Seed guardian seeds

I should have posted on this days ago but was feeling too dreadful at the time. After sending the HSL a reminder, I got my Seed guardian info, followed a few days later by my seeds. I've taken on three varieties.

There's Mummy's Pea, one of several that the ancient Egyptian myth attaches to. I already have a few seeds of King Tut, which seems to be another of these.Egypt came under British domination after the Napoleonic Wars, and the first modern Egyptologists followed shortly afterwards. In no time, people were cashing in on all the publicity for ancient Egypt. Credulous tourists were sold peas which had been 'discovered' inside mummies, and seed merchants back home were soon offering peas with similar claims.

The remains of peas actually were discovered in Tutankhamun's tomb when it was excavated in 1922, and the myth transferred itself to this, with peas from the tomb supposedly having germinated. In fact, as you might expect, conditions in Egyptian tombs are not satisfactory for long-term seed storage. No seed from such a tomb has ever been found in a viable state, though a 2000-year-old Judean date palm from a dig in Palestine has been germinated, and found to be genetically quite different from any known date palm.

I suspect - though I don't know - that the various 'mummy peas' go back to the pre-Tutankhamun period, and those with variations on the Pharaoh's name come after. King Tut, AKA Prew's Pea (a name which has attached itself to several of these varieties) is grown in the US, and hasn't any history attached that I know of. Mummy's Pea, (also AKA Prew's Pea) comes from Durweston, near Blandford Forum, Dorset. The local gentry are the Portmans, who were friends of Lord Caernavon, who financed the Tutankhamun dig. Peas from Caernavon's kitchen garden may well have been passed on to their head gardener.

Then there's a climbing bean, Brejo, apparently a Native American heirloom. It's supposed to do well in wet springs, so it may turn out to be a winner. Finally there's an Estonian ridge cucumber, Izjastsnoi (I've no idea how to pronounce that!), which is said to be tolerant of poor treatment and cool temperatures, which is what I like to hear. Cucumbers are outbreeders which need to be isolated to prevent unwanted crosses, so it's going to be a bit more of a challenge.

Black Potatoes and Rare Peas

I've just acquired a few tubers of another old black spud called Negresse (yes I know, the name makes me cringe as much as anyone!). It's a 19th-Century French variety; the name should come adorned with accents, only I've no idea how to add them. It may well be another strain of the same variety. I'm going to grow both and see how they compare. If they survive the blight long enough to do anything that is, since they're extremely late maincrops. Many thanks to Ian for the parcel.

Supposedly, Vitelotte originated as an import from Peru. If so, then it's quite possible that there may be some genetic stability in it, or that several slightly different versions were brought over. It would be interesting to try hand-pollinating flowers, and see what grows from the seed.

Another parcel which arrived this morning, from Grunt, in Canada, contained Kent Blue Peas, the variety which launched my search for rarities, Carruthers' Purple Podded, supposed to be particularly tasty, and Ezethas Krombek Blauwshok. Kent Blue seeds are small, slightly dimpled, and adorned with purple speckles, which appear again on Carruthers, but not to the same extent. Krombek is a farm in Western Cape, South Africa, so was the variety bred, or preserved there, I wonder?

Meanwhile I'm planting peas like mad, but I've got the worst cold I've had in years, and that's about all I'm managing to do.

Black Potatoes and Pink Onions

I've already posted about the probable Vitelotte I found in the market. I've now discovered a page here: http://www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au/Sorting/Purple_Congo.html which suggests that this and several other old black potatoes are strains of the same variety. It's going to be a question of growing them out and comparing them. If I can get a crop despite the blight, that is, since it seems to be endemic on the site now, and they're all late maincrops.

Not long ago I found some pink shallot type alliums in the market, which I planted to see what they did. I got the Plants of Distinction catalogue yesterday, and spotted a variety called Pink Torpedo (http://www.plantsofdistinction.co.uk/acatalog/A-Z_of_Vegetables_ONION.html , partway down the page), which looks just like it. If so they'll give me seed this year, and I'm definitely not complaining at that. From what they say, it's mild-tasting European variety.

Signs of spring

There are a few! The snowdrops are steadily increasing from year to year, and are beginning to form sheets of white. Some of the garlic is beginning to sprout, or was before I mulched it all with a load of autumn leaves. It's still down there somewhere, and no doubt it will reappear. Oca, Chinese artichokes and tuberous peas are all in.

