Of Bees and an Old Joke

Just as well I've been pushing myself to do the painting these last few days, as I woke up this morning to pouring rain, I had to put my raincoat over my pyjamas to go let the chickens out. Despite the rain they came shooting out of their house as if they hadn't eaten for a month. Of course, since having to re-roof the run to keep the fox out , they now have an area to go in that is under cover although today’s rain was still coming in through the chicken wire sides of the run. None of the chickens are laying at the moment which is a bit depressing, the two chicks are still too young, although the Orpington has grown huge, the three ex batts have been putting all their energy into growing their feathers back and do look almost respectable now, Mary and Amelia have no excuse. Last year Amelia stopped laying in the autumn and didn't start again until January so I may have to resign myself to having to buy eggs for a while.

The quail are no better as regards laying and really it is time I moved their cages into the garage for the winter as they are not as hardy as the chickens. Oliver and I may go to sort out a space for them later. At the moment we are sitting comfortably on the sofa playing Ceebeebies games on one laptop, whilst I try and write this on another.

Yesterday, as soon as I’d dropped Oliver off at nursery I was out in the garden. First, I did the long overdue task of sorting the bees out for winter, feeding the hives that seemed light and removing any supers that didn't have any stores in them. If there were any supers with honey in, then I swapped them over so that they are now under the brood boxes instead of on top. On two of the hives I reduced the size of the entrances by putting a wooden block in place. I only seemed to have two of these though so I will have to buy another three and also buy more of the metal mouse guards which are pinned into place to stop mice raiding the honey during the winter. It is also time to treat the hives against varroa and then, after that, I can safely leave them alone for a while. I was encouraged at how healthy the hives were looking, all five hives were stronger than any of  the hives I had last year. I could also see bees coming in with their backs coated in white pollen which is a sign that they have been visiting Himalayan balsam, an invasive foreign plant which is much disliked by everyone except beekeepers who appreciate the pollen it can provide late in the season. It is good to know that my bees are within flying range of Himalayan balsam just as it is good to know they can access alder catkins in February for an early start to their season. Next year my challenge with the bees is to try to pre-empt swarming. Although it was good experience, handling this years swarms, and has allowed me to build up to five hives, to get a good honey harvest, the bees really need to be  able to concentrate on bringing the nectar in rather than building up a new colony after swarming.

Inevitably, inspecting the bees took longer than I thought, and it was nearly five by the time I’d finished putting everything away but as Oliver was spending the night with his other grandparents, I didn't have to collect him from nursery so I was able to zip out into the front garden and do a little more in my mission to obliterate the orange paint. Yesterday was the turn of the drainpipe,

which copying all the neighbours I painted black.

 As the drainpipe is next to my neighbours front door, it put me in mind of the pun I once heard on ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, ‘Was it you who spilt black paint outside the front door? Well go and never darken my doorstep again!’.

In Which Our Heroine Discovers Once Again That Some Things Really Need Two People

I have been fired up to do DIY recently, partly inspired by the success of the garage door and partly driven by the knowledge that when winter is really here I won’t be stirring far from the fire let alone going up ladders.

The title of this blog is explained by my attempts to repair a hole in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling.

 

Now my plastering skills aren't brilliant and I know it would look better if a real plasterer did it but this is about frugal living, unlike one of my neighbours, I cannot call in the professionals even if ‘he was ever so reasonable, only £500’.

So there were two alternatives either a) live with a hole in the ceiling (I’d tried that option for the last 18 months) or b) try to fill the hole with plasterboard and plaster over the joins.

Oh dear.

This is where I needed a second pair of hands. I discovered that when standing at the top of a stepladder trying to balance a piece of plasterboard against the ceiling with one hand, while reaching for the prop to hold it in place with the other and then watching the prop slip out of reach and fall onto the floor.  By the end of the day, I’d discovered several more things , most importantly that the plasterboard adhesive just wasn't going to cut it and  a belt and braces operation involving screwing it into the ancient laths was also needed.

However I did manage to get most of the hole filled in.

It then just needed a couple of smaller pieces of plasterboard and the gaps filling in, but the weather has been so good over the last week that I was seduced into working in the garden instead.

