Planting

The bees are going great guns, with nine frames of brood, the broodbox full of bees, and a few drones present. I've given them a couple of frames of foundation, to give them some comb to draw. I'm finding wild comb at the beck of the broodbox every week, and they might as well draw some where I want it!

I've been planting peas and brassicas. Caulis, kale, brussels, purple sprouting broccoli. Spis Bladene kale from the HSL is a bit of a mystery; it means 'eat the leaves', and is definitely not the plant's name. Apparently it 'appears to be a perennial kale', which sounds interesting. Half a dozen wigwams of peas meant loads of grass cuttings to be barrowed, but somehow I've managed this far without doing my back in. I'm planting more as fast as I get them planted out.

There's still far too much digging to be done.

Bees

I've had to take a couple of days away from the plot; I had a vomiting bug, but I seem to be getting over it. All very unpleasant.


Meanwhile, the bees have been taking advantage of the good weather. They now have six frames of brood, with an entire frame of eggs. There are a lot more bees in the hive, and a few have moved through the excluder into the supers. I spotted one drone. That's what I like to see this time of year. The queen's laying flat out, and by the time the bramble, which is my main honey source, comes into flower, there should be plenty of bees ready to take advantage. The one thing I need to watch out for is swarming. The queen headed a swarm last year, and I have to assume she's likely to head another this. So I need to keep a sharp eye open for swarm preparations.

The sowing I planned to do this week obviously hasn't happened, but I can get cracking on that tomorrow if I'm feeling up to it.

Bees

My hive now has brood covering five frames, with masses of capped brood. The number of bees is now increasing rapidly, and will clearly continue to do so for a while. There's a growing area of capped drone comb, and I expect them to be hatching by the beginning of next month.

So all's well, and I can expect a decent honey harvest as long as they don't swarm. The queen headed a prime swarm in May last year, so I wouldn't be too surprised if I do find them making swarm cells. I'll have to keep an eye on them, and be prepared.

Things are growing merrily, though I lost a lot of the young plants I had in pots during the freeze before Christmas. I look at the amount of digging I need to do and despair sometimes, but at least I can plant some things through black plastic, and evade some digging that way.

Plantings

I've just put in Serpette Guilotteau peas, on the windowsill, and All the Year Round lettuce, and Spanish Black carrots, under cloches.

All the Year Round is mentioned in Christopher Stocks' 'Forgotten Fruits', which is mainly about vegetables despite the name. It was around before 1856, and it's a selection from an 18th Century variety, Tennis Ball. This used to be pickled in brine. I've heard of pickled cabbage, but never of pickled lettuce!

Slow spring

It's slowly getting warmer. Too slowly for me. The bees seem happy; they were busy bringing in bright yellow willow pollen at nine degrees today, in full sun. They need sun to be active at that temperature, but willow is good. I've always found that bees would only start raising significant brood after it started. If it was too cold for them to fly while the pollen was on the catkins, they were going to be very late.

They've got three and a half frames of brood, and were in a very nice mood; they took no notice of me pulling their home apart at all. There's quite a lot of pollen in there; quite a bit of it under the brood, which is supposed to be a native bee characteristic. These are hybrids, but with, I suspect, a fair bit of native blood.

The broad beans are coming up slowly at last. I've put together two more mini greenhouses, since I couldn't get the right size covers for the old ones. I'm going to use those as shelving for stuff that can go outside. The brassicas I started the other day are now up, and are in one of the new ones. Digging is proceeding fairly well, and I'm managing to move a bit faster. I don't feel any better, but something has to be improving.

LL sent me some oca to replace what I lost last year; there are three varieties, where I only had two before. You can tell because the tubers are different colours. That gives me more chance of getting seeds. Different varieties have different types of flower, and without going into the technicalities, you need flowers of two different types to get pollination. Seed gives the only chance we have - and it's not much, given the number of people interested - of getting a new variety which can form tubers early enough to cope wit our climate. The problem with the existing ones is that tuber formation only occurs as the plant begins to die back, and then the frost is likely to catch it.

First planting of the year

Greyhound cabbage, All The Year Round cauliflower, Green Heading Calabrese and Gloria de Portugal, a variety of couve tronchuda. I'm going to try to resist further temptation until these have come up. Meanwhile they're sitting on the windowsill.