The latter two are new to me. Chinese artichokes are familiar in name, at least. It's a mint relative with small tubers which have a bit of a reputation for being difficult to clean. We'll see; it's easy enough to sluice most things off in the stream. I hadn't heard of tuberous peas until someone offered me some; apparently, they were Linnaeus' favourite root vegetable. He was an 18th century Swedish botanist who invented the modern form of scientific nomenclature for living things. The peas look like everlasting sweet peas, and have small tubers; they're said to be very low-yielding. they must have been grown quite widely at one time, as they're naturalised in various places.

I'm holding off on planting anything else. The soil is nowhere near warm enough to sit on with my bare bum, so I certainly can't plant seed direct. I could start the tomatoes, but then they could easily get too big before they can be planted out. I'm feeling rather half-hearted about them since I've lost them all to blight three years running. Similarly, I could start the peas, but I want a good choice of varieties for the show in August, so I'm going to wait. Leeks and some of the brassicas can be started as soon as I'm confident about the weather, but there's plenty of time yet.

Types of Pea

All our modern peas are descended from the wild pea, Pisum sativum, which is still found in the Middle East, though the subspecies which gave rise to the garden pea, probably in Afghanistan or nearby, is apparently extinct. The remains of seeds of this species have been found in Stone Age sites from Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. Around 3000 BC, they show up in European sites, showing that they were being cultivated outside their original range. Later the Field Pea was developed, an improved type with larger seeds, which became a medieval staple.

All peas were originally round-seeded. When dried, they are, as the name implies, round, with little or no wrinkling. They're full of starch, which feeds the seedling while it establishes itself. They're filling, but not so sweet as Tesco's frozen peas. So they're not what you really want for that little green pile on the side of your plate. Originally, they were grown in the fields to provide dried peas for pea soup, mushy peas, pease pudding and the like, providing an important part of the diet. Namissa's West African, none of us like English cooking much, and they're ideal for the type of food we do like, curries, African dishes, and the like. So they suit us. In the garden, they're as tough as old boots, and can safely be planted in autumn for a spring harvest.

Until the 19th Century, the rich used to eat sweet young peas when they were in season, and leave the mature version for the hoi polloi as far as they practically could. Around 1820, a wrinkled pea appeared as a chance mutation in a field of peas. There seem to have been earlier wrinkled varieties, but it was from then on that the great 19th Century advances in pea breeding took place, so it has to be seen as significant. It has far more sugar than the older types, as it's not metabolised into starch so efficiently. This made it possible to breed the sweet-tasting, large seeded marrowfats which are so familiar today. They're tender plants which have to be planted in warm soil, as the seeds rot easily. Their appearance, combined with the development of glasshouses which made it possible for those with money to extend the season, led to the continuing popularity of the green pea, a crop which has never been particularly high-yielding.

Yields are greatly reduced by the virtual disappearance of the tall varieties which were the mainstay up till the middle of last century. Tall peasticks became ever harder to find, and as a result the tall varieties, which often reach six or seven feet, started to disappear. This was exacerbated by stupid laws which forbid the sale of seed of unregistered varieties, the cost of registration, and seed companies which develop crops with farmers in mind, then flog them to gardeners. Farmers, of course, want something which can be harvested by machine, and that means one which is short enough not to need support. So the average seed catalogue nowadays has about half a dozen short peas, where a Victorian one would have pages of peas, many of them tall.

Tall varieties are still around if you look. Alderman is still commercially available, and is one of the best. Other varieties are available from smaller suppliers like Robinson's, Real Seeds and Brown Envelope Seeds. Real Seeds charges 1p for membership, so they're not selling to the general public, others ignore the law. apart from those, a lot more are available from sources like the HSL or seed swaps.

Purple-Podded Peas are old-fashioned field peas. They're not as sweet as the green-podded ones, though many have wrinkled seeds. I suspect most go back to the 19th or early 20th Century. On the whole, they don't have fancy names, either because they've been lost, or because they were bred by farmers and gardeners rather than by seed companies.

Umbellate peas are a curiosity. Sweeter varieties appeared in Italy in the 17th Century, and became popular on the continent. Charles II took a fancy to them when he was in exile, and brought them with him when General Monck invited him to become king. The umbellate peas date to this era. They have wide, flattened stems (the technical name for this is fasciation), branch at right angles to the main stem, and have all the flowers at the top. The only one I've come across is the Salmon-Flowered Pea.

Mangetout peas lack the hard membrane lining the pod, and have been bred for sweet pods which can be eaten whole when the peas are small. There are two types; snow peas, with flat pods, and sugarsnaps, with round pods.

