the day after the night before

I turned in at the usual time last night.  The Systems Administrator said he would sit up a little longer, but when I woke up at half past two the other side of the bed was still empty.  I stomped downstairs in my dressing gown (I just wrote 'padded' there because that is what people walking around in dressing gowns always do, but it would be inaccurate as well as a cliche, since I don't possess a pair of bedroom slippers, and it is impossible to pad wearing Birkenstock clogs).  The SA was watching the telly, wearing headphones so that the sound wouldn't carry up through the bedroom floor.  He said that this was getting interesting.

I'd arrived just in time for a very long speech by someone I now know is the twenty year old SNP firebrand.  We watched until about quarter to four, while Our Ginger rolled about under the warmth of the reading light on the table between us, ecstatic to have human company into the small hours.  He would like it to be election night every night.  We climbed into bed just as the announcement came from the count in Southwark that Simon Hughes was out, and when I rejoined the election coverage on the Today programme this morning it was clear that David Cameron was heading back for Downing Street.

Given that the party I was supporting won with an overall majority I ought to be happier than I am, but I feel more of a tepid relief that economic and foreign policy will not be driven by the two Eds. I can't think it would have ended well.  Now we've got the European referendum to look forwards to, whippee, but perhaps our relationship with Europe is a boil that had to be lanced at some point. The Systems Administrator revealed at lunchtime that last week, inspired by a Dan Hodges column, he had put a fiver on an all-out Tory majority at twelve to one.

Meanwhile, back in the mundane world of north east Essex, I have been experimentally spraying plants in the back garden with a product called Grazers.  Anne Swithinbank refers to it regularly in her Amateur Gardening column as if it worked, and since I have a lot of time for Anne Swithinbank I thought it was worth at least trying.  It is a calcium solution that you spray on foliage where it is absorbed, and it is supposed to make the plant unpalatable to nibbling rabbits, deer and voles.  It was discovered by accident in the course of a project to try and improve crop growth by treatment with minerals, as the experimenters realised that never mind whether or not their trial crops were growing faster, they were not being grazed off nearly as much by pests as the untreated controls.

If it works that could be a great help, and I could also use it on things like the emerging buds of hellebores, destroyed by voles in the ditch bed for the past two years, and as a precautionary spray on other winter flowers that have been stripped by muntjac in the past.  I have sent off for a five litre sprayer that should make doing entire borders faster, and in the meantime the SA got me a little hand held pump sprayer from a local garden centre.  The cost of Grazers is not too bad at thirty-nine pence per hundred square metres if you go for the largest pack size, an application can allegedly last four to six weeks, and young and newly planted things are most at risk.  I don't mind if passing deer take the odd swipe at leaves on a mature shrub, it's when they strip it of every flower bud that I get cross.

The main problem is that it's another job to do in an already crowded gardening schedule.  Time spent weeding, edging, pruning or planting feels constructive, or at least the garden looks tidier or more interesting when you've finished than before you started.  Time spent spraying an invisible liquid on plants just so that they can not be eaten by rabbits feels like more of a chore.  We do need to get rid of the bunnies living in the garden.  I saw two on the top lawn yesterday, a big one and a little one.  The SA took a shot at them from the bathroom window but missed, since the air gun is not calibrated for shooting that far downhill.  The gate is doing some good, though.  We've had the camera set on it for a few nights to find out what's going on, and there have been up to four rabbits at the same time, sitting outside and looking in.

vote early, vote often

I have cast my votes, all three of them, since as well as the parliamentary election we have district council elections, put a cross in up to two boxes.  I always vote.  When my grandmothers were born women didn't even have the vote, and I am jolly well using mine.  And no, there should not be a 'none of the above' box.  Ticking that would be to fail to grapple with the real choices in front of you.  A party that could deliver lower taxes and simultaneously fund a better health service, more generous financial support for everybody who deserves it, good schools for all, and a world class concert hall for London would be a splendid thing.  But since there isn't one able to deliver all that, or even universal free ice cream and kittens on Fridays to everybody who wants them, we're left with making the best of what's actually on offer.

And an uninspiring choice it is too.  If it's true that we get the politicians we deserve then we should be pretty worried.  The Systems Administrator and I normally love election campaigns, following every interview and discussion on the Today Programme, the World at One, the evening news and Pienaar's Politics with keen interest.  We've sat glued to the TV on election night watching the results come in, but I don't think we will be this time round.  The quality of debate has been so meagre, so dishonest, sound-bitey, shouty, superficial, and trivial, that we've watched and listened to less news in the past three months than ever in the previous decade.  And the photo ops have been so embarrassingly fake.  Samantha Cameron painting a bench in a community garden while wearing a smart safari jacket, holding the paintbrush well away from her body as if it might bite.  Who is that supposed to impress?  If you're going to paint a community bench then wear overalls or an old t-shirt.  Or better still do some relevant voluntary work for the other fifty weeks of the year that could feature in the election campaign, mentoring disadvantaged youngsters in paid internships at Smythson, perhaps.

Radio 4's Dead Ringers had the leaders of the two main parties banged to rights.  David Cameron does sound exactly as though he were talking to an eight year old who wouldn't put their pyjamas on.  He's sounded like that for quite a while, as though the interviewer and by extension the listening public were rather common and rather dim, and it was trying his patience having to waste his time with us.  But Red Ed is no better.  What happens if you don't win an overall majority, Mr Milliband?  But I want one!  Wanty, wanty, wanty.  And as for Grant Shapps, who on earth can not remember whether they were juggling to still fit their business activities in after they became an MP?  Since that episode the Tories seem to have padlocked Mr Shapps in a box, for we've heard nothing from him in the later stages of this election.  But Ed Balls is so annoying that I have to run across the kitchen when he comes on and switch the radio off, or over to the soothing tones of R3, or Classic FM if R3 is having a Ligeti moment.

And when was UK national politics reduced to a list of micro-promises to special interest groups? Two hundred million pledged to this small subsector of voters, three hundred and fifty million to that.  The other parties' pledges rubbished because they can't say exactly where the two hundred million is going to come from, when the size of the national economy is umpteen billions and two hundred million is smaller than a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.  Where is the grand scheme of things?  We seem to have plunged into an era of pork barrel politics that would put a US state contest to shame.  Although I am losing track of the number of projects the proceeds of the mansion tax is going to fund.  Just as in the Middle Ages the pieces of the true cross would have made a cross a mile high if they were all collected and stuck together, so with the things Labour is going to pay for from the mansion tax.

Voting wasn't as painful as it might have been given my disgust with every one of the main parties, since I rate my constituency MP and have a lot of time for my district councillor, who I do vaguely know.  And it's a safe Tory seat anyway so it wouldn't have made any difference to the outcome if I hadn't voted.  And ghastly as most of the Conservative front bench are, I would rather have George Osborne as Chancellor than Ed Balls.  I think the Tories have some vague glimmer of an idea that if you want a decent health service, education system and all, you need to foster a spirit of enterprise to generate the wealth to pay for them, whereas the Eds will busy themselves micromanaging the redistribution of what wealth there is until it is all gone.  And these are the politicians that we deserve.

trying to be neighbourly

I discovered the other week that there is a new beekeeper living just around the corner from us. I'm using 'just around the corner' in a relative sense: it is about half a mile if you were to walk along the lanes, less if you were to push through the undergrowth in the wood.  It is one of the closer houses to ours.  He has lived there for some time, to judge from the continuity of the cars parked outside and the length of time there's been a sign saying Eggs for sale, but is relatively new to beekeeping.  A swarm set up house in his compost bin last year, and he decided to keep them rather than simply ring the beekeepers and ask if someone could come and take them away.

I met him at the monthly club meeting, after somebody spotted that we were near neighbours abd introduced us, and I agreed that I'd be willing to go round and give help if required, while warning him that I was not good at swarm control and probably not the best person to learn from.  On Monday the call came.  Somebody had told him that while he was at work a great cloud of bees appeared over his hive, but then appeared to go in again, so he wasn't sure if his bees had already swarmed or come out for a fly about and then thought better of it.  There still seemed to be lots of bees there, but there were also queen cells, though he wasn't sure if they were sealed or not.

