I spent the afternoon on a Zoom call mini-conference hosted by an ex-colleague and friend. It was looking at ways of improving young people’s mental health by immersing them in nature, with the hidden agenda of making them value natural and climatic resources more through this exposure. There was a lot more to it than that, but that was the gist.
Shortly before it started, I heard that an environmental vandal had been at work overnight quite close to here.
My first reaction to that was ‘fake news spread by social media’; sadly, for once, this proved to not be the case. How a 16 year old can get to a place in the middle of nowhere, with a big chainsaw, then walk half a mile from the road to the famous site (the moon was quite bright last night, but the wind was 65mph and the rain was torrential), cut down a famous tree, and then go home is beyond me. It also tends to disprove the hypothesis of the mini-conference.
Why? “I don’t like Wednesdays!” ?
Anyway, there were fewer than 30 people on the call, and one was someone that both my friend and I had worked with 30 years ago. In a senior role, he was a total sexual predator (particularly to trainees), who loved the sound of his own voice, didn’t listen, talked over people, never arrived on time to any meeting (even if he’d called it) and always left early to some more important engagement. My friend, then at the start of her career, was the target of his unwanted advances (but bravely stood up to him and called him out), and he and I had words on several occasions about his unprofessional behaviour. Not someone I expected to ever see again, least of all at this sort of event.
The internet was running very slowly here today after the wild weather in recent times, so I was only using audio, and my name was my Zoom pseudonym. Luckily, in the circumstances. After this person turned up 20 minutes late, interrupted the person speaking to give his apologies, 3 times, and demand a recap of what he’d missed, I thought I was sending a personal message to my friend the meeting host, “He doesn’t change, does he?” but oops, it appeared to everyone. I’m not sure that he saw it, unfortunately, and he left again after half an hour. A true Freudian technological slip, if such things exist.
Month: September 2023
The new kitchen worktops can’t be made for fitting next Monday as planned because apparently the colour is no longer a stock item so has to be sent from foreign where it is made. It was a stock item back in June when we had the utility and craft room worktops made, but not now. The material should arrive in “2-3 weeks.” Who knows exactly when. Thank goodness we haven’t taken the sink out yet (the sink side was due to be templated next Monday when the first side were fitted and then fitted Monday 9th).
The manufacturer claims that he wasn’t informed of the new stocking policy by the only distributor in the UK. Just in time delivery has a lot to answer for, but there is absolutely nothing we can do. They won’t order material until they have templated, and they couldn’t template until yesterday.
Added to this, the tiler isn’t now available until the end of October and wants to charge far too much. probably because he knows this is the last job we have for him. Mr BW has therefore decided that he will do the tiling himself. He’s done small areas before, and indeed the whole of the utility down south with our own made tiles (almost the same as those we have now found) so no doubt will manage admirably. He will then have done the whole of the kitchen himself.
When the tiler visted to see the job, he did tell us exactly how he would approach it, which will be useful. He also said that the thin protective net-like membrane on the tiles needed to be washed off and the tiles dried off, becauses otherwise it gets in the grout and makes a mess of the finish.
I have failed totally to find what this very thin, almost invisible, mesh membrane is made of.
Apparently it is only found on expensive tiles (hence why we’d not seen it before) and is used to protect them in transit. This is a wodge I picked off the top of the sink full of hot water that I used to float/rub it off the first two boxes. Each piece is very very fine.
Some of it seems to dissolve in the water, but not all. I hope it is a corn starch type product, but I fear it may be plastic. Not wanting to unleash handfuls of microplastic into the local environment via the septic tank, I need to know.
Anyone happen to know, or have better Google-Fu than me?
It’s 3 weeks off 15 years since I realised that eating wheat was causing me a lot of digestive and physiological problems.
There have been 3 occasions in the ensuing 15 years when I have inadvertently consumed something with wheat in it.