Petit Pois are bred to provide very small peas. I find it hard to see the point when large varieties like Magnum Bonum are as sweet as anything!

Black potato

I found these in the market the other week, and got some small ones to grow on. The stallholder had no idea what the variety is. The tubers are deep purple-black, with violet flesh. From what I can make out, the two most likely varieties are Vitelotte, 19th-Century French, supposedly imported originally from Peru, and Congo, 19th-Century British. Both are late maincrops from what I've been able to discover, though someone suggested that Vitelotte may be a bit earlier than that. Congo seems to be very late indeed. I don't know what the chance of it surviving trhe blight is, but I'l try.

Anyone got any ideas?

PS. I've added a pic of the inside. It's not much good but I couldn't see what I was doing. Namissa just said it looks just like black pudding.

Oca

I planted two varieties of this obscure South American root crop last spring; one white and the other red. They went in a foot apart, in rows two feet apart. It didn't do much till around midsummer, when it started spreading out. It's frost-sensitive, and the tubers don't form till the top growth is dying back. I fleeced it, and meant to harvest it for Christmas. Thanks to the weather and a bad fall, I only got it up a couple of weeks ago.

Yield was very variable, from a pound or so to nothing. I'm not sure why, but some of the tubers I put in were very small. The red hadn't suffered from the frost at all, while white tubers on the surface had gone soggy. There was very little slug damage, and I found none underground. They taste lemony; allegedly they turn sweet if they're left in the sun, but I didn't try this. I'll be planting again shortly. This time I'll use larger tubers, and hopefully I'll do better.

Peas

As you can see, it snowed all night. It's been mild and sunny today, and it's been melting fast. It's now clouded over, so hopefully it won't freeze tonight. Namissa insisted on driving to the mosque for prayers. She injured her shoulder in a fall over a month ago, and I was quite worried as it's been giving her hell. She says it hurts, but it's not as bad as when she did the same thing last week.

I'm going totally mad this year; nineteen varieties already, and another on the way. I've got enough seed of half to expect crops off them. I only have a few seeds of the others, many of them from the HSL, and I'll be growing them to bulk up. Then there are the climbing beans on top, but I'm not going quite so crazy there, and I won't be trying to grow all the dozen or so I have this year. I'm going to have wigwams all over the plot, but it should be interesting!

The varieties are:

Purple-Podded varities:

Robinson's Purple Podded

(From Robinson's Seeds, hence the name)

Lancashire Lad

Victorian Purple Podded

Clarke's Beltony Blue

Ezethas Krombek Blauwschok

(Old Dutch variety)

Commander

Green Podded Marrowfat Types:

Champion of England

Alderman

Early Onward

Hugh's Huge

McPartlin

Robinson

Magnum Bonum

(My favourite so far)

Hatif d'Annonay

Mangetout Varieties:

Golden Sweet

(Yellow pods, purple flowers)

Carouby de Mausanne

(Large pods)

Bijou

(Very rare, described by Real Seeds as a 'Giant sugar pea'. Very large flat pods)

Others:

Irish Preans

(Large seeds which look a bit like small broad beans. Allegedly a cross, but I don't believe it! Purple flowers)

Serpette Guilotteau

(From Real Seeds. Small peas, curved pods. The latter is a primitive characteristic, so it may be interesting)

Salmon Flowered

(Pink flowers in a mass at the top of the flattened stems. It seems to be a survival of the umbellate type which was popular in the 17th Century)

Purple Flowered Russian

(According to the HSL, this has purple flowers, and small round peas in thin pods. It sounds interesting)

Some I've grown before, some I haven't. I'll post reports on the ones I get a crop from later. The marrowfat types are often well recorded, with dates and breeders available. These were in the old seed catalogues, for sale to those who could afford to keep buying pea seeds. The purple podded types seem to have been grown by farmers, who habitually saved their own. As a result, there's no history attached to them. They're not so sweet, and were dried for pease pudding, mushy peas, soup, and similar dishes. Most of the varieties I've come across have peas the size of marrowfats, so I suspect they're 19th Century 'improved' varieties, rather than anything older.

Heritage Seed Library

I've been meaning to join this for a couple of years, but held off till I was more confident about my seed saving skills. For your membership, you get a few seeds of each of six rare varieties; I also got some Hughes Huge peas as a new member. By sheer coincidence, this was one I already fancied, as I like tall peas, which crop more heavily, and it's ever so easy to save pea seed. If you volunteer as a Seed guardian - I have - you get a list of 'orphans' in March, and choose up to three. You grow them and return seed to HSL for distribution. So I should get eleven varieties (with a lucky dip bonus variety) for my £20, which isn't bad going.

