openspaceman

Yes two apples and a pear next door and several apples (including at least one Bramley and I don't know if they can pollenate) within 300 yds. There never was a lack of fruit, it's just that it didn't survive to ripen on the tree. All done as best I could. I've pruned apples before and know how to leave fruiting spurs. I also did a pear a couple of years ago which subsequently fruited so heavily it snapped branches ;-(

Licensing is the big issue, EA will charge both for the abstraction and then the return of water to a stream if it is one they or a drainage board control I'm told. I'd definitely play with this if I had the opportunity, guerilla style. I queried a scheme local to me where EA are rebuilding a weir and adding a fish ladder (wholly good thing IMO). Originally someone considered putting in a 150kW Archimedes screw generator ( they are more fish friendly than conventional types) but that was abandoned and EA will not explain their reasoning, two similar ones were put on the Thames at Romney weir by the crown or their agents and seem to work well.

I tried to but it was quite a heavy infestation which is why I thought preventing fruiting might give the tree a chance to recover. It is an old tree, it looked old 40 years ago when we got here but I was busy so didn't give it any attention. The apples never kept well but had a pleasant taste , over the years the brown rot caused most to fall prematurely and any that remained were damaged. Yes I should fell it and it would give another parking space plus when I'm gone the site will get redeveloped into a 5 bed house owned by someone with a good job in London and young kids wanting to be sent to the sought after local school but for now I like it and cannot replace it with anything I'll benefit from.

You've started an interesting thread (or two if we include food from the wild) and I will be looking at it. I posed a question about my ancient apple tree a while back and got no response; it suffers from bloom wilt and associated brown rot plus an infestation of codling moth. I pruned out what affected branches I could see plus removed all the blossom in an attempt to break the codling moth cycle.

I agree you should not use a support fuel for drying but there is also no point in trying to make char directly from wet material. In principle there is easily enough energy in wood to make char from freshly felled material but it will require a bit of kit as mentioned earlier. Coupled with a bit of summertime air drying I can see even things like hedge cuttings could be done but note these may be better as a source of organic carbon and nitrogen which is otherwise lost in the carbonisation process.

Nope, I'm not that well organised. Apart from anything else all my ventures have been commercial failures and it's commercial success that drives economies. That's fine, the alkali effects of a high temperature char can start addressing that but a bit of lime wouldn't be amiss. I wonder what crop would take off excess iron? On heathland restoration they attempted to grow cereals when reverting marginal arable land back to heath, the idea being cereals take a lot of minerals off site when harvested. Sounds good, the legumes will put a bit of nitrogen back in but won't overcome the oxygen and nitrogen deficiency of poorly composted wood chip, again compost tends to tend to the lower pH so you need to address acidity/ Retort char tends to be made at lower temperatures (<450C) and still contains pyroligneous compounds which are themselves acidic. Also Cation Exchange Capacity seems to develop as the amorphous char develops graphite like structures above this temperature, char directly exposed to fire reaches higher temperatures but of course the yield is less. I'm not at all sure about what size is best but I would want to avoid dust lest it be carried off into the water course.

What's the reason for high iron? Some of the more successful trials of biochar have been on sites with heavy metal contamination, re-afforesting mine tailings, but I don't remember iron being mentioned, it was a FC report which may be worth searching for. Low soil organic matter is best addressed with properly composted plant material. Compaction in the short term will need some mechanical action and biochar could be incorporated at the same time. Beyond that worms are your friend and look at the extremes farmers are now going to to keep machinery off most of the planted areas. I cannot particularly advise as it depends on circumstance. Following the lead of Alex Kingston in Canada I changed the running environment of the woodchip stoker of a KOB 500kW(t) boiler which heated greenhouses, shop and offices at Slough such that it produced char rather than ash. Obviously this meant more wood chip was used than if the chip had been totally incinerated. It produced a very charry ash but we had no use for it. The nursery produced ornamental plants which needed an acid side of neutral soil, already the irrigation water was acidulated to counter alkali because it came from an aquifer below chalk, and as woodash is alkali and more suited to food crops... When I worked on a farm in my youth the government subsidised lime spreading and I have no reason to believe it is not needed now. Most of the current promoted production methods are old science; retorts, kilns and flame cap, all of which were known to John Evelyn when he wrote Sylva. As such they are wasting 70% of the energy in the rawstock. We demonstrated running a gas turbine on the offgas but even that added to the capital cost to make the process uneconomic when a simple heating system co producing char would not have cost a lot more than a simple biomass burning system. I envisaged a system that would make use of those difficult wastes arising from our work, like sweeping, mulchings, stump grindings and the small leafy chip which was causing a problem in the heap destined for power stations. My biggest problem was a wealthy trumplike boss who, despite having a degree in ocean science, believed that marine organisms were creating petroleum deposits faster than we were extracting them and that we needed more CO2 to increase photosynthetic activity (which isn't happening overall) so the carbon sequestration was an anathema to him. I reluctantly sold off the major items I had accrued to make char when I retired due to having nowhere to run the process.

