It’s been two and a half years in the making, but this morning my wife persuaded me to cut these so we could have them with lunch.
After such a long wait it was quite exciting to finally get to taste something, grilled with hollandaise sauce. And very nice they were too. Hopefully we’ll be picking more a couple of times a week, at least until the start of June.
I’m not entirely sure where the time went today, but a fair bit of it was spent working on more beehive parts. I filled a few dents in some poly brood boxes and repainted them (and in a poly roof), oiled the “vaping rim” that I added to a UFE and finished converting the four section boxes into two bait hives (mostly by gluing one on top of another and then gluing in a rail to support frames). I’ve completely ignored bee space issues with the latter on the grounds that they won’t be in the box long enough for it to become a problem. As the boxes are very old, I also oiled them to help keep the water out.
Winter salads in the melon house and polytunnel, looking pretty healthy. With a bit of luck these should keep us going until Spring when we have salads growing out in the main plot once again.
One of the most odd things about the recent days of the inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal has been the apparent ignorance of the senior staff involved. We’re frequently told that such people have to be paid frankly obscene amounts of money to obtain the most talented individuals for their jobs. It very much appears that one of their necessary talents is not asking questions about important aspects of the business, and in fact almost dismissing them as “beneath their consideration”. I’d have thought that taking so many sub-postmasters to court for having their hands in the till really ought to have rung alarm bells very high up. It’s an awful lot of staff to believe are up to something seriously illegal in one business.
Or is the real talent actually the ability to create plausible deniability and develop a sudden case of amnesia so that they can claim when challenged that it was nothing to do with them?
Presumably Liz Truss must have turned off her irony meter when addressing parliament today to oppose Richy Sunak’s bill that imposes a cut-off for the age at which people are allowed to buy cigarettes. It would limit personal freedom, she claimed. Well, yes, it would, though I’d suggest that’s a very poor argument when personal freedoms are limited in many other ways just to make society work.
The real irony however is that when she was Prime Monster (Remember that? Perhaps not. Blink and you missed it, though perhaps not the resulting financial fall-out) her government refused to allow Bermuda (a British colony) to implement cannabis reform. Quite how that jibes with her opposition to limiting personal freedom I’m really not sure.
To pour more petrol on the fire, she allegedly supported the idea of cannabis reform when she was a Lib Dem, presumably before she realised that total nutcases were more welcome in the Conservatives.
I’m reminded of the quote often attributed to Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others”.
After getting the front and back sorted, I decided that actually the back wasn’t sufficiently high, so I made the sides a little higher and I’ll add an “extension” to the back to match them afterwards.
After extending the back I added the timbers for the roof and wrapped everything in breathable membrane. To make it mostly watertight (there’s no door yet) I found some scraps clear roofing and fixed them down. They’re really in no condition to use as a permanent roof though. I just need to work out what I’m going to make the final roof from.
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.
