The Perils of British Bathrooms

Our life in Landbeach has been an eventful experience in home ownership.
Most of TAT's readers will be aware of the ongoing and multivarious sagas relating to things that go wrong with this house.
We are grateful to report that none of this has pertained to the significant fabric or construction of the house itself. But just about everything else has ....well....given us a wealth of learning opportunities, shall we say.

And none more than the bathrooms.
Showers that leak - but we have never found the source, baths that leak for months and only let you know when the wall is wet in the room next door....tiles that fall off the wall, shower thermostats that are welded to the cold setting....loos that don't flush, or constantly slightly flush.
Oh, and the times we could have sung 'Oh dear, what can the matter be? One of our guests is stuck in the lavatory....' (Only once had to get the local handyman to get them out though.....)

Then there is the decor aspect - those lovely coloured bathroom suits that were so popular in the 70s....candy pink, avocado green, Mother-in-Law beige, and then our own dearly beloved aquamarine.

But now, prepare yourself for the most fearsome bathroom peril of them all.....     
that autumnal nightmare....          
            The Spider in the Bath

yes, that is a standard sized penny....

Sadly this one ruined the poetic nature of such a peril by being in the sink instead.They can climb drains, but they can't scale shiny porcelain bowls.

I am too much of a nature lover to flush her down the plug hole; besides, she would have blocked the drain. So, here is the patent bug-eyed bath spider removal technique:

'Here we go again...'

The nature experts say that spiders, like mice, just turn right around once they've been ejected, and find their way back into the house. Who knows how many times I've already chucked this one out? If it is the same one, she's eating well, as she gets bigger every time!

Apple Harvest

It has been an amazing Summer this year. With all the rain from last year making the foliage lush, and days of uninterrupted sunshine in late June and all of July, the apple harvest has been phenominal.
 Since we moved here two years ago, we have been systematically but conservatively pruning the overgrown fruit trees at the end of our very long garden.  We were not at all confident of the outcome....possibly reflected in the lone apple I put on this number plaque earlier in the year (Made at a potter friend's house)

The beehive is romanticised....perhaps one day Mark will make one for me like that.

However, our poor elderly Bramley trees were no exception to the national bounty.  Anna, Mark and I had a fun two hours picking them all.

Anna in her favourite habitat - up a tree.  I still need to prune for height, having done the untangling and removal of dead stuff the past two years.  I mean on the tree, of course....not Anna.

Mark kept a running total of weight - but we've forgotten what it all came to probably about 60lbs though.

 Sooty had fun pretending to be an apple. As Anna and Mark picked I chose the best ones to wrap up in newspaper for storage. I kept packing them around Sooty till he finally got the hint....

 

 

 

 

 

I blend in rather well, don't you think?

Even the little £3 Aldi Cox's Orange Pippin tree that I have had stuffed in a tomato pot for 3 years produced its first fruit - 18 lovely apples. And most delicious they were too.

Size was a little.....variable.

This year we need to hack back some of the overgrown shrubs around the 'Orchard' at the end to allow more light in to the trees.  I am hopeful that even the Victoria Plum will survive my ministrations and produce well next year - we had a few handfuls of scrumptious plams despite the tree looking most unhappy after a good haircut last autumn.

Pork Pate - Vegetarians Look Away Now!

I've often said that if I really knew what went into pate it wouldn't eat it.
Well, now I have made it from first principles and its yummy.
We picked up our half a happy pig from Hempsal's Farm last week. This time I was spared no realities - we got the lot. Head, bones (extracted), feet.....
The rest of the family stayed totally clear of the kitchen while all this was going on.....
And here is why:

Liver, trotters and half a head: the cheek is the best meat...though not much of it.

What to do with half a pig's head?

I reasearched a little here and there....considered boiling the head as for brawn (Head cheese to US readers - sounds a bit like toe cheese to me....) Somehow, having a head in the pot and watching the gums recede as it boiled did not appeal. Settled on using the meat for a variant on Delia Smith's Coarse Country Pate.


