Memory Lane, 26th May 2023

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

A few views of the veggie plot as it stands today.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Leave a comment

Time to be a mummy chicken

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

I’m a little late getting around to it this year because of the way everything is happening everywhere all at once, but last night we put two and a half dozen hatching eggs in the incubators. I actually only ordered two dozen, but we were sent and extra six by one supplier.

They’re a mixture of Copper Black Marans, Cream Legbar and White Leghorn which I like for the lovely range of egg colours (and I want to try to cross the Marans and Legbars next year to see if we can get some green egg layers. If successful we will of course have to eat some of the eggs with ham. The other variety is Buff Orpingtons which my wife and daughter both like I think because they’re just so huge and fluffy. They always make me thing of the birds in the Chicken Run film.

So, today is H-20. I’ll whip the trays out in a couple of days to weigh them just to see if we’re getting the right kind of weight loss. Average weight at the outset was about 53 grammes.

Posted in Chickens, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

More super frames

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

Yup, I’m still going… About eighty-five frames done now, mostly new, but also some old ones re-waxed. I’m getting towards the end of my store of wired foundation now. I think I have fifteen sheets left of all those that were packaged up, plus a single spare sheet I found that has had some of the corners nibbled by mice. Honestly, I don’t think the bees will care…

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

Memory Lane, 22nd May 2023: Swarm in a bucket

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

After three weeks and twenty-one swarms I was starting to run out of kit that I’d never thought I’d use again, let alone the “good stuff”. I ended up shaking this swarm into a bucket when it arrived on a tree branch at home, then tipping transferring it into an old brood box with a scrap of OSB for a crown board because I had nothing else.

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

Nasty bees

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

Thanks to an EFB outbreak locally I have an inspection booked with the seasonal bee inspector on Thursday, so I thought I’d take the time to have a quick check over of the hives beforehand. I opened the first hive and they were really not happy. Having gone through the upper brood box I reached the point where there were so many bees on my veil that I couldn’t see the frames clearly so decided to close up and call it a day.

The bees had not had enough however. I had to drive around a hundred metres with all the windows open before it was safe to take off my suit and gloves. That may be down to the oilseed rape that is going over in the field just over the road from them, but even so it needs to stop. Once the inspector has been I’ll be looking at requeening to get some more pleasant genes into the colony.

I contacted the SBI to let her know what to expect, which seems only fair. She suggested we wait until next week to do the inspection, when the weather is supposed to be better and they might have calmed down a little.

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

No dig diary, 16th May 2024

Posted on May 16, 2024 by james

They’ve been in the ground a couple of days, but I didn’t have time when they were planted to net the brassicas I’ve planted to stop the butterflies and smaller pests getting at them so today I put that right, adding over twenty-five metres of fine mesh over the plants.

They weren’t the only things that needed protection from pests either. Most of the new strawberries are covered, but the late-season ones weren’t because I’d run out of the trays I’d used to cover them. Deer have clearly been through the garden since and eaten the leaves off the plants (leaving the fruit, fortunately). For the time being I’ve put some mesh cloches over the top to stop the browsing.

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

Memory Lane, 21st May 2023: A pair of pairs of swarms?

Posted on May 14, 2024 by james

I visited a bait hive today and found this:

As the “clump” of bees outside didn’t appear to be having anything to do with those inside, I guessed that it was perhaps two different swarms that had tried to move into the same bait hive, the one arriving last finding that they couldn’t go where they’d been planning.

I put a second hive on top of the first and with a little smoke they happily trooped upwards into it. I don’t imagine they’d have done that if they’d been part of the initial swarm. Two for one. Good catch 🙂

Then at another apiary I found this:

Again, the cluster of bees outside didn’t look as though they were part of the same colony as the one inside the hive. They were really not keen on moving however. In the end I had to scoop them off the outside of the hive and dump them bodily into another, getting stung on the hand for my trouble. What amazed me most about doing that however was how warm the huddle of bees was. Quite unexpected.

Both colonies seemed quite happy in their new homes once moved. I’ve never seen it happen before, but then I guess not so many people put out bait hives.

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

Super-quick super frames

Posted on May 14, 2024 by james

Looking through my supers today I decided that I probably don’t have sufficient frames for the Summer, so used my new frame-making jig to make up another twenty (as well as the ten I made yesterday) and dug out a super’s worth of existing Manley frames that needed new wax. This evening I have been putting in the foundation. I think I have at least 100 sheets of wired super foundation so I’ll use as many of those up as I can and then move on to foundationless or starter-strip frames.

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

No dig diary, 14th May 2024: Berries behind bars

Posted on May 14, 2024 by james

Last year our currants and gooseberries produced a reasonable amount of fruit, but we got to eat almost none of it: the deer and the birds ate almost everything as soon as it approached being ripe.

So, this year we have repurposed a fruit cage that I actually bought as a possible “bird flu winter home” for the chickens and turned out to be useless for that purpose. So the fruit cage is now installed over the top of the currant and gooseberry plants and we’ll see how that goes. The blackcurrants are already smelling wonderful even though the fruit are still green.

Also today I finally got around to planting out various brassicas — cabbages, romanesco cauliflowers and calabrese. They also need to be under nets to keep the pests off, but I ran out of time for that today.

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

Smell that taste

Posted on May 14, 2024 by james

Back when I planted up the new strawberry beds I transferred the plants in the old bed to pots of compost and put them in Frankenstein’s greenhouse. It was quite late to transplant them, but it was potentially a better option than just throwing them into the compost. Most of the plants are doing pretty well and either flowering or producing fruit, but a few are really ahead of the game and had ripe fruit already, so obviously I wasn’t going to leave them.

They’re “Cambridge Favourite”, four year old plants now, but still smell lovely and taste great. Plenty more to come yet, too. The only real difficulty is keeping them sufficiently well watered.

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