djbobbins

I made a Yorkshire bitter from a kit years ago which was good but strong, then tried another coupe (a lager and a Scottish Heavy) which were a let down. The lager I think because I went for a plastic barrel rather than bottling it (too lazy). Sloe gin is good, made a few lots of that in recent years. In answer to the question above, it is no stronger (the strongest ABV liquid most yeast can live in is about 16-17% I think) so it is just for flavour and body. Most recently I have gone back to making a few things from scratch and have tried nettle beer, rhubarb wine and a grape wine. The nettle beer was crap, tasted very very bitter. In an attempt to sweeten it, I dosed it with the recommended amount of campden tablets (to kill the yeast) then put some more sugar in. Long story short, yeast wasn't dead and I ended up with broken glass all over the place when the bottles exploded a couple of weeks later. Rhubarb wine was good, pretty easy to make and the result is excellent (albeit a bit sweet) - I would be proud to serve it to anyone as a dessert wine. The grape wine is currently in a demijohn in my kitchen so we'll have to wait and see! I used to have a homebrewing book years ago that had a recipe for weetabix beer in it, sadly the book has gone to charity and I can't find the recipe anywhere online. Anyone know it?!

Man City for me too, and before anyone calls "glory hunter" I was there when they were playing in the old third division against Macclesfield Town!!

Have you tried blackcircles.com They were the place recommended by my favourite tyre / exhaust supplier. They supplied me some winter car tyres on time, on price and with very good customer service when no-one else could (even though a few places claimed they could, wasted my time for weeks and then couldn't supply).

Point taken on the pollination but as already said above, if a wasp has its place in the world then all the better if it's a long way away from me! I'm sure it was only £25 but I think the guy was doing pest control as a sideline to something else - remember he was only there about 20 minutes, only came from about a mile and a half up the road and turned up in a normal road car. Fairly basic PPE, no special vehicles and the main equipment cost was a spray bottle like you'd do a bit of weed spraying with. But I re-state my case - watching through the kitchen window at the little sods swarming around when he was spraying made me glad I'd not opted for a DIY approach. My family is obviously getting softer with each generation; my father's approach to wasp nests is to prod with a sweeping brush and my grandfather used to smoke them out at night, then sell the whole nest down the pub to fishermen!!

How can you love a wasp? They are evil little sods with no purpose in life other than to sting! I stood on a nest as a youngster, got stung a few times and really hate them. Last summer I saw a few flying in and out of my coal bunker, lifted the lid and peeked in only to find a nest about 6" diameter directly in front of my nose. Dropped the lid and legged it, paid the £25 quid for someone to come out with protective gear on and spray it. They were swarming all over him when he was spraying, it was some of the wisest spent money I've ever podded out I reckon!

Am I allowed to dive in and say that a tree of that size needs removing (too close to the house, IMHO) and something more suitable putting in its place? Just my opinion - I guess the risk of damage to property depends on the soil conditions.

My best mate got married last year. He was really pleased that he surprised his missus (to be, at that point) by hiring a Rolls to pick her up from their house. When they got home that evening, some oik had been round to the back of the house, removed one of the sealed units from an externally glazed window and basically turned the place over. Old family jewellery stolen and the wedding day pretty much ruined. Anyway, they had strong suspicions that the culprits were one of the immediate neighbours, who'd seen the Rolls arrive and the occupants of the house leave en masse. This has left them very uncomfortable being in the house, to the extent that it's been on the market for about six months. They've now accepted an offer on the place and have found somewhere else to live, which is going to be a huge weight off their shoulders. So, my mate feels some "afters" are still owed to the neighbours (once all is sold, done etc) but doesn't know which to "deal with". Therefore, in the style of an exam question, "please discuss options available, specifically covering any retribution tactics and the persons against whom these could / should be exercised, timing etc."

Or, use less gas and install a woodburner!