They distribute a catalogue containing about 200 varieties to pick from. the emphasis is on peas, French beans and tomatoes; these are all self pollinated, and really easy for seed saving. I haven't yet experimented with saving seed from cross-pollinated species, but I'm going to have a try. The trick is to stop them crossing with other varieties grown nearby.

Meanwhile, however cold it is, the days are lengthening noticeably, and the first snowdrops are blooming. Spring is at hand!

Oca

I lifted these yesterday, from two plants. As you can see, the red

oca didn't produce much. I don't know whether it's typical, though; I couldn't see any more of the same variety with tubers on the surface, which would give me a comparison. Some of the tubers I put in were very small, and I'm planning to plant the biggest next time. I don't know whether that makes a difference. It showed no frost damage at all, having come sailing through with nothing but fleece and snow above some of the tubers. The white variety had a more satisfactory yield, but all the tubers on the surface had gone soft from being frosted. There was next to no slug damage, and what there was, was all on the surface.

The second pic shows some alliums like long shallotts whic I found on a Chinese stall at the Bull Ring market in town. Many of them are shallott size, and at first I assumed that was whaqt they were. Some were much bigger though; for comparison, they're sitting on an A4 sheet. When I got them, there were very few of that size, and I picked them out for growing on. Today, though, I saw they had more in, and a lot were this size. Obviously the customers prefer the big ones! I'll try them and see what they turn into.

Snow

I've been a bit incapacitated for a few days due to a rather nasty fall. I went over on some very slippery steps in town, and smashed the base of my spine on the stone. Nothing's broken, but I haven't been able to walk properly, and bending or getting out of a chair are painful. I took these pics a few days ago, but haven't felt up to posting them.

I'm no good at laying these posts out (don't know how people do it actually), but the next pic shows chunks of ice three inches thick on the canal. I can't get it to go anywhere else. The freeze went on for a week or so after the ice was broken, so the ultimate thickness would have been considerably more. Not that I'd have risked walking on it!

















The rest of the pics were taken round the allotment site.

Deadouts

Hives 2 and 5 have died out. I can't see any obvious reason; neither had touched the candy I gave them, though both were very short of stores. They don't show the normal signs of starvation, so it's not isolation, when a cluster can't move over to food in cold weather. The overwhelming majority of my losses involve first-year queens, so it has to be something to do with the queens. They weren't mated in bad weather, or when there was a shortage of drones, so it's a mystery. Losing half my hives is a major setback!

What do we do with the Christmas story?

Despite what the church says, there isn't one Christmas story in the Bible. There are two, and they're different.

Matthew is a strict Jew, writing for a Jewish audience. He hates the Pharisees, insists that the Law must be kept more strictly than they do, but who generally agrees with their interpretations. His Jesus is born in a Jewish context, to a family in Bethlehem (apparently they live there), in the reign of Herod I, who died in 4 BC. The first people to respond to the birth are Gentile astrologers, following a star.

The origin of the star is to be found in Numbers 24:17. A king called Balak has summoned Balaam, a pagan prophet, to curse Israel An angel intervenes, and Balaam is forced to bless them instead. He says that 'A star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the borderlands of Moab, and the territory of all the Shethites.'

When devout Jews found themselves impoverished and oppressed in the last couple of centuries BC, they started to imagine that God would intervene decisively, to put things to rights. Either he would send a great angel, or a human king, the Messiah (messiah means 'anointed one'; the king was anointed at his coronation, and was sometimes called 'the Lord's anointed'). This king was symbolised by the star; the Dead Sea Scrolls use the passage in a messianic context.

Matthew envisages an essentially Jewish Kingdom, but there is plenty of room for Gentiles within it. There is no evidence that any Jew ever claimed that Gentiles would not find their place. So to emphasise this, Matthew presents Gentiles as the first people to respond to Jesus.

The astrologers go to Herod, expecting to see a royal baby. He knows nothing of the birth, and reacts angrily. He was a paranoid tyrant; Augustus allegedly said that 'It was safer to be Herod's pig than his son'. When he was dying, he had the sons of Jewish notables arrested, with orders that they should be killed as soon as he was dead, so that the Jews would mourn his passing. In the event, they were released unharmed. So, according to Matthew, Herod ordered the slaughter of all the children under two around Bethlehem. The massacre is not mentioned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Mary and Joseph have been warned by an angel in a dream, and have run away to Egypt, where they live as refugees. Eventually, they return, believing it to be safe. However, Herod's son Archelaus now rules Judea and Samaria. After another dream, they move to Nazareth, where another of Herod's sons, Antipas, now rules.

