Steel Kitten

There's nothing sweeter

I've been watching a great programme tonight: Jimmy and the Wild Honey Hunters. 

Jimmy Doherty of Jimmy's Farm fame goes to Nepal to meet a group of ancient local people who hang 200 feet up the side of a cliff to harvest the honey of massive wild bees with nothing more than a knife on the end of pole, a basket to catch the honey comb and a net over their faces. 

Of course he can't leave before giving it a go himself, but Jimmy being Jimmy and a bringer of chaos, manages to break the knife off the handle so he has to hang around for about 20 minutes in mid air while they fix it. Overall, it takes him nearly an hour to get some himself and only just manage to get some out of the basket when he gets to the ground before the hunters scoff the lot! But it's quite clear from the look on his face that the taste of that wild honey was worth enduring two million angry bees and three stings for.

I think a lot of people forget that Jimmy was doing a PhD in Entomology before he became a farmer and it's quite clear he has a soft spot for bees. He quite rightly points out that without them we would have no crops of any kind and he keeps a few hives on the farm to help pollinate his crops and sell a bit of honey in the farm shop.

I'd been giving thought to bees a lot lately. When Martin and I went to Barnsdale I ended up intruding on private honey bottling session in small log cabin hidden away behind some trees. Outside the hut were 4 hives behind perspex. I must confess I was intrigued. It looked like such a simple set up. And the women in the cabin enthused about how little there is to do with bees. You don't have to do a great deal except when you have to harvest. Ok there's the possibility of swarms so you have to know how to handle that and you must learn how to care for them properly when harvesting. But they do their own things, feed themselves and are generally congenial if you don't annoy them or nick all their food. 

And that is the problem. If I was hesitant about chickens, which are generally harmless, I'm downright paralysed about the idea of keeping something that could swarm and kill me. Not to mention I'm sure Fleagle will be stupid and get herself stung to death as well. She likes to eat bees and wasps you see. Every now and then while you're out and about in the garden in summer you hear a little yelp, look over and see her struggling to chew something causing her pain and you know it's a stinging little beast.

Besides, I have it on good authority from Chas Griffin in his book Scenes From A Smalholding that there are not enough words in the dictionary to properly describe the different types of stickiness that honey presents. Ripping-stickiness of rubber slipper sole on vinyl floor. Gummy-stickiness of jumper elbow in honey pool on worktop surface. Coco-the-clown-stickiness that gums the newspaper to the floor and then newspaper to your shoe. Super-glue-stickiness that stops you putting a jug down. Finally there's the faint, etheral, miasmic stickiness that gently floats down out of the atmosphere and coats every surface in the house. every door knob, every handle and remote control. Yep, Chas has a way with words about honey and bees that just puts you right off. 

I think it's safe to say that until the house is finished and I have a little time on my hands to really pay it the attention it deserves, bee-keeping may be one of those things that will have to wait. 

Anyway, shortly after Jimmy and the Wild Honey Hunter is aired, the BBC makes the show available on its iPlayer here, but it's only available for a few days so take the time to watch it now if you haven't seen it yet. You can also read about it here on the BBC.

The end in sight

Getting the conservatory done and dusted is proving to be a bit of a slog. But then I guess that's what you can expect when you do it all yourself.

As we are fast approaching a year since we first started building it, I thought I'd give you a little update on where we are. 

Last August, this is what the area outside our kitchen window looked like. 

It regularly flooded, even in light rain. The ground was solid, potable clay that was saturated with water thanks to a poorly placed soak-a-way

Today, it looks a little different.

Martin has worked his socks off getting it in shape. We're in the middle of laying the sunflower patio at the moment - just a bit more digging out to do by the fence so we can have flower bed and the outside at least will be complete.

I have to scrub down the patio and wall to get rid of the algae and dirt, then I can make up some cushions so people can sit on the wall. It looks like that's what the previous owners built this bit for.

On the inside of the conservatory there's still more to do though. On September 10th a carpenter is coming in to fit a frame and install a set of french doors from the kitchen, which means the two days prior to that the kitchen will be in disarray as we take out the window and knock out the brickwork. 

