In the mean time

While we are waiting for the exchange of the property into our names we are not sitting idle. There is a lot of preparation going on behind the scenes. Here are some of the more visible preparations.

Richard and Astrid are building frames for a bee hive.

Below, I am threading wire into the frames to hold the foundation wax.

Rich inserting the foundation wax in a frame.The wax smells of a mixture of honey and wax, strange because that is exactly what it is. There is a thought that because so much foundation wax is used the bees lose some ability to make the cones for themselves.







Most of the preparations for the farm have been finding out things on the internet. I am pretty inexperienced at gardening and hardly know my plants let alone pests and how to combat them. I have joined 'Garden Organic' a national charity that sells organic seeds and other gardening stuff.
Here I am trying to grow mulberry trees from clippings that I got from the school. The white stuff is perlite, it holds a lot of water and air. After putting hormone rooting powder on the ends of the clippings I put them in these old yoghurt pots with compost and perlite. Stand them in water until the water is taken up to the top, don't water down (as I first did) as this washes off the rooting powder (which I thought it would but couldn't think laterally to avoid it). I roughly followed some instructions on how to take clippings from a website called 'Instructables'. I have since covered the whole lot, except the top of the 'sticks' in plastic, to keep the moisture in. I put them in clear containers in the hopes of being able to see any roots develop. i left the tips open as a way of telling if the things are still green (alive) or not. Lets see what happens.



On the right are a black and a red currant bush. I bought them last week, to go on the farm. On the left is a runner from the nut tree whose leaves you can see on the very right hand edge of the picture. It is a hazel nut, or cob nut, tree. This mother tree was given to me by a neighbour. We had not been at this house for long when I met him inspecting the trees boardering his property. I asked him what type of trees they are. When he told me that some of them were nut trees I got excited to know that it is possible to grow nut trees in a suburban garden (such was my ignorance). I told him I had always wanted a nut tree. He said that the trees always send off runners and he would give me one. When nothing happened for many months I thought he had forgotten but I didn't want to say anything, didn't want to pester him. Anyway about a year later he gave me this little tree in a pot. I realized he had been waiting for it to establish itself before he gave it to me. That was over 7yrs ago now. Last year we had a good crop of nuts and now this year we have it's first baby and somewhere special to plant it.