Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
After the winds of Saturday, Sunday dawned clear and fairly still. Perfect weather for pottering in the garden. Morning Run There was a bit of exercise to do first so I headed off for a run along the River Leri and then back along the beach. Nothing too exciting and not too far or too...
I picked a whole load of succulent blackberries from the hedgrows at the weekend. Free, health food, what is there not to like about that! Better still, I’m pretty sure that the majority of our bumper honey harvest this year came from nectar from the flowers on these blackberry bushes. I can’t be sure of...
Beekeeping has always been an interesting hobby for us. We never had any intentions of making loads of honey and selling it for a profit. A good job really as Ynyslas isn’t the best place to keep bees and our honey harvest rarely produces much honey. If it were a money-making scheme we would have...
Well, as forecast Sunday (yesterday) was indeed the hottest day of the year so far. The temperature on the Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station here in our back garden hit 28.2ºC at 2:01pm. Still quite a way off the all time high of 33.7ºC but today is meant to be hotter still and it is...
I don’t know, I turn my back for 5 minutes and the bees are up to something again!! This time I think it’s a good thing as they have filled their supers to the brim!! I’m not sure where they are getting their forage from but there seems to be a honey flow! The garden...
Unsuccessful Swarming We never have much success with our bees during swarming season. As soon as there are signs of swarming we tend to do the standard artificial swarm procedure. This is supposed to ‘trick’ the bees into thinking they have swarmed and you should end up with two colonies: One containing the original queen...
After a nice night away with Anna I decided to take a quick look at the bees. It had only been 5 days since I’d last inspected them but it’s prime swarm season so it’s good to keep an eye on them. Leri Hive The first hive, Leri, was all looking good. They have a...
Another quiet weekend here for us. We had some good days on the ‘solars’ though thanks to the blue skies and cool temperatures. There was barely any import from the grid. Just a little here and there for things like showers because that draws too much power for our inverter. Otherwise we were using solar...
Phew, I think I’m on top of things in the garden! It’s the same every year – things seem a little overwhelming when you first venture out and there are so many jobs to do. However, a few sunny days and the nice long list of jobs to do soon starts to get whittled down....
The bees have had their usual ups and downs this years. Things started well but we then lost a couple of swarms while I was in hospital. I did manage to split a colony though and caught an errant swarm too. We now have four colonies all of which are (we think) queen-right. The smallest...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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