Brassicas

My Seed Guardian seeds arrived today; Boothby's Blond cucumbers, and Cooper's Bean Pea. It's a little confusing when there are small, rounded beans known as pea beans, and large peas known as bean peas! There's even a Mr. Bound's pea bean and Mr Bound's bean pea, which got me totally mixed up last year.

I read that you can start couve tronchuda indoors in February for an early crop. It's a little late for that, but I'm going to start it on the windowsill in a couple of days, along with a few other brassicas. It'll be good to get a few things started again. There's ben some discussion of the HSL variety Spis Bladene, a white-flowered kale. Apparently the name originated as a mix-up; they acquired it as nameless seed with 'spis bladene' (eat the leaves) on the envelope, and nobody knows what it actually is. So many old varieties have come down to us without their names; it's infuriating. They say it 'appears to be a perennial kale', which is interesting. there used to be a lot of perennials; some flower rarely if ever, while others have to have the flowers picked off to make them last. Over the years, some of them appear to have been selected for biennial flowering; Hungry Gap, if it is the same one, is now a biennial rather than a perennial. I wonder whether anything could be done to breed the perennial tendencies back in? I'd love to try some brassica breeding, but I'm acquiring so many rarities, I'm probably going to be stuck with just perserving them.

Bees

I had a look at my remaining hive yesterday. The temperature was at an in-between stage; they weren't really flying, but they weren't clustered either. Bees are always difficult to handle at that point; they fly up freely when disturbed, then crawl over you and get into your clothes. There's nothing I hate worse than bees up my sleeves or my trousers!

Anyway, they had eggs and young larvae on three frames, and a little pollen stored. That's all good. They'll be hatching out at the end of the month - it takes three weeks from the egg to the bee - and the hive will probably expand fast after that. Meanwhile, it's obvious they've been systematically shutting down egg-laying in cold weather. That's a good sign in our climate, when we get significant periods when the bees can't forage. Brood eat them out of house and home, and that's when they starve.

Meanwhile, I'm making slow progress with the digging, but otherwise nothing much is happening. Broad beans planted over a month ago still aren't showing, though there are healthy-looking roots sticking out of the bottom of the pots. Things should speed up now, as there's no more really cold weather forecast. It's a frustrating time of year.

Bees

I've let myself in for it now; I've taken on the job of Newsletter Editor for the local Beekeepers' Association.

I had a look at the hives the other day; it was more like April than February. Hive 6 is dead. I was wondering last time. When I think back, they didn't really bring in any honey last autumn, while Hive 4 was storing masses. They slowly windled away over the winter. that's often indicative of hybridisation with unsuitable imports. People bring in queens from southern Europe or other warmer climates; they don't fly or mate in poor weather, and they don't cope with cold winters. I don't understand the attraction.

Hive 4 is flourishing. The queen evidently stopped laying during the cold snap last week, and has now started again. They were bringing in masses of hazel pollen, and actually have some stored. I've never seen bees storing pollen in February before.

My wife has just bought a video camera, and I made my first ever video, of the allotment. It's very short, but I included some shots of the bees as well as snowdrops and hellebores. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbI6XqPUShQ .

Allotment video

I managed a little digging today, but really wasn't feeling up to much. I made my first ever video, and didn't even realise I was recording sound until I played it back. Snowdrops, hellebores and hazel catkins on the allotment, and a very active bee colony.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbI6XqPUShQ

Sarracenias

Another chilly and miserable day. I had a splitting headache all night - a symptom of my chronic fatigue syndrome - and felt bad enough to cancel what I'd planned to do on the plot. I did get down briefly though.

Some Sarracenias arrived this morning from Blackkitty2. I've grown them before, when I was in Cornwall, and was keen to try again. So I had to get them potted up. I've just put them in 4-inch pots for the moment; they'll be OK for the moment, but once they start growing they need to sit in a saucer of water or something similar. So I need to concoct something that won't need daily topping up.

They're fascinating things; the leaves form tubes like upright trumpets, and trap insects which drown in the water at the bottom. The plant absorbs the juices as they rot. The ones I had before were about eighteen inches high, and fed on midges and the like.