Word of advice from someone who has switched in the past - make sure you get good evidence of meter reads on the day of the switch. I had a hell of a time (threatening letters etc) because I wouldn't pay the bill from my old supplier, seeing as how they were trying to invoice me for about £300 worth more of electricity because they'd estimated the meter read. I knew the readings were wrong but didn't have any hard evidence to prove so ended up having to pay the bills of both old and new suppliers based on the estimate they'd agreed between them. I didn't pay for any electricity twice, but did end up paying a higher (pre-switch) rate for some of the volume.

Reasons to get rid of it: Soil conditions? Risk of heave to the next door neighbour's house (which looks pretty close based on the photos showing the swing / climbing frame on the other side of the fence)? Personally I would be in the "get rid" camp, replace with something else and stock up on hardwood for logs!

I cleared an alder copse a couple of years ago and have got a friend with about 30 acres of mature alder woodland. As everyone has said, good firewood once it's dry, burn it within a year or so though because if it gets wet again it turns to pulp (a bit like silver birch, IMO). Very light when dry though, so you will get through a lot of logs in volume terms.

A few years back I had a driving job in a "fleet" of five different vans - two Transits, a LWB high roof Sherpa, a LWB VW and some French thing (Pug / Renault / Citroen). I'd rank the VW top, Transits second, Sherpa third and whatever the other one was last, purely on driving experience - however they're not really in the same class. The LDV was a twin wheel beast, underpowered when loaded up but huge. In our job, with lots of student drivers, they didn't get the chance to reach lunar mileages so it's hard to judge reliability. 28 mpg from the Caddy thing sounds a bit scary; I nearly bought the "car" version of one of them recently but at that kind of fuel economy I'm glad I didn't!

Not had ours lit for a bit but we have got cavity wall insulation and front of the house is SW facing so gets a lot of sun in the afternoon / evening. Working away at the moment though, 30 degrees (Centigrade) at 5pm outside today... Oh yeah, and the beer is about nine quid for a case of 20 x 500ml bottles of Warsteiner... :thumbup1:

Relevant for phoning or emailing you for ever more offering you some kind of "wonderful" deal on phone or internet access. How is it the Monty Python song goes again? Ah - I remember... "Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam"!!!

I'll give that one a hearty "seconding". In desperation I bought a Golf a few years ago, it was relatively cheap for the age and mileage, seemed nice and clean but I could tell it had suffered a minor shunt (poor panel fit on NSF wing). Ended up costing me £2500 in various repairs (cracked gearbox housing, numerous problems with drive train) in about 14 months before I decided enough was enough and p/x'd it in. Garage did an HPI on it and discovered not only had it been clocked (by at least 30k) but was also Cat C damaged. All told, the loss on the car and the repairs cost me over four grand in a year. For the sake of spending 10 minutes and 10 quid on the web it is a mistake I will never make again.

To whom? If there are any buyers out there it would be a winner, there are bloody hundreds of the things at about height for going to a garden centre... they need some kind of thinning out and selling a few would be ideal.

My father has got about an acre of pasture land which has naturally seeded with rowan trees over the last ten or fifteen years from some nearby mature specimens. Some of the "seedlings" are now beefing up about, up to about 8 foot tall or so. Whilst they're not ready for doing anything with yet, I was just wondering if the wood has any particular uses (i.e. in the way that alder does for clogs or charcoal, ash for axe handles, pop for getting rid of that firewood customer who always complained, that kind of thing)...