When the BT engineer came last week, my garden looked like this

Now it looks like this:

I decided to sacrifice the lilac tree, which does have its moment of glory in May but then spends the rest of the year either casting a shade over the garden or demanding I prune it.

I didn't do it all by myself, I had help:

Once I have got the roots out, which will be a job and a half in itself, I want to replace it with a dwarf cherry tree which will match the lilac for pretty blossom in spring but then give wonderful fruit in summer. I will put two or three gooseberry cuttings in front of the wall where the brambles were running wild and then the rest of the garden will be filled with herbs and salad plants. I do have a hankering for training a grape vine round the doorway though which led to the realisation that I really must paint it first.

I’m ashamed to say, that I think some of it (the orange bits ) are still the way they were when we moved in twenty five years ago and not unreasonably are in very poor condition.

Yesterday, I sanded and painted all the bits I could reach with a stepladder. Unfortunately the green paint I’d used on the garage door ran out halfway through the front door.

I’d already decided that this green was a bit too bright and I was going to find a darker one but then when I went to the shop this morning, there was my paint at £6.80 a tin or the market leader at £17.95. Maybe the brightness will fade over the winter.

So today’s task is painting, but tomorrow I may well be back up the ladder wrestling with the kitchen ceiling as the weather forecast is rain for the rest of the week. It doesn't really matter which I’m doing, either will move me closer to the sort of house I want to be living in.

Of Garage Doors

Well they are finally finished, and I am hugely relieved.They started out like this:

And three days and much hard labour later, they ended up looking like this:

More important than what they look like, they now open and close and are not in danger of blowing down in high winds. The area in front of my garage is used by the district nurses visiting my next door neighbour and I didn't relish any of the complications of having a garage door fall on their cars. 

Anyway, I couldn't afford new doors and my carpentry skills aren't up to completely making new doors, so my only option was to  do a make over on the old doors. I knew from when we repaired the dormer roof that  sheets of 18mm exterior grade plywood came in 8ft x 4ft which is exactly the size of each door, and cost around £20 each. From that it seemed a simple idea to take the doors off their hinges and glue and screw the new wood over them and then give them new heavy duty hinges.

By Saturday, I had given each plywood sheet two coats of paint  in the garage where I could do it in the dry without having to use a stepladder. I had also sanded and painted the wooden surrounds, which meant by Sunday there was nothing left I could do without taking the doors off.

The trouble was that the doors were already up when we moved into the house twenty seven years ago, so I was trying to remove rusty bolts that could have been in place for forty or fifty years.

 I got them all off except two, which I struggled with all day. I went off and bought a metal blade for my jigsaw and then realized I couldn't get the blade close enough to use. I tried to drill it through but my drill ran out of battery. Eventually, once the drill was recharged, I drilled the wood round it and pulled it out that way. The second bolt just needed the wood drilling a little round it to let me get a spanner to it. Then I was left grappling with a completely free 8ft door. 

There was a distinctly wobbly moment when it looked like the door was in control over me, but then I got the upper hand and lifted it on a trestle table. The actual gluing and screwing process wasn't difficult apart from the old door was warped out of line and I think the new wood had  warped during its time in the garage so the two pieces had to be clamped together before I could screw them. By the time it was done it was about seven in the evening and I was too tired to have confidence in my ability to measure the spaces between the hinges properly so I had to call it a night leaving the garage missing a door which was not what I wanted. 

 On Monday, talking with a neighbour, convinced me that I would be better off using bolts rather than screws, so I set off for the ironmongers on the other side of Leeds.I had a meeting in the afternoon so it was evening by the time I had the hinges up, and was ready to ask neighbours to help me lift the door into place. Unfortunately the measurements had not been quite right and the door was too high up to close properly.