I tried to talk him through the options to stop them swarming if they hadn't already, which were to do an artificial swarm if the queen was there and he could find her, or split the brood if the queen could not be found to make two much smaller colonies, which with any luck would then settle down to sort themselves out and not swarm.  He didn't have any spare equipment, except for a half size nuc box with no frames, and I advised him that he did need to get hold of a spare hive as soon as possible.  Neither of us were free to look at them yesterday, but he suggested hopefully Wednesday.  I admitted I would be around on Wednesday, although the weather forecast wasn't good.

I felt slightly edgy this morning as I waited for the call.  I feel vaguely uneasy even waiting for a delivery.  It's that knowledge that your day is not entirely your own until whatever is supposed to happen has happened.  More to the point, I am not good at spotting queens or stopping my own bees swarming, let alone deciphering what's happening in a colony I've never seen before so that I don't know how big it was this time last week and can't tell if it's suddenly got smaller.  But it seemed incredibly churlish not to at least try to help, and rather two-faced to pose around being Treasurer of the local beekeeping association while refusing to help an actual beginner beekeeper with his actual bees.

The rain came on pretty early, and when he rang it was to say that he was hoping to look at them tomorrow morning.  In the meantime at my suggestion he had spoken to the man who taught me beekeeping, to my great relief.  The tutor's advice also seemed to boil down to a choice between doing a full artificial swarm and merely splitting the brood, which was all that I'd been able to think of.  My neighbour is going to go to the tutor's regular practical apiary teaching session tomorrow evening, and in cowardly fashion I felt relieved that he was now under the wing of somebody more competent than I am.

In the meantime I agreed that if he wanted to call me tomorrow I would go round while he opened his bees, and try and work out what was happening.  In the late morning, that is, because I have the early afternoon slot earmarked for my own inspection.  I suppose that if my neighbour hasn't managed to lay his hands on a fully assembled beehive by tomorrow morning then I should offer to lend him my very battered and ancient national brood box.  I switched to the commercial larger frames years ago, but the national box will still take the bigger frames with the aid of an eke stuck on top.  I would need it back pretty soon, though, since at the current rate of progress it's going to be all I'll have left spare if I need to hive a swarm.  Last year I was reduced to trying to house a beautiful large swarm in a nucleus box, and it turned out to be so large that they would not all fit in, poor things, and some had to spend the night hanging on the front of the hive.

talk the talk

I did a woodland charity talk in Romford this afternoon.  It always feels daft to be clocking up virtually a hundred miles in a round trip to the other end of the county and back to preach the virtues of environmental stewardship, but no volunteer speakers ever seem to come forward from the eastern London fringes.  I sometimes have to share my patch with one or two others along the Suffolk border, but they won't go as far as Romford.

I left plenty of time, since you never know how the A12 is going to be.  In fact, the traffic was flowing very freely and I arrived early, leaving me with plenty of time to listen to the World at One and stare at the chain link fence around the Methodist Church car park, trying to work out if I'd seen it before.  I thought I probably had, but after a dozen years of doing talks one car park ends up looking much like another.

The audience was small but welcoming, the barrel-ceilinged hall large and echoing, and the extraneous noises kept on coming.  Somewhere in the building a telephone rang with a proper old fashioned ring tone, the voices of people came and went in the lobby outside, and the hall door rattled ferociously.  It was pretty windy.  My car had been shaking in the car park as I looked at the fence.  I kept on talking, watching the lady in blue in the back row fiddling repeatedly with her hearing aid and thinking it was no good, I couldn't talk any louder or more clearly than I already was.  Juliet Stevenson could have, but I couldn't.

There was no vote of thanks afterwards because the friendly organiser disappeared to make the tea, and her friend who was supposed to be bringing the formal proceedings to a close went to help her.  As I chatted to one of the audience she confirmed my feeling that I had been there before, saying she had heard me before.  I thought I recognised her.  I'd like to say piously that human faces are more memorable than chain link fences, but the truth is that I'm not awfully good at faces, and quite observant of building details, and the main reason I'd remembered her was that she was blind.

spring flowers

Something new seems to come out every day at this time of the year.  In the ditch bed the purplish-pink pom pom flowers of Rubus 'Olympic Double' are looking very sumptuous.  I got my plant by mail order years ago, from a serious specialist shrub nursery, then suddenly it was all over the weekly gardening press as a readers' special offer, which seemed to kill its prospects dead at the top end of the market.  My former employer never stocked it.  It is a cheerful thing, though.  A bit of a one trick pony since after the purple flowers nothing else of any note happens for the rest of the year, but a perfectly pleasant occupant for a largish woodland edge border.  It runs, but only enough to give an informal effect of mingling.  I like plants that mingle (up to a point, I'm beginning to wonder if the only safe use for Coronilla varia might be stabilising a motorway embankment) but if you were a tidy gardener who like everything to stay firmly in its place you might not warm to 'Olympic Double'.

Dicentra spectabilis is in its full glory.  This is the tall version of Dicentra, not one of the dainty ground covering ones, whose arching stems carry dangling pink and white flowers that look like a lady in the bath if you turn them upside down.  And use your imagination.  It will help if your sense of imagination is quite vivid.  Mine is, as I used to remind colleagues who told me that various possible investment outcomes were impossible on the grounds that I couldn't possibly think that.  I could, and it sometimes happened, like the costs of excavating the Eurotunnel over-running by more than the amount the contractors had provided for over-runs.  Lots more.  Nowadays we are supposed to call it Lamprocapnos spectabilis instead of Dicentra.  One of the ways I know I am middle aged, apart from needing varifocals and not having any idea what's in the top forty, is that my brain is becoming steadily more resistant to plant name changes.  I've learned Dicentra spectabilis.  And Stipa arundinacea, and Schizostylis coccinea.  Why not leave it at that?

I've got a white form of the Dicentra (or Lamprocapnos) as well, but it is not nearly so vigorous as the pink.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing so long as you know what to expect.

The scented, pure yellow deciduous Azalea luteus is just coming out.  I have managed not to put anything pink next to it, to my great relief.  I normally catch myself out that way every year, looking for a home for some small pink or yellow thing, and then finding I've shoehorned it in next to something else yellow or pink, and they clash.  A rather smart white cluster flowered rhododendron relative that I got from Glendoick is also just opening.  I have forgotten its name, and there won't be time to look it up for you now as I'm on the glide path to serving supper in ten minutes (attempting to cook rice, not my strong point.  Shortcrust pastry may hold few fears, but my rice comes out like glue half the time).  The white almost rhododendron is much happier than my other purchases, who found their new lodgings perched above a ditch in the semi drought of the Clacton coastal strip a very poor substitute for their Scottish home, let alone the Himalayas.

And that is all the flowers there's time for as I try to keep an eye on the rice.  If I remember tomorrow I will look up the name of the pink species peony that is an object of complete beauty for the three days or so that its flowers last.  You get extra points for growing those in your garden.

The short indignant tabby is sitting next to my chair so that I have to be very careful not to trample on her each time I go to the stove to check.  She is squawking for more food, and I have been telling her she already has food, but now I see (or rather I heard before I saw) that Our Ginger is finishing it for her.

shopping with satan

I know Amazon is the Great Satan, but it is awfully useful.  It's a friend's birthday next Friday, and I thought a couple of days ago that it would be a good idea to get her a small present, a paperback book or something.  Then as I realised that it was a Bank Holiday weekend I began to think I'd left it a bit late, but decided that if I could get whatever it was in the post by Wednesday I'd be OK.  I'm due to do a daytime talk on Tuesday, but could get down to the post office first thing on Wednesday morning if the book arrived on Tuesday.

I typed Anne Tyler's name into the Amazon search box, since I thought my friend liked her, and it came up not merely with a list of Anne Tyler's novels, but others in a similar vein.  I baulked at the latest Tyler title in hardback, being an impoverished skinflint friend, and thinking that hardback novels were too heavy and bulky to be of much use.  You can slip a paperback in your handbag, which is still not as handy for travelling as a Kindle, but Amazon have yet to crack the Kindle gift book.  I don't know what's taking them so long.

I worried about the earlier Tylers, in case she already had them, but settled on Colm Toibin's Nora Webster.  It seemed not so ostentatiously Literary that reading it would feel like hard work, but not insultingly Chick Lit light.  If she doesn't like it she can always regift it.  It's the thought that counts.  She has previously been kind about buying me lunch for my birthday, but since I don't see how I can fit a London trip to see her into the next three weeks I thought I'd better do something sooner than that.