One of those was last Monday when, in extreme delight at having found some tiles that were exactly what we wanted for the kitchen (slightly smaller but almost exact versions of the ones we made ourselves last time we couldn’t find the tiles we wanted, even down to the sort of clay they were made from), I drank 2 cups of hot chocolate from the tile shop’s free vending machine. I am always suspicious of anything that I consume away from home, but I didn’t check. I think it must have been the shock of the price. *whispers* £70 a square metre, but at least we got the 20% trade discount. They are very beautiful though, and, realistically, still only just over a pound a tile and undoubtedly still cheaper than making our own.
Eating wheat when you can’t never ends well. The ensuing pain and digestive, excretory and bloatedness chaos have totally wiped me out all week.
The Army even sent 6 helicopters out on Monday night while Mr BW was at a meeting. Despite hedge hopping all around for half an hour, they still couldn’t find me, and I couldn’t get out of bed to make myself known to them.
Mr BW has been a star and has somehow still managed to get everything done that we needed to have done before they template the worktop for Phase 1 (LH side and peninsular) tomorrow afternoon.
Fortunately I feel a bit better today, but it is the first time I have ever had to make yoghurt, sundried tomato powder and Sunday dinner while a wall unit was fitted around me and water pipes hung over me.
Old units still visible in this picure.
And here:
Summation of the week: Knob Placement. It’s not easy.
The kitchen is 4″ off square. This has given us a problem. The wall units are OK as the wall is straighter up there and they are only 30cm deep. The base units are fitted to square, but we have lost too much space, so, middle-of-the-night thinking and looking tells us that they need to be moved and rejigged.
I cannot find any tiles I like. I only like square matt tiles, or, at a push, slightly shiny with multi-dimensional slight undulations. “Sorry madam, they are not fashionable!” I refuse to have what is fashionable: brick shaped tiles, laid brick-stylee, most of which are shiny and large, as they look like they should be in an institution. Public toilet, school kitchen, prison… No, just no.
I had an epiphany at 2am a couple of nights ago, and spent an hour cutting sheets of A4 in half, and then blutcaking them to the walls in an inspired-by-years-of-patchwork-designs pattern. I loved it at 3am. I was unsure at 9am. I hated it at 3pm.
[insert picture later]
Last time we couldn’t find tiles we liked we made them. There is a big difference between making 2 square metres of tiles and making 7 square metres. Particularly when you now live in an area where you don’t know anyone who has a big-enough kiln to fire them.
Yesterday looked as if it would be the last nice day of summer, so we went for a perambulation in Perambulation.
Today it is raining.
Which is just as well as Mr BW has just booked for the worktop to be templated on Monday week. Back to work…
The abolition of the differently coloured tops is very frustrating.
When in the freezer or on their side in the fridge it is impossible to tell which is which when you have more than one sort.
I re-use the empty bottles for all sorts of things: storing home-made soup in the freezer, storing dyestocks (red used to be for dyes for wool and blue used to be for dyes for cotton fabric), storing dry rice, pulses and beans (much lighter and easier to manage for dysfunctional hands than glass).
Even the labels look similar now, and (at least in Waitrose and Morrisons) the type of milk (skimmed/semi-skimmed/whole) seems to be in the smallest print – almost as if it is the most unimportant thing!
Gloriously sunny here again this morning – but it was only 6 degrees overnight. Very very dewy. The stars and the milky way were lovely though. Oh how I love living where there is no light pollution.
Back to the units now – and the mopping and wiping. Bits keep having to be chipped out of the not-square walls so the new units will line up. And hacking the wall means lots of dust, even using an industrial vacuum cleaner as we go. Yesterday was 11 cloths and 7 mop head covers. Let’s hope today is less dusty.
Currently installed: top and bottom up to the soil pipe. I’m told that that Is the hardest bit as it involves the two corner units. The build quality and paint finsih is great – much the best we’ve seen anywhere we went (and we saw most of what is available in the 3 years we’ve been planning this!).
