As I posted yesterday, this was how the current compost heap looked on Sunday evening.
I threw a bit more stuff on and today buried a couple of dead rats in it, but having had forty-eight hours to get going, it’s really shrunk quite a bit.
Good job too, because I don’t have the next bin empty yet, thanks to the awful weather we’ve had over the last few months.
My daughter arrived home yesterday with a car load of cardboard that her employer didn’t want. He’d told her to put it in the bin and she told him that I had a better use for it to make no dig beds. Not all of this is hers, but I was getting close to running out.
As we put a lot of material into the compost heap this weekend I thought I’d check the temperature.
I really ought to find some convenient way to use at least some of that heat, but this far I don’t have any clever ideas that don’t involve getting tangled up in pipework when trying to empty the heap.
The floor that I posted about not long ago is now actually supporting something! I’ve started making the framing for the toilet from tanalised 3×2.
Front and back first, so I can measure off the exact slope for the tops of the sides.
I see this…
but I can’t help thinking this…
Has anyone ever seen them both in the same room?
Despite the high winds and horizontal rain showers I decided that today would be a good day to sort through kit in the apiary and work out if there was anything more I needed as I got around my apiaries inspecting over the next couple of weeks. Surprisingly, despite winds gusting to 40mph+ there were still bees flying.
I’ve put together three bait hives, but I need to recover bits from a couple of apiaries to make up as many as I want. If the weather calms down a bit I shall do that this week. I also want to swap some colonies into new brood boxes (double broods, in fact) with insulated dummies that will give them a “nine over nine” configuration, which is a smidge more space than in brood-and-a-half. Again I don’t have enough, but this time it’s down to brood boxes being used to store old frames. I’ll need to find somewhere else to put those. I reckon most can probably go in my “double decker xylophone” as I emptied an awful lot of frames out of that last year.
I found a few boxes that need a little light repair work, and four old section boxes that are no longer useful as section boxes, but two joined together with rails inside to support frames might well work as a bait hive brood box, meaning that the brood boxes I was using can now be used for “proper” hives. All those, together with four as-yet-unassembled roofs have been brought down to the workshop so I can work on them tomorrow when it’s also supposed to be very windy.
I’ve found another couple of brood boxes that are probably beyond repair, but I’ll hang onto them for the moment and see how things go. I might yet be able to repair them sufficiently to use them as boxes for bait hives, too.
The grass has been growing steadily this winter thanks to the relatively mild temperatures and it’s generally been way too wet to mow it, so the lawn and grass in the vegetable plot were starting to look like a jungle.
Sunday proved to be dry however, and once the dew had mostly evaporated, my daughter was out with the mower.
We have a 1m x 1.8m-ish (3’x6′) trailer that we use for dragging “stuff” around the property and she managed to fill it three times, even jumping on the clippings to pack them down and get more in. Usually once is enough mow the entire area. Once the trailer was full the grass was layered with shredded paperwork, the last of my son’s A Level notes and old newspapers in the compost bin. We left it full to overflowing.
It’ll be interesting to see how much it sinks over the next couple of days.
Not quite, but it’s been irritating me that I was reminded of someone I couldn’t place every time she’s been in the news recently.
Pussy cat
Pussy Galore
Whilst on the topic of strawberries, I’ve also now dug all of the remaining plants out of the old raised strawberry bed. I think there are around fifty in total. They’ve all been put into individual pots and as many as possible moved into Frankenstein’s greenhouse, but the last fifteen or so have had to stay outdoors. There’s no room left in any of the greehouses because plants are stacked up waiting to go out once the ground dries sufficiently (or are just sulking, in the case of the tomatoes).
I decided to remove the fleece that I’ve had over the new strawberry plants now the weather is a little warmer. Mostly it was there to keep the deer off whilst they got established anyhow. All the plants are looking well and I was amazed to find these, hidden under the leaves of one plant
It is an early variety, but this early? Checking over the others revealed a few more. Looks like we might be eating home-grown strawberries next month 😀
