Peasgood

Sounds like it is probably mostly down to the parakeets but wasps and earwigs can and do make holes. If there is a lot of it good practice says you should remove infected fruit. Don't leave unpicked fruit on the trees and dispose of mummified fruit. All this will reduce the infection risk (not eliminate it)

Apple Brown Rot (Monilinia fructigena) Usually only on damaged fruit, damage that has resulted in the skin being punctured, bird or insect damage most usual. I guess hail damage is a possible explanation some times. Close contact will spread it from apple to apple. "One bad apple will spoil the barrel", apples used to be transported in barrels.

You will have to put up a pic of the mould, there are lots of them. I would guess scab but could be botrytis or any other mould if the skin is damaged.

Having gandered through those I now know you should use glyphosate because Roundup contaminates the ground. (they are both the same thing!) Injecting with neat antifeeze works but red diesel doesn't. 20 litres per hectare is the required glyphosate rate but anything above 5 litres is illegal and you are better off buying it off a farmer because they use stronger stuff. (I'd say 360 is about the same strength whoever you are) Having filtered through what I can, I am going to spray the foliage with a strongish mix of glyphosate, a week later i will cut and bag the foliage and burn it and inject the stems with a 50% mix of water:neat glypho. The stems will be a bit shorter than recommended 18" because the plant isn't much bigger than that. Any regrowth this year will get a good dose of something I probably shouldn't have. Is this OK?

I'm after a bit of advice off you knowledgable folk please. In the spring I found a very small patch of knotweed on my place. It wasn't much at all and i thought/hoped that I had pulled it up. I looked again yesterday and there are three spreading shoots that are a couple of feet high (not spears) What in your experience is most likely to kill it? I can spray with glypho, inject,cut,dig, burn etc etc. What do you reckon? It is only very small but I want rid of it now.

First go

As you raise the point about making assumptions, I thought your comment about "bosses creaming off all the profit" fell well into that category when I read it. I only work with Romanians these days. If one gets broken I can just send it back for replacement. (Haven't broke one yet)

You couldn't see anything wrong in the OP's picture could you.

HSE visited a local woodworker. This guy has been there for about 40 years, maybe more. The fellas that worked there have all been there for 30 years or more, my point being that they survived intact for this long. HSE told him all the changes they required to make things safe. He said he wasn't able to work with those changes and shut the shop! No doubt the HSE went away gleeful in the knowledge they had saved those men's lives, the redundant men felt they had ruined them.

50-70p/bale for just baling.

I read yesterday that horses can be allergic to citronella and it ends up being worse than the flies. Just go carefully before you dunk your horse in it.

Have never heard of this and I am far from convinced it is even possible. If anything shouldn't it be the plants that result from the seed that showed a variation in the fruit rather than the fruit of the cross pollinated plant? Any pictures? And I am dying to say it was a gall wasp p.s. we picked 1/3 of a ton of raspberries today, and yesterday, and the day before................

I'm 50. I had my HGV medical recently. The last time I went to the docs before that was to have my HGV medical. The time before that was to have my HGV medical. I am aware how lucky I am to not need the services of my doctor, I seriously hate the fact that i am required to do cpc. It is bollocks! How can it possibly make sense to say I need re-educating on something that a HGV driver does every day. How can it make sense that that re-education requirement can be satisfied by turning up drunk from the night before and just sleeping all the way through and it still being OK. How can it be OK to do the same session 5 times and the "course" is satisfied? How many times do you drive don the road and think "that HGV driver needs re-educating"? and compared to the idiot car drivers on the road who do you think needs re-educating? This country is just swamped by too many people both living off the backs of those trying to get a job done and doing all in their power to prevent the tryers from succeeding!!!!!!!!

Desperately sorry to hear this, my thoughts and prayers are very much with you and yours. I have experienced such things myself over recent years and although it will be of little comfort to you right now I promise things will get better. Or more correctly the pain becomes manageable. Very sorry for your loss.

Well, I can sympathise with that one. My missus has decided we need to grow enough hanging basket tomato plants to reforest all of the Amazon area even though we do only have 3 baskets to put them in. Enough aloe vera plants to treat the casualties of a medium size nuclear explosion and has now moved on to mass curry plant propagation. As for gooseberries, I would guess we have picked and sold about 5 tons so far this year.

Why do you grow so many if you don't know what to do with them? I grow even more than you, but I do my best to sell them. (it's my job)

My T20 cracked it's block, about 2" crack and leaking water. K-seal cured it. In fact it wasn't K-seal as I couldn't get any of that, I used the dearest one Halfords sell. Mine is a petrol/tvo engine and gets a lot hotter than a diesel.

After a lifetime of having engines not start i would say Easy-start is way too harsh. For long enough I used a gas blowlamp into the air filter instead. I now prefer aerosol brake cleaner. Does the same thing but without all that knocking and banging.

As said the black thing is a good thing and is eating the little white things which are the bad things. Those bad things don't make leaves go brown like that though, summat else is going on as well.

I was going to say you need an acrobat through it.

I bought a cheap chinese water pump off ebay, 2" petrol powered. Use it to top p m pond out of the brook, completely illegally of course. Anything more than ticking over and it will suck the stream dry. 1" is going to be plenty.

Tell the neighbours the tree is unfortunately dying and to mourn its loss you will be planting 10 leylandii in its place.

There are hardly any minor differences never mind major ones. Works better on nettles when they are very young and growing rapidly or later on just as they start to seed. The later one can be very effective.

Didn't know there was such a thing as a kent 1.8 Nice car, good fun

The most lingering smell from my childhood is the smell of cattle on a funeral pyre of railway sleepers in the foot and mouth epidemic of the 60's. I was just a kid, although my family were farmers we grew stuff we didn't have animals as such. I never really realised just how much of an effect it had on me until the more recent outbreak. When they announced on the news that foot and mouth had come back I just burst into tears. From my bedroom window in the 60's I could see next door burning their cattle. Everywhere you went there was just clouds of smoke as the railway sleepers burnt. That smell of burning hair/flesh and creosote. Nasty!