AHPP

Mum and dad have just lost the faithful old wire phone. Same handset for forty years. You could hear the little dits as you dialled it. I'm sat looking at the empty rawlplugs, like the height marks on a doorframe of a lost child. Replaced with some ting tong Fisher Price bullshit on a base station that plays music. That'll last a year or two before the battery goes.

Thought similar. But... I'd be interested to see a site sketch map. From the photos, it looks like a MEWP would be sat in the road. I'd feel safer in that tree than in a MEWP in a road lane, protected by plastic cones from the absolute retards you encounter on the roads in their 50 mph, 1000 kg darwinism boxes. Correction: I wouldn't just feel safer. I'd be safer.

I had the good manners to not say bats.

Put your hands down. No foul. What do you do then? Connect wires in one of those green boxes on the side of the road? Spike up poles to make calls with a comically large handset? Thrash out million pound deals with Peter Jones? Steal iphones from a moped?

No. I just apparently don't know much about Land Rovers. Wikipedia says it's a trim package so I assume it's just that and nothing to do with County Tractors. Fine. It's quite plausible they might be sent somewhere for aftermarket running gear though. You know, if someone wanted one that worked.

What did County do to it? I can understand them modifying things like the mk5 Transits by adding 4wd systems but Land Rovers already have that.

What's this stint of commuting into the smoke for? You've been at it a few weeks now.

Ducks are messy in a wet sense but I understand don't tan your plants as badly and do eat slugs. Chickens will ruin everything. Ducks characterful too. I'll probably get some. My mate's geese wander round my side already but are fenced out of the vegetable patch. Good guard animals, good eggs. I've got courgette seeds in the outside bed. And sunflowers, onions (seed, not set) and some other stuff probably. Away from it atm. Interested to see if anything's broken through the weeds on my return. I do feel wasteful in a sense. I have the space and time a lot of people would kill for. If it was truly my patch, I would probably try and get other people in there working it harder. But it's my mate's and he's fed up of other people so I'm just ticking it over for him. I could do with running a commune type thing really. Or maybe just having a wife who likes the aspects of gardening that I don't. Apply within. Position comes with own copy of Mrs Beeton's and after passing a probationary period, a cow. How big's your garden? I bet you could do chickens. I don't find them that dirty. The rats are 90% overspill from the chickens, ducks and turkeys my mate's side. Have had no problems to speak of with them so far (six months). Probably lost about an eggcup of grain.

I've got lettuce growing (outside) primarily to feed the chickens. Was advertised as producing year round. Will put some in the tunnel; interested to see whether it grows better inside. Would do beans too, since the idea has now entered my eyeline. Again mainly for chickens. Not big on eating them myself. Polytunnel was already there but in poor order. I built new ends, made the doors open the right way and put new plastic on. Laid a slab walkway, put some potting benches along one side, manured beds the other side. Recommissioned it as it were. Same as the other buildings. It doesn't take a lot of ripping out broken shit and installing a few straight lines to make something neat and usable (capable even). Like the pavilion, my HQ. Pulled out the floating floor, put some wall panels on some drafty bits, took the broken roof off, spent ages flipping tin sheets around on the ground to overlap the nail holes with good bits of others, put it back on, installed a gutter into a load of linked barrels. Inside, built benches, put some old cupboards in. Even have a work bench with a vice on the corner. Just put a door on it to keep the hens out and the broody one in. It's a lovely place to be. I go up on a morning and read John Seymour on Self-Sufficiency and arbtalk. Occasionally twat rats with the 22 from my chair. When the coffee runs out, I find something that looks shit and potter on making it less shit. Whole story is this. My mate rents the whole 2000 square metre (half an acre) compound but only uses 700 (a sixth of an acre). The 1300 (one third of an acre) "my" side was trashed from a previous tenant. Broken glass and Monster cans everywhere. Holes in everything from air rifles. Total vandal. I'm in there primarily to tidy it up, make it a blank canvas for someone who could really make something of it. I enjoy doing infrastructure like buildings and water but since I'm there it seems silly to not do a bit of actual gardening so I'm dipping my toe in. That's part of maintaining it anyway, having things happening with the soil.