Amazon sent me an acknowledgement email, and then one saying that my parcel would arrive on 3 May, which was today.  I remarked to the Systems Administrator that Amazon were going to deliver my book on a Bank Holiday Sunday and the SA said that they couldn't be, their computer must not be able to cope with it being a holiday.  Then they sent another to say that my order had been despatched and could not be changed, and then one giving a tracking number and delivery slot.  I never even heard the van, which is worrying since I was busy in the kitchen at the front of the house through the entire designated hour, but suddenly the parcel was there lying in the hall.  The driver had obviously decided to dispense with a signature, or perhaps our lack of a doorbell or knocker put him off.

That is wonderful.  I know that Amazon is the Great Satan, but that is so convenient.  I could make my choice sitting at the kitchen table over a mug of coffee instead of having to go to a bookshop which saved me half Friday morning, I didn't have to pay to park, Amazon even came up with a sensible suggestion.  I suppose eventually the tax man will catch up with them, or the revolution, or something will happen to bring the party to an end, but in the meantime it is wonderful.

Meanwhile, I have been supporting real publishing at the coal face by buying a newly published book on a Northumberland garden direct from one of the authors.  The garden is Herterton.  We visited it at the end of the 2012 season and were instantly smitten, so when I saw a book might be in the offing I stuck my name on the list to be kept informed.  It has been brought out by a recently formed publisher, the Pimpernel Press, indeed, I think it may be their first title, and to get the project off the ground the photographer who project managed the whole book had to put up her own money and take five hundred copies.  My copy arrived a couple of days ago, very neatly packaged, so that leaves her with not more than four hundred and ninety-nine to go.  It is a lovely book.  I wouldn't necessarily have paid £34.95 for it if I hadn't visited the garden and liked it so much, but I have.

Addendum  The other Great Satan, Tesco, is succumbing to the form of insanity defined by repeating an action and expecting a different result, which Einstein may or may not have said. They keep sending me booklets of vouchers for £4 or £5 off if I spend a minimum of £40 or £50 within a tightly specified time period.  Given that their problem is partly that people are moving away from big weekly shops to the flexibility of more frequent, smaller ones, then sending them vouchers for use on relatively large, inflexible shops seems to be missing the point.  I suppose that's what their marketing department knows how to do, and they will go on doing it until the new management come up with a different plan.

Addendum II  Our Ginger can notch up another pair of ears on his basket.  As we were sitting in front of the fire last night he suddenly appeared on the hearthrug with a baby rabbit dangling limply from his jaws.  He was out first thing this morning as well, instead of squawking in the corridor to be let into the bedroom, and he is out now.  He was out earlier this evening  too, hunting along the bottom of the rose bank for a rabbit to come out, but they never did.  We know this because the Systems Administrator was sitting on the deck behind the bog bed also waiting, loaded gun resting on his lap like Tony Soprano.  Maybe after two hits in two nights the rabbits are getting more cautious.

rabbits

Something chewed a hole in the bottom of the rabbit gate a few days ago.  I wondered when I first saw the damage whether it had got caught up in the brambles by the entrance and ripped that way, as it's only plastic trellis, not wire netting, but there really weren't any brambles left growing within range and I'd done a pretty thorough job of clearing the debris away.  The Systems Administrator noticed the hole, and on examination pronounced it firmly to have been bitten through.  I assume that a rabbit coming in from our neighbour's field had got caught on the inside one afternoon when we shut the gate.  The alternative, that something bit its way in, is more worrying.  I darned the hole with some green plastic coated wire, and we'll see if it happens again.

We were half way through watching Good Morning Vietnam yesterday evening when there was a sudden rustling from the pile of cardboard recycling in the corner.  I assumed that one of the cats was trying to nest in there, but the SA, more suspicious, got up to investigate, followed by cries of Take it out!  Take it out now!

Our Ginger had caught a rabbit, pretty good going for a frankly chubby old boy who must be thirteen if he's a day.  He did not want to take his rabbit out, and the SA had to take it out for him. It was only a baby bunny, but that's one down, or it is if Our Ginger got it from the bottom lawn where the rabbits are living in the rose bank.  Even if he got it in the meadow it still counts, but not if he brought it in from the wood.  I've no ambition to eradicate the wild population, just the ones in the garden.

We returned to watching the film, and at the end of it discovered a trail of blood spots across the hall, but by then it was getting late and I said I'd clean them up in the morning.  The SA had better not disappear in mysterious circumstances, or I can imagine the scene with the police when they discover the blood stained tiles, and the investigating officer's disbelieving voice as I claim that they must be animal blood.  The tension would mount, until the moment when the Sergeant approaches the Inspector as he sits at his desk (maybe we could have a bit of Sibelius in one of his more anxious moments playing at this point) and says We've had the results from those stains back from Forensics, Sir.  Rabbit blood.

When I went upstairs this evening to change out of my gardening clothes and do my back exercises there was another teeny tiny rabbit, nibbling the lawn at the top of the rose bank.  I went and told the SA who fetched the air rifle, but the rabbit detected the sound or movement of the window opening, or maybe the strains of Classic FM drifting out, and bolted.

cleaning out the hens

I cleaned the chicken house out this morning.  I play up the orduresome duty, mucking out the hens, ho ho, but it isn't actually as bad as it sounds.  Healthy hen droppings are pretty dry, and sawdust provided in generous quantities is pretty absorbent, so you aren't dealing with wet, oozy muck.  Some of the time you can get away with just cleaning the roosting board, which is the shelf provided under the perch precisely to catch the regular shower of guano that hens produce as they sit there in a row through the night, but over time droppings find their way down on the the hen house floor, and periodically you need to shovel the whole lot out and replace with fresh sawdust.

The old sawdust plus droppings go on the compost heap where they make a useful addition, the nitrogen in the muck helping the carbon heavy sawdust component rot down.  That's what you need for a good compost heap, a balance between green and woody waste.  Too much green and it turns to slime, as neat lawn clippings do.  Too woody and you wait forever and a day for your compost to rot down.

Cleaning the house was complicated by the fact that one of the hens has gone broody.  She sat tight in her nesting box as I shovelled the muck off the roosting board, and stared at me balefully while I cleaned the sawdust off the floor.  The roof over the roosting board and one end wall of the hen house are hinged so that you can open them right up to get access for cleaning.  This is essential. If you are ever thinking of buying or building a hen house then think about how you will muck it out. The Systems Administrator based ours on a design in the Golden Cockerel book of poultry houses, though massively scaling up all the structural members.  This came in useful when a large tree fell on it, but that probably isn't something you need to factor in as a general rule.

Finally I wanted to change over the sawdust in the nesting box, so that our eggs would be laid on fresh, pristine wood shavings.  The nesting box is a small box attached to one side of the main house, designed to make the hens feel secure while they're laying.  It must be a vulnerable position to be in, sitting there with an egg half way up your fundament, and hens like a dark, secure space in which to lay.  The nesting box has its own little hinged roof for purely human convenience, so that you can check for eggs without having to open the main house.

I picked up the broody and thrust her gently into the body of the hen house.  I'd previously taken two eggs from under her when I let the others out into their run before breakfast, and she was not sitting on anything, just sitting.  She won't lay while she's broody, and meanwhile the other hens do seem to find her brooding presence in the box mildly off-putting.  I had to retrieve an egg from the run the other day, which the old lady Maran had left there rather than go and share the nesting box with Broody.

The hen turned around and tried to come back into the nest box, then after the first couple of shovelfuls of sawdust dealt me a mighty blow on the back of my hand with her beak.  I was grateful that I was wearing my gardening gloves, which are quite thick, and after that had to alternate between clearing sawdust and fending her off with dabs of the shovel.  She presently gave up trying to drive me away or get back into the nesting box, and instead gave way to a great outpouring of indignation, shrieking her complaint at the top of her voice.  There are few animals capable of expressing outrage as eloquently as a hen.  I poured clean sawdust into the box, while she bounced on the perch and screamed.  I locked the roof of the nesting box down again when I'd finished, and after a minute more silence descended as the hen resumed brooding.