We ordered several units ‘dry assembled’ as we needed to be able to chop them about a bit to fit, so we can see much more of the construction than is normally visible. All the joints are dowelled and glued, and things like the adjustable legs are heavy duty and very easy to adjust when in place.
A question – how far (in mm) do your kitchen worktops overhang your units?
I can remember showing you a picture of the external main water feed (blue pipe) suspended in mid air when the front was out of the house this time last year.
This time it’s the kitchen water feeds (RHS).
This will enable us to still have water to the sink for as long as the sink is there.
Once the sink and its nasty old falling apart units and offensive black worktop have gone, all the plumbing behind the units, which came up from the floor, will be rerouted properly via the channel already chiselled vertically into the wall, from the new overhead pipes. But, for now, this is as good as it gets. As long as the dishwasher can still work, I am happy. We have other sinks, but I so hate washing up by hand that even one day of not having a dishwasher fills me with dread.
Meanwhile, work continues on fittting wall cupboards on the LHS around the soil pipe:
This task would have been easier had Mr BW’s multi-tool not given up the ghost part-way through. A new one has been ordered for delivery on Tuesday, and as the original was only a cheap Aldi special and is at least 7 years old and in constant use, it owes us nothing.
£102.98 for a new multi-tool against the £5-7K that it would have cost us to hire in a plumber, a plasterer, an electrician, a joiner and a tiler is excellent value in my book. And we certainly couldn’t have done it bit-by-bit and still been able to use the kitchen while it was being done.
The preparatory bits that take all the time are now completed, and putting in the base units and the rest of the wall units will be much quicker.
Well, that’s a novel way of delivering a pallet of bagged mushroom compost!
And yes, you do have to pick it all up and get it to where we want it. Somehow.
After a very hot and humid morning, it’s been raining since about 2pm; a bit of very quiet thunder, but no lightning.
It’s still hot and humd though, and getting dark.
The kitchen is coming along nicely.
And I got two heaped washing-up bowls of runner beans blanched and into the freezer. Cooking or processing while fitting a kitchen is jeopardise.
Summer may be over.
The first wall unit is up. That, I am told, was the hardest one. I am glad about that because it was very very heavy and a real pain to get to clip onto its fittings (two on one wall and one on.another, and the corner of the room wasn’t square, although that wasn’t initially apparent and necessitated wrestling the unit off the wall again so the wall bracket could have a spacer inserted to bring it forward). The instructions say that unit can hold take 65kg. I will not be testing that out. The second unit is waiting patiently for its brackets to be positioned.
The rerouting of the plumbing from underfloor to overhead was completed without the need to take down any part of the ceiling. The two new pipes slid through alongside the joists on the third try. This is the first thing that has gone right for ages.
The ceiling got repainted in less time than it took me to dehead the spent flowers in the back garden. Washing out the roller and brushes took me more time than the painting.
In between we are trying to fit in all the normal end-of-summer tasks, as well as various visits to see other organic food producing enterprises, various village shows, and b33 events.
The b33s are back where they should be at this time of year, helped by the glorious weather this week, the hen with the bad foot is much better, and there is a lovely dewy spider’s web on my old plough.
It is chaos.
We love it.
Yesterday, as the weather was set to be the 7th day of the long-awaited summer (Indian Summer – is one even allowed to call it that these days?), we went to the coast an hour and a half north of here. A repeat trip to that 4 months ago on our wedding anniversary. A fabulous proper day out with beautiful scenery there and back and the beach (sand, scenery, pebbles, shells, fossils, trains, free parking, uncommercialised) is definitely now confirmed as my third favouritest beach in the world. I even found a cowrie (my favourite shell)!
Today in the kitchen Mr BW did electrics: lowering a socket and switch so we could put in a cup shelf and making the under-cupboard lighting safe, and even more plastering. Once again, still-live sockets were found behind units, although these were not quite as bad as the live socket found behind the plyboard in the upstairs shower.
And I spent the whole day – yes, the whole day – trying to work out which new dishwasher to buy. I thought I had it all worked out months ago, but the information derived from many sources proved to be out-of-date.
