Category: Living off the land

Bees and Fruit – growing, harvesting & processing,

What’s the buzz?

It’s been a busy few weeks in the beekeeping world – we’ve captured 3 honey bee swarms and seen (and heard) another one flying over the house, off to make it’s way in the world.

A swarm in the orchard

The key to capturing a swarm is to find the queen – once she is safely in the box then the rest of the bees follow on behind. Then it’s just a matter of waiting until all are safely gathered in, and after that, moving them into their new ‘permanent’ home; warm and dry, with wax frames and some food to get them started.

There is a parallel here to my day job. With any change, there is usually one key stakeholder to ‘get on board’. Prioritising their concerns is the number one job of the Project Manager. As long as they are reassured, then usually the rest of the team will make it work.

Now it’s a matter of keeping them all productive for a good honey crop…

Making trees into wood

At LWBD, weekends usually involve doing stuff on the farm.

Sunday’s job was to complete a track through the Christmas Tree forest, to get better access:

 Ready to work.
At this point, there was a HUGE thunderstorm, and suddenly being in an all-metal digger didn’t seem like such a great plan.

Have coffee and think.
New plan needed.

How about processing some of the blown-down timber? And make the trees into wood.

This is a lovely bit of Elm, which came down in a storm a few winters back, and has been sitting in the yard waiting for something to happen.Just small enough to get into onto the sawmill by hand. Any bigger, and I need the digger, but I’m not going out in that rain…

First cut makes a flat surface. (Not always the deepest)

Once there are two flats, the rest is simple: just keep slicing.

…and slicing…

Done!

Some excellent slabs, ready to be dried a bit more. For the nerdy, these were about 14% moisture on the surface, but nearer 22% on the fresh cuts, and that would warp terribly if I started to make anything from it. So it’s into the office plant room, which is a dry 25-30 degrees, for a few weeks, to get it down to <10 %, which should make it stable for a life indoors.

If you feel like making some trees into wood, then pop over and help out.

And you can take home what you mill.