Luke writes for Romanised Greeks, and is the most obviously Gentile of the Gospels. His Jesus is born immediately after the Romans establish direct control of Judea. Archelaus ruled as Ethnarch for about ten years, until Jewish complaints led to the Romans sending him into exile, and establishing direct rule.

Judea came under the Syrian Legate, the most senior Roman official after the emperor, who had responsibility for the entire eastern frontier as far as the border of Egypt. This was far too large an area for one man to control directly, so most of it had come under native princes who were subject to Rome. At the time, the Legate was a man named Quirinius. He visited Judea, and carried out a census, to determine the taxation base. This happened in late 6 or early 7 AD. In order to deny that there is a discrepancy between the two Gospels, some conservatives claim that Quirinius may have served as Legate twice. Unfortunately, this is based on a mistranslation of a partial inscription which does not include the mane of the governor it refers to. After the census was complete, a Prefect, drawn from the minor aristocracy, was appointed to govern Judea.

According to Luke, John the Baptist was born before Jesus, and was his cousin. He was born miraculously, to an elderly mother, under 'King Herod of Judea', ie Herod I. Six months later, ten years having been dropped from the story, unless Luke confused his Herods, an angel appeared to Mary announcing the birth of Jesus. She protested that she was too young (parthenos means 'a young woman', not necessarily 'virgin') but the angel reassures her. There is an undoubted virgin birth in Matthew, but Luke is ambiguous, and can be read either way. Both are concerned to say that the birth was miraculous.

The family live in Nazareth, but have to visit Bethlehem for the census, as this is where Joseph's family originated. This makes little sense. Roman taxation was based on where you lived, not where you ancestors lived, for obvious reasons. No system could handle that degree of chaos. Additionally, Galilee was ruled by Antipas, and taxes would have been paid to him, not to Rome. Both Matthew and Like have to cope with a tradition which said both that the Messiah was to come form Bethlehem, and that Jesus was from Nazareth. Luke's solution looks a little contrived!

So, according to Luke, Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem. There are no animals; they were added to the story later. Shepherds are the first to respond to the birth; Luke is greatly concerned for the poor.

So we have two rather different versions of the story, one for Jews, and one for Gentiles. In all probability, neither author had much to go on; very likely, nobody was sure of the exact year of Jesus' birth. But that doesn't matter; they weren't writing history. In fact, in our modern sense, history writing had not been invented. They were writing theology, in the form of story. Matthew writes for Jews at a very difficult moment of their history, and presents Jesus as a suffering Jew. Luke writes for Gentiles, and presents him as having been born into the Roman world, and as being recognised first by the poor. Both show him as the miraculous Son of God from the moment of birth.

After 2000 years, the church should be mature enough to take both stories seriously, with all the tensions between them, rather than smothering them with the saccharine nonsense of the traditional 'Christmas story'!

Cold!

I had a quick look at the allotment yesterday; as expected, everything's frozen solid. The canal towpath, which is fancy brick paving going into town, is like an icerink. It's supposed to be warming up a little by the end of the week, according to Metcheck, so with any luck, I might get to taste some oca this side of the New Year.

The failure of the Overconfident Age

Somehow, we have drifted into a situation where we think we have the power to find an easy answer to everything. We feel we need 'effective management' of every situation, to make the 'problem' go away, and let us get on with our lives untroubled by whatever it is. When things don't get solved in a short time, we look for someone to blame. We blame the individual worker, the manager, or in politics, we blame the government. But some 'problems' don't have instant or easy solutions.

We think we can solve the 'problem' of crime by imprisoning ever more people, without remembering the historical link between crime and relative poverty, as that would upset our ever more unequal society. We don't think about how many criminals suffer from mild learning disabilities, or mental health probles, which deny them the chance of a decent job. We don't think how many come from broken families, or wonder whether these might be a function of an individualised, very mobile society in which we no longer know our neighbours, and no longer have the support of the extended family. Support networks are missing, so in every generation, some parents fail to cope. Children of dysfunctional families are unlikely to become the parents of healthy families, and so the 'problem' snowballs from one generation to the next.

