Christmas shopping...

Instead of doing any Christmas shopping, we went to Belmont and bought a large amount of pure wool. Some Icelandic, the grey on the left, and some super untreated Herdwick. Projects in mind include a long cardigan for Agnieszka, a jacket for Kalina and several hard wearing, weather-resistant, ultra-warm hats.

Back yard in bloom

Not the most beautiful of yards, but at least it's better than either neighbours!

Doing the splits...

Over the winter I lost a colony of bees. Talking to other beekeepers, reading other blogs, browsing articles, has led me to the conclusion that the colony died of starvation, not helped by being affected by nosema last autumn and being a small cluster, probably unable to keep themselves warm enough to move to available stores during the last really cold snap. Since then I have been thinking about splitting the one remaining hive and how best to do it.


Yesterday seemed an ideal opportunity. A week previously I had knocked down a queen cell and knew something had to be done, so with a decent bit if weather (sunny, a bit cloudy, cool breeze) I decided to take the chance. Equipment was readied, every grain of sugar in the house was used to make syrup, hive parts were checked for cleanliness and spiders.

I did the normal inspection of the first hive. Removed the, now empty, feeder and checked stores. There still isn't a massive amount in there, but they have enough and this cool weather surely has to end soon. In the brood boxes, as the hive is on double brood, all was well except for a couple of queen cells. Two frames of brood were removed into the new box, along with a couple of extra frames of bees, then began the hunt for the queen. Three times through the bottom box and I gave up. Surely she can't be in the upper? But three frames in, there she was. Into the 'queen cage' (an old hair roller) and transferred to the new brood box. She scuttled off between the frames and I moved the hive onto its stand. Added some syrup to the feeder, put the crownboard and roof on, strapped it up.  

Now I have to be patient. Will the queen be happy in her new home? Will there be enough bees to cluster successfully? Will she swarm? Or go back to the original hive? Will the bees in the original hive rear a successful queen? Are there enough drones? It will be a long week I think, and I am already itching to go and have a look, but I know that disturbing them now will probably do more harm than good.

Simple steps in seed saving...

Although I know it makes sense, I am still slow off the mark when it comes to seed saving. Having to construct a fly-proof cage, isolate a plant and then try to pollinate it myself without any biddies getting in to fluff it up, makes the whole process seem quite arduous. But I keep reading about it, thinking about it.

Last year we had a good crop of very tasty broad beans on the plot. The first batch were put in in October, but a brief snow fall in December burnt all the tops off and they didn't survive. So in Srping I replanted, in the only part of the plot with more than four inches of topsoil, and they grew, flowered and fruited well. I left about a dozen or so pods on the plants at the end of the season and then removed them after a couple of weeks. I now know I should have taken up the plants and hung them to dry before removing the pods, but no matter.

In the early part of the year, around half of the seeds I saved were put into large yoghurt pots, two to a pot. They were left outside and given no real looking after. After a month or so they started to show and gradually two plants showed from each pot. I had 100% success with the first batch.

About two weeks ago they were planted out on the plot. Good roots, nice tips, they should do well and produce enough beans for us and for some more seed. The other half of the seeds are destined to go out on the Rainford plot in better soil. The variety is a dwarf one, and last year only grew eighteen inches high.

I'm really pleased with the success of the germination and progress so far. Plus I feel like seed saving could actually be easier than I thought. While I have saved about a fiver, it's the satisfaction of knowing I grew them, I harvested them, and I kept the seed in good condition until this year. I saved some seeds from the runner beans too. A baker's dozen, which have also gone in yoghurt pots, one to a pot this time. I can see the top of the soil thrusting upwards but so far it's impossible to tell how many will germinate and grow.

Farnworth jest fajnie, częśc 3

To my great amusement I spotted this sign on the way back home last weekend. Even funnier is there was another one round the corner.

First of the year...

A strange year so far, with the long hot May and then the damp and chilly June. Then today, again, we're at boiling point after planting out leeks in the rain yesterday. Haven't been to my parents' plot for a couple of weeks, due to Todmorden Show, so the spinach was a bit of a mess when I got there this week. Stripped a lot of it to tidy it up and picked a few other bits and bobs. That gave us our first home grown meal of the year:

New Charlotte potatoes, mange tout, calabrese and a slice of home-made cheese on top. You can't get better than that!

Spring has sprung...

... the grass is ris,
I wonder where,
the birdies is.

