From Farnworth to France in one day...

A week in France was just the ticket. A break from the routine of work and daily life and far away from the hell hole that is Farnworth. We drove down to Portsmouth, taking the ferry to Le Havre overnight. It was Le Mans weekend so we were accompanied on the boat by every red-blooded, car-mad, testosterone-filled bloke from the south coast, eager to show off their driving skills to the French public, none of whom give a toss about driving. Or skills.

For the first night we stayed within sight of Mont St Michel but were so knackered after the ferry that we crashed out at 8pm and didn’t surface for twelve hours. A week in a gite followed; a week of morning coffee, fried fish, salad, bread, chilled cider, cold wine and the greatest discovery of recent times – mayonnaise and mustard. Mixed. In one jar.

Having breakfast outside the gite, determined to enjoy it, even when it wasn't that warm and sunny.

The beach at Pleneven where we went a couple of times...

And the moules frites we had which were covered in garlic and made Agnieszka a bit ill.

The green man at the crossing in Erquy, hidden by signs to other things...

Us having a walk along the front at Erquy, which was tranquil and calm, if a bit cloudy.

A street in Dinard where we went for the day out and where we climbed to the top of the horological tower which made me very frightened, especially when the bell rang the quarter hour...

Leeks and other veg ready to go out into plots and gardens, spotted at a market in Lamballe.

Me trying to have a quiet slash behind the cathedral in Bayeux. It reminded me of the book, Clochemerle, where the town council builds a pissoir next to the convent and how it divides the town. Very funny in a French farce way.

And finally, Leo Sayer's older, uglier, madder brother, spotted in St Malo trying to chat up a couple of birds and, despite the leather waistcoat, hat and face like a folded napkin, doing quite well.

Messer-thingummy-branter-sums

They're actually called 'mesembryanthemums' and are a riot of colour at the moment.

Left out in the cold (frame)...

The back yard in Farnworth is a wind-blown chiller for plants, even the white painted wall hasn’t made it much warmer and drier although I think it has helped in some small way. what has been useful is the option of planting things out on an allotment and it was there I took the ogorki last week to place in the cold frame. This is a bit of a rickety structure but solid and with a plastic roof should keep out the worst of the weather and let the heat build up to produce, we hope, a bumper crop of pickleable fruits.

We have two types of ogorek: gruntowy and zaprawowy. Both should yield plenty of small, knobbly cucumbers that are perfect for pickling. Fresh they are among the best things I’ve ever eaten and would be purchased almost daily in Poland. Usually bought with strawberries although, I must point out, not eaten simultaneously.

To finish off the day at the plot, we decided to try some early potatoes. Not many to a plant, so obviously not quite ready, but the ones we did get were very tasty and lasted as long as it took to get them home, wash, boil and eat them. As the seed potato was still solid, we put it back in the ground. It might not give us any more spuds, but you never know and part of the fun of gardening is doing things that seem right at the time.

A sting in the tale...

We were warned last week about the wasp’s nest in the shed. As I am now the unofficial family expert on bees, wasps and other flying insects, I felt it my duty to go and inspect. While everyone had seen the one hanging up on the shed rafter, they were slightly unnerved to know that one enterprising wasp had built a nest on the fleece hanging up. The fleece was issued by Pilkington’s architectural glass division so maybe that was why the house of paper was constructed where it was.

Ring-a-ring-a-Ringley...

Sunday was a very warm slightly humid day, so we went for a walk along the canal and back through Ringley woods. It was lovely and I enjoyed it a lot. Such a pity the weekend is only two days long.

The wilt alternative...

Although I wouldn’t say it was my dream home, our little house in Farnworth is comfy and, since they put the insulation in, cosy. It’s big enough, except for the long thin crappy kitchen, it isn’t too full of junk and we have pretty much everything we need. Once I remove the bee hives from the front room, we’ll have space again, so all is looking good.

The yard, however, is another story. The house doesn’t face due south, so the amount of sun we get is limited and despite the wall now being as bright as I can get it, it is still chilly during the afternoon. This has affected the plants with the result that tomatoes are stunted and yellowing at the edges, the ogórek have wilted and died and some of the flowers are listless and slug food. This time last year we had a glorious crop of plants, all brought on in the garden of my parents and strong enough to survive – until the rain blighted them all away – in a sun-free yard.

