To bee, or not to bee

Sometimes the universe provides, and when it does it is like basking in sunshine.

For Christmas I booked Simon on to a bee-keeping course (at Assington Mill). This was long overdue as he had already received a beekeepers smock the previous Christmas, and has wanted to learn for a couple of years. While looking for a course I had read up on the Cambridge Beekeepers website about the costs of setting up hives, and all the equipment required. This was a bit eye-watering, especially as the long-term plan was to learn first about conventional beekeeping, before moving to a Warre or top-bar hive to practice natural beekeeping.

A local beekeeper, David, has sited a hive on the farm for several years now, and he called up last week to ask whether we would be interested in a couple of hives which needed a home. The owner was moving to Australia for 2 years the following day, and had just realised they needed to re-home their bees at short notice!

So, on a chilly and very misty Sunday morning we trundled down to a house in the village in the Land Rover, and met David to collect one standard hive and a nucleus hive. The hives had to be sealed up so we could transport them, and the bees were not too pleased about this, coming out to see what was going on. Once they had decided it was best to get back into the hive (the cold can kill them), it was fascinating to see one bee station itself in the entrance and fan its wings. Apparently this is to waft pheremones out of the hive to guide the remaining bees back home.

Well, we got the bees back to the farm and set the hives up in their new home, but it is touch and go. David says the hives feel very light, which means the bees may not have enough food to last them through the winter. We will try to feed them but we may still find that they don’t make it – in which case we will need to look out for a swarm.

Hence the title of this post, to bee, or not to bee, that is the question.

 

New Year, New Loo

Ok, so actually Simon built this excellent ‘ig-loo’ for our composting toilet in early December, but I’ve been too busy to show you it. This is a picture of it during construction, so you can see how it’s made using hazel poles, and woven ash from our old orchard (soon to be forest garden). It now has a layer of felt carpet underlay and a canvas tarp over it, so its nice and snug even in the driving wind that we’ve been experiencing out on the fen edge.

Dad made the wooden compost loo box last year for use on one of the courses, but we hadn’t been using it ourselves until now as our loo shelter consisted of a few straw bales to preserve modesty, but was open to the elements!

We now have the luxury of a wind-up lamp and some reading material in there.

Happy new year to you all!

Re: Cycling

As usual, now that the summer months are drawing to a close, I am making more use of my bicycle, in stark contrast to everyone else. My favourite thing about cycling at the moment is the ‘thinking time’ it gives me to mull things over, and on my last ride home from work I used this to think about all the other things I love about cycling. I had plenty of time as it takes me around an hour to do the 10-mile journey. Some thoughts that came up were:

1. Zipping past stationery traffic
2. Entering Cambridge en masse with other cyclists and dominating the road space
3. Birdsong
4. The ability to stop and eat blackberries straight from the bush
5. Getting fit without having to ‘do exercise’
6. Noticing the weather
7. Appreciating living in a flat landscape
8. I understand how my bike works (not so with a car)
9. I get into work feeling like I’ve already achieved something
10. Being part of the solution, not part of the problem

Other cycles have cropped up this week too – as well as the cycle of nature manifesting itself in a lovely autumnal mist yesterday morning, I’ve also sponsored a colleague who is using 2 legs rather than 2 wheels to raise money for the local branch of Food Cycle by running a half-marathon. As Zoe’s job is promoting the reduction of food waste I think this is a nice positive example of putting your feet where your mouth is!

Season to taste

Well, time flies when you are having fun! After cramming 3 weddings (one in Majorca), a christening, a house sale and of course a forest gardening course into a 4-week period in August, we are looking forward to some slightly more relaxed weekends during the Autumn so we can catch our breath (and write this blog…).

The forest gardening course that we hosted back at the beginning of August has left us with plenty of food for thought, with some great design ideas produced by the group. We now need to make time to finish mapping our old orchard as it is now, coming up with a final design and getting feedback from you on it. Once this is done we can get hold of some plants and run our planting days over the Autumn and Winter – we’ll keep you posted!