Then there is climate change. There is, of necessity, no easy or instant solution. So we deny it, and believe every manipulated 'fact' thrust at us by people who are doing very nicely out of deceiving us. Governments meet to seek solutions, but lack the courage to look beyond the next election, the next opinion poll, the next press conference. We have built a society where a government which asks for sacrifice in the face of disaster may well lose the next election to a party which offers pie in the sky. Whatever power struggles are going on behind the scenes in China, their government evidently has as much invested in short-termism as we.

So Copenhagen has failed, as it was always likely to, and Obama is spinning it as 'meaningful', as he inevitably would. Nations get the governments they deserve, and this catastrophe is a function, not of political failure, but of ingrained hedonism. As a society, we are unable or unwilling to face reality.

But a significant proportion of us do realise what is happening. That is our strength. If a grassroots movement could grow until even governments realised that slavery had no future, we can do the same here. None of us have any interest in the collapse of our climate. Only ordinary people, defying when necessary a regime which consistently attempts to criminalise protest, can force can force that regime to take the necessary action.

Bad sex?

A church in New Zealand has got itself into hot water with a poster about Mary and Joseph: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/churchs-provocative-poster-begets-almighty-row-1844274.html .

What strikes me is that it doesn't deny the Virgin Birth, as I would, but it asks questions about it. There's nothing wrong with that; as Thomas Aquinas said, God is not the answer, but the question. I suppose the conservatives would get upset. I don't understand the mentality, but to them, it's de rigeur to be offended by any questioning of religious tradition. But questioning is good. As St. Paul said, 'Test everything, hang onto the good'. If we don't ask questions, how can we sieve the good from the bad in our traditions?

We don't know anything directly about Jesus. He didn't write anything down himself that we know about, and if he did, it has not come down to us. Unlike Muhammad, nobody recorded eyewitness testimony about him; claims that the Gospels were written by eyewitness hang on special pleading and dubious interpretation. Rather, we have what some sections of the church chose to record about him a generation or two after his death. Not suprisingly, they disagree. Matthew makes him a strict Jew, insisting that every least bit of the Law [of Moses] should be followed strictly, as they interpreted it. Despite Matthew's loathing for the Pharisees, his Jesus always seems to agree with them on legal matters. Mark, on the other hand, makes Jesus abolish the food laws, and Luke is so eager to whitewash the Romans that he blames the Jews for everything. The evangelists were men of their time and place, wtiting for the diverse needs of their own communities.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what they say seriously. If the church wants to call the Bible a holy book - even presume to call it 'the Word of God', whatever that means - then we need to take it ultra-seriously, even the bits we don't like and don't read. It is, after all, the only witness we have to the origins of church traditions. If we want to claim that Christianity has some basis in history, then that is where we have to begin. But let's drop the practice of taking selected snippets, ignoring the diversity of the Bible's witness, and insisting that traditional interpretations are 'what the Bible says' and have to be 'believed'.

How many people out there believe that infanticide can be a blessed thing? It's there in the Bible (Psalm 137), doubtless as the witness of a community which remembered Babylonians killing their kids during the sack of Jerusalem. We can take their despair and grief seriously without making infanticide a religious duty. Why can't we be as mature in our handling of the rest of the Bible?

Oca

The oca was, as I expected, flattened by the frost a couple of days ago. it's a south American rootcrop which I haven't grown before, and which, you will have gathered, is frost-sensitive. I had wanted to fleece it, but I couldn't due to a bad cold.

You plant it in spring, about a foot apart, and let it get on with its business all season. Tubers start to develop as the daylength shortens, and you lift them a couple of weeks after the foliagfe dies completely back. I expect to have it for Christmas, if there's a crop there.

All the beehives are still alive. That's a pleasant change from last year. I think the difference is in the autumn weather. Two autumns ago, the weather was so vile that they couldn't go out and forage, and went through what stores they had. I got them through last winter on candy, but that's only carbohydrate. I think the lack of pollen led to malnutrition, hence the problems. There are artificial substitutes available, but they're only used as a stopgap, and aren't satisfactory for more than a few weeks. This year, they were bringing in lots of pollen, so hopefully they'll come through better. Hive 5 is a bit of a worry, with only two seams of bees, but the others all have four.

Internet access

It's working properly today. It worked properly yesterday as well.

I changed to Sky a few weeks back, purely because AOL is so damned expensive. Since then, I've regretted it. Very often, it slows right down about 9am, as office connections come on, and stays slow for much of the day. It will still download material without any problem, but accessing sites becomes extremely difficult. Sometimes it's like that all day. A dialup would be faster and more reliable. But then, sometimes it works.

