After a long and bitterly cold winter hibernation it seems things are finally beginning to stir on our wee farm. Daffodils are struggling to push up to the sunlight despite the continuing cold conditions and I see with some relief that the bees are busy and apparently healthy, so far so good. The bees are going to bee a big thing this year I hope. I’ve got great plans to beecome a small scale commercial producer but this will all bee dependant on me getting the industrious little monsters through the rest of the winter. If you had asked me a week ago how my bees were doing I would have exuded an air of smug confidence. “Endless talk about colony collapse disorder, varroa mites and winter starvation would make you think that bee keeping was difficult”, I might have said. “My bees are fine, better than fine, they are great” I’d chuckle, my head filled with recent observations of my clever bees returning to their hives with legfulls of pollen despite the biting cold. A week is a long time in bee keeping and I’ve since learned that legfulls of pollen or not, now is the time of year when bees starve to death. Because of this I’ve decided to feed them and it was while doing this that I discovered what a bad beekeeper I’ve really been. Lots of modern beehives come with a metal mesh floor under which is slung a removable hardboard drawer. The purpose of this is to count varroa mites (little vampire buggers that weaken bees). The drawer on my best hive had sagged a little and left a gap at the front of the hive which it appears the bees have for months been mistaking for their front door. What a scene when this week I realised what had been happening and removed the drawer. There must have been thousands of bees all dead (and frankly a bit mouldy), piled layers deep on top of the drawer. I must have killed half the colony with my complacency. Bad, bad beekeeper. Despite all this it has to be said the bees seem OK and if we get through to mid April hopefully we’ll get some honey off them this year.
Green house use
Although we’ve had night time temperatures that have frequently hit –10°C there is a small piece of An Feirm Beag that is forever Tuscany. Walk into the greenhouse on any day where there’s even a glimmer of sun and you can just bath in its heady polycarbonate warmth. The prospects for propagation are very exciting. So far though we’ve only planted courgettes (Fiona planted and they are thriving), and an entire tray of basil (I planted, probably dead). Now we are warming up for the real challenge, tomatoes, big juicy ones. Now if only there was a plant that grew mozzarella balls and pizza dough we’d be really sorted.
A bit of hedging
To be fair to F the place was looking a bit scruffy and overgrown. Given that this is my own natural state it’s not really surprising that I wasn’t too bothered but F was and so finally, having accepted that I in fact wasn’t ever going to “get round to it”, I relented. And so men were called. They were big men and they arrived with tools, big tools with many teeth and motors. Big motors and…..yeah you get the idea. Two days work and the place is looking a bit tidier but not to be outdone (and probably because their chainsaw was bigger than my chainsaw), I decided I had better have a go myself. There’s a row of small trees along the south end of our vegetable plot that I’ve be threatening to thin out since we first arrived. I started out with the notion of thinning out the whole thing in a day, but the first tree, a tall and spindly ash took me that long to fell and scared me so much that I called it a day before I’d even finished cutting it up. Most of the branches are still out there as I write reminding me that some things are best done by big guys with big chainsaws.
Raspberries & hops
One of our friends gave us five raspberry canes in exchange for some eggs. You have to love the bartering. Anyway not only will these canes produce, we hope a bumper crop of raspberries but it also gave me an excuse to produce yet another ridiculously over engineered construction with which to support the raspberry bushes. Naturally I stuck it up in the hops garden (now a Mecca of ridiculously over engineered horticultural construction) and my hope is that it will be the first of three or four rows of fruit bushes. The hops are still not showing much. Doubtless they won’t show their head until we get milder weather, but they are at least still alive, I think.
Digging with the rotavator
I’m actually very fond of my rotavator. I bought it last year for €80. It didn’t actually work when I bought it but having taken it home and given it some TLC it eventually chugged into life and has been chugging away reliably ever since. Rotavators are not the easiest thing in the world to use. They tend to skim over the surface bouncing erratically like a drunken Duracell bunny only bigger and made of metal but once you learn how to control them (it took me 6 months), they can be a life saver. For reasons of weed control you should never ever use a rotavator to break new soil. It tends to chop up the roots of dandelions and docks which only makes for more dandelions and docks. For reasons of expediency I’ve been using mine to break new soil. I’ll worry about the weeds next year. To get the thing to dig down to any depth I’ve discovered that you need to rock it from side to side, move on a bit and repeat. This is tough work no doubt, but it’s easier I think than digging and it does break up the soil. Inevitably however having just about got the hang of one contraption I’ve begun to harbour an ambition to get something a bit bigger, more powerful and possibly dangerous. I’m slowly but steadily nurturing the idea of getting a wee tractor for the wee farm. Something small and cheep that could pull a plough of harrow. As they say round here, a Massey would be sassy but a Zetor would be better.
Problems with planting
Not for the first time this week cries of “THAT FECKIN ROOSTER” could be heard on the wee farm. Our rooster is a gobshite. As it turns out Speckled Sussex roosters are known for their viscous temperament. Known that is by everyone but us and perhaps by the guy who gave him to us as a free gift. It may not be polite to look gift horses in the mouth but if you are ever given a gift rooster it might be wise to look him up on Google. Apart from his usual sneak attacks when your back is turned and always amusing assaults of my father in law, the foul pecker (rooster not father in law) has taken to leading all the chickens into the vegetable patch to dig up anything and everything we put down. He has to go and soon. We of course rang the man who gave him to us in the first place thinking to offer him first refusal, but it seems he isn’t keen to take him back. He has a rooster of his own which he tells us is doing unspeakable things to his drake. It’s made me even more nervous of turning my back on our fella.
Duck production.
The hens it seems have switched from egg production to vegetable destruction and the egg count is way down. The ducks however have gone into egg overdrive. Ovumdrive perhaps. In any case they are now churning out an egg a day each which is nice though we don’t really know what to do with them all. The Mammy in law has started selling them on the black market. Apparently there’s loads of people out there with a terrible addiction to duck eggs.