An explanation of why you're being slightly snide will cover it.

I still can't get excited about growing plants. I like ones that get above the weeds quickly and I can identify easily. That to me is potatoes, onions, peas and rhubarb outside and tomatoes inside. I reckon I should be able to hack asparagus, garlic and chillis too. Fruit trees (and to an extent hardy bushes like gooseberry) are fine. Animalhusbanding comes far more naturally. Chickens and sheep can outrun slugs. Yes they do crass things and die but so do plants and at least there's some certainty and finality to it rather than fretting over yellow leaves and slug holes.

You'll have to spell out what was so revealing about it because I'm afraid I'm not clever enough to tell. Over ten years overall. Never full time. Had a few weeks of a few years doing 2-3, sometimes 4 days. Had periods of 0-1. Had periods of kicking the arse out of it for 6-7. Had periods of doing nothing for months. Usual ebb and flow of the grimy arbc unt. But what I have done is always turned up for big/ugly trees nobody else wanted and made it work. That's how I can look at the OP's tree with relative surety. So yeah, what have I missed? It's a small tree, still standing, no obvious damage, roots still in the ground, leaning but nothing mental, plenty of other trees to use, plenty of dropzone. There's pictures of both sides of it and if there were wires, snapped tops etc in it, he'd have said. As soon as he takes five 20 kg branches off the road side, he's negated his own weight. Do that a few times and it's done. Keep your tail tidy (road) and don't get pinched on the stem. But if he can't do it, I can. £600 + VAT. Thursday 19th June suits me. Private message on here.

Nice! I think there are four in the pot outside the catflap.

Steal from nobody. There'll be no dole to apportion the loot to anyway. Remember, dole isn't just universal credit for tracksuits and tins. It's farm subsidies, gift aid, Princess Anne's heating bill, council shovel leaners, the Ethiopian Spice Girls, NHS compliance and governance controllers, TV licence correspondents, state sewage distributors etc etc etc etc etc. The ****************ing lot. Immigrants are annoying if you don't like foreign people but they're not why you're poor. You're poor because of bad monetary policy and the existence of town and country planning.

Because the bloke asked and he knows I can't see it so will rely on my advice only to a certain extent. I can rewrite my post hedging my bets in every conceivable way but the buck will still stop with him.

That's fine. Anchor and/or rigging in neighbouring tree if you can (why wouldn't you anyway) but no disaster if you can't. Looks like a twat of a place to site a MEWP.

Buy monstrously expensive alkylate premix and slop half of it over the side of the saw. What else. They make more sense in the woods or with pump and mix fuel anywhere.

kram's not wrong wrong btw. Combicans aren't the be all and end all. I don't use one. I don't like the bourgeois character of the nozzles and if I only need a battery saw, I only need chain oil. I'd like to say I could leave the oil in the van too and just use some belonging to whoever I'm climbing for but a depressingly large amount of the time, I'm the only adult present who brought any chain oil to a tree surgery job.

Out of interest, does anyone know the tolerance on petrol pump readouts? There are rules on food packaging weights etc. Must be same for fuel. Related: I had a temp job at a heating oil delivery depot. I can't remember if I was told this in relation to the main kero products or bunkering derv but it was widely acknowledged that you wanted to buy fuel in the morning when it was cold and at its lowest volume per mole.

That took more googling than it should have btw. The internet's initial assessment was that you think I'm a junkie.

Can't believe I've never come across that before. Yes.

I think I've done it with my Hyundai but I can't remember how well it worked. I can't remember anything.

Victimhood bollocks-talk. British shooters are dreadful for it. It's like middle Englanders quoting Daily Express articles that say snooker tournaments can't have a white cue ball because it's racist, and everyone throws their hands in the air as if they have to comply (with something that may or may not have even happened) or they'll be struck by lightning. It's competitively submissive. I hate it. Who exactly told who exactly what exactly?

Oil first for poka-yoke too. If you put petrol in first and then get distracted, you'll have neat petrol and kill your saws. If you put oil in first and then get distracted, you'll just have some oil in the bottom of a big can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

Is that just a wheelie bin or have you rigged up some kind of funnel?