Why are there now no mainstream dishwasher manufacturers offering more than 2 year warranties as standard?
Even Miele, who claim that their appliances last 20 years, now only give 2 years as a standard. In the 1980s they gave 20 years, last time I looked it was 10 years, now it is only 2, the same as most other manufacturers. Put your guarantees where your claims are, manufacturers!
The purchase cost of a dishwasher is only a very small proportion of the long-term costs. Energy usage and water usage are, these days, much more significant than the initial price. Plus some manufacturers will not sell spare parts to competent individuals to effect repairs, so one is forever tied to high-price manufacturer servicing.
I finally settled on a Bosch, with a (claim after purchase) 5 year guarantee, even though it has all sorts of smart tech crap that we will never use (seriously Bosch, who needs a push-notification on one’s phone that one only has 5 dishwasher tablets left?!), because the overall price per year of guarantee was less than that of any other machine.
Bought via John Lewis on a cashback credit card, with free removal of the old appliance (and it not being able to arrive for another 11 days, by which time hopefully we/the new kitchen will be ready for it), and with 3 months of free dishwashing ‘product’, it wasn’t what I had expected to be purchasing.
In the past nearly 40 years I have had 3 Zanussi dishwashers, 2 Siemens and an inherited Whirlpool. The latter was old and smelly when we got here, and, three and a half years later, is still plodding on (albeit with the door held on with extra screws, and the top basket held together with Mi1dred’s high temperature sealant) although it is very very noisy, doesn’t provide as much space as it might and doesn’t dry well. Zanussi don’t make ’em like they did 40 years ago, and Siemens have been more than disappointing (the first lasting 5 years, the second 7), despite supposedly being a premium made-in-Germany product (I have just discovered that Bosch now own Siemens though, although the latter was once the premium product).
My requirements were: freestanding, very quiet, very energy-efficient, very low water usage, at least 5 years of guarantee, cutlery shelf rather than basket, delay button, ability to turn off all sounds. The one I found, having spent all day researching, seems to be the only one of the hundreds available that can offer all of those.
Which? say that the average lifespan of a dishwasher is 17 years. We’ll see…
In case, at some point in the not too distant future, you find you can no longer view BW – and this problem will probably apply initially to those of you who keep everything totally up-to-date – there is a problem with the age of the security certificate for this website.
Thanks to Commentator Tim for bringing this to my attention and advising that the way round it is to add it as an exception to whatever browser plug-in is preventing access. Well… I think that is what he said he did, such technical things are beyond me these days.
This is the sort of thing you might see:
I have sought advice from the hosting company and the nice tech who picked up my pleas for help has pointed me to exactly what to do, but I am a bit too scared to do it until Mr BW can supervise (I think he had to do it for his own website), but I am unconvinced that my 20 year old lovingly hand-coded-by-Oddverse-Alan (who has long since left the building) template will cope with new-fangled add ins. And as to where I find the .htaccess file, well, I probably knew it once…
But… it may be a while before Mr BW can help as now that we have removed all the old kitchen units on the LHS, we have discovered that the water pipes that feed the sink and dishwasher that we believed ran between the ground floor ceiling and the first floor floorboards actually run down the wall and then underground. They run down the wall behind the lovely oh-so-clean (*shudders*) grey-coloured soil pipe in the centre of the picture.
Cheap 1970s copper pipes in nasty 1970s cement tend to corrode and leak, as we found to our great cost when we had to renew and re-route all the central heating pipes that originally ran through the same concrete floor when we first moved in. So, this problem must be fixed before we fit a brand new kitchen, or we risk having to pull out and re-replace the kitchen at some future point when the pipes leak. That ‘we’ being the royal ‘we’ of course, and, obviously, sourcing and re-routing pipework has to come above renewing blog security certificates.
Thank goodness for the many thousands of pictures we have taken at pertinent points in the renovation and building works. And thank goodness that Mr BW has them all stored and indexed so that he can find them when he needs them in a hurry. And that he has the correct tools and knows how to do the job, as that’s another £1,000 in plumber costs saved. Thankfully, as the coffers are more than empty.