Then we have an electrician coming to run the wiring from the house to several sockets in the conservatory, a tiler to put down the floor and then Martin will plaster the walls that were originally the outside of the house. Then I go in to do the final cleaning, decorating and painting.

So, my hope is that by the end of September, this conservatory will be complete. 

On the one hand, sometimes I wish we had got someone in to do it. On the other hand, I now know how much care and attention has to paid to anticipate and deal with problems and do a good job, and I'm not sure that level of care and attention exists anymore in many companies in the marketplace. 

The people we got in to help us; our neighbour John to do the footing, our bricklayer Bob to do the walls and floor; our gas technician Alan to move the whole boiler (and made it run 10 times better into the process) have all been wonderful, and shown as much worry and care about the project as we have. Mind you, we were very careful to ask the right people and get recommendations of their work. We took our time, which may have added to the overall length of the project, but also added to the standard to which it was done.

I vote high standards over speed every day of the week.

Car booty heaven

Despite the dodgy weather lately, I've managed to squeeze in a little car booting down near the Super Sausage cafe on the A5 by Paulersbury over the last few weeks. I've been pretty good, restricting myself to only craft items or interesting quilts, although a few other little items sneaking in here and there, so I thought I'd share them with you.

A log cabin quilt, dating from around the 1950s by the look of the fabrics. 

A lovely old paisley feather eiderdown - I was so excited about this one! I looked through Cath Kidston Vintage Style book for advice on cleaning and she was was sure that most old quilts can be machine washed if they aren't falling apart. So into the machine it went and came out absolutely fine.

Two new bags

A little retro-style flask. A decorative item only as the stopper is just a plug style. Unless you are prepared to carry it upright constantly. Which I'm not! 

Three shabby chic mugs in a bottle carrier

A picture for the kitchen of one of my favourite style prints...

A chinese style picture frame to match a letter rack I found a few weeks ago. This lives in the kitchen at the moment. 

Five brand new cushions which have been locked away until decorate the living room (I'll tell you about that another day!). I had to put that one cushion upside down. The perfectionist in me was screaming symmetry so I deliberately turned it that way. Call it cheap therapy.

Then just when I thought it couldn't get much better, a casual glance in a bargain bin in B&Q unearthed this little gem: a pair of brand new massive canvas curtains - around 1.5 metres wide by 3 metres long each - which will be perfect for a few cushion covers and a big tablecloth for our garden furniture.

More projects to add to the rest!

The little egg factories

I haven't blogged much about The Girls since we got them. All my worries about them being hard to look after and escaping have been pretty much unfounded. They're quiet, reasonably clean, like to talk ten to the dozen and take themselves back to their coop at the end of the day without a murmur. 

We tend to get 2 eggs on 3/4 days of the week  and the rest 3 a day if Bisto obliges. We know it's her because she lays the smallest eggs and we only have a small one every few days.

So it was with some shock that on Tuesday Martin went to collect the eggs and found 4 in the nest. I had a hard time convincing him I hadn't left any in there the previous day, but I can tell he wasn't convinced. To be honest, neither was I. 

Then yesterday I got a shock when I went to collect the eggs and found 5. One had been broken - it looked like it had been squeezed hard to...ahem...get it out and had folded inwards on itself with the  pressure - but the rest were fine. To me it looked like Paxo's size, shape and colouring, which worries me because she is only a slip of a girl really, the smallest and frailest of the three. 

I have a feeling it has something to do with cutting out their night time feeds and letting them out for one last good forage before bed. To settle them in when the first got here, I'd make up a meal every night of veggies to make sure their crops were full and they were happy. I've been cutting that down gradually and now only give them a small amount on the evenings when the weather is horrid and they don't want to forage. It must be linked somehow. 

However, saying that a battery hen can lay up to three eggs a day and I had assumed that those days were gone for The Girls. perhaps not. 

If this keeps on, I'm going to have to start a one women bakery to get rid of them. We can only stomach a maximum of two omelettes a week (six eggs in each) and I occasionally have one for my breakfast or with a salad for my lunch, but I still have to make two slab cakes a week (which take three eggs each) and occasionally a four egg meringue base for a pavlova as well. 

Of course Martin is in his element. A kitchen over flowing with pavlova and cake? His idea of heaven.