It’s an almost desperate task to bring plants to maturity. The greenhouse we put up on the allotment is almost complete and I am frantic to get some of the tomatoes into it to try to get them growing properly again. Going out every morning to inspect is a sad and depressing job, as they don’t seem to be growing or even looking any stronger week on week. I’d like an allotment of our own but I read a piece in the Manchester Evening News this week that said the waiting list in Bolton was around three years. So far we’ve done three months or so. A few years back you’d walk straight onto a plot, not now. What irritates me is those people who have taken on plots in times of low demand are still managing to hold on to them despite long waiting lists. Surely it’s one each and those who have two, three or more should give them up.

One alternative is a community plot but I’m not convinced that’ll be a good thing. Have to find out more about it. Until then, I guess it’s struggle on and do what we can. Learn from experience and try to do better next year. It’s a depressing thought, though, no tomatoes for a second year.

As there are no photos of plants to look at, here's a couple of us putting up the greenhouse on the allotment.

Four candles...

When I bought the two spare hives from Matlock they came with a lot of frames with old foundation in. Gradually, over the weeks, I have been clearing it out of the frames and putting it into a big tub. I decided, after taking advice at Stoneleigh, to melt it all down and get it ready to exchange for something useful.

So it was, on a dreary Sunday morning, I took out our best saucepan and filled it with a little water, put it on the gas and warmed it up. As it warmed I added some of the old comb and started to melt it down. It’s amazing how much comb can melt down into such a small amount.

Using a plastic herring tub from Lidl, an old tin that once held Cadbury Heroes and a pair of tights we managed to turn a load of dusty and spider-web-ridden comb into a selection of wax moulds. I’m quite pleased at the result and hope that subsequent melting days will be easier, quicker and, from a cleaning-up point of view, decidedly less messy.

Take a box of old comb...

Melt in your best pan until liquid...

Get the wife to donate her old tights and then burn her fingers on hot wax...

Produce a selection of odd-shaped blocks of wax for various uses later.

The only mould I have specifically for wax and which you can buy for £1 a 1oz block.

Stoneleigh and the bee show

Saturday 19 April saw the UK’s premier bee keeping event at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. As I am new to beekeeping and mildly curious we (yes, I made Agnieszka go too) got up at 5am to make sure we were in Sale on time to get the coach. Only a dozen people went from Manchester – six didn’t turn up – which seemed a poor show, but left plenty of room for us.

The show is at the National Agricultural Centre, south of Coventry, and we arrived just after 9am. Even at that hour there were plenty of people scurrying about, armed with hive parts and tools, bee suits and wax. On entry, we handed over our tickets and got wrist bands to wear, which Agnieszka managed to stick to my arm hairs, giving me something to moan about for the rest of the morning. Inside was a warren of different rooms all chock full of bee keeping equipment: hive parts, tools, smokers, suits and associated paraphernalia. After being shoved and buffeted by tweeed-clad middle classes - who are always the rudest, despite their ‘breeding’ - we found a stall selling mead. A short while and three taster glasses later, we felt mellow enough to continue…

About the only thing I bought was a Fresnal lens to help spot the bees.
The mania that was the Thorne's offers. Talk about territorial and aggressive...

Bee suits now come in any colour you like, at £98 a pop.

And equipment to extract and process honey - this one is four grand, and it's on sale!

Outside were tents to exchange wax, melted down at home, for foundation to use in the hive for the forthcoming season.

Any mould will do, these look like they were melted into buckets.

Once the wax is melted and rolled into sheets it can then be used in the hive for the bees to re-fill with honey.
Someone making skeps in the traditional way. A relatively quiet corner, away from the hubbub of commerce and frenzied buying.

Photos, as ever, by Agnieszka - dziękuję serdecznie.

Peaks and tarts

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of e-bay. I don’t understand how people can spend hours and hours on the site looking for things. I agree that if you want something specific, then it’s a good way to start, but just trawling what there is for the sake of it… no thanks. I'm reminded of the poem about the tinker's wife, by Patrick Kavanagh: 'I saw her on the dunghill debris / Looking for things.'

I have, however, been watching it avidly over the last few weeks in the hope of picking up some bargains for a second, or even a third, hive. This has meant trying to gauge how good a piece of kit is and then decide how much I am prepared to pay for it, all from – often blurred – photographs. The first couple of bits I bid on went for way over what I was prepared to pay, so I lost them. The same thing happened on a full hive I was bidding on, that went for quite a lot too. I think one problem is that there isn’t that much available and when it appears, a lot of people – and most with more disposable income than me – are after it.

Still, I did finally bid on two hives and upped my bid in the last five minutes to get the lot. I was happy with the price and it meant I would have at least one extra hive of decent quality (I hoped) with a few spare bits too. As the following day was Good Friday and I was off, we decided to jump in the car to collect them and make a day of it. Unfortunately, the weather was still cold and very windy so the plan of a nice walk on the hills was scuppered.

