Exhausted

I've overdone it a bit this week. The sun come up this morning and found me just bone tired. A good night's sleep helped some last night but I'm still not moving very fast or hard this morning. Just sort of putting around.

Still, the root cellar has a roof on it and didn't collapse. I don't think I'll put a whole lot more dirt on there though as the beams are already stressed. I don't know how it will perform when the existing dirt gets soaked with water. Corky (my dirt expert) says that one cubic yard of that type of earth weighs approximately 1 ton. We've got 3 cubic yards spread semi-evenly across the roof. More would keep it cooler in there, but I think with the slapdash construction job I did on the roof I should probably call it a win and leave it alone. If the roof holds up for another month then I'll trust it for this winter's food storage. There's still plenty to do on the root cellar, but none of it needs to be done today.

The bees are establishing their colonies but it looks like one package either took off for parts unknown or merged with one of the others. There's a low population in there. I'm not sure they'll make it. We'll see though. Bees can surprise you. The insides of those hives are really not set up right. I've got to put frames back in and I have some of the short frames inside deep boxes, which is just stupid. I don't know how that happened. I must have slapped it together without paying attention and didn't inspect closely before I put the bees in there. Today would have been a good day to fix all that but of course I went to get my bee suit out of storage and couldn't find it.

I tried to just go deal with them sans suit but they're very aggressive right now, partly due to the weather but partly due to their just getting established. I was forced to retreat in shame. I've ordered a new suit (which I needed anyway) and it should be here on Tuesday. Hopefully that won't be too late.

So I'm just taking it easy for the rest of the day. I collected some type of nettles that are trying to take over my garden. They're clearly a nettle but they have a different shaped leaf than the normal stinging nettles, so I don't know which species. I hung some up to dry and in a week I'll wash them and prepare a small sample to serve myself with a fried egg. If I don't die and they taste good then I'll have identified at least one wild edible in my new home.

It's a good day. Not too hot and really nothing pressing that has to be done. I'm going to lounge around some and enjoy it.