It's digging time again

Do you remember I said I wasn't going out in the garden this year.

Do you remember how adament I was that I would focus on my work and not run myself ragged in a garden that descended into hell roughly once a week?

Well I'm a big fat liar.

The reason there hasn't been much in the way of posts about the garden was that I was acutely aware everyone would say "Hang on! I thought...." so I did it on the quiet and sneaked around so you guys wouldn't know.

I'm coming clean, mainly through frustration because it's driving me nuts and also because Martin and I have reached that happy plateau of in one ear and out the other, which isn't satisfying when you want someone to empathise. Either that or he thinks if he pays too much attention when I whining about the garden he may get roped in to doing something.

Actually that's not fair of me. He's laying a patio for us this weekend after pulling overtime shifts every day this week and staggering in at around 5pm looking haggard, so it's not as if he's had the time to do anything in the garden. I got his dinner ready by 5:30pm today and packed him off to bed at 7:15pm to sleep through until tomorrow morning. And actually he did help me dig something up the other evening for half an hour, so ok, I'm definitely not being fair.

Anyway, I'll tell you what I've been doing in the garden and then tell you why I'm frustrated.

I made myself a weeny salad garden up by the greenhouse which has been a huge success. I dug over the ground, laid weed suppressant membrane and lined the outside with some pavers I picked up free from a local stone mechant when he was turfing them out. There's cos lettuce, parsley, mixed lettuce leaves like oak leaf and red, californian leaf mix with mizuna and mibuna and basil. I made a wee mistake with the stones - very hard to get seeds to germinate when there's stones covering them so I couldn't make it look as smart as I would have liked.

In another wee spot in the same area is a courgette plant surrounded with rocket.

A big pot of leeks, ready to go in the ground when they get to pencil size

Then there's tomatoes...

Raspberries...

Runner beans....

Apples from a tree I managed to save after the previous house owner cut it down to a stump

Potatoes...

...and in various other parts of the garden we have onions, rhubarb, spinach, greengages, plums, pears, mange tout and masses of blackberries.

Complete failues or losses so far include one plum tree (silver leaf so cut down), carrots (eaten by slugs), parsnips (failed to germinate), blueberry (killed by the frost but miraculously managed to stick a teeny shoot up this spring so growing the whole bush from scratch again) and gooseberries (sawfly). The fig plants haven't produced anything yet, but they are a bit small so they can be forgiven.

My frustration is this.

Yield.

For the last three years the yield on everything except the trees and blackberries has been poor. The ground is to blame. I keep digging in soil improvers every year and every year it forms a clay pan and compacts before the growing season is out.

Every evening I've been going out and letting the girls have a scratch round the garden to fill their crops while I work on the veg patch. Because of the amount of cats and daytime foxes, I daren't let them be free range in the garden alone so they have to wait until I come out in the evening. It's the one time I'm guaranteed to be able to get them back in the coop safely because they put themselves to bed as it gets dark.

So while they scratch, I tidy, dig, weed, stake, plant, sow and sort. The potatoes were dug up this week and I wasn't hugely impressed by the yield. It's not been that dry over the last few months and the ground has never completely dried out. It just seemed to be the ground had compacted and...well.. stifled them I think. There's only about a spades-worth of depth in the soil despite digging two spades worth down last autumn.

I was out there this evening, double digging again before I put the leeks in and adding yet more stuff into the ground to improve it. Tomorrow I shall have to rotovate in the dug out trench just break down the huge solid blocks of clay.

Usually I do this once a year in the autumn, but if I have to do it now just to get the leeks in, it seems to me I'm going backwards with this garden not forwards. I've gone from double digging once a year to doing it twice. And I couldn't see a single earthworm in the damp soil, which worries me hugely, and I know it's not the girls as they don't come onto the beds.

And looking at the onions, they look fairly pathetic as well this year.

I'm kind of hoping that with the girls here, their straw and manure will help the ground much more after I've dug it all in. 

Otherwise I think I'm going to get a shire horse and just stand it over the bloody beds. Or maybe steal one of the cows from the back field for a couple of hours a week to get the 'job' done shall we say.

It may seem like a small thing, but when you put a lot of effort into something you need some reward.