The hives were down in Birchover, not far from Matlock. We allowed two hours for the journey and made it with a minute to spare. We were not helped by the slowly snaking line of traffic along the A6 through Stockport, Bramhall, New Mills and along, nor by the closure of the road after Buxton, which led to a detour and a heated discussion about maps and their reading. But we got there in one piece, eventually. Birchover is a small village with two pubs and a shop. A few stone-built houses lined the narrow, car-filled, main street. The guy I bought the hives from was only young and had changed type of hive because the new ones have a bigger brood body and this helps to over-winter bees, giving them more room to build up in the summer. This meant he was selling his old hives, which he had bought from someone else, and I was to benefit.

The two hives look ok, but do need a good clean

My two hives looked ok on first appearances. Slightly tatty, but serviceable. It’s only since I got them home that I’ve discovered the roof of one and a super have damp and rotted parts to them, but even so I still have enough to build a complete hive as a second, back-up one, plus I should be able to use what’s left as an ‘emergency’ hive. For swarms or something similar. I’m now spending my evenings sanding and cleaning, in readiness for scorching and treating with wood preservative before painting. I think they’ll be ok after that for a few years at least.

The new hive, assembled and waiting for bees

After this, with the car full, we decided to head into Bakewell and have a look around. It was very busy but not as busy as it could have been, had the weather been better. We went to a ‘craft fair’ and were talked into a bar of soap which the woman said could be used as air freshener as the aroma was so pungent. This is nonsense. It doesn’t smell unless you stick it almost up a nostril and I’m glad we didn’t listen to her claims about the other crappy products she had on sale. We dodged into the old scout hut to avoid some hail, and the remainder of our trip to Bakewell was spent popping into shops to get out of the rain. Not something we normally do, but nice to do now and again.

This week, the MEN reported that at least half a dozen people have had to be rescued off Kinder Scout because they lost their way, going up without maps or good boots. Maybe next time we venture out to the Peak District it’ll be fit for walking. For now we finished off in traditional style. Before leaving, to plod back up the A6, we bought a Bakewell pudding. Half got eaten in the car, half when we got back. Very tasty.

For Ewa

Dla Ewka.

Mam nadzieje, że gdieś jesteś, to jest dobre miesce. Ciepło i z słońcem. Spokojny śpi.

Easter brunch: a bit of breakfast, a bit of lunch...

We were talking at work and Helen, the secretary, asked if we had many eggs at home, in readiness for Easter.

‘We must have about thirty altogether,’ I said, thinking of the fridge full of them.

‘Not real ones,’ she screeched, ‘I’m talking about chocolate ones!’

Therein lies the difference between English Easter and Polish Easter. In Poland, the run-up to Easter is one of anticipation. Good Friday and Easter Saturday are days of fasting – in that they are days without meat – which makes the Easter breakfast all the more special. In England it’s just an excuse for a country with a high proportion of obese / greedy people to eat lots more chocolate. I have heard that some people start stuffing their faces with chocolate eggs on Good Friday. Why? Are people really so ignorant that they do not know what Easter is about? So how did we prepare? The week before we visited the Polish shop on Derby Street in Bolton and stocked up on white sausage and ham and then I popped around the corner from work to the Polish shop in Manchester to get more white sausage in case that wasn’t enough. I like the shop near work, it’s one where the girl doesn’t – or claims she doesn’t – speak English, so I am forced to remember words and practice what I know. She asked me on this visit if I wanted some cake but as Agnieszka had plans I had to say no. Who, in their right mind, would buy a dry and crappy shop-bought cake when they have a wife who makes succulent, tasty, moorish cakes at home? Not me. As part of the table decoration, Agnieszka crocheted some little chickens that looked very cute but didn’t understand they were supposed to sit on the eggs, they insisted on slipping off. The table was full on Easter Sunday: ham, sausage, boiled eggs, cheese, tomatoes, gherkins, onions and I baked some rolls so that we would have fresh bread. A bunch of daffodils added some further colour. My mum and dad were invited and arrived with their own chairs as we only have two. It was a lovely meal and made me look forward to a year that should be full of joy and, hopefully, less trials than the last one.
The cake was a roulade-type, made with honey and spread inside with yoghurt before being rolled and covered in chocolate. It was – because it didn’t last very long – one of the most succulent and tasty cakes I have ever eaten. Even so, it still comes second to my favourite – the apple cake. We haven't had one of those for a while... hint hint.

Wesołych Świąt Wielkanocnych!

From grim to Greece...