Oh, and the oil companies also pay tax on their profits as well as a tax on extracting the oil... so the 60% of the pump price (fuel duty and VAT) is probably more like 80% when you take that into account... Still, Gordon Brown managed to use all of this money to pay for your local council to employ a horde of people in non-jobs, or for benefits claimants to live in £2000 a week houses, so I suppose we should all be happy:cursing:

The cheapest I can remember seeing unleaded petrol in pence per litre was 39.9p. That was in about 1987 or 88. So since then, price has gone up more than three-fold. More recently, I recall that for a while petrol hovered around the 70-75p per litre mark, about 2003-04. So in effect, it has almost doubled in cost in seven years. That is the equivalent of about 10% compound per year by my rough calculation. If you really want to, you can go onto the ONS website and see how prices have changed since 1987 (see "Time Series Data", series identifier "DOCU")! But it would seem my memory is pretty good, probably because it is so painful going to the pumps... I'm not here to defend the oil companies, but what they are doing is responding to the market. Yes, they make money on extracting oil, but why would they then process that into road fuel and sell at a loss, if they could instead sell it by the supertanker load? To draw a comparison, for those of you that do firewood as well as tree surgery, if you can get £500 for a job, and you have two options of what to do with the wood - either sell it for £50, or deliver it to someone's house and pay them £50 to take it off you, which do you go for? Last time I did any real research on this, the margins on petrol retailing were very slim - about a penny per litre. The most profitable thing at a petrol station was the carwash, which probably explains why so many filling stations have closed and are now occupied by a gang of blokes with a few buckets of water and sponges. Global oil markets are driven by supply and demand, OPEC is happy to have oil at $100+, Osborne sees that demand for fuel doesn't really fall if he creams another penny or so on top of every litre, so unless someone is going to come up with a wood-fired car I think we will have to get used to more pain at the pumps.

Dairy I think I could cope with, body clock might take a bit of getting used to, but sheep are buggers - I did a stint on a family farm during school holidays years ago. I have a hard-etched memory of a day when a group of us rounded up, penned, sheared 650 ewes and wormed 1,000 lambs. How is it that a 2 foot high sheep can climb an almost sheer three foot verge, and five foot of dry stone wall on top? How? No really, how?! I reckon they must be possessed!

What about a Series Landy and go for classic car insurance?

There are a couple of different things to consider: gearing (debt to equity ratio in the funding of your business) cover ratio (number of times that your business profits will pay the interest on your outstanding debts) Since your business is likely to be "owner operator" personally I (and your bank) would probably be most concerned about the latter. As well as interest charges, however, I'd recommend taking into account any fixed or obligatory payments such as vehicle leases, property rates and also salaries. The total cash outflows for all of these mandatory payments represent the level of risk to your business of failing. It is worthwhile remembering that most businesses do not fail as an immediate result of making a loss, but of not having the cash to pay debts or interest costs as they become due. Sure, if in the long term a business makes recurring significant losses, it is unlikely to be generating positive cash and thus is likely to fail, but that is a symptom of long term problems. So - in a kind of answer which only opens up a load more questions - perhaps consider how much you turned over last year (or more importantly, got paid in cash), what your fixed costs and interest charges were, and therefore what the ratio was. How much does your turnover need to fall before you aren't able to cover costs? If your business can take a reduction in turnover by 50% and you've got long term work contracts, then you're probably okay. However if you find out that should your turnover reduce by 10%, you will be struggling to pay your bills, you might want to consider reducing your cost base!

Having enjoyed a family picnic and a quiet pint at this pub: Castle Inn EdgeHill, Banbury, Oxon, OX15 6DJ I came home this evening and have just finished mortaring down some paviours for new steps next to my garage. It struck me that laying bricks and concrete is something I find rather satisfying - I think it is the (perceived) permanence of it. Anything else, apart from tree work, that people get job satisfaction out of?

Euc burns well as has already been posted on here but the thicker stuff (16" or so) couple I felled took three years to be properly seasoned IMO. It is an absolute witch to split by hand; I haven't got a splitter so if you're better equipped you might be okay, but on an 8-10" round, the maul pretty much bounced off it without making a mark (other than where there were very big cracks from drying). I ended up having to take a 14lb sledge and wedges to a good proportion of mine. Have a butchers at this: Prima Bio - eucalyptus specialists - promoting new uses for eucalypts