Back again!

Whoops!  I haven’t posted since May…..bad blogger, bad blogger, bad blogger.  But if anyone is still interested, a little snippet of the last few months.

 

Garden Bargains

Here in Norwich we have a discount store where every thing is 99p or less.  If I am in town I always have a poke around and generally come away with a bargain or two.  This week was no exception.

I bought all these garden decorations for under £10!  My favourite I think are the flamingos.

And I pulled the first crop of radishes as well.  The garden has been very dry and I have done loads of watering but yesterday evening and night we had a good long downpour, absolutely soaking the garden and the rain filled all my water butts right up again.  Supposedly we are in for another hot and dry spell – proper June weather at last.

The Honey Flow

“A swarm of honey bees in May

Is often worth a load of hay.

A swarm of bees in hot July

Is hardly  worth a fly”.

This old country saying couldn’t be truer.  If you are lucky enough to collect a swarm this time of year, chances are that it will be quite a substantial size and you will end up with a decent hive of bees.  Swarming is the bees way of establishing a new colony and increasing in numbers.  Before swarming can occur, a new queen has to be raised.  Just before she is born, the old queen will depart with over half the colony from the hive and ‘swarm’ usually in a tree or bush and send out scout bees to find another suitable home. If you are really lucky, they may set up home in an empty hive left about for this very reason, but this does not happen that often.  Obviously your remaining colony with the newly hatched queen is depleted in numbers and will take the rest of the season to build up numbers again.  Bee keepers try and prevent this process of swarming, to keep their hives with a good number of bees, so to enable a greater honey collection.  Once the spring arrives, the bees have to be opened up weekly and each frame inspected for the tell tale signs of queen cell building, these have to be taken out, hopefully preventing swarming.  This is not as easy as it appears as with the vast number of bees climbing over the frames on inspection, a queen cell can be easily missed.

A frame filled with honey and capped over with wax

This frame is filled with honey but as yet uncapped

After inspecting my bees at the weekend, I noticed there is a lot of honey in the frames, some of it capped over with wax, which means that it is ready to extract.  We are well into the honey flow now with all the spring flowers in bloom.  I shall leave it 2-3 weeks and then take off the frames of honey to extract it.

So many bees, missing the queen cells is easy

To take these photos I had to remove my gloves to operate the camera, luckily I didn’t get stung!

Colourful Cushion Cover

Still working from my never ending stash, I have been working on this cushion cover for the past week.

As you can see one side is a giant granny square – slightly wonky, not sure what went wrong, probably due to having to re attach new colours on every row.  If anyone has any pointers concerning this problem, please let me know. 

The other side is done with the diagonal box stitch.  I love this stitch as it gives you a lovely dense texture and fairly rips along once you get the hang of it.

The edging was a sort of shell pattern by slip stitching x 2 followed by hdc, dc, hdc all the way round. I cheated and didn’t do a removeable cover, as I can easily undo one side if laundering is needed.

Visiting the seals 2011

We did this trip about a month ago and I snagged this post from my other blog, I hope you don’t mind!

You may remember last year around about this time we went to see the seals at Horsey.  Well as it was such a lovely day yesterday (Wednesday), after work we all clambered into the car and drove the 15 miles to Horsey again.  On looking back at last years blog I noted that we were a couple of weeks earlier this year.  It is always a bit hit and miss, not really knowing if there are going to be any there or not but last week the crew of Royall Courier managed to get through Potter Heigham bridge and walked over from Horsey Mill to the coast and reported that they had seen numbers of anything up to 600.  We parked a bit nearer to the beach than Horsey Mill because as it was in the evening we didn’t want to run the risk of being locked in the National Trust car park, plus Nigel being a bit tight didn’t want to pay the parking fee! 

The dogs enjoyed a roar round along the long track leading up to the gap in the sea wall, sniffing about for bunnies and just before we arrived at the dunes, I made sure they were securely on their leads.  We made our way over the steps on to the viewing platform and as luck would have it below us were several groups of seals basking in the evening sunlight. 

