I’m going to stick with the 90s interval for this week and see how things go, probably moving back to the 85s interval next week.
Today my 50m reps were almost all 44s, with one 45 and one 43. I was really quite tired afterwards though, and struggled to get into the 18s with my 25m reps. I suspect I started a little late and didn’t get as much rest time as normal between the two sets. Hopefully it will be better tomorrow.
I managed to earth up the potatoes today, but other jobs then got in the way of me doing much else. The only other garden-related thing I’ve done is emptying a pile of the remains of old beehive frames that I’ve melted down for the wax into the compost bin, so mostly the remains of the cocoons that the larvae make when they pupate, plus a bit of scraped-off propolis. Not sure if that counts as a “green” or a “brown” 😀 I suspect the latter. It’s a job I’ve been meaning to do for ages (like, several years), but failed to get myself organised until now. I’ve just been stacking up all my old frames and bits of comb and now I’m running out of storage space so needed to do something about it. I reckon there must have been almost a wheelbarrow full of the stuff in the end, and I’d guess I have about 4kg of wax to clean up.
Things seem to have slowed down in the veggie plot a bit, partly because I was ill for the best part of a week, but also because there doesn’t seem to be much to do. Many of the plants I sowed in May expecting to be planting out now aren’t actually ready yet, which perhaps isn’t such a bad thing as quite a few of those I’d expected to be gone by now (to make room for the new plants) aren’t even ready to be harvested.
In the polytunnel, the tomatoes seem to be doing fine, as are the couple of butternut squashes I planted under cover. All the peppers are a bit of a disaster area though. I’m really not sure we’ll get any fruit from them at all. The remaining lettuces are running to seed, which is a bit of a problem as the ones I sowed to go outdoors aren’t ready yet. The garlic looks to be doing very nicely.
In the main plot, the potatoes need earthing up, but the plants are really not that well developed. The sweetcorn is making some progress, but is hardly huge and the squashes planted between them have been very slow off the mark. My runner beans are doing really well, but the borlotti beans and french beans, sown at the same time and planted out a week earlier, are struggling. We’ve eaten some of the first planting of beetroot, which are a little smaller than tennis balls now, and the brassicas, parsnips and carrots seem to be doing nicely. The broad beans have had very little in the way of flower despite being very healthy plants and the onions also look very strong, but whilst the stems are thickening, they’re not really forming obvious bulbs. The outdoor garlic is actually starting to die back. I don’t think it will be long before I’m harvesting that. Happily there’s no sign of rust on it, which I was expecting. The carrots and all the brassicas are still under mesh, but I’ll probably uncover the broccoli now to make it easier to cut (and once we start cutting, the butterflies can’t really do any serious damage to it anyhow).
Today I sowed kale, winter cabbages and swedes, along with another batch of radishes and spring onions, and put in strings to support all the cucumbers and melons. The weather looks a bit uncertain for tomorrow, but I’m hoping I can get the potatoes earthed up and thin the carrots and parsnips and perhaps plant out a few more brassicas if I can find room.
I have new plans for the longer term, too. My wife would like us to grow some asparagus, so in the autumn I will probably make another no-dig bed as there’s no way I’m going to have space in the existing plot.
Final swim of the week and another small improvement, with mostly 45s 50m reps and mostly 18s 25m reps. I can be happy with that progress over the week, even if it’s taking somewhat longer for a full recovery than I anticipated.
Another small improvement today — I’m up to 46s for the 50m reps, though still working off the 90s interval. My 25m reps were a mix of 18s and 19s too. I can live with that for the time being.
Today was a little easier than yesterday though I still didn’t push things too hard, probably averaging around 48 seconds for my 50m reps. I was very tired afterwards though. Probably just as well that tomorrow is a rest day…
I finished my course of antibiotics today and I’ve been itching to go for a swim, so feeling much better I hurried off to the pool. That’s when I found out just how well I wasn’t 🙂
Bearing in mind that immediately before I was ill I was managing 20 x 43s reps on an 85 second interval, today I was struggling to do 50s reps on a 90s interval. I kept at it though, skipping a few where necessary and not trying to force the pace. Hopefully as the week rolls on it will become easier.
Thanks to my lack of mobility over the last week I’ve not got much done in the veggie plot other than a bit of tidying up, so it was nice to get out today and sow some more calabrese and romanesco cauliflower seeds. It may well be too late for both, but we’ll see how it goes given that this year has been so weird already.
It was also in the plan to sow another batch of spring onions, but it turned out that I didn’t have any seed left, so that will have to wait for another time.
I can stagger about a bit now the antibiotics are having an effect, so this afternoon I was doing odd jobs in the garden to stave off the boredom and when I was taking my shoes off to come in for a drink I saw this out of the window. I’ve no idea where it came from. It’s a fair way from most of my hives. I was sitting no more than four feet away when I took this in just my shorts and a t-shirt. They were so docile.
It was about three feet off the ground in a small apple tree, so out came all the kit and rather than shaking the bees off the branch into a box I decided to be kind and snipped off the branches they’re on with secateurs so I could carry them away, lay them on a sheet and put my new resized box over them.
They seemed happy enough with the idea and started fanning to let the stragglers know where they were.
There were a fair few stragglers too, as some had dropped onto the grass when I snipped off the branch. But I lay part of one of the branches they’d been on over the top of them and they all climbed on so I could shake them off in front of the box.
Most of them got the idea pretty quickly.
And in about ten or fifteen minutes they’d pretty much moved in.
This evening I removed the wooden blocks and the remainder of the branch (they all climb up to the top of the box, so that’s easy), wrapped it up in the sheet and took them over to an empty hive where I gently shook them in having removed some of the frames first. The frames wouldn’t normally be the opposite way around to those in the box underneath, but there’s a good reason this case.
Then all the frames go back in.
And a few left outside once the lid is on found their way back in through the entrance.
Once they’ve settled in I’ll remove the plugs either side to open up a couple more entrances so they have plenty of room to get in and out during the summer.
Or rather, not swimming, 7th June 🙁
I was out in the garden after lunch on Saturday when suddenly many of my major muscles starting convulsing, to the point where it was painful and I had to drop to all-fours so I didn’t fall over. After a couple of minutes that passed, but I realised then that despite being out in the sunshine and still being able to feel the warmth on my skin, I was shivering. I managed to get indoors, bounced off the walls a bit on the way to the bedroom, fell on the bed and zonked out for several hours. That evening I was pretty much sitting in a puddle of my own sweat all the time and my body temperature was 100°F (can’t get the thermometer to read °C at the moment). The small hours of Sunday morning were a bit hallucinogenic 🙂 Yesterday my temperature had come down a bit, but I was still quite feverish and didn’t sleep very well last night either.
This morning I woke up to find that my left foot was swollen and bright red, and my left calf was blotchy red all down the outside. I can walk, but it’s not easy because I have limited feeling in my toes. My temperature is closer to normal, but I’m still going through phases of sweating and shivering. A trip to the GP was arranged fairly sharpish.
I am now on heavy-duty antibiotics and not planning on doing much with my time for the next few days as its become quite uncomfortable to even stand up, so swimming is off the menu for the time being 🙁
