So this weekend Jo and I have been celebrating our 5th Wedding anniversary and what fun we have had. The highlight was last night visiting Winter Wonderland in London’s Hyde Park. If you want to know a little bit more about it you can see the website here but basically it is just a great collection of Christmas stalls and an amazing collection of rides. This go from tea cup rides to full on rollercoasters and giant wheels. It was really great fun.
Jo and I were going around high for two reasons. Firstly, we calculated this was only our 5th time away from the children in 14 months and though we love them with all our heart, it is sometimes nice to simply be the two of us. Secondly there was mulled wine stores everywhere and we simply couldn’t resist, especially as it was a little chilly out last night. The mulled wine certainly warmed the cockles!
Anyway, we found the most amazing stall. Now let me tell you, this “fair” had a distinctly German feel to it with almost all the rides with German text all over them but imagine my surprise as we walked through all the stalls selling toys, Christmas gifts and other random Christmasy things, to see a stall selling wax candles honey and…..mead. I nearly fainted and slightly tipsy on mulled wine Jo and I had to take a look.
It was fantastic. The candles were mostly Christmas themed, the variation of honey amazing (Lime Tree honey, Acacia honey, Heather honey and many more) and then there was the mead. Though there was ordinary mead there were countless other mixtures to try out. The owner (pretty obviously having had a few too many of his own samples!) was German and a lovely guy. It turns out that he was from a family run company in Germany who run over 500 hives (apparently there are about 10 families who run this many and there are two others that run more) who make everything to do with honey. It was great.
Anyway, we left slightly more tipsy than we arrived having sampled most of the mead. We ended up buying a bottle of the mead mixed with cherry (not sure if trying it again sober it will have the same appeal!) but we left happy bunnies and I hope our paths cross again with this gentleman as he was lovely. I hope you like the pictures below.
So the time has come for feeding my bees in Spring (or thereabouts anyway!) and so I had looked at the research. Appartently feeding bees with sugar syrup is a bad idea this early in the year because the syrup can freeze. Therefore Bakers Fondant was the recommended feed for bees. One slight problem however was not having the slightest clue what bakers fondant actually was.
As it turns out it is basically icing that goes on the top of cakes (as you can see from the pictures) but is appartently the best for feeding bees in Spring. So I did a little bit of research (as well as visiting various supermarkets and asking around with the response of several blank faces……fondant for bees? You’ve got to be kidding…..) and found that a great place for fondant (in the UK) was Bako which is essentially a wholesaler of baking products. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, what can I say…….there must have been a foot of snow fallen during the last two days and temperatures have dropped to the lowest levels November/December have seen. Amazing really but I hope it is okay for the garden.
I have now planted the Sweet Peas and Broad Beans and the SPs have started to germinate but the BBs not. However the BBs are in the shed but the SPs are indoors. Might have to rectify that somehow.
So the winter is upon us and the gardening and beekeeping world is shutting down. Its funny, I have a mixture of slight melancholy about it. Part of me is sad that it all now slows down, the garden doesn’t look as nice as it did several weeks ago, the bees are less active and are all tucked up trying to keep Queenie warm (at a constant 35 degrees) and yet there is also the other side of me that is a little bit happy about it all. It is the tidy up time (I know, I know, the fashion at the moment is to leave the garden relatively undisturbed to allow wildlife to thrive but I really struggle with this) and the beds start to look nice again without all the rather sad looking dead plants which were once proud to fill the beds. Read the rest of this entry »
When I first stated beekeeping I didn’t have a clue. I thought you simply put a beehive at the bottom of the garden andthen simply drained the honey out of the side every so often from one of those beer tap type systems. I presumed beekeepers dressed up for a little bit of fun making out it was more serious than it was and felt it was more like a secret club of white boiler suited, bearded, morris men liking men over 50. How wrong could I be and especially when you consider you actually have to feed bees. Read the rest of this entry »
I am sat here on a nice comfy sofa with my legs stretched out in front of me. I am looking at a lovely open fire that is radiating warmth and I feel that slightly numb affect of a couple of glasses of wine. Music is playing in the background and the cat is asleep on the piano stool. A Saturday evening couldn’t really get much more relaxing. Read the rest of this entry »
have had. The highlight was last night visiting Winter Wonderland in London’s Hyde Park. If you want to know a little bit more about it you can see the website here but basically it is just a great collection of Christmas stalls and an amazing collection of rides. This go from tea cup rides to full on rollercoasters and giant wheels. It was really great fun.