There is none Activated charcoal is normally made from a specific feedstock, often bone, and has been through a process, chemical like chlorine or steam, that reacts with the char to pock mark it internally, this increases the surface area many fold. This extensive surface area then can adsorb organic molecules and keep them bound to the matrix. It is orders of magnitude more expensive than plain old char. This was one of the big hopes for biochar in soil, that the pore sizes in the char would be the right order of magnitude to encourage mycorrhiza as far as I can see there has been little evidence of this.

Biochar is not the same as slash and burn but it has some related attributes. Slash and burn clears land ready for agriculture whilst also making readily available minerals in the ash for crops, it also leaves a small proportion of charred material in the soil. This points to char in the soil being innocuous if nothing else. Historically where? The current enthusiasm comes from historical research in ancient south american cultures, tera preta des indios, where fertile soils with a heavy build up of char were identified in the midst of less fertile places. Many soils under a good rotation are fertile and productive but other soils, particularly sandy ones have become leached out of available nutrients and abandoned. Until trees become established and their fungal associates break down minerals from deeper strata the surface cannot regenerate, a few generations of trees and their litter and the shallow surface fertility has built up again, forest soils being the ultimate permaculture. So it's unlikely better soils will benefit but there is beginning to be an accumulation of evidence it does help as an additive on poorer soils. Plus there is of course its ability to function as a carbon sink with voluntary credits beginning to become available to enable subsistence farmers to avoid a cash crop exporting soil fertility. The problem I see in a developed world fad is that the biochar becoming a product wastefully produced, rather than a co-product alongside a heat market. Any of these modern clean burning stoves with over fire air happily produce char from dry wood and could be modified to separate it out before it burns. If an arb company wished to demonstrate a zero or negative carbon footprint biochar is an obvious route to achieve that if you have the nouse to get it accredited and marketed.

Yup, I didn't for a moment think you would be as inept as myself.

It's good enough that you enjoy it, I never got the hang of any instrument. Indeed when trying to tune my younger granddaughters' presents I have trouble distinguishing if a string is higher or lower than it should be.

...And when do we get to see or hear you performing with then?

Bearing in mind my experience dates mostly from the 70s, after which very little conifer planting was done locally and by 1990 most landowners made the mistake of using tubes and 1100 plants to the hectare and no further intervention or provision for maintenance. We planted with workers in pairs. The foreman would fix a ranging pole in the ground for the first line and then walk out to the end of the proposed line. He would fix a second pole. The second person would pace about 10m with a third pole which the foreman sighted in. Each person would then measure out the row spacing at right angles to this first line and place a new pole. The foreman would then place a pole in the second line and the second person would sight in. Planting was done keeping the two poles at the line ends in line. Then we were supposed to start planting in each row toward each other, measuring 6' between each plant (by then we were planting 6' in the row and rows 8' apart.measure 6ft in the previous era planting was typically 5 by 5), in practice it was paced out and this could lead to weeding difficulties as each line would have a slight variation in planting distance. Weed growth was a big problem as often there was a long delay between felling and planting and it was done with fagging hooks, so being able to predict where the next tree should be nestled amongst larger weeds was needed.