Of course, the ultimate would be something like the orchid in the H G Wells short story:
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/9381/

While I was down there I met my new neighbours on the neglected plot next door. They seem keen; I hope they make a go of it this time!

Peas

Goodlife has just sent me seed of two varieties, Paula and Skansk Margart (I don't know how to do umlauts and that little o the Scandinavians put over vowels, so that'll have to do!), from one of the Scandinavian seed banks (http://www.nordgen.org/index.php/en/content/view/full/62/). Paula has small round seeds, and Skansk Margart is green and wrinkled. That's really all I know about these so far. I'm looking forward to growing them out and learning more.

This is a small butterbur (Petasitses) about eight inches high, which grows in the lane on the way down to the allotments. There's a much bigger version in the woods, and I'm not sure which, if either, is 'proper' butterbur.

The snowdrops are in full bloom, and I'm busy planting a long row of autumn raspberries. These are the popular ones on the site; I don't know the variety, but lots of people have them. They're easier to manage than the summer raspberries; you just cut everything down in the autumn, and they fruit on the new canes the following year. Crocuses are out; I'm not a fan, and haven't planted anything except a few species crocus.

Hive 4 was busy today, bringing in masses of hazel pollen. I had a look at them; they're starting to raise brood - I find most strains stop in very cold weather - and have patches of eggs and young brood on two frames. Hive 6 has bees in a couple seams, and no brood that I could see. The sun had gone in, the light was bad, and I could easily have missed something. They're looking weak, so I hope they get going!

Spring is coming!

The first snowdrops are out, and there's no more hard frost forecast. I've planted sixty Aquadulce Claudia, in pots. I's a pretty indestructible variety, though I've given up trying to overwinter it due to waterlogging, which does kill it. If the worst comes to the worst, I have more. Come April, I've got Red Epicure and Crimson-Flowered Broad Bean to go in, but they're not so hardy, and I don't want them flowering at the same time. I can cope with two varieties at opposite ends of the plot, as they're unlikely to cross-pollinate, but I'm not sure about three.

Someone in the States has sent me eleven named varieties of couve tronchuda. It's a rare old Portugese cabbage, which is apparently loose-leaved, somewhere between a modern cabbage and a kale. A couple of places used to stock generic seed, but it's now disappeared, So I asked around, and that's what I ended up with. I've now got more rare brassicas than I know what to do with; the seed is in the freezer as it'll take several years to grow it all out. I can probably manage two varieties a year if I net them on alternate days while they're flowering so they don't cross. The hedges round my plot do a lot to isolate it from the rest. I'm scrounging unusable net curtains from the church charity shop, which gets inundated with stuff that's fit for nothing but the rag man.

There's a short clip here about couve tronchuda, from the BBC series 'The Victorian Kitchen Garden'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt8KMWiq48M

Bees and allotments

I just spotted a pot about this on Chris Slade's Bee Blog http://chrissladesbeeblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/bees-on-allotments/ .

I've had bees on my plot for ten years, mostly illegally. Originally, Birmingham allowed a couple of hives on a plot, but there was a row about someone keeping very bad-tempered bees on my site, and it caused such a ruckus they were banned. It was a long time ago now, and the rule was recently relaxed. You're still supposed to check with the Allotments Department.

My view is that it shouldn't be a problem, as long as common sense is applied. In any situation with close neighbours, temper should be a priority. Most sites are open, and people are likely to be working or passing within a few yards, in full view of the bees. I have hedges, which makes a lot of difference, but there's still no excuse for nasty bees. Low swarming should be a major consideration as well; swarms may do no harm, but they do frighten people. They make extra work for the beekeeper as well.

Then not too many hives should be kept. I can see a potential problem on some of the sites in London, where plots are about the size of a tablecloth, and in this case the answer might be to set aside a quiet corner of the site rather than having hives on individual plots. At the other end of the scale, my plot is very large, with six-foot hedges, and has more scope than most. A couple of hives on the average open plot is probably about right.

In ten years, I've only had objections to my hives once, and that was from someone who was openly trying to drive me off the site. I had a letter from the Allotments Department years ago, pointing out that bees weren't allowed, and asking me to remove them 'as soon as possible'. Somehow or other, it never became possible, and as the letter was never followed up, the bees were never removed. I had the impression at the time that they weren't very interested! Apart from that one incident, everyone has always been quite supportive.