We’ve just seen this bird on the drystone wall:
Mr BW thought it was the yellow wagtail back again, but it is the wrong colour, and slightly larger than the last time we saw it. It was, however, doing a wagtail shimmy. Any ideas?
Mr BW hates beetroot.
I have no idea why, as that he grows for me is delicious. In the past, I’ve tried hiding it in many dishes, but he always spots it.
The other day, having cooked up the latest batch in the pressure cooker, and found it to be particularly gorgeous, I persuaded him to try it again, hoping that maybe his taste has changed as he heads towards his next decade. While he didn’t actually spit it out, he did pull a face.
“How can I make you like beetroot?” I asked.
“Maybe cover it in chocolate?” he suggested.
“But it will slip off!” I protested.
“Well, then, I can have the chocolate and you can have the beetroot!” he retorted.
Mr BW has no such problem with courgette. He will eat it raw, or cooked in many different ways.
His new favourite is in this very yummy Chocolate and Courgette Brownie (gluten free) recipe given to us by b33keeping friends last weekend. It was in cups, but I translated and tested in grammes.
“It wasn’t me, it was a mouse!” he declared when I asked where the missing 3cm squares had gone.
It’s meant to be made in a square 20cm/8″ tin, but most of my tins are still lost in a box buried under the new kitchen units in the living room, or maybe in the conservatory, who knows, so I had Mr BW do a bit of mental maths and we decided that the best available alternative was the 26cm round tin (first used for the bottom tier of our wedding cake nearly 30 years ago) that was in a kitchen cupboard. I say was, as the contents of that cupboard are now (as of yesterday afternoon) also in boxes, buried, etc etc. This made it a bit thinner than it should have been, but that was no bad thing.
I cut it into 3cm squares to get it to just under a thousand calories a portion, and even the courgette, which probably counts as one of your five a day doesn’t negate that.
Chocolate and Courgette Brownie:
300g courgette, finely grated
200g almond butter
1 large egg, beaten
2 level tablespoons cocounut oil, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
85g h0ney
65g cocoa powder
1 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 level teaspoon salt
100g chocolate chips or cacao nibs, or chopped nuts
- Preheat oven to 175°C and line 20cm square tin with baking parchment.
- Squeeze excess moisture from courgette (I squeezed it with clean hands into a sieve over a bowl; I then had 220g)
- In a large bowl, stir together courgette, almond butter, egg, coconut oil and h0ney until smooth.
- Add cocoa powder, bicarb, salt and choc chips/nuts.
- Bake approx 25-35 minutes. It will still seem a bit ‘soggy’, and the top won’t spring back when pushed like many cakes, but it should have shrunk slightly from the sides of the tin and the top may look slightly crispy. It’s a brownie not a cake after all, so it’s meant to be squidgy and decadent!
I had to have it with plain yoghurt as it is so rich, but Mr BW has no such problem. Creme fraiche would go well with it too, and a bit of torn mint sprinkled onto that would help cut through the gooeyness too I think.
To make a vegan version, substitute the h0ney with maple syrup and the egg with chick pea juice.
It’s summer here again today! Which is of course typical as we are emptying food and crockery cupboards in the south-facing kitchen prior to ripping them out. That will leave just the side with the sink and dishwasher still as it was.
Luckily I managed to get 10 of the 64 litre plastic boxes emptied yesterday ready for re-use, and we have lots of plastic folding tables. We had three big built-in heavy-duty floor-to-ceiling deep double-doored wooden cupboards installed across one end of the long room back in 2021, so we are still able to function. We are also keeping the actual worktops temporarily so that they can rest back on top of the new base units once they are installed, pending templating and manufacture of the Corian tops and sinks (which might take the manufacturer a couple of weeks).
