After nearly 4 weeks of lockdown there is a pattern forming in my life, as I’m sure it is in many other people’s lives. I’m in the fortunate position of having a garden where I can sit or busy myself. The trick is to spend as much time sitting as working – contemplation is supposed to make one wiser but I’m not sure it’s helping.
I’ve done a lot of weeding and it is starting to deliver results but there’s still a lot more to be done in the back garden before I move onto the area along the tree lined walk. Talking of which, during the winter this became waterlogged, almost a pond and as a consequence two of the mature holly trees look as though they’re dying (no great loss because holly trees are not attractive).
The problem with clearing the garden of weeds is, it open ups large tracts of land ready for plants. I do have a planting plan courtesy of Thrift Landscape Designs however sourcing the plants during lockdown is going to be a problem so I will leave the design until next year.
The vegetable plot is ready for things to happen. I’ve sown beetroot, carrots, shallots, parsnips and prepared the plot for the runner beans. Nothing is showing through yet however it is looking neat and tidy for the time being.
I need to do a second sowing of the things that are already sown.
The Cavolo Nero (Kale) is the fastest shooting seeds I’ve ever known. Within days of sowing the seeds there are plants showing through. Unlike my courgettes and cucumbers which seem to be on a go slow.
Another few days and these green shoots will need to be pricked out into the vegetable plot.
And so to the bees who are not having to socially distance, quite the reverse. I now have 9 frames of bees and have added a Super box on top to take the nectar which will become honey. It is at this time of year the bees build up ready to swarm. Honey bees are a super organism and as such act as if they are one creature – 30,000 brains thinking as if they are one. In the bottom left of this photo there are drone cells. The drones (males) will mate with a new queen. Before the bees can develop a new queen I need to spot it (second guess) and move the existing queen into a nucleus hive.
With this in mind I’ve positioned the nucleus ready for the split. It has to be sufficiently far away from the main hive so the workers don’t return to the original hive. They are needed to support the old queen while the queenless hive will accept the new queen.
Before I can undertake the split I need to find the queen and mark her. Not for the first time I spent 45 minutes the other day meticulously scanning each frame for the queen but I had to give up without finding her.
Trying to think positively I ordered a basic honey extractor which arrived today. It’s quite Heath Robinson but I’ve been assured it works.
Apparently you put a couple of honey filled frames into a cage inside, crank the handle and centrifugal force keeps the frames in place while the honey is thrown to the side of the container and runs down.
There’s a tap at the bottom to pour the honey through a mesh filter and stored before I decant it into jars to be given away. I need to design a honey jar label – I’m thinking along the lines of “Honey from the Pig Yard” with bees and pigs.
As from tomorrow, Sunday 19th April, it will be 4 weeks since I touched another human being… doesn’t bear thinking about.