We made our way onto the beach and took it in turns holding the dogs so we could each get a closer look.  The pups were a fair size now and there were the most amazing variety of colours, ranging from all one colour of dark grey, cream and brown to allsorts of dappled, dalmation type colours and even one very rusty coloured pup.  There were also various ones bobbing about in the sea, lazily swimming in and out of the surf. 

At a rough count there must have been about 200 in total. On the evening air the soothing musical song of the seals could easily be heard as they playfully rolled about on the beach, play fighting, and jostling about for the best spots.  We watched them for ages and then reluctantly made our way off the beach back to the car, still hearing their distant lyrical calls to each other.  As we made our way back along the track, the sun went down quite rapidly but leaving the most amazing sunset which Norfolk is so very famous for.

Barmy about Bunting

I recently have been somewhat obsessed with crochet bunting.  I found a great tutorial over on the blog of Pink Fluffy Warrior and just had to have a go.  My first attempt was just plain triangles which I used outside our door - excuse the filthy state of the guttering, which has since been scrubbed!

Then I did some more triangles interspaced with some hearts, which I put up outside my kitchen window around the other side of the house.

I then had a go at bunting with letters – the ideas for the letters were taken from Melody Griffith’s “201 crochet motifs, blocks, projects and ideas”.

I put this up at the boatyard outside reception.  Unfortunately we had quite a windy day today and it kept blowing up on the porch roof, so no one could read it.  Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if over the weekend, some bright spark didn’t take a liking to it and spirit it away.

This bunting works up really quickly and also I only used yarn from my stash – which despite several projects, still doesn’t seem to be diminishing.

After finishing the bunting I have now started two more blankets, even though I haven’t finished off my hexagon throw yet, but I just couldn’t resist.  In my defence, I am still only working from my yarn pile, so I think it is allowed.

The Canine Boomerang

Sunny Sunday

Boy was I ready for a day off today. The pace has really picked up at the boatyard as the last two weeks have been really busy, with most of the boats booked for the Easter hols.  Friday and Saturday were both very long days with lots of what we call ‘newbies’ – people coming on holiday on our boats who have never had a boating holiday before.  As you can imagine, the tuition and takeover procedure is a lengthy process and at one point yesterday, Nigel lost his voice!  Eventually we cleared the yard of all boats and went home yesterday for our Saturday tradition of a cream cake and coffee followed later by Nachos and salad (can’t be bothered to cook on Saturdays!).

Today must have been the hottest day of the year so far.  The sun has been shining all day and there has actually been some warmth to it.  Before we could do anything today, Nigel had to pilot 3 boats through Wroxham Bridge but once finished we drove out to the countryside and did a new for us 4 mile circular walk from Alby Crafts.  Unfortunately I forgot the camera which was a shame as we walked through some lovely countryside.  The oil seed rape fields are just coming into bloom and in another couple of weeks there will be vast blankets of stunning yellow.  My bees love the oil seed rape and it makes lovely honey but needs to be extracted from the comb quickly as it a fast setting honey.  Once jarred up it sets within days and turns almost white.  We also so a fox up ahead which Tillie tried to chase but to no avail.

Talking of foxes, my new hens have settled in really well although we had a little bit of a scare earlier in the week.  It had just got dark and the phone rang.  It was Nigel’s Mother saying her outside security light had just come and she had seen a fox go past her window, had we locked up the hens?   Luckily I had about an hour earlier but I still went out to check they were ok.

The girls have been busy haven’t they?

 

This afternoon I inspected my bees which being all suited up in my protective gear, was hot work.  The numbers inside the hives have increased dramatically since my last inspection and there is some new honey in some of the combs.  I managed to spot two out of the three queens, no easy task trying to spot her amongst her thousands of workers.  One hive is very small and will need feeding up, so I will have to mix some sugar syrup up for them later.  I still managed to get stung on my hand, even with my gloves on, luckily it didn’t hurt at all.   The place I hate getting stung is on my head, now that really does hurt!!

At last the warm weather has brought up my seeds at last.  Excuse the mousetraps but the little blighters nosh on my seeds as soon as I sow them.

Can’t wait for later on this evening as No 1 Son is due home for a few days – Hurrah!