Vegetable Seeds.net

I've just had £25 worth of free seeds from this online company for putting a link to their site on here. I discovered them just before Christmas, and got a small order very fast, right in the middle of the Christmas rush.

Postage is free, prices are excellent. Prive per packet is under £1, at least in most cases, and this leads to my one criticism. The quantity of seed varies wildly with the variety, no doubt reflecting seed prices. Some seed - hybrid Asparagus, for instance - is extremely expensive. leading to packets with two seeds. Very few places stock this seed, so I wonder, forstly, whether it's worth it, and secondly, whther they'd have done better to make an exception and have a more expensive packet with, say, ten or a dozen seeds.

Overall, though, an excellent little firm, and one which seems very responsive to Emails.

Oxalic Acid Treatment

A couple of days ago, I mentioned to my neighbour on the allotment that I have trouble managing the tops of the hedges. I got there today to find that he's done the whole length of it down his side. That's the first time in eleven years that a neighbour has taken the initiative and cut the hedge! I've still got the other side to do, but it's on the lower side, so the worst half is done for me.

I've just given an oxalic acid treatment (for mites) to my hives. It involves mixing up 7.5g of oxalic, and 100g each of water and sugar - that's enough for my hives, obviously the quantities can be altered appropriately if necessary - and squirting 5ml over each seam (between combs) containing bees.

Both are alive, and looking healthy so far. They're a bit light so I'll give them both some candy in a few days. One has a gigantic cluster filling the entire box, and was flying. A colony like this will build up quickly, and probably give a good honey crop in a good summer. They eat themselves out of house and home though, need a lot of beekeeper support over winter, and may eat as much as they bring in in a bad summer. They may well be swarmy as well. The other has a much smaller cluster on five frames, occupying about 1/4 of the area of the first, and wasn't flying at all. That's much more what I want, especially given that it arrived with two queens, mother and daughter. This is a native bee characteristic, associated with strains which swarm less often. It'll also eat less over winter, and need less support from me. After this winter, it probably won't need any.

So I'll requeen the first colony as soon as I've got a reasonable number of drones, and keep the queen in the second for another year at least. That's assuming they both survive that long!

End of the big freeze

At least, I hope it's not coming back! I've sorted out some of my compost bins ready for when I start clearing ground again, and checked the hives. Everything's still alive. Meanwhile, here are some snow pics.

A couple of the local reservoir.

Frustration

I haven't posted for a while; I haven't been fit to do anything on the plot, which is in a sorry mess, and now I'm feeling well enough to try - even if I can't guarantee that I'd get very far - eveything's frozen solid. My soil freezes very solid indeed, and after a few days of sub-zero temperatures I can't get a spade or fork into it. Not that I'd want to; digging frozen material in deep just makes the soil slower to warm up when the thaw finally comes.

So I'm sitting at home feeling frustrated, and dreaming about what I'm growing next year. Multiple wigwams of some of the better pea varieties, for a start, with one kept exclusively for seed, and masses of dangling CD's strung between them to fruighten the pigeons. One thing I'm not going to do is allow them to make off with half my seed crop!

Daffodils

There's a piece in the Guardian today, arguing against planting daffs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2010/oct/20/why-i-hate-daffodils . I partly agree, partly disagree. It all depends on context.

I wouldn't plant them where all the rather drab foliage is going to show up after they've finished flowering. In many situations, I prefer the miniature version, as full-sized daffs can be overpowering. But in the right place, they're superb. I plant them in the lane outside my plot, where they brighten it up no end, and then the leaves are buried in vegetation for the rest of their short season.

I have trouble with crown imperials, the other bulb the article mentions. I agree they're superior to daffs, but I've only got one spot where they condescend to grow at all, and they suffer badly in wet summers. At bottom, I think they need drier conditions than I can offer.

It's been a while since I posted, due to illness. I've been able to do nothing on the plot for a while, and it's in a truly disgraceful state as a result.

