And now the hard work begins

There was no time to bathe in the glow of yesterday's village show success, for today we had a mountain of produce to deal with.

Selecting near perfect, matched specimens for showing means that there is always a significant quantity of imperfect, unmatched specimens left over.  There is nothing wrong with these specimens other than slight defects in appearance. They have been tended over the past weeks and months with care and attention and there is no way that we would let quality produce go to waste.*

This morning we set to processing our harvest.

My first job was to prepare, blanch and open freeze the carrots.  I did a batch a couple of days ago and internet sources suggested that they should be blanched for three to five minutes. I followed this guidance, but have my doubts. I have a suspicion that this is way too long and will lead to soggy veg, so this morning I only blanched them for ninety seconds before chilling, drying and freezing.

With those out of the way, I pulled the beetroot from the fridge and put them on to boil. A pickling vinegar was prepared and by lunchtime I had a kilo of beetroot pickling in a jar. It'll be couple of weeks before we can sample it,  but I can't wait.

At this point I should mention that 30% was fully occupied picking and preparing beans and she also knocked up a rather good tomato soup.

The weather had cleared by the early afternoon, so I grabbed my smoker and headed up to the orchard to check on the bees.

The first colony inspected was nucleus #2. The one that was set up at the end of last week.  The young queen had been released from her cage, but there was so many bees that it was not possible to spot her on the combs. It was also difficult to see whether she had started laying yet, so I can not yet determine whether this has been successful. I transferred the frames and bees to a full sized brood box, added five frames of foundation and re-filled their feeder with syrup. Hopefully I will spot her, or young brood at next week's inspection.

The colony established from nucleus #1 was doing well. The queen was spotted easily and there was plenty of young brood. She has definitely settled in and started laying. Her attendant workers had also started to draw out the comb on the foundation in the brood box and some of it already held capped stores. Again I topped up the colony's feeder and hope the other colony looks like this in a week's time.

After inspecting the hives I headed back to the kitchen and made a batch of celeriac soup with the any other vegetable entry from yesterday's show. I can report that the soup was beautiful and that fresh celeriac has a much deeper aroma and flavour than those from the shop.

That pretty much sums up today's accomplishments, but there are still a lot of vegetables to be harvested. 30% and I are yet to agree on whether we will be pickling or making chutney from the rest of the beetroot.

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* The show entries get eaten too. They may have sat in the village hall for a few hours, but they're still fresher than anything on a supermarket shelf.