The first job was to remove the meat from its various hiding places.
So I whipped out my nice sharp Sabatier and investigated. I left the brain alone - it was a lot smaller than I expected.
The teeth could have done with better brushing and flossing - another reason to avoid boiling the whole head.

I did boil the trotters because the meat was encapsulated in very tough connective tissue. Also, it made AMAZING stock.  Would you believe that from 6 trotters (Not bad when I had only bought for only half a pig....) this was all the meat I could find:

Apparently trotter meat is delicious.

I had about 600g of liver, a few micrograms of trotter meat (!), about 400g head meat, so I added 400g unsmoked streaky bacon and a chunk of unspecified weight from the belly.

Blend it all up with 3 cloves of garlic, 20 juniper berries crushed, 20 black pepper corns crushed, and a dollop of trotter stock.

I pressed it into a loaf pan and some ramekins and baked them in a bain marie at low heat for 1.5 hours.

Out of the oven, covered with foil, and weighted down with whatever I had to hand that was heavy....tomato cans, pestle and mortar, bookstand etc.

And here is the result:

I have sliced this up and frozen it now.

One member of the family couldn't wait to try the pate, so he jumped on the counter when no one was looking, knocked the weight off one of the ramekins, clawed back the foil and helped himself. I hope he had indigestion from all that pate - his breath was certainly rather garlicky, hence we identified the culprit after the event.

Who me?

We agree with him though - it was quite delicious on crusty bread with a cornichon.  Garlic breath all round.

Winter feeding

The gurus said it was time to feed bees; especially new colonies that have not had long to build up their own stores for the winter.
So, I dutifully followed instructions, and fed them.

I was somewhat amazed to think that the jerry can of 'Invert sugar' syrup I had bought would all fit into one hive, but that's what them-in-the-know had said, so off I went to do the deed.

14 litre jerry can of syrup.

There are winter syrup feeders available to buy at vast expense (Can't use the type I had used during the summer because this syrup is too thick and sticky for the bees to suck through the tiny mesh of the bucket feeder.) But the experts said they always used 4 standard British rectangular plastic ice cream tubs placed inside an empty super directly on the brood frames - no queen excluder.

SO, I took four nice blue Walls ice cream tubs and filled them each with syrup.
The experts also said that bees drown if they have nothing to stand on, and so to place a nice wad of straw to float on each tub of syrup.  Straw floats......check!

Here are the feed tubs full of syrup ready to be placed in the hive.

Those self same experts said it would only take 2 to 3 days for the bees to suck that lot up and need the rest of the can pouring in to top them up, so off I trotted a few days later but.....HORROR!
I found each tub with half the syrup still in place and a crust of drowned sticky bees on each one!

Sorry, no photos- things got a little too sticky for camera.
My straw wads were not big enough. The bees had landed on them, and with the weight of them all, they had sunk!  I must have lost 100 to 200 bees. Not too awful in a hive of thousands, but it was a sorry sight.

I scraped them all off, refilled the tubs and this time, shoved enough straw in that it could not be flattened - more like a straw scaffold than a float.

Straw scaffold - mostly dead and dried cow parsley stalks this time. No namby pamby dried grass!

Another check in 4 days, and the syrup was all gone. The straw and tubs were not even sticky! And there were no drowned beese. just a bunch of very full frames underneath.

So, back to business. Normally, it wouold be a question of closing the hive up and leaving it there for the winter, but we have an added variable: ivy. Lots and lots of ivy. Bees love the stuff, and it has only just begun to flower. My babies are flying back and forth with loaded paniers of pollen, and stomachs full of nectar.
With the brood box full of syrup for the winter, time to add my super again, in the hope of a late season harvest of ivy honey.
I don't feel bad about fobbing bees off with syrup while I extract the good stuff. Ivy honey sets like rock after a few weeks, and the bees can't use it during the winter anyway - at least not unless the weather is good enough to allow them to fly out for water regularly.
Guess what the next bee post will be about????