 Tuesday morning, I had to try and take the hinges off and drop them by an inch without taking the door off or putting too much strain on the new hinges. With the help of David, my neighbour, and using blocks of wood as levers we managed it,
And I was free to start on the second door. After all the trouble of the first door, I can't say I was looking forward to the second door but it was easier second time around. For one thing, I had borrowed an angle grinder which made short work of cutting through troublesome bolts. The only hitch came at half past four, when I realised I was a hinge short, which meant another trip across Leeds, driving through rush hour traffic to get to the ironmongers before it shut. Then I should confess, that I screwed that hinge in the wrong place so when with the help of the neighbours again, we lifted the door into place, it would only rest on the top two hinges. I needed to move that hinge and cut a inch of plywood off the bottom. I was getting distinctly tired now but I wasn't going to give up so close to the finish, and by eight o'clock it was done. I'd even screwed a bolt on the door to keep it shut.
There are a few more bits to do, the paintwork needs touching up and there are two battens that are still to be screwed on the bottom but they can wait. Today is going to be spent relaxing with Oliver (hopefully a happier picnic than last week) and then tomorrow I am harvesting my first honey!

Winter Approaches

Winter is coming; the weather today is predicted to be twenty degrees and sunny, and I can still wake up by natural light before 6 am but there has been a definite turn in the seasons. Summer with the lazy feeling of one easy day following the next, has gone. In its place is Autumn with its underlying notes of panic. Summer may whisper 'Relax, lie back, enjoy yourself' but Autumn is saying 'Hurry, hurry, hurry, so little time, so much to do'.
Like the animals and birds, I feel the need to prepare for winter. I have been a disappointment to the garden this year, not enough has been sown or planted but the fruit has done well. There was enough rhubarb and red currants to mix with bought strawberries to make a summer fruit jam and there were five pounds of gooseberries to make into jam.

 Now the blackberry season has started,

I gathered three pounds on Friday

 with the promise of much more to come, they will go into the freezer for a few weeks until the apples ripen to make blackberry and apple jam and also pies and crumbles, the taste of autumn, warming food, served hot with custard. I currently have in the kitchen, one overgrown courgette, which with cauliflower, cabbage and onions I will cut up and leave in brine for a few days ready to make piccalilli. Most important, on the subject of food, I have reserved the loan of a small extractor from the LBKA to be picked up Wednesday so next week I will be attempting my first honey harvest.
However autumn is not just telling me to get my cupboards well stocked for winter, it is saying that I only have a month, maybe six weeks to get repairs and DIY done. I have a list as long as my arm of tasks that need to be done, before I can relax in security but there simply won't be enough time to do them all in six weeks, especially whilst preparing to sell soap as Christmas presents, so taking one task at a time I am preparing to renovate my garage doors.

I can't afford the hundreds of pounds to replace them and even if I could I don't think I will ever be sufficiently interested in garage doors to want to spend the money on them, but they are in a bad way. The last time I remember sanding and painting them, I developed mastitis and as my youngest daughter is now 19, that is quite some time ago.
The doors are made of marine plywood on a wooden frame and the wood has started rotting especially near the hinges which in turn are rusty and bent.

The plan is to take the doors off entirely (if I can get the rusty screws out), cover them with new sheets of plywood and put new tougher hinges. The drawback is that this will make the new doors very heavy so getting them back up will be a struggle. I will let you know how I get on.

DIY with help

Today is my day for looking after my grandson Oliver who is nearly three. It was a beautiful sunny day  so I thought we could be outside in the garden with Jess the pup, whilst I tackled a DIY project that I have been putting off for a couple of months.
I have been wanting to give the chickens a roof to their coop or at least one corner of it. Last winter they hated the snow so I covered the run in a tarpaulin which worked for a while but sagged when full of heavy rain and made the run darker than it need be. So I thought a quick solution would be to screw clear PVC panels to the roof.
 My first worry would be whether I could get the 8ft length of them into the car but we just managed it.

















That was in November and somehow the panels were put into the garage and left there. Either the weather was wrong or I was busy with something else or it was Christmas but today there were no excuses.
It was a lot easier than I'd imagined, it would have been even easier if I hadn't had a toddler climbing the ladder behind me saying 'What you doing? What you doing?' on a loop/ Pup also had to be shut in the house when I needed to get in the run with the chickens and then whined piteously the whole time.
Still it is finished now and will give the chickens a nice dry place to go to.

I was intending to post this last night but had one of those unfortunate accidents that happen when you have a toddler, a puppy and a bowl of soup. I left the laptop overnight to dry out and things seem okay now.