Squaredy

I have just been contacted by a man who is purchasing a property in Kent (ME13) and wants to find a contractor who can clear a ten acre cherry orchard. The area is to be re-planted as a vineyard. It is 400 or more trees around 18 inches diameter so will be a fair chunk of work for a small scale forester. If you are interested please PM me and I will share the owner's contact details. I do not have a lot of information about the job, and I cannot vouch for what is involved but the customer seemed to know what he is up to. Hopefully when the trees are down I might be able to purchase a lorry load for milling - it would be a shame if it all went for biomass. It is a bit far from me, but I have heard that lots of lorries from this area head to Kent with logs for the biomass plant, so maybe one can make a detour and come back with a load!

Yeah Richie Benauld was awesome. And in his day one of the best Aussie players ever.

Indeed, and don’t forget the butterfly with a limp!

I always follow the cricket, but as a sawmiller not an arborist I cannot afford Sky so out comes my long wave radio. Aggers and the others are great anyway, but I do miss Blowers.

As a general rule you may be better off buying from forestry contractors. That way you can get a whole timber lorry load delivered for around £70 per cubic metre or maybe a bit more for Oak. I do buy from tree surgeons but usually only if they deliver to me and then I pay around £70 per cubic metre. And make sure you know how to calculate volume otherwise you will get into endless arguments about how many tons you are being sold. I would suggest always paying per by volume not weight.

Yes agreed, that is the easiest way. The surface can still dry but not the inside. And keep them somewhere cool but with air gaps between them so they don’t start going mouldy. Softwoods usually best as they won’t fall apart.

No indeed does not sound nice. However I still think most people would be horrified if they knew how often we in the UK allow raw sewage to flow directly into our rivers and coasts. And I know this is not a unique UK problem of course.

Well I for one would happily pay more for such a basic human necessity as drinking water and waste water treatment. If my bill increased by 35% it would cost an extra 80 pence a day, but across all customers would give Welsh Water many million extra to reduce rainwater getting into sewers. Have you ever walked on a beach covered in sanitary towels????!!!! I have.

Yes, but what is shocking is that this happens surprisingly often. For example Pendine sands (one of the UK's biggest beaches and a major tourist spot) had raw sewage discharged 317 days out of 365 in 2017. Now I know Wales has a reputation for plenty of rain, but even Snowdonia does not have this much! Link here Sewage empties into waterways 30k times WWW.BBC.CO.UK Campaigner wants more to be done to stop storm overflows getting into Welsh rivers and seas. Much of the problem is that so many rainwater gutters and I would imagine street drains discharge into sewers instead of storm drains and soakaways. My house is a good example. It was built in 1925 and like every other house in the street the downpipes from the front of the house go to the strom drain which empties into the local drainage ditch; but the downpipes from the rear of the house goes into the sewer. In this example it is fixable - not cheap - but then neither are the fines which we will end up paying if the Environment Agency ever get round to enforcing the law.

Thanks for that, I am looking into them. Ideally I would rather avoid cotton altogether, but at least it is organic, and they are reasonably priced and plain so ideal for embroidered workwear.

Yes I do agree totally. I decided that when I buy twenty or thirty polo tops for myself and my workers I would make a more environmentally sound selection than polycotton, but it is proving difficult. I am am still researching and hope to find a good choice eventually.

The energy consumption of cotton is high, in fact as far as I can tell wearing cotton clothes has a huge environmental impact. But at least you avoid the problem of tiny bits of plastic ending up in our food because it enters the food chain. As an organic substance at least it simply rots away when discarded. Imagine how much microplastic will be in the world's oceans if we keep washing plastic based clothes as we are now for a century or two.

Washing machines need to be designed with a simple easily accessible little filter which is cleaned every week or so. Maybe in a few years we would all be horrified at the idea of a machine without such a filter. But at present we are still in the dark ages with sewage. In times of heavy rain it is still normal for raw sewage to discharge totally untreated to rivers and the sea. I know this is a different problem from micro particles but it shows how far even a developed nation like ours has to go.

WAS shipped to China. They stopped this about two years ago and are now really cleaning up theirs act.

Thank you for that. I am struggling to find bamboo products on their website. Do they do bamboo polo tops do you know?

Yeah I found Finisterre, and it looked good. Bit out of my price range though sadly at £40 each polo shirt.

Not quite right, though not totally wrong. The ten rivers that feed 90% of the plastic into the oceans are: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong, Nile and the Niger. So yes the biggest culprit is the Yangtze in whose basin 500 million Chinese live, but several other problem areas as well. And China are making massive strides to clean up their act, like no longer taking other countries plastic.

I am trying to source sustainably produced clothing - polo tops etc. They must be plain enough to put a logo on, and probably made from bamboo or organic cotton. I have found Bam of Bristol, but mainly they are highly patterned. Any of you fellow arbtalkers who are concerned about our planet know of a brand I could try? I am looking for workwear to get embroidered and only need it for two or three staff, but ideally I want to avoid synthetic fabrics and get a more ecologically sound option than cotton. Any ideas?

It is not impossible to use Eucalyptus for furniture, just not ideal. More a case of why would you try when Ash, Alder, Beech, Cherry, Birch, Elm, Oak, Sycamore, Sweet Chestnut and others will be so much easier! They planted it on a large scale in California many years ago and discovered it was pretty useless - too twisty even for railway sleepers. This link details special milling techniques (quarter sawing) employed to minimise splitting in Eucalyptus, but still ultimately unsuccesful. Making furniture from eucalyptus wood WWW.DOWNTOEARTH.ORG.IN Though scientists have developed a way to saw eucalyptus wood without cracking or twisting it, furniture makers aren't convinced of its utility. The best Eucs for timber are apparently the old growth ones in Australia, which is not surprising I guess. Having said all that I would love to hear of other peoples successful uses for Eucalyptus timber, if anyone has any.

Great looking sticks. Such a shame they are Eucalyptus. My limited experience of this timber is it splits and twists so badly it is barely worth milling. Might have uses for crude landscaping milled into sleeper sizes, but the user will have to expect serious movement. Fun friday fact....Eucalypts are the most planted tree in the world, largely due to their extraodinary speed of growth and ability to find moisture in even the most arid conditions.

Clean compared to just burning on an open fire - yes of course. But burning plastic waste is just burning fossil fuels in a similar way to burning coal or oil. It produces lots of carbon dioxide and lots of particulates. Larger particulates are removed, but under a certain size they aren't even monitored. So I agree it is better than dumping our waste in the rivers and sea, but we need to drastically reduce our plastic waste in the long run. There is no truly sustainable way to deal with it.

Or maybe just accept that a few hundred pounds worth of damage has been done to your patio by a couple of trees and pay someone to re-lay the affected slabs? Would you want to live in an area with no trees?

I have read some of it and it is quite radical. I am no labour supporter but the people who are behind the report have my respect. I suspect very little of it will ever be enacted but maybe it will help start debate. We we need to talk about the housing disaster that has befallen this country, and the extreme disparity it has created. In the last twenty years house and land prices and therefore rents have spiralled out of control, which is lovely for many people, and a nightmare for the rest.

It is very important to get it right. I have had this done by a local saw doctor and even sent them off to Fuelwood in Warwick the Lucas agent. The only people I would recommend are Tewksbury Saw Co. They have vans covering much of the country and know how to do it right. They transformed one of my blades that had never been right even when re-tipped by others.

Ah you have my sympathy, I hope the police get somewhere. Good luck with it and I hope you can continue whilst you get it sorted....or are you now kitless?