Bees getting active

The recent mild weather has meant that the bees are venturing out of the hives. They aren't in vast numbers at the moment but today was warm enough for them to be out and about and I saw them returning with pollen. Hopefully that means there is brood to feed or the hives are getting ready for some.

As we are already experiencing spring weather, despite still being in winter, we will need to bring forward our plans to add an extra brood box to each hive. The purpose of this is to double our number of hives. Over the next couple of months, the bees will fill the brood boxes and when it comes to taking them away, they should be full of brood, bees and queen cells. We will aim to leave the queen in the existing hive. In the new hives set up with the brood boxes, the new queens will hatch and stay with the colonies. We did this a couple of years ago with one hive as an emergency as we found it had lost its queen in March. We added the brood box to another hive to merge them but separated them in May. Each went on to be a strong colony.

Munching their way through ivy

I discovered soon after getting the goats that one of their favourite foods is ivy. I found this rather surprising at the time but have learnt to pick it wherever I can. One of the hedges on my allotment is covered with it so yesterday I set about chopping some of it back. It made an excellent meal for the two goats.

14 eggs

We got 14 eggs from our hens today, and 2 from our ducks. For the hens, this is the highest since the summer so clearly egg production is heading in the right direction. The photo above was taken at lunchtime so doesn't include the ones I picked up in the morning or the final one tonight. We'll be looking to swap some of them soon (as well as use some ourselves!)

More quail eggs

Having made a start with our quail venture by hatching 7 eggs last month (unfortunately but not unexpectedly one chick died) we have another 24 eggs which went into the incubator last Friday. They should hatch a week on Sunday. The six remaining chicks that hatched last month are all doing well. They are growing rapidly and are developing their wing feathers. They are looking more like quails rather than the bundle of feathers they were a couple of weeks ago.

Pancake cafe

The pancake cafe we ran at our local community centre (Marley Hill) last night was something of a modest success. We had no idea how many would turn up but from 5.20pm to 8pm we were working constantly as a steady flow of customers came in to try out the pancakes made using our free range eggs. At 50p a pancake, they were priced to encourage people to get seconds, thirds and so on!

The question now is, shall we serve up pancakes at our forthcoming community cafe on 30th March? I think the answer is likely to be "Yes"!

Pancakes

Pancake day is coming up (on Tuesday 4th March). We will be holding a pancake cafe at Marley Hill Community Centre and with our hens and ducks laying more eggs, we had a practice run today at making pancakes. We had them for breakfast. Very nice!

Red cabbage and turnip soup

I was searching through the shelves in my garage last week (we use it as a store room) and I discovered a red cabbage and a turnip, both of which had seen better days. I stripped away the outer leaves of the cabbage and found it was fine inside. The turnip was a bit dried out but still usable. So, I put the two together, added some artichokes from the unending supply on the allotment and made them into a soup. Not the best one I have made but it was not bad.