I’m also dying to do some foraging for wild food around the farm before it’s too late. I have managed to grab the odd blackberry while cycling up the road, but the hedgerows are also bursting with sloes, elderberries and probably many other useful plants. Being on the farm it’s impossible to ignore that ‘Autumn’ feeling of a gathering-up and the colder months approaching. There is a hurry in the air as combine-harvesters work through the night, barns are stacked full of straw and the swallows have all departed to warmer climes.

We dug out our John Keats poetry book so we could enjoy his evocative words:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

I’d like to say I remembered all of that by heart but sadly that’s another thing that will take time!

A plum job

For the last few days I have been getting stuck in to the time-consuming though not unpleasant job of harvesting plums. We have several Czar plum trees in our old orchard, which have suckered all over the place, and every year they produce a phenomenal number of plums, which all ripen pretty much at the same time. If there is someone available to pick them all (sometimes a Wooffer) then there is still the job of doing something with them before they turn to mush, which can be a big job if you are suddenly presented with several buckets-full.

To make things easier, I have been picking them in smallish numbers every day, and cutting and stoning them at the same time (necessary anyway to avoid the occasional disgusting surprise of a maggot!). I’ve been laying them out on trays in the freezer overnight, before transferring them to bags the following day.

In this way I am hoping that we can save more this year from rotting on the tree or attracting wasps (there are already a huge number of wasps feasting on them – talk about Fair Shares!). We’ve already taken some fresh ones in to work (in some cases swapping for courgettes), and we’ll be hosting a group jam-making session in 3 weeks time (by which time presumably all the trees will be empty. They were a bit early this year, oddly, as it was predicted they would be late!)

The orchard that the plums grow in is the site for the new forest garden we will be designing on our course in August. There’s a possibility that we might be able to graft some different plums or other fruit onto the Czar rootstock, so that next year maybe harvesting will be a bit more spread out, with a bit more variety. Not that I’m snubbing the delicious plum crumble I’ve just devoured (thanks mum!).

Wasted

The current landfill cell at Waterbeach, lined with tyres and with pipes visible for collecting methane.

Yesterday I took a group of people to visit the local Waste Management Park, where Cambridge’s refuse is processed and landfilled, and garden and food waste are composted. I have visited before (I work in waste & recycling), but despite this I found it still made an impact on me. On the one hand, it was great to see the contrast with the last time I visited. Since then an enormous Mechanical Biological Treatment plant has been built which extracts as much recyclable material as possible from the rubbish, and then composts the leftover mainly organic material in two gigantic composting halls. This meant that the landfill cell which by this time last year would have been full up was only perhaps three-quarters full – great progress. But when we were shown through to a window overlooking one of the composting halls to see an area the size of a football pitch covered with half-composted waste (to exclamations of “Oh my god!” from a couple of the people in the group) I was reminded of how shocking and disgusting it is that humans still produce so much waste. Cambridgeshire is one of the top counties for recycling and composting, but we still send just under half our rubbish to landfill (albeit through this plant that attempts to salvage what it can – low-quality materials worth a fraction what they would be if they were put in the recycling bin instead). 400 tonnes of waste every day go into the plant, most of which could have been avoided, reused or recycled if people had taken a bit more personal responsibility rather than expecting someone else to deal with it at great expense afterwards.

Connections

We had our Introduction to Permaculture course here at the weekend, and it was lovely to meet people from both near and far who are interested in permaculture and low-impact living. It’s always fun to meet people who you’ve only corresponded with by email – you don’t realise that you expected them to be a certain way until you meet and find them different.

There is always a great energy when a group of people get together to learn about permaculture – it’s not so much a course as some kind of rite of passage. The connections that people make with one another and the conversations shared around the camp fire are just as valuable and intense as the teaching itself. I think that everyone goes away feeling a change. I’m looking forward to having some longer residential courses here in due course – watch this space!