… is putting (at least some of) these 15 boxes of files, which came up with the removal men and have sat on the landing (on cardboard so as not to permanently dent the carpet) for a month now, back into the filing cabinets from whence they came on 17.7.22. Thank goodness for good labelling, and good pre-weeding, because they came out of 7, but have to go back into 4.
Meanwhile, Mr BW continues to work on the kitchen bit by bit, so that there is the minimum disruption to the usual mad frenzy of early autumn harvesting and preserving jobs.
The plastic boxes have to be emptied so that we can reuse them for temporary storage of the next tranche of kitchen cupboards to be removed. Mr BW can then get on with the next stage of electrics and the next bit of floor tiling.
Only Bodgit and Coverit (previous owners) could have managed to put in a brand new kitchen 22 years ago without tiling all the floor and filling the gaps beween the walls and the floor. 17th century floor (with later additions of loose concrete, which constantly sheds dust) is not what I want under my new kitchen units. Of course, one cannot now buy the tiles previously used (which we like much more than anything you can buy now), so we’ve had to get cheap generic grey, and ensure the new overall footprint covers the old. That will be where the masking tape is, all being well.
Now at the beginning of meteorological autumn, we had the first ‘proper’ day of summer yesterday. Warm from dawn to dusk (and all night), no wind, and we finally managed to sit outside to eat in the evening. There have been a handful of other warm and sunny days in July and August without rain, but they have always been marred by northerly or easterly winds, and too-cool evenings. That out-of-position jet stream has a lot to answer for.
A most disappointing summer, although the runner beans, mange tout and peas have loved it. Even taking into account the heat in June, I find it very hard to believe that it was the eighth warmest summer on record.
In summary:
” Met Office Senior Scientist Mike Kendon said: “The lion’s share of fine and settled weather in summer 2023 for the UK occurred in June, when high pressure was widely established bringing many dry days of warm summer sunshine. After that, however, the jet stream shifted much further to the south, with low-pressure systems often bringing rather wet and windy conditions to the UK through much of July and August.
“The characteristic variability of the UK’s climate has once again been illustrated by this summer: the season’s temperature figures are influenced by how significantly hot June was, but the result is that summer 2023 will go down as a warm and wet one for the UK, with plenty of rainfall in the second half of the season.” “
A question for those of you who grow fennel (herb fennel that is): are your plants lacking in foliage this year? Ours have plenty of flowers (the b33s are happy) and seeds (we and the birds will be happy) but almost no leaves. This is true of both the bronze and the green varieties. I noted on last week’s GW that Monty Don’s looked pretty similar. I’d have thought with all the rain there has been the foilage would be very lush.
Occasionally one of you says something in the comments that reminds me of things I have mentioned before and then forgotten about. Yesterday it was Scoakat.
This is the place where the labyrinth was going to go. Until last summer.
Only we then had several roofs full of old slates that were beyond reuse to dispose of.
We had anticipated the slates being put back on the roofs they came off, but it became apparent that they were not best quality when they were first reused in 1974, and they were several different sizes. I’m pretty sure that the disappearing/disappointing roofers also dumped some they’d taken from elsewhere on the pile they left behind.
It was either pay for 2 skips (the better part of a thousand pounds) and for them to go to landfill, or come up with a plan.
So I came up with a plan. Make a slate garden out of them.
One day when Chief Builder wasn’t here – or he’d undoubtedly have charged us extra – we got his lads to take the (many) piles of slate down to the bottom of the orchard and spread them over a flat area.
We then added the best old ‘traditional’ b33hive we have (salvaged from a field years ago and refurbished), and Mr BW put in a row of big stones from the demolished front of the house to stop the slate sliding down if there was torrential rain, and to make an edge to strim grass up to. I’ve been adding plants occasionally (not visible in the photo), mostly white, and eventually the area will have seats and a table, and be a nice place to sit. If we ever have time for sitting.
From time to time I go and jump on the slates, and, eventually, it will all be crushed. Perhaps we should have a pogo party to get it done more quickly?