We gave up on their phone connection after a month, and went back to BT. Their salesman lied to us, the service wasn't what we asked for, and it was more expensive than we were told. I'm trying to persuade the wife to drop their TV service, since it's also expensive, and she watches very little that isn't on cable. I'll probably get rid of their internet before long as well.

Mystery bean

It's not a good shot, but has anyone got any idea what these beans are? They were at the bottom of a parcel we're passing round, and that's all I know!

PS I've been informed that they're soya beans, probably 'Elena', which is, as far as I can see from a quick google, the best one for British weather. I'l try them next year and see what happens.

Last week I should have been in Oxford for a gathering of gardening bloggers, but I've had some horrible gastro-intestinal bug, and spent most of the weekend on the toilet. I'm still not right, but I did manage to check the bees yesterday. All four hives look healthy, with small amounts of brood, eggs, and reasonable quantities of stores. There aren't as much of the latter as I'd have liked, but they'll be OK if I keep an eye on them, and probably feed syrup next spring. This year they've gathered plenty of pollen, which provides most of their nutrition; honey is just a source of carbohydrate. This time last year, the weather was so awful that much of the ivy went unpollinated, resulting in a shortage of berries. The bees hardly managed to forage at all. It's going to be interesting to see whether they come out of the winter stronger than last year, after going into it well fed.

I knew I should have stolen a frame of brood for that split I made. They've abandoned the queen cell I gave them (which was on a frame of honey), so I combined the hive with No. 2. So that's four hives going into winter, and I won't be trying any more queen raising till June. We'll see what's still alive in the spring.

I've checked all the hives, and not one of my recent splits has worked. The new Hive 3 had very few bees and no queen, so I've combined it with Hive 4. The top story of Hive 2 had lots of bees but no queen. I did find a hatched cell, but it was unbelievably small, the size of a worker cell, and they were making a loud buzz all the time they were open, as queenless colonies do. Hive 4 had a single supersedure cell, so I've moved that box across to Hive 3, and given it the cell. There are still drones about, so one sunny day at the right time should ensure mating.

The old queen is still there, and queenright autumn supersedure is a regular habit of native strains. This is when the hive raises a new queen without swarming, with the old queen still present and laying. She usually continues to lay for some time before finally disappearing. It's something which should be sought out and selected for, since strains which do this rarely swarm. I haven't had a colony make swarm preparations since 2006.

I don't have as many colonies as I'd hoped to go into winter with. One has an old queen at the end of her life, but if they don't raise another cell, there's every chance of her coming through the winter. It's a pity it was only the one, as if there had been more I could have left one. Three colonies have young queens which appear to be well mated, and one has a cell. We'll see what's left next spring!

Hive 6 is deserted. There's dead brood, two dead queen cells, and no bees live or dead. I can only assume they all went back to Hive 5 next door. The honey has been completely robbed out. This never happens in hives with my standard reduced entrance, but I didn't have one spare, so this one ended up with a wide-open entrance. I noticed bees going in and out, not wasps, so the honey is presumably in the other hives.

I'm digging over a patch I dug earlier in the season. It had a big patch of bindweed, and there's still some left. I may not have done very well growing veg this year, but at least there's a lot more ground free from perennial weeds, which isn't going to need any more routine digging.

Some of us spent Saturday learning to identify apples. We've got around 70 old apple trees on the site. Many have been idnetified already, but there are more to do. While most are common varieties, there are some rarities as well. As far as we know, it's a unique feature of the site, and we want to maintain it, by replacing trees as they die off. I know, for instance, that there were once three apple trees on my plot. All I found was a few rotting logs, and many others have gone the same way. I've planted trees to replace them, and we've now planted a communal apple orchard at the end of the site, on a plot that was completely derelict.

Last year we had a day to learn how to prune them. Some of us are now planning to get some apple books, and try to identify as many of the remaining trees as we can.

Oca

This is the oca I planted last spring, sprawling all over the place. It doesn't do much until midsummer, then starts spreading. It's a South American root vegetable; the tubers swell as the shoots die back, so I won't be lifting it till all the top growth is dead, in late November or December. It's about my one success story this year, so I'm looking forward to it!

