openspaceman

My black mulberry is just about in leaf but the catalpa up the road isn't and that is generally the last one I notice.

No I was just curious, I have only bought small things off ebay and not had a problem yet. I have never managed to sell any of the few things I listed so similarly don't know what happens if the buyer is a scammer.

I agree but you're avoiding the issue of whether ebay would pay out and maybe that is why they do little about scamming.

Yes but that doesn't explain why the buyer would not be protected by ebay's buyer protection scheme.

If it's a scam how come ebay's buyer protection doesn't work?

Do you notice little green caterpillars descending on a silken thread? Tortrix viridana comes in waves, sometimes you won#t see any but others it will strip an oak as it flushes. The oak will try and replace lost leaves with ones containing more tannin

A young man who asked me for a job told me I was capitalist scum and his sister in her eulogy looked pointedly at me when she said how he always wanted to work in forestry. Needless to say I had not employed him, despite quite liking him and trying to look on him as a son I never had, because I could not trust him. He never had a job and died at 28 of a heroin overdose. I became disillusioned with american imperialism during my short stay on an air base as they extricated themselves from Vietnam.

The trouble is they are american companies and the US government will not countenance that, it's part of their economic colonisation strategy. In the past the various anti trust and monopolies laws would have been used to break them into smaller competitive entities, as happened with Standard oil in the US.

I've dug up dozens of these grubs when turning a rockery into my veg patch, reburied them under an adjacent hedge.

There must be a solution that allows stratification, even if it means a separate and much smaller pump reversing the flow through the solar system and tank unless the solar is a separate coil within the tank.

Is this because the hot water from the panel is entering too low in the tank and rather than stratifying at the top it is mixing with the whole bulk of water in the tank?

I was involved in regenerating heather for quite a while, I developed an undercover burner for English Nature as was and advocated a high mowing and burning regime but politics got in the way and a quicker fix was adopted. They started using weed wipe but the contractor only seemed to take one pass and only targeted the birch which was 18" above the heather, trouble was by that time the weed wipe couldn't get a high enough dose onto the plant. In the end they resorted to late summer spot spraying with knapsack and a selective herbicide (which type I was never told) and repeat visits produce a steady income for the contractor. Even with the grazed areas there were problems over animal welfare and Natural England advised scraping, trouble is where they ended up putting the hundreds of tonnes of scraping messed up the hydrology and ruined the habitat for some rarer plants.

Yes but then the panels need to be lower than the pump. Also some consideration needed to prevent freezing in winter with any system. Solar PV has halved in price in ten years, are you MCS? I've toyed with solar thermal, even rigged some swimming pool panels from a demolition to feed a 600gallon steel tank by thermosyphon but wasn't impressed enough to go for it on the house. I reckon I only spend about 60 quid on hot water in the summer months and that doesn't justify a lot of investment. OTOH in the summer my PV produces more than I use and I cannot justify an EV, mind at best it would only get me 60 miles on a sunny day like today. Now sticking 5kWh into my hot water tank would be better justified for the expense of a controller to divert the excess.

I'm replacing a few bits and pieces that were stolen from my soft top vitara when I visited hospital on my way from work. The silky bigboy arrived today, within a week of ordering from them .

the billhook from snedding the poplar to put it on the bonfire. I felled it diagonally across the garden it fitted with 2ft to spare. The major took me to the medics at the academy and asked the corporal to stitch me up, which he proceeded to do and just when he was about to insert the needle the major reminded him I was a civilian and required local anaesthetic. 3 stitches and 40 years later I still see the scar.

I dated a girl who joined up and visited her at Stoughton barracks, later felled a lombardy poplar in the CO's garden at Sandhurst, still have the scar to remind me.

Me too, bloody animal has rucked up both my newly sown carrots and wild flower patch. Me too again, must be 40 years since I attempted to grow vegetables. interesting thing is some seed packets were 18 years old and carrots and coriander have germinated Luckily I've been asked to pull out some ash trees so will get back to some work soon.

I cannot see how you come to that view by mentioning the earnings of 50,000 people. What are you saying: Employees of a state financed organisation should not earn as much as £100k/annum? No one should earn £100k/annum? The demand for health care will always go up and as the science of healthcare gains more knowledge then treatments and procedures will become available and will cost more. As populations age there will be more demand for care. The funding for the NHS is constrained by what the economy can afford, so is related to earning and income tax plus other demands. It's no good saying we should grow the cake bigger so everyone should have a bigger share and hence personal contributions to healthcare should go up, this was Thatcher's mistake, the bigger the cake the increase in slice the rich get and the rich do not spend their money for the benefit of the rest. We know there is incompetence in the NHS but I see incompetence in many people I have to deal with in other industries. The NHS seems to be particularly incompetent in IT systems but how can it be changed, it's a behemoth? Talk of rebuilding it from the ground up ignores the billions of man hours that underpin the monster, I think Microsoft faced the same problem when updating windows such that windows 10 probably still has code from windows 95 in it somewhere. What this crisis shows is that we don't value the things we need, when we think we have enough, over the things we want, which is insatiable, and why salesmen, politicians, entrepreneurs etc. earn more than dustmen, nurses, care workers etc.

How come you keep dredging this figure up? There must be many organisations where the upper 4% earn more than £100k. Also where does it say consultants are not in that figure? I was at school with brain surgeon who made far more than that out of the NHS before he spent half of his time in america. Staunch labour supporter too though he has ghosted me for these last twenty years. My old boss drew a few million out of the company while I was there and that was quite a few percent of the gross turnover. I've never earned or made much money but then I've never understood the quest for so much more, especially when I see what wealthy people spend it on but I can see a problem of governance when measures to control pollution depend on fiscal controls which are a burden on those with the mean income and a triviality to the wealthy that are responsible for much higher levels of consumption than average.

What makes you think it hasn't?

Pine felled at this time of year is renowned for getting blue stain quickly, left a while and the sapwood goes black. As you said it is because a lot of sugary sap is moving about. Back in the day it used to infuriate us that the lightweight concrete block makers would delay collecting pine at roadside because they wanted the sugar to be used up, trouble was the stacks were losing 5% of their weight each week.

It was the same at the Mclaren F1 factory when I got a tour, the boss's OCD is what made him successful.

Now @Big J has set you straight on the realities perhaps you could say over which period you are harvesting 600m3, is it a one off or sustainable yearly? Also you say you have storage, is it open or covered? You don't have to kiln dry if you can air dry successfully in a summer season.

As I recall the agricultural wage, set by a wages board, in 1974 was £15 per week for 40 hours. That works out at 37p/hour. I had just moved from being a General Farm Worker to trainee forestry worker and the forestry wage was £19 to allow for the harder work and conditions. A three bedroom house in my village could be had for £4k in 1969 but inflation was beginning to bite by 1974 and by 1979 the same house was £30k. What you lot seem to be missing are a couple of points 1 It's a crisis and someone always makes money out of a crisis, as farmers did during and after the war. 2 International trade depends on confidence everyone in the chain gets paid, one link in that chain fearing they will not get paid and the thing breaks down. We import half of the food sold in UK and this supply is already dented. The last thing we need is for farmers to dither about putting this years' crops in the ground because they fear they won't get harvested.

@tangsta will have some smaller tops but a 2 hour trek to Kent.