Tuesday 30 July 2013

Honey, trees and pizza

Huge storms hit the South West of France last Friday evening. Lightening, thunder and a tempest wind the likes of which we had never witnessed before.....pretty dramatic stuff. The only casualty for us was the large ash tree in the courtyard. A huge part came down, just scraping the buildings and unfortunately it's going to have to be completely taken down. What a shame but it was getting rather big and we were lucky that it didn't do more damage.


The days have been so hot here recently it has been hard to find the right time to visit the bees (bees don't like to be disturbed when its 30c + it's best just to leave hem too it)


One of the homemade frames a neighbour had lent me with the nucleus needed to be taken out, but the bees had built out from it in a weird shape to fill a space. Anyway, most of this I took out and put on the ground for the bees to rob out and reclaim but I couldn't resist taking two small pieces of honeycomb back to try some of the honey on my toast. Delicious! We won't get much honey out of these hives as they are just getting established but next year it's going to be great.

Later on Sunday we fired up the pizza oven in the garden for the first time. We used old vine stocks to get it going and the whole process worked like a dream! It was so much fun. Even my first attempt at pizza dough was yummy and the chicken cooked perfectly too.







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