There are plenty of birds around, they have been flexing their song muscles for several weeks. I stood at the back door last night and, mixed in among the screams of children, the revving of over-tuned cars and the distant sirens, listened to a blackbird filling the air with his liquid song. It is a sound I always get pleasure from, particularly in the urban mess that is Farnworth.

It's not just the birds gearing up for spring. Yesterday, when I got to the farm there were three new additions. Mum Zina was looking very pleased with herself, despite needing a hand to get the first kid, a breech presentation, out. These were born on Friday and are already jumping about, itching to get in and play with the other goats.

More are due this weekend, so I am hoping it happens near enough to Sunday for me to be present.

With the weather so bright and sunny, I also decided to have a quick look in the hives. Both colonies are doing well, although one has used up almost all of its winter stores. I took two of their empty frames out and swapped them for two full ones from the other hive but will need to pop back this week and give them some sugar syrup to keep them going. If the weather is good, they might not need it, but better to be safe than sorry. I have been quite good so far at keeping them going through the winter and I would hate a basic mistake like not feeding them interrupt my success.

Although the sun was out, it must have been warmer on my head than in the air, as you can see.

All is quiet on New Year's Day...

Well, maybe for the rest of the street it is, but not here. While everyone else was sleeping off a hangover, I was out drilling, sawing, cementing, bolting and nailing together my first shed. Made from remnants of the chicken run, some Freecycle cladding and some timber scrounged from my dad, and constructed over two days, all it needs now is a narrow door and then I can transfer the pile of bee boxes and plastic crates that have been cluttering up the front room. Won't somebody other than me be pleased?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow (part two)...

On Monday of this week it started to snow. There had been a dusting earlier, just before New Year, but Monday night's fall was prolonged and heavy. We were woken around 6.30 by the sound of spade scraping on tarmac and a quick look out the window showed a taxi driver stuck outside the house. He was gamely attacking the six or seven inches of snow that had fallen but, as Agnieszka pointed out, he should have been clearing the snow, not trying to remove the road surface. Every so often he would get back in his car, rev a little, skid a bit, then get out and start further pointless digging. Anyone other than a taxi driver and I may have gone out, but as they know all there is to know about driving, I left him to it.

As everyone knows, more than a third of an inch of snow = day off. I had rung in by 8am and then wandered out with Agnieszka as she went to get a bus. First, putting their customers first as usual, had suspended all services. Later in the day, when they resumed, they weren't using Bolton bus station as it was snowbound. I know this is an outrageous thing to say but, why weren't the drivers clearing it in the morning? I mean, they couldn't go anywhere could they?

So with both of us off we had a mid-week fried breakfast and then trundled off into the park for a walk. I love the silence of the snow, everything seems to still, peaceful and untouched. That is, until we reached Moses Gate ponds where a selection of Farnworth's (and probably Bolton's) finest had removed some large road signs, bent one edge and were using them as sledges. Some had even gone to the trouble of punching holes and fitting ropes to make them look more streamlined.

We walked back along the main road. No plough had been down here. In fact, there were no signs of any activity on the part of Bolton Council to clear anything. We saw no gritter, no council staff, nothing. It is as if our ability to deal with a problem suddenly evaporates when the snow arrives. Everyone is helpless and, it has to be said, giddy. I think it was summed up by a comment on an idiot board, sorry, online forum. It said, roughly, 'why can't we cope when countries that have snow regularly can?' As far as I can see, the answer to that is in the question: other countries cope because they get this kind of weather every year. We don't. The last time it snowed like this was, according to the Guardian, 1982. So it is no wonder we don't invest in snowploughs and blowers, shovels and grit. If everyone did a little, then all would be well, but I noticed on our street, I am the only one to clear the front of the house.

Anyway, enough moaning. Here are some photos.

The back yard, with the covered chicken run and hut on the left-hand side.

Me, sure I'd left the car outside the house.

Oh, there it is.

Market Street, Farnworth at 9am on Tuesday. It would still be like this at 5pm.

Hungry swans on the pond at Moses Gate park. Other photos in this post were also taken in the park, thanks to Agnieszka for being patient and taking them while I ran around like a loon.

Back to Blighty...

So we arrived back in Hull on a bright Tuesday morning and took advantage of the day by driving up to Bridlington. By 8.30am we were stuffing our faces with a full English (Agnieszka) and a full veggie (me), washed down with milky coffee, in a sea-front greasy spoon. From there we waddled off to the beach for a walk in the early morning sun before heading up to Flamborough for a stroll along the cliffs.

