A Round Up to Catch Up

Its been too long so excuse me trying to catch up with blogging by combining things all together.

We've crammed a lot in to the last few weeks.

First up we went to a Downsizer Foodie Weekend. A fab weekend of foods, foraging and meeting up with old friends. The best way of summing it all up is in this video we made. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEs24LDV31E Its on Youtube as it won't upload to blogger due to size.

More mundanely I've been well stuck in to studying. This current module is on systems thinking. So learning how to think holistically rather than breaking everything down to constitutent parts. This of course makes sense to ecological thinking. It is never just about the polar bears or the rain forests. Each is interwoven to everything else and needs to be seen as an intergrated system. This course is challenging and the workload is heavier than I've been use to. So you can understand that having spent a whole week writing essays the last thing I need to do is blog!! Writing overload!

The plot is getting in shape. We've planted up the potatoes and they're showing through the soil now. Onions are in along with the start of the beans. Fruits are starting to set on the gooseberry and currant bushes. We've started to invest in fruit trees for the end of the plot and have 2 apples and one pear planted up. We've put guards on them from the offset to avoid damage from rabbit or deer.

Bees came through the winter absolutely fine and one of our hives was doing so well we have split it so now have 2 hives + one nuc ( smaller box of bees that will be encouraged to grow on to make a new 3rd hive) One of the big questions for us now is just how many hives do we realistically want or feel we can manage to look after. Still thinking..

See; not been idle :-)