushing the plants. They seem to be quite delicate when they’re small.
Another showery day meant that working outdoors wasn’t likely to be fun for long, so I did some watering and planted some peppers and tomatoes in the polycrub.
Since I had my “pepper head” on, I then found some four litre pots and planted up more peppers into them, in line with the suggestions from “Chillichump”. They’ll stay in these until the roots fill the pot and then they’ll be moved into something bigger. Depending on how things work out, I might do a second plant of each variety. My intention is to keep these ones in the greenhouse for the year.
(Tomatoes and leeks photobombing the picture there.)
In the polytunnel we actually have our first tomato. It’s nowhere near ripe yet, but it can’t be long 😀 Sadly my phone camera just couldn’t be persuaded to focus on the actual fruit, so no photo.
Also in the polytunnel, more mushrooms are popping up. I’m really hoping this bodes well for the mushrooms that I’m hoping to grow on logs.
Shedload? After yesterday’s surprise I was even more stunned today when I visited the compost heap. At one point I counted fourteen native ladybirds mooching about around the vegetation. Some are visible in this photo, but yet again others were camera shy.