I let them out for a run this evening, because it was a couple of weeks since they'd been out and I felt so mean, but the broody stayed in her box.  It seems a waste, when she could be scratching around under the hedge and eating grass, but it's what she wants to do at the moment.  The evening became decidedly chilly, and I was grateful when at half past seven the Systems Administrator appeared in chicken wrangling mode, and herded them back into their run so that I could retreat indoors.

weeding and mulching

Forecasts for the rain that was threatened or promised. depending on your point of view, have been continually scaled back over the past twenty-four hours, and today stayed dry, allowing me to continue weeding, feeding and Strulching along the base of the veranda.  Weeding was slow and fiddly work as I untangled a lattice of interlocking roots and rooted stems belonging to one wanted and two unwanted species.  They don't teach root identification as a specific skill at horticultural college, but it's something you learn on the job if you have the kind of complex garden where hand weeding and mulch are the order of the day, rather than hoeing, and if ambition outstrips resources so that there always are weeds.

The wanted plant was Jasminum beesianum, an agreeable if unspectacular climber with small pink flowers and a faint scent, definitely not one of those jasmines to make you swoon.  The Bluebell Arboretum consider it garden worthy enough to stock it, and I quite like it without feeling very strongly about it.  It climbs by twining, like other jasmines, and suffers from an amount of dieback each year without any apparent ill effect, again like other jasmines.  My plant is not totally sold on the twining, climbing idea, and tries to run across the ground with almost equal enthusiasm.  Quite a lot of climbers do, many honeysuckles and ivy for starters.  I chop it off when it gets to the path across the back of the rose bed, and allow it to form a frondy mass of ground cover along the bottom of the veranda if that's what it wants to do.

Unfortunately a couple of stinging nettles had got a toehold at the bottom of the decaying trellis under the veranda.  It doesn't matter that the trellis is getting a bit shabby, at least until the point when it collapses completely, since it is totally hidden by a rampaging Clematis montana, variety unknown as it was already here when we moved in, plus climbing roses 'New Dawn' and 'Climbing Etoile Holland', and a honeysuckle, another legacy from the previous owners and variety likewise unknown.  There used to be a Russian vine, which was so rampant I resorted to strong poison fairly early on, and a blue flowered potato vine that I was quite fond of until it fell to bits, probably from old age.  There used to be an inherited Clematis texensis 'Duchy of Albany'.  I knew the variety, because the previous owners had left the label on and it was still legible, but I haven't seen her yet this year.  Trachelospermum jasminoides would have smelt lovely if it hadn't died, twice, but I think Dregea sinensis might still be alive.  It is another climber with an almost cloyingly gorgeous scent, plus milky sap that brings me up in a rash, though not everybody, so I may yet regret planting it.  But I always garden in long sleeves anyway.

Stinging nettles have bright yellow underground roots, that don't look too much like many other things, and also send stems running along the ground that root where they touch.  They are initially reddish and mature to a dull buff.  Neither looks too much like the stems and roots of the Jasminum beesianum, but disentangling two interlaced sets of horizontal stems and running roots while keeping one of them reasonably intact is a fiddle.

I recognised the other unwanted plant without knowing its name.  It is a wildflower with dull little spikes of flowers that the bees like, and I wouldn't have minded leaving one or two in the back of the bed if it hadn't had running roots.  A runner that you don't even like is a no-no in a border.  Fat, white, and mercifully not too brittle underground stems ran from one stalk to the rest, and took some pulling out because they kept ducking under the jasmine.

There were ivy seedlings as well, and yet more Geum urbanum or Herb Bennet, which is another dull wildflower that I don't mind in the wood but don't want all over the borders.  And there was a bit of goosegrass or cleavers.  Goosegrass, like the poor, ye have always with ye.  But they were quick to root out in comparison.  Once I reached the box hedge surrounding the hybrid tea roses there were unwanted seedlings of Campanula lactiflora, demonstrating that a weed is in part a plant in the wrong place, since I am perfectly happy with 'Loddon Anna' elsewhere in the bed, I just don't want a monoculture of her seedlings.

One more push tomorrow should do it, unless the forecast for rain is resurrected, and then it's on to the island bed, where several cistus that were looking perfectly good until those sharp late overnight frosts have now died, and Coronilla varia needs yanking out by the handful.

frame building and cake baking

I spent the afternoon fitting foundation into brood frames and making a cake, a honey recipe I hadn't tried before, that used wholemeal flour and vegetable oil instead of butter.  The book said it needed to cook for about an hour and a half at 170 degrees Celsius, and since the Aga doesn't do anything between 180 C and just below boiling I was going to have to improvise, so sitting in the kitchen to react to the first smell of burning seemed a better bet than disappearing into the garden with the timer in my pocket.  Besides, it had rained over lunchtime leaving a legacy of wet foliage and distinctly cold air and I didn't think my chest would take kindly to either.

The brood frames in a commercial beehive measure sixteen inches by ten, hung landscape wise. Two vertical end bars with grooves on their inward sides are nailed to a top bar.  The wax foundation, which is impressed with hexagons the size of worker bee larvae cells, is reinforced with a zig zag strand of wire that projects in loops at the top and bottom of the wax sheet.  You bend one set of loops through ninety degrees and put the wax sheet in the wooden frame so that the wire loops rest on the underside of the top bar, while the sides of the sheet of foundation slip into the grooves in the side bars.

With me so far?  This is where a YouTube tutorial video would come in handy, if you actually wanted to fit foundation into a frame yourself.  Once the wax sheet is lying snug and flat in its frame, top edge close up against the top bar, sides neatly caught by the side bars, bottom resting on a very thin bottom bar that you've previously tapped into its tiny receiving slots and tacked to the side bars, you then nail a batten over the top wire loops, holding them securely.  Then you fit a second very thin bottom bar to the bottom of the sides so that the bottom of the foundation sheet rests between them but is not tacked in place.  What could be simpler?

Quite a lot of things, as it happens.  You want the wax to be at a comfortable working temperature, not too cold or it will be brittle, but not too warm or it will start bending and breaking in your fingers like over-warm pastry.  The kitchen gets to about the right temperature at this time of year with the Aga, but you wouldn't want to be doing it in a cold shed in winter.  You don't want to be doing it in a shed in the warmer months, either, unless it's bee proof, because the smell of fresh wax will soon bring them along to investigate, and accidents can happen.  The Systems Administrator got stung that way, making up frames in a workshop with several curious bees.

You want to tap the wax into its side slots gently, working from both faces and not applying too much force, so as to keep clean edges.  As soon as the edges get bent or broken it becomes much harder to get both sides to fit into their slots all the way down.  Wax foundation is not the easiest stuff to transport, being apt to melt or break if it gets too hot or cold or is roughly handled, and I was pleased that the fifty sheets I ordered from a new supplier I haven't tried before arrived in mint, crisp condition.  If the sheet is catching anywhere on either end it will buckle and refuse to lie flat.  If it does that do not force it, investigate where the sticking point is and gently ease it into the slot.  When it's sitting properly it will lie absolutely level.

Now comes tacking on the batten that's going to hold it to the top bar.  You press the batten in place and turn the frame upside down, resting it on a solid surface, in my case the kitchen table. You take a tiny nail, half an inch long or a shade longer, and hammer it through the batten so that it goes through one of the wire loops and into the top bar.  You repeat with all the wire loops, and maybe add one or two nails for luck if the batten doesn't feel absolutely secure.  Once the bees have drawn out the comb and filled it with brood and stores on both sides it will be heavy, you will need to pick it up regularly and turn it over to look at both sides, and you really, really don't want the frame disintegrating in the middle of a hive inspection.

Notice how I glossed over the tricky bit there.  You hammer the nail through the batten.  Just like that.  You just hammer it.  Which means that you take a half inch nail in your right hand (assuming you are right handed) and position it where you want it to be, pressing it into the wood as much as you can with your bare fingers.  Then you hold the nail between two fingers of your left hand so that its tiny head is just proud of your fingernails, and tap it with a small hammer.  The tip of the nail is resting less than half an inch out from the wax sheet, which will limit your room to manoeuvre, and you would like the nail to go in reasonably vertically.