No progress

My ME's been troubling me all year, and I haven't been able to cope with the work on the plot, which is in a right mess. The last couple of weeks it's been so bad I haven't even got there, let alone done any work. If that wasn't bad enough, it also affects my ability to concentrate. I've been struggling to write anything at all recently. I think - I hope - I might be getting a little better, so hopefully I'll be back soon.

Show

Our annual vegetable show, which I organise, was on Sunday. It's taken me this long to recover! The person doing the teas had to drop out on Friday due to work, and then we had a thunderstorm in the middle of setting up on Saturday. It all worked out on the day, though. We had 18 people enter - not a lot out of 80 plots, but we get a couple more every year - and as you see, we filled the benches. There were a few minor glitches, and I really must get myself organised and get coloured card for the certificates well in advance. This year I couldn't get any locally, had to print them off myself, and they ended up curling. I didn't get the thirds really brown either, more a brownish pink. I could do with putting the date on them somewhere as well. As long as I can get it a bit better organised every year, and get a few more entrants each time, everyone's happy.

It's not competitive at all, more a bit of fun and an excuse to get people together, and anyone can win something. I entered eight classes, and got a first for my onions, plus a second and two thirds. That proves it's not competitive!

Bees

Hive 6 is back in a good mood, which is a great relief! Something must have upset it last week, as I didn't get a single sting today. There's still no sign of drone brood. I wish I understood more about the reasons why they do or don't produce it. I didn't have my camera unfortunately, but I potted patches of brood which were being uncapped, with the pupae sitting there looking at me. that's a good sign. It's known as 'hygienic behaviour', and suggests that this particular colony is good at detecting larvae with something wrong with them. If we can breed strains which detect varroa mites in cells and deal with them, we'll be well on the way to breeding a bee that can handle them without chemical assistance.

Hive 4 has a good patch of drone brood coming as long, but not as much as I thought. I'm always optimistic about these things. I need them to have a good big patch or patches capped over by the end of the month so I can raise a couple of queens. I didn't see any evidence of hygienic behaviour, but that could be because they haven't yet got enough bees to spare any for the job of removing sick larvae. Time will tell.

I repotted a Trillium recurvatum which I planted in 2005. It started germinating in the spring of 2007 - they tend to come up over several years - and it now has fat little rhizomes up to two inches long. They need a lot of patience, but it's worth it in the long run. My interest goes back about ten years; I was given several bin liners full of unwanted plants from someone's garden. They were a treasure, mainly Trillium kurabayashii, Cyclamen hederifolium and snowdrops. Some other species were stolen by a neighbour, but I still have those.

Bees

Both those hives seem to have settled down. The first swarm to arrive - now Hive 6 - has a broodbox brimming with bees, and has reached the stage where its temper is beginning to show. The bigger the colony, the more older bees there are going to be in the hive, and these are the ones that sting. Yesterday they got up my arms and under my veil - a habit I loathe - and stung, so I won't be raising queens off that one unless it turns out to be a one-off. They don't have any drone cells that I can find; swarms often don't produce many in their first year for some reason.

The other one - Hive 4 - hasn't had so much time to build up, but it does have drone cells appearing. It's got a slightly bigger broodnest; 8 frames as opposed to 7. In a couple of weeks I should be able to start raising queens.

The wren's bringing beakfuls of insects into the shed, so the eggs have to have hatched.

Round the Plot

This is a Kent Blue pod, at about the stage when I pick them. It's very sweet-tasting, while bijou, the other mangetout I grow, is massive but less sweet. Unfortunately I couldn't get to the plot for a few days over the weekend, and meanwhile the dangling CD's I use as pigeon scarers got tangle up. The result was that the flying rats completely stripped Kent Blue and Lancashire Lad, and partially stripped several other varieties. Kent Blue is hard to find, but fortunately I have a source in the US.

This morning I had a newsletter from the HSL saying that Lancashire Lad isn't what it pretends to be, as it was originally a green-podded variety. It's still a nice purple podded pea, even if it is now nameless.

Bijou and Robinson side by side. Robinson is a very good-looking pea with large, well-filled pods, but it's dwarfed by the five-inch Bijou pods. If I can time them right, I should do well with one or the other in next year's show!

Carlin pea, the oldest known variety. It was recorded in 1562, four years after Elizabeth I became queen. It's probably a lot older than that. It has small, green pods, but plenty of them, and as you'd expect, it's not particularly sweet.