This ‘Lemon Popsicle’ Kniphofia, just outside the kitchen door, came out a couple of days ago. The b33s are loving it, and the nearby chive flowers. The summer has not been good for any pollinators, as they can’t fly when it is raining or too cold, and we’ve seen maybe a tenth of the butterflies we had last year, and about the same for bumble b33s. I’ve seen very few hover flies, and few solitary b33s.
With a few sunny days in the last week, our b33s are madly flying anywhere and everywhere, trying to gather enough pollen and nectar to raise the winter bees that will keep their colony alive until spring. Usually honeyb33s won’t forage on ‘complicated’ flowers, because their tongues are relatively short (compared to bumbleb33s) and they can’t reach into the flower corollas. Generally they just ignore anything that is not a ‘single’ or ‘open’ flower, but they are currently so desperate that they are exploring complex flowers they usually wouldn’t go near. Here, a ‘frizzy’ poppy (which we didn’t plant here but which must have come up from the south, where they just appeared and cross-bred over the years). Apologies for the poor photo (two b33s to the RHS are about to dive into the petals to see what they can find):
For the first time in the 28 years we have had buzzy familiars, we haven’t taken any h0ney off at all. On August 11th, because of the poor weather in preceding weeks, when we opened the b33s on the first fine day, we found two colonies starving and had to emergency feed them with sugar syrup. There was no h0ney at all stored in the brood frames. Had we not opened them on that day, they might now be dead.
I am still very shocked and upset about that, but have to console myself that we did get there in time, and we couldn’t have looked at them any sooner as it was too cold and too wet to open the hives.
In order to get them through the winter now, we will have to feed each colony around 20kg of sugar syrup, as they have been unable to collect enough nectar to store, and only just enough to keep themselves going through the summer. Luckily b33s aren’t fussy about where their carbohydrate comes from, but Costco are limiting what they are allowing people to purchase, and it’s currently around £1.17 a kilo in supermarkets (cf 60p a year ago and 48p in 2019), plus stirring 200kg of granulated sugar into boiling water (it takes about a litre of water to dissolve a kilo of sugar) to dissolve it into solution is a big and arm-exhausting task. It’s going to cost £200 to hope to keep them alive over winter, with no income as there has no h0ney to harvest. The tax man is not going to be happy at the size of loss we will be declaring this year! We don’t keep b33s to make money, but it is nice if we can break even, as well as do good through providing a pollination source to farmers.
Of greater concern is whether queen bumbleb33s (and other b33s where they do not persist as whole colonies over winter) will have been able to store enough body fat, before they go into hibernation, to survive the winter.
I don’t know what sort of summer b33keepers have had in other parts of the country, but talking to others locally at the Show last weekend, it’s the same story all over up here. This really has been the most challenging year in living memory. As I said to Mr BW, if this had been our first year, I don’t think we’d have had a second.
And while we’re having a catchup post, we have finally (nearly) finished the area around the vegetable beds in front of the greenhouse. We never rush into doing things until the ideas we have feel ‘right’, and this part has taken 3 years to finish off, although we have been growing in the raised beds since soon after the greenhouse was finished the first autumn we were here (2020).
The central ‘feature’ is another big lump of recycled house stone, topped by an old feeder (into which we will plant something when we decide what), and several objets: many old shoe lasts, and some triangular metal floor tiles from a closed foundary in the next village down south. All picked up over many years for not very much money at all, or given to us by people clearing out (on which subject, we have already gained a reputation locally as Rehoming Central and Nice Nearest Neighbour this week kindly gave us a beautiful 40″ x 18″ slab of granite left over from her kitchen refit 5 years ago, which will no doubt turn into a table or bench eventually – maybe even down in the slate garden pictured at the beginning as I’ve just realised the colours will be perfect together).
The small green lumps are creeping thyme (loved by b33s) which will hopefully cover the entire area around and between the stepping stones eventually. We bought two very large plants (for £4 each), split them into 8, and will propagate more by dividing them further as time goes on.