Now all sorts of things can happen.  Possibly the tip of the nail will skate sideways over the batten, and you will have to put down the hammer, reposition the nail and start again.  Once you feel the nail start to grip you can take your left fingers away and use them to press the batten firmly up against the wax while you hammer.  At this point the nail may prove not to have started to grip after all, and jump out of its hole, skating across the kitchen table if it doesn't disappear behind the batten, in which case you will need to retrieve it because otherwise the batten won't sit snugly against the frame.  If you are unlucky then at this point the wax will drop out of its grooves and you are back to square one.  Maybe the nail will go in half way, and just as you think you are home and dry the next hammer blow will send it at a mad diagonal, so that it barely reaches through the batten to the frame and is of no use at all.

My first frame took me so long I began to think that at this rate the bees would have swarmed before I'd completed a brood box's worth.  Then I got back into the rhythm of it, and had done a couple of dozen by the time the SA wanted the kitchen to make the supper.  I didn't think the smell of fried onions would agree with the foundation, and was obliged to give the kitchen back over to culinary purposes.

I made a mistake with the cake.  It rose spectacularly, much more than I was expecting, but after an hour the top was just starting to catch and I tried moving it over to the simmer oven like you do with Christmas cake, where it collapsed in the middle.  Only then did I twig that of course Christmas cake uses plain flour and no raising agent and barely rises at all, whereas this recipe used self raising with a teaspoon of bicarb for good measure.  I shall try again, cutting out some discs of greaseproof paper and tinfoil to put over the top after the first hour to stop it burning.  Of course it would be easier simply to ignore any recipes for cakes cooked at less than 180 C, but before I do that I need to prove to my own satisfaction that I can't wangle a way round the problem somehow. There are people who keep a second cooker for such difficulties, but we don't.  It's Aga or nothing. Or in this case honey cake modelled on a Polo Mint.

deadheading

I have just deadheaded the daffodils in the lawn.  Books and gardening articles say that you should, to preserve the bulbs' energies for flowering next year, all except Christopher Lloyd who said that we deadheaded them to make ourselves feel better.  After all, we didn't deadhead the snowdrops, and they flowered perfectly well the following year.  He's right about snowdrops.  And I don't deadhead any of the small bulbs in the gravel, the dwarf tulips, scilla and Chionodoxa, or the crocus in the bottom lawn, or the grape hyacinths, and they multiply by seeding and still keep on flowering so that the display grows year by year.  Either daffodils are particularly lacking in stamina and need special help, or Christopher Lloyd was right.  One could design a proper trial, with patches of deadheaded and not deadheaded bulbs of different species, and see how they performed the following season, but I'm not going to.

What I am very particular about is leaving the foliage to die down naturally.  Bulbs in pots that are destined for the garden are cleared to one side and left to go on growing for a few more weeks after flowering before being disturbed.  I grow four pots of hyacinths every year, to stand by the formal pond, and move them out into the borders afterwards.  They are extremely long lived plants in the ground, and after more than two decades of planting twenty bulbs (give or take, allowing for mice and weather catastrophes) we have a generous scattering through the front and back gardens. The ideal time to add to the display is when the faded foliage has not quite disappeared, so that you can see where the gaps are.

Tulips are likewise only asked to do one year in a pot, then allowed to die back completely in their containers, while I remember to water them and sometimes even feed them.  Then I empty the pots, and sort through the bulbs, discarding the very small ones.  The bigger ones that are worth keeping to replant are stored dry until November, though there was a glitch last summer when mice found them in the garage and ate half of them.  They go into the dahlia bed nowadays, where as there is no way of telling what's already there I have to take pot luck on the risk of digging up the existing occupants.  The display in the dahlia bed tends to be slightly irregular and gappy, but overall looks cheerful enough and reasonably full, especially with the red and orange stakes. Before I hit on the idea of using the dahlia bed for tulips in the spring I planted some previously potted tulips around the edge of the vegetable patch, in very poor unimproved sand.  Most have vanished without trace, but there is a fine stand of 'Ballerina', a lily flowered variety in a lovely luminous shade of orange.  'Ballerina' is said to be relatively long lived in the soil, as is the pillar box red* 'Apeldoorn', and in this case what is said chimes with my experience here.  It doesn't always.

*  Pillar boxes were originally painted sage green, and were not changed to the familiar red until 1874, according to a website about Anthony Trollope that Google threw up while I was checking to see if pillar box was properly one word or two.  That nugget might come in useful in a quiz, or to fill a conversational lull at a particularly stilted social occasion.  As it is it has filled a paragraph.

nature is not cooperating

It didn't get warm enough to open the bees.  I was afraid it wouldn't.  I watched the thermometer, and gauged the feeling of the air on my face periodically, but the former only briefly crept up to thirteen degrees before sliding down again, and the latter maintained a raw, nippy quality. Showers are forecast for the next three days, and a maximum temperature of eleven degrees.  I don't have a good feeling about this, and am kicking myself that I didn't force myself to inspect them the week before last, the day after I went to London, but there you go.  One of the commercial beekeepers at last Thursday's club meeting was saying how his colonies were being slow to build up, and he blamed it on the mild autumn allowing another couple of generations of varroa mite at the end of the season, weakening the hives going into the winter.  He probably wouldn't have expected my colonies to be building up so rapidly any more than I did.

Meanwhile, the last three days' worth of clips from the wildlife camera make grim viewing.  There are rabbits in the back garden, morning, noon, and evening.  Also muntjac in the middle of the afternoon.  The field of vision of the wildlife camera is not very big, and the video clips don't last very long, so we haven't yet worked out exactly where the rabbits are coming from and going to, but it looks as though they, or it, could be living in the rose bank.  There was only ever one rabbit in shot at a time.  It was an adult and not a baby, but apart from that one wild rabbit looks much like another to me.  The Systems Administrator has reset the camera, now pointing directly at the suspect point in the bank rather than along its base, and we'll see what we get in the next day or two.  I blame the Romans.

It was tranquil in the greenhouse, apart from a little mollusc damage.  I sprinkled a few slug pellets on the affected trays of seedlings, and on the dahlia pots as the first dahlia leaves are just starting to emerge.  I don't use slug pellets widely around the garden.  Most plants are big and tough enough to take a little damage, and if things are real martyrs I tend to let them disappear and plant something else.  Thus my collection of hostas in the open ground is limited to the yellow leaved form 'Sum and Substance'.  I believe that what puts the slugs and snails off is not the colour of the leaves but their thickness.  Even 'Sum and Substance' is not immune, getting mildly nibbled by the end of summer.  It depends partly on how many molluscs you have and how desperate they are.  I recommended 'Sum and Substance' to my mother, but in her garden it was reduced to nothing, as was 'Red October' (a rather nice form with red leaf stems) in mine.

The greenhouse is full to bursting and then some, and I'll be relieved when the chance of overnight frost is pretty much over and I can risk putting the overwintering geraniums and other tender things outside.  By dint of shuffling trays of slightly more advanced seedlings and cuttings out to the cold frames I just about made space for everything I needed to prick out (some of it should have been pricked out days ago) but I really am starting to run out of room to put anything down.  I broke a stem off a marguerite stepping past it to get to the staging, and rather than waste it trimmed off the side shoots for cuttings, though if they take then that will be another half dozen pots needing somewhere to live.  I did consign one badly root aphid infested Geranium maderense to a bag of waste destined for the dump, since I have more plants coming on.  It would be nice to eliminate the root aphid this summer if possible, through a programme of planting out, Provado and ruthless throwing away of infected pots.  While I've got it I can't even resort to the generous gardener's method of making space, which is to give pots of plants away whether people want them or not.

poised for action, weather permitting

Once the Systems Administrator had drilled holes in the metal covers for the beehive roofs the rest of the construction went together really easily.  I finished assembling my fifty frames, as far as I could with only three sheets of wax foundation to go in them, and have sent off for some more foundation and another roof and entrance block.  With the complete frames left over from last year and the three I did this morning I have enough for a full size hive and a half sized nuc.  I've got two nucs, three brand new spare brood boxes and an emergency fourth consisting of an old national hive with an extra inch and a half stuck on top so that it can take the larger commercial sized frames.  I have spare floors, though they are solid and not my preferred open mesh, three complete roofs, spare crown boards and entrance blocks, and some sturdy ekes normally used for holding food buckets in the autumn that will do as makeshift stands.  I am all set to try and control swarms, except that if next week's weather forecast is right it won't be warm enough to open the bees.