This one rings true

The wire wool above the oil is part of the oil bath, it works on the principle that any dust bubbles up with the air and is attracted to the side of the bubble which bursts onto the wire, the dust then falls back with the oil and settles on the bottom. Paper air filters work on the principle that much of the dust cannot get through the pores size of the filter, plus smaller particles impinge on a fibre and get held there by weak atomic forces. Maybe you are jumping to conclusions that it is dust from air that is getting in and causing the damage. It could be simple overheating.

I've not heard of bitumen floors before, what's the construction? You're right about the heat being lost at the perimeter, I've read that you can create a "heat island" by trenching around the house and installing 150mm thick polystyrene foam all around to a depth of a few feet. I vaguely considered it here but the house is so small that as long as I can chop wood the little gas I use is affordable. These semD cottages were built as farm workers homes in 1862 with suspended floors but a fire between the wars killed the occupant, when they rebuilt they just seemed to infill and render the floors so we have a similar problem, no damp course either and only 600mm footings.

Yes I think there is also the need for an emergency engine stop. I asked you about this in another thread, I wondered what the pull was like to see if it would be possible to have a simple branch stripper for small conifer in front. Our local wildlife trust volunteers cut small scots pine to halt invasion of the heather and these branch loggers could turn that into a product if the branches were off first. I would like to see your one working. If the blades are set around the rotor such that the cut is complete before the next blades engage with the wood then I can see it won't pull. If the second set of teeth are cutting then it will keep cutting and pulling. This could be a simple function of the number of blades. E.g. 3 blades it won't pull 4 it will.

I can have a stab at it if Gary wants to elaborate on why and where the justice system has failed.

...but you'd be wrong

May be easier to put a two pin socket into the fuel solenoid earth and route a rope attached to the plug to stop the engine. The PTO will continue for a while though if the IPTO clutch disengages. On my Holder running the bench or screw splitter the PTO was not live so it stopped with the engine I'm not at all sure how a modern PTO gets stopped

My tongue doen't get round that as nicely as Piptoporus betulinus

Dunno, never met him but he's attracted a stalker by the looks of it, best not offer them titbits.

Yes and it's the rebated fuel that's the clincher. I used diesels all my working life and like them for theior robustness as much as anything else. That's right but it's also about the local environment as particulates from combustion don't travel far. The simple fact is that most particulates in our local environment are man made, those from combustion are implicated in many health problems. Also there are no safe lower limits for the air we breathe, This is because once ingested the disruption that the chemicals on the particles can cause to DNA is deep seated. Thereby lies an effect, when manual workers only lived to middle age in the randomness of chance the associated cancers did not develop, now we are ageing the chances increase. Also many cancers are not attributable to a cause yet so the full story is yet to be told. Having said that and not to be complacent our air quality has improved drastically since my childhood, less bonfires, better emission controls on power stations, next to no stubble burning, lead removed from petrol, fewer open fires etc. so Transport and woodburning become the biggest emitters and attract attention. That's another story and probably now too late to do anything about it except learn to live with the consequences, it's the tragedy of the commons because capitalism cannot factor in external costs. Yes and this is where petrol hybrids will be more suitable than diesel ic engines for transport but for long haul... As I understand it DPFs differ from catalysts in that they actually prevent the particles getting out as all the effluent has to pass through the walls of the filter medium, rather than pass down tubes lined with catalyst which initiates a break down. Normally the DPF is hot enough to burn the small particles to CO2 which then passes out, if the DPF isn't hot enough then it begins to block , the back pressure is senses and sufficient fuel is added by various nefarious means to heat it up and burn out the soot. Over time ash in the fuel and other solids will clog it and it will need replacing, at some expense. My little diesel has no DPF but I only use it for long journeys. I note in recent weeks the differential in price between petrol and DERV has increased such that my mate's petrol hybrid now challenges my diesel overall on fuel cost.

Just consider a pattern of 50 odd pellets at 100 yards, it would spread about 10 ft. Now consider the average distace apart of 50 pellets in a 10ft circle and fit a small drone in there, how many pellets will hit the target even if stationary?

They were imported by James Jones back then and got called Highland Bear. What sort of stuff are you after?