Apr 07

Music to prune by

It was a glorious day on Sunday and the afternoon was particularly delightful

Not too hot and not cold,
not too sunny and not to dull
but…Juuust right!

A great day to clean up the area around the house and remove some of the excessive growth on the vines and trees under the carport. And what better way to do it than to set it to music.

An interesting mix of music that included music from Franz Liszt and Beethoven, “The Beatles” and “System of a Down” provided the perfect backdrop.

The grape vines needed some serious work as I wanted to untangle them from the wire netting and move them all to the front so that it will give them more room and make it easier to net them to protect against the birds

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I had to cut thegrapes04m back pretty hard but I finally got them all rearranged and ready for next season. I will get a smaller crop next year as the grapes grow on new shoots from one year old wood and I removed many of the buds that would produce grapes. However, we should get it all rather the birds! and it will be a bumper season after that.

 

 

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I also cut back the bay leaf and the passionfruit very hard to make more room and provide extra light and warmth to the the house.It was a fair bit of hard work but made all the easier listening to the music in the background 🙂

What music do you listen to in the garden?

 

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Nov 05

A Taste of Honey

Well, after all the madness with the Swarms over the last few weeks it was a relief to settle down and extract some honey this weekend. I collected four swarms and apparently missed two more over the last five weeks and managed to sell one to a friend of a friend. That leaves me with five to manage which is more than I had planned but it is still do-able. If it seems to be too much effort I can always combine a couple to reduce the total number.

Using a friend’s two frame extractor I extracted 14kg from 9 frames, I was expecting a bit more but quite a few frames were not yet full or had brood in them. But that’s OK I wasn’t after a huge yield and I’m not currently using queen excluders.

I like to get a hive done in one hit and then return the extracted frames (stickies) to the hive for cleanup and refilling. It also helps me to keep the frames in the same hive as much as possible to minimise the spread of disease. Because I only have a few hives to manage it’s pretty easy. With a lot more hives I imagine it would be more difficult to keep track of the frames and hives.

Of course, while doing all this, I have been listening to a lot of honey related music including this old favourite.

What’s your favourite track with the word Honey?

 

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Jul 09

Carta Extremis sample

Carta Extremis featuring Sean, Mike and Anthony.

A sample track from Friday’s show at double Deuce.

 

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