In the longer run I need more open mesh floors, some more proper stands, a couple more entrance blocks and probably some more crown boards.  And the discipline to unite colonies come this autumn if they all make it through the summer so that I don't go into next winter with as many as six colonies, let alone more.  The trouble is that most methods of swarm control leave you with two sets of bees where there was only one before.  Pick up a swarm or two and you can find your number of hives has doubled in the course of a season.  For every hive you really need to reckon on having a spare, for use at this time of the year when they're thinking about swarming.  It's easy to end up perpetually short of kit.

As the treasurer of the local beekeepers I see how many hives all the members own up to when I'm processing their bee disease insurance payments, and it never ceases to surprise me the number who reckon they won't have more than three colonies at any stage of the year.  If you start the season with more than one you are quite likely to get up to at least four at some point, if you want to either do artificial swarms or simply split your colonies to prevent them swarming.  I fear many people must do what I've done myself often enough in the past, which is to stare anxiously into their beehives, conclude they don't know what the bees are doing or if they've already done it, and leave them to get on with it.  You will probably not lose all your bees that way, but you're unlikely to get much honey, and the bees you do lose may end up causing a nuisance to somebody.

The day was so cold and dank that I gave up on my plan of working in the greenhouse when I'd finished with the beehive equipment, and began to tackle the mess on my desk instead.  Apparently the UK is going to be hit by an Arctic Plume.  I think I'll hold off on buying new pelargoniums for the pots by the pond for another week or two.

hive assembly

I've spent most of today in that traditional Saturday activity, assembling flat pack furniture, only mine was furniture for bees.  Thinking that I'd be well prepared in advance of the swarming season, back in January I ordered some self assembly brood boxes and beehive roofs from a well known national supplier of beekeeping equipment in their sale.  It took a long time to arrive, even longer than the warning on their website said it might, and then three heavy, slightly battered cardboard boxes turned up.  Since late February they have been sitting in a dark corner of the downstairs sitting room.

Winter is the ideal time to build hives and get ready for the season ahead, or so the theory goes. But in practice assembling the hives never rose to the top of my list of things to do, because it still seemed likes months or at least weeks until I'd need to use them, and there was always something else more urgent to do, and as I struggled with what seemed like an endless series of colds I didn't feel like building beehives, and I hoped the Systems Administrator who is much handier than I am at these things might offer to do it.  Until suddenly the swarming season had started, and it became urgent.  And the SA showed no inclination to spend a day assembling beehives.

The brood box is the bee factory within the hive.  It is the bottom box of the stack, where the queen lives and lays eggs and the workers raise the next generation of bees.  I use commercial brood boxes, which are large enough to accommodate frames sixteen inches wide by ten inches deep.  That's large by beehive standards, the idea being that it gives the queen plenty of room to lay.  It needs to be reasonably solid, and I'd gone for western red cedar, seven eighths of an inch thick.  And to save further on cost I'd gone for seconds.

I'd heard mixed reviews of these seconds.  Some people said they were straightforward to assemble as long as you were prepared to finesse things as you went along, while others said they were infuriating to the point of impossibility.  Both camps turned out to be more or less right.  To give structural strength and rigidity the corners were formed of mortice and tenon joins.  You couldn't have any kind of reinforcing corner vertical piece inside the box because it would get in the way of the frames, so all the strength has to come from the joint itself.  Except that the slots and the sticky out bits (there must be a technical carpentry term for those) on the adjacent side that were supposed to fit into the slots did not exactly align, by a big enough margin for it to matter.  Not just a bit tight so that if you gave it a good couple of whacks with a hammer it would slide home, but extra sixteenths of an inch of wood so that the joint absolutely would not fit together, even when hit quite hard with a lump hammer (using a wooden dolly so as not to damage the joint.  I don't know much about carpentry but I do know that).

I cadged a metal file from the SA's workshop, and made painfully slow progress filing the joints down to enlarge the holes.  After a while the SA saw the extent of the problem and found me a rougher file out of the stash of railway modelling equipment, which speeded things up a bit, but out of the dozen corners I had to assemble (three brood boxes) I reckon only one went together without substantial preparatory work.  So it was conceptually simple, but horribly time consuming, and if you didn't have a rough file to hand you've have been stuffed until you'd gone out and bought one.

I was working at the kitchen table, not having anywhere else, and it seemed like a nice reversal of the traditional domestic roles at lunchtime that I was the one apologising that the kitchen was full of bits of wood and glue and nails, while the SA graciously said that it didn't matter.  The kitchen table is not the ideal working surface, being a bit too bouncy for hammering things together, and I could see why in proper engineering workshops the benches are massively heavy and made out of metal.  Still, I didn't have one of those.

By mid afternoon I'd progressed to the three roofs.  The wooden interiors went together quite easily, being far smaller than the deep boxes, with fewer slots and bits-that-go-into-slots to worry about, but I could not for the life of me see how I was supposed to attach the wooden part to the aluminium roof.  The metal cover is to make the roof weatherproof, and if you were building a hive from scratch and were very cost conscious I don't see why you shouldn't use roofing felt, but if you buy the flat packs then metal comes as standard.  Without any holes drilled in it to put nails through to attach it to the wooden superstructure.  I puzzled about this, and tried knocking holes in it using a nail, but the main thing that happened was that the nail bent.  I went and begged an awl from the SA, who gave it to me with some misgivings, warning me that it was fairly lethal, and I managed to knock two holes through the first metal roof before bending the tip of the awl.  So I had to confess that I'd knackered it (though the SA will be able to sharpen it back to a point) and ask very nicely if the SA could possibly drill some holes through all three pieces of metal in the morning.  I don't understand why they don't come already drilled, when you get everything else down to the drawing pins used to fix the little bits of mesh over the ventilation slots, and maybe I am missing a trick and they are not supposed to be nailed on, but I really can't see how else to keep them in place.  There were no instructions with the roofs.  I did look.

slim pickings in the asparagus bed

I have started cutting the asparagus, a mere handful of spears each time.  I suddenly noticed a few days ago that there were a few stems ready to harvest.  Since then I've read that St George's day was the traditional start of the asparagus season, but I didn't know that when I cut them.

Apparently the UK is set for a bumper harvest, because last year's good summer and this year's mild spring are what asparagus likes.  I don't think that will apply to our crop.  I haven't looked after it very well, indeed, when I started clearing the vegetable patch over the winter I had grave doubts whether it was still alive.  There didn't seem to be many old fronds from last year, and asparagus is one of those plants that disappears completely below ground in winter with no dormant buds at ground level to reassure you that there's still life down there.

The current bed is my second attempt, which put us back for starters when you're supposed to give plants time to become established and build up their strength before cutting any spears at all.  I planted the first one in the ground without doing much to it first, having read that asparagus liked good drainage and thinking we had that.  A few sad stems pushed their way up through what seemed almost a solid carpet of stones, and were eaten by a pest which may have been the asparagus beetle.  I decided it was time to start again in a different bed, this time boosted by the addition of lots of compost, and bought some pot grown plants that were going cheap at work after the manager had potted up some packaged roots that were left languishing unsold in their bags.

Unfortunately due to a communications failure with the Systems Administrator when the SA was going through a vegetable growing stage they were dug up and thrown on the compost heap.  I rescued as many pots as I could find and replanted them.  They were supposed to be an all male variety, but as some carried berries and bird sown asparagus started popping up in the gravel they clearly weren't.  There hadn't been enough pots to fill the whole bed, and two or three years ago I sent off to one of the seed companies for some bare rooted plants of an allegedly superior variety. There followed a horrendously dry summer, and while I tried to water them they were a long way from the house and there were a lot of other possibly dying plants that needed watering as well.

I did manage to get the bed weeded and Strulched, and for a while it looked under control, but last year I don't think it was weeded at all, and by then the covering of Strulch had broken down, so it was a sadly overgrown and weedy asparagus patch that greeted me this winter when I decided to try and have another go.  Some of the most recently planted posh plants had become exposed, so that the central part of the clump was above the level of the soil, held in place by its surrounding circle of roots.  They looked completely dessicated and very unpromising.