You probably remember that Hive 5 used to be very large, and nasty-tempered. About half the bees had a yellow stripe, and it was full of drones. I had a look yesterday. All the bees are black, and extremely quiet on the comb, just like Hive 4. I can only imagine that the queen, raised from an egg laid in Hive 4, avoided mating with drones from her own hive, and mated selectively with Hive 4 drones. These may have shared a mother with her, but will have had a different scent.

Hive 4 has lots of honey in the broodbox, so no worries about that one. I'll give it a gallon of feed with Fumidil-B in it, for Nosema, and that's all. Hive 1 is fine, but it doesn't have so much honey stored, so I'll give it candy just in case. It's a lot better off than any of the hives were this time last year, though. Hive 5 has some drones, so there's something for the new queens to mate with. I'll check them out next week and see what's happening.

I've been feeling a bit better today. I managed to dig a patch of bindweed which was spreading out across the ground and rooting as it went. I split Hives 4 and 5. I was hoping 3, the split from 4, would raise its own queen cells, but it failed to do so, so I gave it a cell, and gave another to the split from 5,which is now Hive 6. I left a cell in the top story on Hive 3 as well, and we'll see how many of them mate successfully.

It's not been a good week for me. I was in casualty, briefly, the other night - nothing serious - and I've been fit for nothing most of the time. I've checked Hive 1, which now has a laying queen again, and done a vertical split with Hive 2. It's now raising queen cells in the top box. Meanwhile, most of the fruit have been blown off the Cambridge Gage, and the slugs have had a feast, losing me most of the crop.

I'm feeling a bit better, and today I actually managed to go shopping in town, get back with a load of fruit from the market, and then get to the allotment for a couple of hours. That's a great improvement! My wife's off sick with a whiplash injury after a car crash, and it hasn't been easy with us both unwell.

I've split Hive 2 vertically, preparatory to raising more queens. Hive 5 still has a lot of the old drones, but hopefully they'll be on the way out. Hive 4 has got rid of its drones in the bad weather, but more will be along, and Hive 2 has plenty. Non-native bees tend to get rid of theirs around now, but given reasonable weather, native colonies should have them into October, if not later. It is, of course, a waste of time raising queens if there's nothing for them to mate with.

The peas are starting to produce, but with the pigeon damage, I'll be using them to produce seed rather than eating the crop, such as it is. Salmon-Flowered is the only one with plenty of pods, and as it's rare, I'll keep them for seed swaps.

We had our site show today. Unfortunately I had a bad attack of migraine yesterday, in the middle of organising it. It was a complete nightmare getting it sorted, and I had to leave most of the practical stuff today to other people. Still, the show was a success, and we got 15 entrants this year, two up on last year. Unfortunately I was so shattered I didn't get any pics. I only had three entries in, and probably missed a first for my garlic because I was feeling so awful last night I didn't get the presentation sorted properly. The question now is, how can I do it better next year?

I've had some wretched stomach bug, so I haven't managed to do too much. Last weekend I just about got through a work party, building a couple of bins for dead leaves and grass cuttings. We haven't been getting so many this year, so I wonder how full they'll ever be! you can se how they ended up, anyway.

Meanwhile, my Cambridge Gage is well laden with fruit.

The bees have not been in a good mood, and for the moment I'm going to have to stop my usual careless habit of inspecting them in flimsy trousers. I'm not at all thrilled with the new queen in Hive 2, as the bees are decidedly jumpy. However, she's not destined for a long life. Once I have more queen cells, I'll probably slip one into the broodnest and try a forced supersedure. This is a way of conning the ees into replacing a queen you don't want, without too much disturbance. Mostly, it works, and if it doesn't, it's usually safest to assume that the bees know something you don't.

However, everything is going more or less to plan. I'm going to be raising more queens in a couple of weeks, and by the time they're ready to mate, the old drones should hopefully have disappeared, and I should end up with nice docile hives once more, after the new queens mate with drones of my own strain.

I've been through Hive 5, and checked that the top box has neither eggs nor queen cells. The bottom box has eggs, so the new queen's there and laying. I broke down all the drone cells I could see.

Behaviour is a bit better, they weren't making the same determined attempts to sting. Stinging depends of pheromones given off by the queen, so if you change the queen, you change stinging behaviour. However, they were still jumping - flying off the combs at me - and following, buzzing around me. these are intimidating, and often lead to stinging. They're programmed into the individual worker's genes, so they'll last as long as this generation of bees. Hopefully that'll be the end of it, but I have three queens which will have mated with drones from this hive, so I can't be sure. I'll be getting rid of those queens next year; I can use them to produce drones or honey, but I can't raise good queens from them.