The roses have done well this year. This is the Jacobite Rose, known by many other names as well. It's a very old Alba, possibly the original White Rose of York. It was definitely used by the Stuarts as their emblem, hence the name. Their motto was 'Rosa Sine Spina', a Rose without Thorns. The young stems are almost thornless, but the old stems develop vicious spines. Whoever thought this one up was no gardener! I had cuttings of Rosa alba Semi-Plena, the other candidate for the White rose of York, but they perished in the drought. I'll have to try again.

Rosa Mundi, an ancient sport from the Apothecary's Rose. It may be named after Rosamund Clifford, Henry II's mistress, or that may be mere romantic nonsense.

I acquired this nameless rose as a neglected plant in a pot a few years ago, along with my Jacobite Rose. I could see it was a climber, so I put it under a lilac; it's now grown right up through, and started putting on a show. The question now is whether it'll carry on up through the hawthorn beside it.

Lastly, I have a wren nesting in my shed. The male builds several nests, and the female picks one to lay in. I've had them build there before, but not lay, so I wasn't too hopeful. They're definitely on eggs this time though.

I apologise for not posting for so long. I've been feeling really under the weather, but I'll manage something properly in the next day ot two. Meanwhile, I've started a new, theological, blog over at http://theradicalmethodist.blogspot.com/ .

Peas

I had another look at that hive yesterday, and they now have brood on three frames, and they're into comb drawing mode. For the first couple of weeks, they were tearing down comb, and I'm not sure why. Bees often tear down old, black combs which the beekeeper ought to have removed long before, but these had only been drawn a couple of years ago, and there was nothing obviously wrong with them. Other combs of the same age or older have been accepted without problems.

Rebsie said she's found two different varieties circulating as 'Kent Blue'. That's not unique; there seem to be several King Tut's. Here are a couple of not very good pics of mine. The small, dimpled, olive-green seeds with purple speckles look right; it's about four feet high, and a bit overshadowed by taller peas. As you can see from the second pic, there are splashes of purple at the leaf bases. It remains to be seen whether the pods become sickle-shaped and knobbly.

This is Bijou, a giant sugar pea from Real Seeds. It's an extremely vigorous grower with these hooded, deep purple flowers. It's going to be interesting to see what it turns into!

This one is Ezetha's Krombek Blauschok. I don't know the origin of this one; it could be old, but there are no old records of the name so it could be quite modern. Over there the purple podded varieties are known as Capucijners, after the Capuchin monks who bred improved field peas in the 15th Century.

Peas

The bees now have two frames of brood. I found a queen, unmarked, and distinctly yellower than the one I originally spotted. They've had no chance to raise a new one, so the swarm arrived with at least two. That's not particularly unusual.

This is the Salmon-Flowered Pea, an amazing old variety with a raft of recessive genes. Pink flowers, thickened, fasciated stems, and all the flowers together at the top. They all bloom at once, unfortunately. The peas are small, round and sweet. I don't know how old this particular variety is, but umbellate peas with this general form were popular from the late 17th Century until the early 19th.

Robinson's Purple Podded Pea, from Robinson's Seeds. These are often sold as generic 'Purple Podded Peas', but they're all different varieties of old field peas, grown originally for dried peas and animal fodder. This one reaches around six feet. The type was first bred on the continent by Capuchin monks in the 15th Century.

Champion of England, a tall marrowfat bred in 1843 by William Fairbeard. Darwin grew this one.

Carruthers' Purple Podded, with a young pod.

Round the allotment

Everything's a right mess at the moment, desperately in need of a strim, which I haven't done due to backache. I seem to have got over it though, so it'll get done shortly. Meanwhile, here are some of the things in flower at the moment.

Allium 'Purple Sensation'

An old-fashioned paeony.

Serpette Guilotteau, an old French pea which allegedly reaches five feet or so.

Camassia. these are edible, and they're multiplying so fast I'll be reduced to eating them before long!

Onions growing through grass cutting mulch. You can see what happens to Poundland fleece after a short while. I won't be buying any more!

Macondo oil disaster

There's some very informed comment here;

http://www.drillingclub.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=wellcontrol&action=display&thread=4840