Many little things

I had nothing in particular that I wanted to achieve today. 

I have just about finished the potting shed reorganisation. The greenhouse has been cleared and is ready to move from the practical to the ornamental, and a large quantity of rubbish has been removed to the tip.

So today I amused myself with little things.

I wandered out to the tomato greenhouse, checked the plants for side shoots and removed the lower leaves. I can report that our Sweet Aperitif plants now have ripening fruits. This is about fifteen weeks from sowing to first harvest, and, according to the internet, exactly the timescale expected.

After sorting out the tomatoes, I refilled the water butts and tanks from the well, and then headed indoors.

My next job was to prepare a batch of sugar syrup for hive #3. The syrup recipe is 1.2 l of water to 2 kg of granulated syrup and it was soon prepared and left to cool.

With my bees foremost in my mind, I then headed up to the orchard and cleaned out the wasp traps. I estimate that the four traps produced a litre mixture of fermenting syrup and wasp corpses. It is truly incredible how many of the damned things I have caught.

The traps were reassembled and refilled with some partially fermented syrup, left over from a couple of years ago. I also gave hive #3 a couple of litres of syrup. It will be interesting to see how quickly they take it in to the hive, and whether it has any effect on colony size.*

The morning was drawing to a close, so 30% and I lunched before heading over to Powick with our little trailer in tow.  30% had found a couple of rather nice wicker chairs for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and we set off to see if they were suitable for the greenhouse transformation.

On arrival we decided that they would do nicely. They will need new cushion covers but the chairs are of a decent quality and will warrant the expenditure on new covers ... I can see some exotic plants being procured in the coming weeks!

We arrived home to be greeted by TP. He had just come back from a short holiday in Ireland, and was to spend a couple of days here with us.

As we caught up with TP's news unexpected visitors arrived. The chap who had ordered a few jars of set honey had turned up with his wife to collect them. We invited them to join us for afternoon tea and had a pleasant hour with them.

Later in the day TP and I headed down the lane with the dogs, and we realised that it was actually far warmer than I thought. We kept the walk relatively short, but I have noticed that Whiffler is now starting to show his age and is probably better being given a couple of short walks than a couple of miles.

My final activity was to use the potting shed for the first time. I planted out a couple of trays of Durham Early Spring Cabbage ... let's hope they don't get eaten by Whitefly, Pigeons, Slugs, Snails ... I sometime wonder why I grow veg!

So that was my Wednesday. An alternative title for today's Journal entry is, Does anyone have a recipe for a litre of candied wasps?

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* This colony is far too small to produce a honey crop this year, so there is no risk of contaminating a honey crop with sugar syrup.