By the time we got back to Farnworth, around five o'clock that evening, we'd covered almost 2100 miles in the previous two weeks. It felt like longer and it felt like we'd never stopped moving. We saw a lot of places we hadn't seen before, some we probably wouldn't want to see again, we'd met plenty of people and we'd been exposed to various set-ups with regard to holiday homes, farming enterprises and agro-turystyka holdings. It has given us a lot of food for thought and, while we think we narrowed the search for a house down, the problem still exists: what do we do for money? More precisely, what do we do for regular income? We would need jobs, at least part-time and while I would go back to teaching, what would Agnieszka do? That's why a bigger city is a better bet, but there the property is more expensive, so living away from town is cheaper but raises the problem of getting in and out for work / cinema / shopping. So we have plenty of things to consider before we can even think about getting animals. Who would look after them? Would they be trustworthy? Would they do it properly? Questions, questions.

We go back to Poland at Christmas for a week to visit Agnieszka's mum and see some friends. Talking it over with them might reveal some answers but, for now, we have to sit tight until house prices here rise a little. Only then will we have a bit of capital to invest in another house but this time I want to do it right, with a big garden, somewhere we can grow old and enjoy living.

When I am in work and feeling a bit off, I think of this picture and remember being deep in the forest, looking for mushrooms with the woman who has made my life so wonderful. Thank you, Agnieszka, for the holiday and, indeed, for everything!

So pack up your sea stores, consider no longer...

After deliberating for a year, we finally sorted ourselves out and made plans for a trip to Poland. We left Farnworth on a drizzly Monday afternoon and scooted over to Hull, where the sun shone and the wind blew, to get the ferry to Rotterdam. From there it was just a little over 800 miles to Smołdzino and our agro-turystyka lodgings.

We were disappointed, however, to find that Pan Tadeusz (http://www.agroturystyka.pl/index.php?inc=kwatera&id=714) didn't have any animals. He keeps a few ducks in the summer, he said, but there was no sign of them in the yard and we didn't check his freezer. The farm across the road (where a 4x4 from Chapelhouse Suzuki in St Helens sat in the yard) had cows but, out for a stroll one evening in the chilly dusk, we heard one in distress. A young bullock, it was yarking fit to bust, and seemed to have a bloated stomach. The woman from the farm came out to see to it but apart from stroking its flank, didn't seem to do much else. Then, as we walked by, there was a thump and down it went. We think it must have died and was chopped up there and then as there was a lot of activity in the yard that night. In the end we didn't buy any twaróg from them, just in case whatever the cow had was transmittable...

We stayed in an apartemencik here, with views across to Smołdzino Las (the forest) and not too far from a little shop. The view from the window is obscured slightly by the fly netting, but gives an idea of how far from Farnworth this place was, and I don't just mean the mileage.
Obviously, with the forest so close, we had to go for a mushroom hunt. All along the A6 from the German border we'd seen gangs of spindly old men in threadbare coats and cloth caps, smoking like Russian factories, standing over buckets of freshly-picked mushrooms, waiting for customers. We had to have a go and, during a lull in the torrential rain, we wandered off for a couple of hours to see what there was. It felt so nice to be wandering in a 'proper' forest, as opposed to the bits of woods we have in England. I know that might sound a bit snobby, but you haven't been in a forest until you've walked for an hour, completely surrounded by trees, silent except for the wind sighing in the treetops, the occasional birdsong and the hacking cough of a bloke pushing a bike through the undergrowth, also looking for grzyby.
So this was our haul. We had them checked by Pan Tadeusz, who threw out a couple and advised us to peel one or two more. Then they were washed and chopped, with half going on some newspaper by the radiatoor to dry and the rest going in the frying pan with an onion and some garlic. Mniam mniam, picked and fried in under two hours. Can you get fresher than that?

Close to Smołdzino is the seaside town of Łeba, a place I have wanted to visit for some time as I heard it is very pretty, with a winter population of around 4000 people and a summer one of ten times that. It was windy and damp the day we visited, all the shops closed or closing after the hordes of summer. It is a pretty town, one main drag lined with shops selling shells, amber, smoked fish, shells, postcards, amber and shells. At the harbour, a flotilla of boats-cum-restaurants / bars were moored, creaking gently in the gale and empty of punters. The whole town was empty in fact. I don't think we saw more than half a dozen people while we were there.
On one of the postcards, this part of the beach is crammed full of people in bikinis, but in October we had the place pretty much to ourselves apart from a couple of brave souls wind-surfing. Back in town, we asked in the post office how to get to the national park and the woman was very helpful, breaking off from reading her magazine for just long enough to direct us to the nearest car park. The lives of celebrities obviously more interesting than two damp out of season tourists.