There's been an advert in the Manchester Evening News a couple of times now, for a 'smile' clinic somewhere in the city. It shows two photos of a smile. The first is of a badly-lit, miserable-looking gurning face, while the second is of a bright, cheesy grin with full-on flash. The people who run the clinic obviously believe that potential customers will look at the two photos and see a marked improvement because of the fantastic dental technique, rather than differently-staged pictures. I am reminded of a similar tactic, where they show two bodies in side view, one obviously breathing out, relaxed, with a big stomach bulging over too-tight trousers and the other of the same person sucking in for all their worth. This, the advertiser would have you believe, is all due to their amazing slim product / lycra corset / elastic trousers. They must think people are stupid. And, in fact, a lot of people are, otherwise these companies wouldn't have the money to pay for adverts in national newspapers.

With this kind of tactic in mind, I now present my new, upgraded, tarted-up, glam wall. What was once a dreary and drab pile of bricks - as you can see here:
Has now been transformed, as if by magic (by only the application of some 'wonder paint'), into something straight off a Greek island.
I hope to use this tactic in the future when we come to sell the house and by clever camera-work and lighting, turn our modest two bed terrace into a glitzy four bed mansion. At three times the market value of course. Cynical? Me?

Like a big game of Jack Straws...

We had a trip out to Ruthin in North Wales last week to collect my first hive. It was a wild and woolly day – appropriate for a day out across the border. The farm was easy to find and in a lovely setting, nestling under a stone outcrop and flanked on two sides by barns. The house dates back to 1500 or thereabouts and came complete with a range in the kitchen which was radiating heat like there was no such thing as global warming but a welcome respite from the chill winds of winter blasting across the fields.

We spotted a wheelbarrow full of bits when we arrived and, sure enough, this was mine. I would need to transform it into a working hive. This is what it looked like when we got it home:

Since then I’ve started to put it together and it looks ok, even if I do say so myself. The front room smells lovely, though, as the wood gives off a slight aroma which you catch every so often when you walk past.

A sting in the tail

The pedigree of honey

Does not concern the bee;

A clover, anytime to him

is aristocracy.

Emily Dickinson

One half of Manchester Beekeeper's apiary

This last weekend saw the second part of the beekeeping course with the practical side, following on from the theory I did at the end of January. A chance to put theory into practice and, looking back, an opportunity to make sense of all the things I’ve been reading over winter.

Quite a few people turned up and we were split into groups. First off for our group was extracting. Into the extracting room we went, uncapped the frames from two supers and loaded up the extractor, which would spin the honey out. This is probably the stickiest job I have ever done and it gets everywhere. We had to wear white coats, hair nets and overshoes for health and safety reasons, but the amount of finger-licking that was going on may have made those precautions pointless. Once extracted, we were able to bottle a jar of our own - harder than it sounds - and keep it as a souvenir. Mine is in the cupboard at home now, stuck to the shelf.

Using honey to glue things together

After a brew it was time to look at making brood boxes, supers and frames. This was particularly interesting for me as I bought plans for building a hive from scratch and up to now they haven't made much sense, although spilling coffee all over them didn’t help. It was useful to see how things go together and to get a few tips, but I did feel that some of the things were a little over the top.

After hammering away and glueing for an hour or so it was time for dinner and then it was 'put your bee suits on' and get outside. It may have been the beginning of March but it was as cold as a witch’s tit outside, with strong winds and little sun. I felt sorry for the bees as they were disturbed half a dozen times on each day and I’m sure being exposed to the cold wasn’t doing them any good. Plenty seemed to be dead on the floor and within minutes of us opening the hive more were rolling around in death throes.

First job was to light a smoker. Despite putting paper, leaves and little sticks in and my penchant for pyromania, I still couldn’t get it lit after three attempts. We resorted to the blowlamp to get it going in the end and that’s the way I’ll go from here on. Braving the wind we were then allowed to inspect a hive and, starting with a super, go through each frame and have a look.

Looking at an empty frame of foundation like I know what I'm doing

Because of the cold we were only able to look at two hives, both of which had queens that were either not laying, or were laying only drones. I think it was the cold that kept them quiet because there was hardly any movement on the frame and I had a small pang of nervousness as I lifted my first frame full of bees.

Looking for the queen

Actually getting to grips with the hive, taking it apart, checking for the queen (which I managed to find twice, despite her being unmarked), prising apart propolised frames and learning how all the bits fit together. What I need to do now is get my own hive and bees and start the whole process on my own. The more I get into it the more fascinating I find it and think it will be something I can get years of enjoyment from.

The view between two frames

Thanks to Vinny for the photos.