And today’s mystery object is…

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Well, I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

If anyone knows what this is, please do say.

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This year’s food fad…

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Is allegedly going to be eating plenty of fibre. Last year was apparently the year for protein.

Honestly, I just don’t get it. Why do these fads even exist? If people are so worried about their diet and health, can’t they just stop doomscrolling for fifteen minutes and actually plan to eat a balanced diet and consume less crap?

Says the man who is going to eat pizza for dinner this evening 😀 Though to be fair, it is pizza made from home-made dough, with sauce made from home-grown tomatoes and no ingredients that most people wouldn’t recognise or that require the use of a chemistry set.

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Mushrooms are go!

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

My plug spawn arrived on Thursday, so today I have drilled out the logs I put to one side and hammered in the plugs. I don’t know if it’s just this willow, but once they were hammered in they became almost invisible so marking the spacings etc. is pretty much a requirement.

The two closest to the camera are Summer Oyster and the two furthest away are Shiitake.

For now, to shelter them from the wind, I’ve put them in our log store. I should probably label them so no-one decides to use them for heating 😀

I have one log left. I’m tempted to find some other variety to try to grow in it though I’m not sure what at the moment.

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Drills, baby! Drills!

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Ok, drill bits, if we’re being accurate. Since I found the three braces, I thought I might sort through all the old drill bits that were scattered around the workshop in various boxes and drawers.

As well as standard metalworking bits, it looks as though we have bits for a brace, masonry drills, morse taper bits, plug cutting bits, SDS bits, spade bits, fly cutters and at least one countersink bit.

I imagine they’re almost all imperial sizes, too.

This one is a mystery though. It possibly looks like a rasp, but why the teeth on the end if that’s the case?

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A brace of braces

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

#2 in an irregular series of “Tools that I have too many of”.

And what is the plural of “brace”, anyhow? Brice? Braceodes?

During “Operation Tidy Workshop”, I found these. They’re quite lovely tools, though I have no idea when I would ever use them these days.

Then I found a third, with which I assume it is also possible to drill around corners 😀

(No, really, I know it’s a ratchet.)

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Crackin’ stones, Gromit

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Our Ooni pizza oven sees quite a bit of use, mostly for garlic bread, pizzas and calzone, but we’ve even used it to cook an entire meal once when there was a twelve-hour power cut when we had friends staying for the weekend.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I put in the last of five pizzas a couple of weeks ago and very shortly afterwards hear quite an obvious snapping noise. There wasn’t much I could do at that point not least because it was dark, so I just continued cooking the pizza and then let the oven cool down.

Daylight revealed the horrible story.

I have no idea why the stone would have cracked, particularly after already cooking a number of pizzas. Obviously it’s a bit chilly at this time of year, but enough to cause significant thermal stress in the stone? Unconvinced.

Anyhow, Ooni were very good about it and arranged a replacement for us which we are going to test drive this evening.

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A new beekeeping toy

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Recently I had the opportunity to buy a second-hand but barely-used electric 20-frame extractor. As it was being offered a fair bit cheaper than the 12-frame model I was contemplating, it seemed like a no-brainer. The only minor issue was that it was a 250-mile round trip to pick it up and that turned into an adventure that I really didn’t need, but more of that later.

So here it is, complete with tangential screens. Obviously I’ve not had the opportunity to use it in anger yet, but it all looks very tidy and test drives just fine.

Hopefully there’ll be a worthwhile Spring harvest this year to test it out on.

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Bumble bees, at this time of year?!

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

End of the first week of January and as I was walking out of the veggie plot I could hear a loud buzzing sound. Took me a while to locate it, but eventually I found this.

I’ve no idea what she can have been doing out so early. Hopefully she’ll survive until Spring, but we’ve probably still got the coldest parts of the year to come.

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Looks like the polycrub works then

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

I’ve not even got it finished yet (yeah, I know), but some of last year’s peppers are still looking healthy despite multiple frosts, which is certainly not the case in the polytunnel and even the ones in the greenhouses are looking a bit marginal. So I’m really quite pleased with this.

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Decking out, paving in!

Posted on January 16, 2026 by james

The path to one of our external doors is decking which is now starting to degrade quite badly so I have decided to replace it with paving slabs. And by chance I was offered these reclaimed ones for very little money at all. There should be plenty to do the path and a few left over for other purposes. I’ll still need to buy other materials, but this has saved me quite a bit.

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