This really will have to be a swift blog post, as I'm going out in half an hour, and I haven't eaten my supper yet. I'm going to a friend's concert, and it would really be too antisocial to open up the laptop and start typing as soon as I get back, at half past nine or ten on a Saturday evening.
I finished my garden write-up this morning, giving it a few final tweaks and a polish and sending it off to the editor. In the end there's only so much you can do. Mid way through the friendly local lawnmower repair company turned up with the Mountfield on the back of a pick-up. The man who delivered it looked slightly concerned when he realised that I was the only person available to help upload it. I saw his point. You don't want to lift anything heavy or fragile with another person who is going to drop it, and if I didn't know me I wouldn't be reassured by the confident offer of help from a grey haired, five foot four and eight and a half stone middle aged lady. Fortunately I am stronger than I look. He hadn't even brought the invoice with him, but said they would send it. After all that I went and weeded the vegetable patch until lunchtime, since I am still persisting in the delightful fantasy that this year I might grow some vegetables. I sowed some in pots and modules in the greenhouse, but when I looked at them yesterday nothing had come up yet.
After lunch I inspected the bees. It was technically just warm enough, and the hives are well sheltered from the wind when it's in the south west as it was today, but it wasn't the sort of day you'd want to keep them open for ages, and the light was terrible. I did mean to buy a small pocket torch to help me see eggs on dull days, but haven't got round to it. The two colonies made out of the colony that was the first to swarm last year were both showing early signs of thinking about it. The twelfth of April is ridiculously early, but it has been so warm that lots of things are ahead of themselves. I took out the immature queen cells I could see and gave them both an extra super to provide more room, for bees and honey. One had already filled a good part of its first super with honey, but it wasn't ready to take off yet, since they hadn't even started capping it. It will be a race against time now, to see if I can stop them swarming until I've got the honey off. If they go, it will go with them. It's a difficult trade-off knowing what you want from your bees. This lot are swarmy, which is bad, but quick to produce a crop, tough and very forgiving of my beekeeping errors last year, which is good.
Then we went with the truck to collect mushroom compost. It could be the truck's last summer. The MoT expires in November, and the Systems Administrator thinks that the rust around the front end may be getting so bad that it will be beyond welding next time, or at least beyond welding at an economic price. We are trying to think of things we could stock up on before it goes. The SA wants to buy a couple of builders' wheelbarrows, though two seems to me excessive.
Tonight's concert is Dvorak's Stabat Mater and something by Stainer. I did invite the SA, but it is not the SA's sort of music. Some other friends are going, and I expect we'll get to speak to our friend whose in the choir during the interval, so it should be a sociable evening, then the SA and I will have a sort of delayed Saturday night when I get home, possibly spilling over into Sunday morning.
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