The reason for coming here was to see the shifting sand dunes that 'walk' between two and ten metres a year. It's an eerie place. For three or four miles you walk through leafy forest, passing halfway the former V2 rocket launching site, now a museum, before coming out into a wider picnic area. From there the dunes rise up above, white against a (for once) bright blue sky. The dunes are slowly encoaching on the forest and quite a few trees were dead or dying after being enveloped in sand. We plodded to the summit of the largest dune, no mean feat in the soft sand, and it was incredible. On one side: trees and the start of a lake; on the other, dunes as far as you could see and then, twinkling in the distance, the Baltic.

A truly amazing place. I think we would have explored more if the wind hadn't been so strong. Every time you tuned into it you got your face sand blasted, like an eco-scrub. The pair of us looked like we'd just come out of a sauna and we were only up there half an hour. After hiking the few miles back to the car park we headed back to Smołdzino and the warmth of our little apartment, where the smells of wet walking boots and drying mushrooms accompanied our evening.

Doing the splits in a morning...

So far this year the hive hasn’t presented any problems but over the last few weeks the bees have been building queen cells and, after finding a couple of them capped, I started to get very nervous that I would lose them if they swarmed. At my weekly inspection last Monday I found a very nice queen cell and decided to split the hive to stop them swarming and to increase my potential honey harvest.

So on Tuesday morning I went to the site before work and did the best I could to perform an artificial swarm. This involves removing the queen and then replacing the brood box with a completely new one. The old box is moved a few feet away and any flying bees return to the new box on the old site, with the old queen. The box is bare so they think they’ve swarmed. The second hive contains the queen cell and the non-flying bees and will be left for three weeks in the hope the new queen will mate and start laying.

Everything seemed to go smoothly but, after reporting back to a more experienced bee-keeper I realised the queen excluder was above the new brood box and not underneath (to stop the queen trying to make a run for it). I had to go back and change it all round later that day. Now all I have to do is wait but the weather is poor and it may mean the queen doesn’t mate properly. Whatever happens, it’s a new learning curve and a chance to try to get better at techniques to increase the size of my apiary.

Farnworth jest fajne (część 2)

We had run out of milk. I say we, but it's Agnieszka who drinks it. Even on a good day I don't like it that much but particularly not the steri she insists we get from Aldi. But that's another story.

As we hadn't a drop in, we decided reluctantly to walk over to Aldi and, if that was shut, to Asda to get some more. However, on reaching Market Street we noticed the newsagents by the bus stop was still open and, as it was closer than either of the others, we decided to go in and see if they had anything. Many of the shelves were bare and when I asked the woman if they had any milk she did what Farnworth people do in lieu of a greeting and pretended not to hear me. Luckily Agnieszka spotted some right at the back of an open fridge and after a short debate about the sell-by date (the 12th, giving us only four days) we decided to take it.

We put it on the counter and the woman said: 'Just check it's alright. We've had some brought back.'

With that she broke the seal, took off the top, stuck her nose right up close and had a good sniff.

'Seems ok,' she said. 'Here, you try it.'

With that she handed it to Agnieszka who dutifully sniffed it, declared it ok, gave her the money and we left.

Farnworth jest fajne!

Having bought a great head of broccoli in Asda last Friday, we decided to steam it with a few potatoes and cover the lot in a cheese sauce. Agnieszka pointed out we only had ordinary cheese in the fridge, so I said I’d go to Aldi on Market Street and see if they had anything more interesting. They had. Gorgonzola for 99p.

I took it to the till. The girl looked at it, scanned it, looked at it again.

‘Is it alright, that?’ she asked, looking a bit wary.

‘It is,’ I said.

‘Is it supposed to be like that?’ She said, still looking closely at the packet.

‘It makes great cheese sauce,’ I said, wondering how long this would go on for.

She looked more closely, almost touching the packet with her nose.

‘But… but… it’s FURRY!’ She exclaimed.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘If it kills me, I won’t be back.’

I wandered home thinking about how it can be possible that people go through life not knowing about the delights of blue cheese. But then, this is Farnworth.

On a different note, after weeks of faffing, I finally finished pointing the wall. All that remains is to seal it with pva adhesive and then paint it white. The idea being that the sun, if we get any, will reflect heat and light into the yard and make it warmer and drier. That’s the theory anyway