tpaine posted:tom can i tell you one of my favorite memories from college. we had a seminar type class and a lady was giving her report on the reading and she pronounced "fukuyama" as "fuckimeyer" and couldn't stop from laughing and the professor also laughed. that's my story. This is your story. - auron
thats a nice story clarence
FrancoNero posted:My project at the moment is a modified keyhole garden for a dead space at the back of our allotment. Going to build it out of sandbags and try a different shape to get more space.
I'd like to build a high temp composter too. We follow a Fukuowa style attitude for general waste at the plot, laying things out underneath the crops to break down there, however we inherited a bindweed infestation so I want to build something that can break that down and not just grow it.
sounds sick, post pics (when done)
also, other garden news:
my 4-5 week old chicks browsing around:
and resting after an exhausting hour of browsing
theyve really feathered out, all but the youngest golden now have a full coast excepting their stomach, legs and their heads. theyve also gotten more and more feisty, the other day it rained straight through so they didnt get to go outside and everytime i went in to check on them they were all leaping at their boxes walls (which are 3 feet high) trying to get out.
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:my roommate and i are thinking of getting a garden plot thing but is it too late?? ARE WE TOO LATE TO SAVE 10 DOLLARS A MONTH ON VEGETABLES?!?!?!
no!!
FrancoNero posted:futurewidow posted:I found this crate on the street and thought it would make a nice patio planter!
I think the size is big enough that I can grow beets and herbs and chard and stuff but I'm worried about a) the staples and nails holding the thing together - would the metal/possible rust be harmful to the soil and b) how would I go about making holes for drainage without a drill?
Even if the staples rust you'll be fine, was discussing this as I've never considered it before but I think it would be something to take into consideration if you were thinking about growing in an iron tank or something.
You should put drainage holes in on the sides low down, also put lumps of polystyrene or lumps of hardcore in the bottom too to help it drain. Also, raise the whole thing up on legs or bricks, stops it rotting too.
how come you don't have a drill? It's good to have a drill. A hand brace or something.
I'm young + broke but maybe I can ask my neighbours
I can raise it slightly and line it with that black garden liner-stuff
futurewidow posted:I'm young + broke but maybe I can ask my neighbours
I can raise it slightly and line it with that black garden liner-stuff
It shouldn't need lining by the look of it. check out junk shops and carboot sales for a hand drill and any manual tools like a spade, fork etc. Drill's about £6 new and you'll need to have drainage.
i like to make primitive tools like this pumpdrill. that is not me in the video. making cool functional wooden survival machines out of sticks and a knife is really fun and satisfying and i recommend it to people who enjoy making things with their hands and being outside, possibly the very people in this thread
firing up the smoker (fuel is balers twine). also visible is the hive tool (little crowbar thing below the smoker)
approaching tha hive, bees are mostly chilling inside
taking brick off the exterior lid, smoker dude ready for anything
exterior lid off, as you can see theres room for the bees to exit/enter via the top through a hole in the interior lid
smoke em if u got em
smoke begins pushing the bees down into the hive and out the bottom entrance, onto the roof
interior lid is off, using hive tool to dislodge propolis (hard sticky shit bees make from sap to fill holes and glue things together) gluing frames to the super (smaller box on top)
super frame w/ bees and some capped honey (white stuff). the beekeeper is using a little gripper tool to pick up the frames but you can do it with your hands if you want
super comes off, down into the hive body boxes. smoker dude going at it a little too vigorously, the bees were starting to run around a lot, getting confused and pissed off
this frame has brood in it (comb cells that are dull yellow and capped are capped brood, the ones sticking out are drone cells). one cool thing is that the bees lay in a spherical pattern with the brood at the center and honey at the periphery so the frames are like cross-sections thru a ball of brood, so you can kind of know where to look for brood vs honey etc.
more brood. you can also see a big peanut-looking horizontal cell, thats a queen cell. i think that might have been empty, there was a queen in here that had started going around murdering all the other developing queens after the swarming (queens can sting more than once)
this frame was almost entirely capped honey
uncapped brood (little white gross things in the cells)
uncapped honey (dark shiny stuff)
heres a full queen cell (peanut looking thing)
this frame the bees hadnt really built up yet, but it shows the white plastic/wax underlay thing that they use to get them primed. its basically a little plastic mat with a honeycomb pattern on it and the bees build on top of that. i think it ensures that the honeycomb is in the right orientation basically
splitting the hive. in the new box we put a couple frames of brood, a couple frames of honey, and a couple of empty frames to give the bees something to do. we had a live queen in there but she wandered off or went back into the big hive or something and we couldnt find her again
so the beekeeper ended up just transplanting queen cells around so there were a couple of full ones in the old and new hives to make sure that there'd be a queen in each
replacing old frames w/ empty frames
ye yee
hives closed up again. at this point the bees were extremely pissed off but hopefully we have two good hives now
Edited by shennong ()
tpaine posted:sorry those are just stills from a beastie boys video shoot
i cant believe you've done this
Tsargon posted:whats the difference between something being capped and uncapped and what does the difference mean?
for the brood, the queen lays an egg in a cell (she starts laying a few days after her virgin flight mating). the egg hatches 3-4 days later, workers feed the larvae meals for 5 days, and then the workers cap up the cell w/ wax. inside the capped cell the larvae undergo metamorphosis to pupae and develop into adults, then dig their way out of the capped cell. i think after they do that they get to hang out and be fed for a while before they have to start working
as far as honey goes, a capped cell is full and ripe and ready for harvest. i think the bees just cap it for storage purposes and to denote a completed cell. its got a thin layer of wax over the cell, so if you've got a comb thats full of capped honey that you want to extract, you have to use a knife to slice off that wax layer before you extract it
uncapped honey is unripe and will ferment/spoil, capped ripe honey basically doesnt spoil ever
babyfinland posted:more honey pics pls
we will eventually extract honey so i will post some when we do!!
To start off I will explain wha happenned. It look like the split we made has swarmed, along with some of the bees from the old hive, this has left the number of bees in the nuc box severely dwindled. Also The swarm cells in the bg have haven't hatched yet (I accidentally killed one, but the other is still going strong). My mother and I caught the hive, and gave it its own box.
So because of this, we need to leave the hives alone for a week and a half in order to let us see if there is any queens in any of them, that way we can see where we go from there (I think the swarm and big hive will be okay, but the nuc may die.)
shennong posted:lol apparently we done fjucked up
To start off I will explain wha happenned. It look like the split we made has swarmed, along with some of the bees from the old hive, this has left the number of bees in the nuc box severely dwindled. Also The swarm cells in the bg have haven't hatched yet (I accidentally killed one, but the other is still going strong). My mother and I caught the hive, and gave it its own box.
So because of this, we need to leave the hives alone for a week and a half in order to let us see if there is any queens in any of them, that way we can see where we go from there (I think the swarm and big hive will be okay, but the nuc may die.)
does 'swarmed' mean they took off?
Tsargon posted:does 'swarmed' mean they took off?
yeah they bail out of the hive usually with a queen
I also got one that grew out of the compost pile but I dug it up because that's gross.
I noticed lil white eggs on my chard today that look just like this
(not my pic, my camera's shit at taking close-ups)
seems like they're leaf miners, I've been seeing the same flies buzzing around them lately. any suggestions? washing each leaf seems like a pain in the ass but if that's what it takes
shennong posted:
no, yes, yes