It wasn't as hot today, and a brisk breeze was blowing, strong enough to make me glad that nowadays I don't have to spend half of August bouncing across the Thames estuary or the southern reaches of the north sea in a sailing boat. I carried on weeding the gravel in the turning circle, and cutting the old flowering stems out of the Euphorbia characias. It was much more comfortable than yesterday, though at some point either the cut end of a Euphorbia stem managed to work its way inside my shirt and touch my stomach, or I was bitten by an insect, because at the end of it I found a livid red and purple spot just above my diaphragm. That's another reason why I'm not as fond of high summer as I am of other seasons. Bees and butterflies and stag beetles are great, but there are so many other things around at this time of year that want to sting or bite you.
I weeded most of the patio, using the Sneeboer tool the Systems Administrator kindly bought me at the Chelsea Flower Show. I am never quite sure whether it is the patio or the terrace. Terrace sounds pretentious, although technically it is one. The ground next to it drops away a good metre, behind a retaining wall. But it doesn't feel like a patio. There are no patio doors leading to it, and although it has a bench where we occasionally sit and drink coffee, it is not regularly used for dining or recreation. In a linguistic world where we have a sitting room, not a lounge, containing a sofa, not a settee, it feels incongruous to have a patio. Anyway, it is an area of rather uneven artificial stone paving slabs (I think that settles it, it's a patio) at the southern end of the house, which keeps the daffodil lawn at a respectful distance from the building, and is mainly used as a circulation route to get from the front to the back garden, though it is a pleasant place to sit away from the easterly winds, with a good view down the garden and out into the countryside.
At the moment it has rather a lot of ant nests underneath. I am not so keen on ants. I swept up the sand they'd excavated, and the fallen leaves from the Eleagnus hedge, and raked weeds out of the gaps between the slabs. The Sneeboer tool for raking out the gaps between slabs is a wonder. It is made of steel, extremely sharp, with a wooden handle, and feels reassuringly rugged. It is sensibly designed without any extraneous sharp points so that when it is lying down it is harmless, and you can't accidentally kneel on a cutting corner. I have had disappointing experiences with English manufactured wooden and stainless steel hand tools, that looked exceedingly cute then fell to bits rapidly in use, either because the joint between the metal and the handle was poorly designed, or because the steel was of low quality. I have great hopes of the Sneeboer. Christopher Lloyd swore by them, and Great Dixter still sell Sneeboer tools in their catalogue.
Then it was time to extract the honey I took off the hive of little dark bees. There is a great preamble to extracting honey, cleaning the kitchen floor so that it is clear of cat fur, keeping the cats out of the kitchen (not so easy when three want to go in there), finding the extractor, removing the revolving wire cage, washing and drying the constituent bits, reassembling it. Finally I sliced the cappings off the first frame, and found that the honey had partially crystallised in the comb.
That was a real bind. Honey from rape flowers is notorious for crystallising very quickly after the bees have collected it, but my bees don't normally go on rape, and I can generally spin my honey crop out of the frames, when I get one. Once the honey has set in the wax, you have two choices. You can give up, and feed it back to the bees, or you can scrape honey and wax together off the frames and heat them gently, until they both melt and separate. I was dammed if I was giving up any honey, after the trouble I've gone to in the past two seasons with scarcely any crop to show for it. I spun what I could, and began to scrape. It is a slow, laborious and messy process, about as sticky as you would imagine.
The Systems Administrator arrived home from Lords before I'd finished, and was warned not to go in or anywhere near the kitchen, not while wearing the best going-to-Lords linen suit. I have now got to the point where the tail end of what liquid honey there was is dripping through a fine plastic sieve, a process that goes more and more slowly as fragments of wax clog up the sieve, while a bowl of mixed wax and honey is sitting under tinfoil on the cool side of the Aga. I don't know how long it will take to melt, since I don't normally have to do this, but the SA has been warned not to bank on being able to use the kitchen tomorrow for any cooking involving garlic or fried onions.
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