I gave it a preliminary weed which got the big stuff out, though I need to go round again and scrape out more oxalis, and delve away at the running roots of a grass that's set up camp in the middle. And there are a couple of bramble roots I haven't got out completely, and some strawberry plants that rooted from runners making a break from the strawberry bed, and that can stay there just for the minute in case I need them.  But the asparagus is no longer competing with any large weeds, and I have watered it once or twice.  I intend to spread a layer of mushroom compost over the bed, just as soon as I can get round to it, which the exposed roots will probably appreciate.  They are throwing up a few incredibly thin and weedy  shoots from underground, so are not dead yet. Indeed, I've a feeling I've read about asparagus fields surviving ploughing, so the essential life of the plant must be located quite far down.

I've only taken my small crop from the older plants, which have been sending up some good fat spears as well as the weedy sprue, and I reckon are strong enough to take it, though I don't think I'll be picking until June.  There was nowhere near enough for it to be worth serving with hollandaise sauce, but it made a good flavouring for a couple of cheese flans.  Home grown asparagus and our own eggs, but that's as close to the Good Life as it's going to get, since we are definitely not keeping a cow.

more threats to the honey bee

Tonight was the monthly beekeepers' meeting.  We had a lecture about the small hive beetle, which was interesting but has increased by one the list of things to worry about.  It is a pest of honey bees, which is not in the UK, yet, but has spread across America and Australia and is heading in our direction.

It came originally from sub-Saharan Africa, where it is only a minor pest, because their bees are extremely good at clearing intruders out of their hives, and are generally much more fierce than the European honey bee.  Left to its own devices it would probably have stayed there, as it can only fly about seven miles at the most, and sub-Saharan Africa is bounded on two sides by ocean and on the third by the Sahara.  Thanks to human beings moving so much stuff about the planet, not just bees but food, plants, and plant based products, the small hive beetle has made a break for it, and is established on every continent (except Antarctica).  In Europe it is still confined to southern Italy, after a Portuguese outbreak arising directly from the importation of honey bees was spotted quickly and wiped out, but you have a nasty feeling it's only a matter of time.

The beetle is quite a lot smaller than a bee, maybe a bit bigger than a bee's head.  It lives and lays its eggs in bee colonies.  The grubs are truly revolting, wriggly maggots that eat everything. Honey, pollen, bee larvae.  They move throughout the hive, chewing their way through the wax, and defecate as they go.  You wouldn't fancy honey that contained beetle larvae frass anyway, but in case you did, their excrement contains a yeast that causes the honey to ferment and break out of its cells.  The bees mop up the honey and store it again, which merely spreads the yeast further through the hive.

The larvae have to leave the hive and burrow into the ground to pupate, so there might be some prospect of controlling them during that phase of their lifecycle using parasitic nematodes.  The adult beetles tend to congregate together in corners out of the way of the bees, who will harass them, so there is some scope for trapping using corrugated card that you then remove and destroy with the beetles inside, or with liquid traps containing cider vinegar, to which they are extremely partial until the point where they drown.  It sounds like putting out half grapefruit skins and beer traps for the slugs, and is probably about as effective.  There is no chemical treatment available. Mind you, the varroa experience has shown that finding an insecticide that will target the insect pest without also harming the bees is extremely difficult, and if there were just one then the target would soon develop resistance.  And there's the problem of not leaving residues in the honey. Honey containing larval droppings sounds bad enough, but at least they're organic.  Pesticide residues, anybody?

The Systems Administrator asked when I got home if I had had a nice time, and I said that it had been very interesting and I'd spoken to people and eaten a chocolate biscuit, which was nice, only it was all rather depressing.  This worried the SA, until we'd established that it was the prospect of disgusting wriggly larvae that was depressing, not that anybody had died, at which the SA looked simultaneously amused and relieved.  I slightly wish I hadn't seen that video clip of the larvae wriggling, though, as I don't want it coming back into my mind if I wake up at three in the morning.  It really was singularly unpleasant.  The commercial beekeeper there said that what we should really be worrying about was not the small hive beetle, but the Asian hornet, which is already as close to the UK as France and will eat fifty adult bees an hour and forms vast colonies containing thirty or forty thousand destroying insects.  So that's two extra things to worry about.

the folk awards

We've just been listening to the Radio 2 Folk Awards.  I couldn't guess who was going to win in any of the categories, or rather when I did guess, I guessed wrong.  The Furrow Collective, who (which?) I saw at the Colchester Arts Centre a few weeks back were up for two awards, but didn't get either.  I thought they'd be pipped to the post for Best Group by The Gloaming, which (who?) by all accounts are fabulously glamorous and includes Martin Hayes, that most fey and faerie of Irish fiddlers.  Who would ever have thought it would go to three young a capella male singers from Stockton?  Not the members of The Young'Uns, to judge from their amiable acceptance speech. Nobody at the Folk Awards ever admits they expected to win, but The Young'Uns did sound genuinely surprised.

I was pleased that Loudon Wainwright III was given a lifetime achievement award, and was waiting for him to thank his producer and Jesus Christ in his acceptance speech, only he didn't, although he thanked lots of other people.  The Systems Administrator and I were early adopters of Loudon Wainwright, and have his first album on cassette.  It still reminds me of lying at anchor on the river Deben, after we played it a lot one summer sailing holiday.  As a proud father he is probably chuffed to bits when the newspaper column inches are filled with praise of Rufus and Martha (I wish I had heard her version of Seven Deadly Sins.  I imagine it would be quite something) but he is probably pleased when the media remembers that his own musical career isn't over yet.

I was surprised that Cara Dillon didn't get anything.  The Radio 2 folk programme has been all over her new album since it came out, and she is so elfin and beautiful.  I thought there should be a Most Elfin award, and it could be given to Cara Dillon, Julie Fowlis and Martin Hayes in turn.  The SA nominated the creation of a Best Bellowhead award, to be awarded annually to Bellowhead.

I am rather sorry that I didn't go to see Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar, who I am pretty sure were on recently at the Arts Centre.  But I had a cold, the seats in the Arts Centre are so uncomfortable that it has to be something really compellingly good to persuade the SA to sit on them for an entire evening, and I was already booked to go to another gig there with the friend who is quite into folk music (though not nerdily steeped in it since infancy) and didn't want to overload her.

Looking at the full list of nominees, I have seen quite a few of them live, rarely in a venue seating more than three hundred, and seldom paying more than twenty pounds for a ticket.  Tim Dowling made a joke in his speech about how the four groups nominated in the category where he was presenting the prize were all dedicated to the tradition while pushing the boundaries (or words to that effect) while all other folk musicians were just in it for the money.  He got a laugh, but it was a bit near the bone.  How many other musicians up for national awards have to man their own merchandise stand during the interval?

a question of priorities

After saying that I must concentrate on spreading Strulch, today I did not touch so much as a single bucket of it.  First of all I watered the ditch bed, and then I helped the Systems Administrator move the piles of cut brambles down from the meadow to the bonfire heap, now that we have a working lawn tractor, and then I inspected the bees, and then I finished watering the ditch bed and watered all the pots.  And by the time I'd had a tiny fit of domesticity and emptied the dishwasher it was gone seven and time to sit down.

The ditch bed and the retro kidney shaped bed round the three river birches are looking very pretty. A fresh crop of weeds is coming through, when you look closely, and some of the flower stems have been eaten off by rabbits or muntjac, but there are primroses, violets, pulmonaria and anemonella, and great clumps of Erythronium 'Pagoda', which seems the easiest of the trout lilies.  The primroses are mostly the wild yellow sort, but there are some pink ones, a few of the little purple 'Wanda', some odd dark red, and a soft pink and white double which are both lasting remarkably well.  Double primroses are not always long lived plants, and I tend not to get round to splitting them and replanting in fresh enriched soil as I would if I were more of a primrose specialist.  There are little violets in a good shade of pinky mauve, and bigger ones in blue.  The pink violets and the primroses have seeded themselves into the shaded part of the lawn where it is turning to moss.  The hellebore flowers are ageing gracefully, as hellebores do, and the spotted leaves of Arum italicum 'Pictum' are making fine fat clumps, since for once nothing has dug up and eaten the tubers.  So the ditch and birch beds are looking very nice, and I enjoyed standing looking as I gently played the hose over them.

There were a lot of brambles.  If I'd been properly on top of them over the past couple of years there wouldn't have been so many, so if I can have a go at the roots with the pickaxe over the remainder of the year then it shouldn't be so bad next year.  Rubus cockburnianus simply needs to go.  It is much, much too rampant.  I can imagine situations in which it could be useful, if you had a spare acre to cover, or if it were safely confined on an island, or maybe in the middle of an area of grass that was mowed weekly so that its questing adventitious shoots were regularly cut down, but it is a menace in a normal garden setting, even in a large garden.  We did not manage to get all the brambles and hedge prunings back in today's session, because after a couple of hours the old lawn tractor began to get rather hot and bothered.  It was quite enough anyway, since by then the Systems Administrator's back had gone.

Four of the bee colonies were bursting out of their boxes and were beginning to think about swarming.  I should really have looked at them last week, only I was committed to going to London on the one really hot day, and the following day when it was warmish my chest was so bunged up I couldn't cope with the idea of opening the bees, and then the chilly easterly started blowing again. Admittedly I could have put supers on, but I expect they'd have started to think about swarming anyway.  They are good natured bees, every hive, but swarmy.  The fifth colony was not doing so well, for reasons that remain mysterious, but the small colony in the nuc, that never built up or did anything useful all last summer, was crammed with bees and had brood on every one of its five frames but without any signs of wanting to swarm.  The sixth colony was almost beeless.  It was originally the other half of the mysteriously weak fifth colony, created by splitting a strong colony last spring, and I had never been able to find any obvious symptoms of disease or reason for its lacklustre performance since.

I gave the full size box from the failed colony to the nuc.  This was at one level a risky strategy, given that I didn't know why the failed colony didn't thrive, and it might have been something infectious.  But the nuc was failing for most of last year, before rallying to the point where it needed a bigger box, and I don't have an endless supply of beehives to give every colony a brand new, guaranteed infection free one every time.  Putting a slightly suspect small colony into a slightly suspect box and reserving my new boxes for swarm control in the booming colonies seemed the best solution.

Besides which, I haven't made up the new boxes yet, I've been so busy with other things.  And now it's urgent.  It remains to be seen how much of the Strulch will ever find it's way on to the borders before winter.

bulk delivery

The Strulch arrived.  The driver had the sense to reverse in, but ignored the request to go round the outside of the turning circle and scraped his way up the eleagnus hedge, though he made it further towards the house than the last one.  I could hear faint fries of protest from the cab because he could not get out, before he emerged through the nearside door.  I found him a piece of board so that he could run his mechanised pallet trolley off the back of the tail lift, and that was as far as it was going on the gravel.

I read an article the other day about the advice from some doctor who was urging the population to take much more exercise for the good of its health.  A stroll around the golf course or gardening were not enough, he said.  We needed aerobic and load bearing exercise.  I don't think his idea of gardening can have been the same as mine, because after the lorry had gone I shifted the entire pallet load off the drive, a bag at a time.  Each bag weights 13.5 kilogrammes, so that's six hundred and seventy five kilos.  Plus the pallet.  Plus dragging a substantial piece of exterior grade plywood over from the workshop and putting it away afterwards.  Shifting approximately eleven times your own bodyweight in materials before teatime counts as load bearing and aerobic in my book.

The Strulch is now cached in fairly neat piles near to where I need to use it, some in the back garden, some next to the remaining bag of gravel in the turning circle, and some by the entrance bed.  I wasn't sure exactly how much I'd need where, so stacked some on the concrete by the pot shed where it would be out of the way and could be brought out as and when needed.  Applying it seems terribly urgent.  The foliage in the borders is expanding by the day, and it is getting difficult to apply mulch.  I resumed Strulching in the bog bed, on the grounds that the thalictrum leaves were growing faster and fluffier than anything else, but really it's a case of everything needing doing at once.  I feel the rest of the week is going to be devoted to mulch.  Apart from the fact that some cosmos need pricking out, and the recently planted heathers and box plants need watering.

Meanwhile, we have a new postbox.  One day last week, as I drove past the spot where the previous one used to be, I passed a builder's van and a pair of workman in high visibility vests carrying a bright and shiny red box.  I considered stopping and asking them what had happened to the old one, and if it had been stolen or needed upgrading to fit modern security standards or something.  But then I thought that their job was simply to install the new box and they could not be expected to know the whys and wherefores of what happened to its predecessor.

The new box was not immediately open for business, having a bag taped over its head, and I wondered hopefully whether there was going to be a grand opening, with Councillor Heaney and Bernard Jenkin making speeches about the importance of rural postboxes before ceremonially cutting a ribbon, but the Systems Administrator said it was probably to do with keys.  It was still bagged up this morning when the SA went to the supermarket, but by this evening when I got back from the beekeepers committee meeting the bag had gone.  I am glad we have a new box.  I did sometimes walk to the old one, and it's a four mile round trip to the next nearest, plus stopping in the lane to post a letter when you're passing is easier than parking is in the neighbouring villages. The school and even the church in our village were converted to residential use long ago, so the postbox was the only amenity we had left.

mend your own lawn tractor

The Systems Administrator has got the old lawn tractor running again.  We had problems last summer with it stuttering and struggling to go uphill, apparently due to fuel starvation, and at some point in the autumn it stopped running at all and spent the winter sitting outside the greenhouse on deflated tyres.  I wondered whether it would ever work again or if I was going to have a dead lawnmower next to the dahlia bed for several years until we worked out how to get rid of it, while the SA promised periodically to look at it once it got a little warmer for working outside.

The tractor's cutting deck gave up the ghost several years ago, and its battery would no longer hold a charge so that it had to be jump started each time using a portable jump starter, but it was useful for towing the trailer around the garden to collect prunings, and I've missed it while it's been out of action.  Fixing it entailed removing a lot of gunk from the carburettor, unjamming a little ball thing that is supposed to regulate the flow of fuel and had got stuck, fabricating a new gasket because the previous one had perished and the machine is so old that the SA couldn't find any gaskets to fit, changing the spark plug courtesy of Halfords, re-inflating the tyres which go down overnight, and buying a new jump starter because the old one was knackered.  The new one came with a small compressor built in, which will be handy as the SA can fix the tyres with the tractor out in the garden instead of having to limp back to the workshop on flats.

I was impressed by the DIY gasket.  It was made out of multiple layers of adhesive paper, cut to shape with a laser cutter and stuck together.  It may not last very long, but as the SA said there was no point in buying the materials to try and make a better one before the tractor was up and running, in case there turned out to be some other fault as well as the fuel system, one that the SA couldn't cure.  All that remains is to try and find a copy of the workshop manual online, so that the SA can mug up on what the fuel flow ought to be.  Still, the machine ran, making it to the meadow and towing back a trailer full of bramble stems and twigs that's been sitting by the pond for weeks. I had just about managed to drag the trailer by hand a few times, with the SA pushing at the back on the return journey, but it is much, much easier with a machine.  And beats multiple trips on foot carrying armfuls of bramble stems.  So next week we should be able to make a clean sweep of the remaining debris in the meadow.

Meanwhile I have almost got to the end of the neolithic barrow compost heap.  The vegetable beds really didn't need any more compost, so I spread some of it around the base of the hornbeam hedge. It is not a happy hedge, not as bushy as it should be, and twigs keep dying back, and as it is on horrible thin starving sand I thought that some nice organic material around its roots plus a dose of fish, blood and bone might cheer it up.  Plus it is close to the compost heap, and I didn't fancy barrowing the compost to the other end of the garden.  And I couldn't think what else to do with the compost.  It's full of weed seeds so I don't want to put it on the borders.  Around the base of the hedge I can give it a stir with the hoe.

The episode of the neolithic compost barrow illustrates one of the things I have learned about gardening since living here, which is that compost is really important.  Unless you have the tiniest of tiny gardens and absolutely don't have space for a compost bin, then learn to make your own and work out how you are going to get rid of anything pernicious or weedy that can't be safely composted at home.  Homemade compost is gold dust, but it is better when it is weed free.  The temporary demise of the tractor illustrates another of the things I have learned, which is to get kit appropriate for the size of your garden, be it a pocket handkerchief or rolling acres.  I wasted much time in the early years messing around with wheelbarrows, buckets and a small tipping trailer, before we grasped that for this amount of space we needed a proper four wheeled trailer towed behind a tractor.  I have felt the lack of it for the past few months, and am thrilled that the SA has managed to fix it.