Billhook

Cloud cuckoo land I am afraid. Many farmers are hardly making a living with a subsidy. it would be great if everyone lived in wooden houses with a turf roof and we sawed the timber by hand with no noisy chainsaws and their fossil fuels. Make all our own furniture, grow our own vegetables, abandon cars. one of the ways that an organic farmer can exist is because the farm is usually surrounded by conventional farms which insulate the organic farm from diseases, weed seeds and pests. You have never seen a field of potatoes wiped out by blight, (see Irish potato famine) or a field of wheat wiped out by cozvered smut or choked by weeds Tom Lehrer had the great line which would apply to the organic farmer in the cases mentioned " You begin to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis "!

Here are some of the facts and figures for the uk https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/614552/organics-statsnotice-18may17.pdf only about one per cent of organic land is down to cereals and most of that will be Spring sown. 40,000 hectares You would be lucky to yield four tons a hectare so 160,000 tons at most compared to sixteen million tons of conventional You have over seventy million mouths to feed A perfect storm is brewing. Too much land taken up with housing and roads and energy crops Average age of a farmer is about sixty and most of those cannot wait to retire, few sons are interested Glyphoshate ban would be the straw to break the camel's back

I think that you can leave out the word "plenty"

It is all relative. Most things will be dangerous to life in the wrong doses. Salt being a prime example. Too much salt will kill you, too little salt will kill you. Relative to the use of Chlorine in our swimming pools and lavatories, Roundup is very safe and has been used by the environment agency to kill weeds in rivers without harming wildlife. I do not see the average housewife wearing full protection suits when they slap Domestos down the loo in random quantities, usually far more than necessary. And yet that chemical is a hundred more times dangerous than Roundup. if any of you have spilt neat chlorine on your skin you will know what I mean. However banning it might cause a huge loss of life from disease. From a farming point of view ,banning it would lead to Winter Wheat being nearly impossible to grow, (I presume that those who want the ban would also ban all chemicals given the chance since Roundup is about the safest chemical) due to weeds like blackgrass. In these days of abundant food it seems difficult to imagine food shortage, but there is a massive human population to feed and the tiny risk of cancer from this product is better than the risk of starvation. You can make a scare story about any chemical. I know the Bi- Hydro-oxy group of chemicals have caused millions of deaths over the centuries. Too little of it will certainly kill you, drinking too much of it will also kill you and swimming under it for a very short space of time will also kill you. We should all be scared! Do not go near it!

The other thing which I do not think has been mentioned is the question of retribution. You may win the battle and send the attacker away with a sore head or even a permanent injury and feel victorious, but his mates may return in force and set your yard/ woodpile/ house on fire or worse. and this may continue after you have rebuilt everything. As Skyhuck says, why start the thread if you are not going to listen to good friendly advice?

I think the legal phrase is something like "A person of sound mind has to be reasonably sure that he is in imminent danger of being seriously hurt or killed, or his immediate family and he can then use proportional force to prevent the attack. If the assailant had a gun and you managed to knock it out of his hand and pick it up and he still came at you then it would be reasonable to shoot him in the eyes of the law. Not if he was running away though I cannot seem to rid my mind of the image of Forestboy definitely doing something dodgy by shooting at an assailant's knees while eating a banana. Would it be impossible for the judge to find him guilty?

Good advice, see what happened to Stokes just to demonstrate how a silly little confrontation can become a massive court case. You would just need to look at what happened to the Wisbech farmer Tony Martin who shot dead a thief running away. The real reason he was jailed, quite rightly, was because the thief was running away and he was not in immediate danger and it was premeditated in that he had cut halfway through the cellar steps and been bragging down the local about what he was going to do if he caught them. On the other hand, a week or two later in another incident a man was woken by a noise in the kitchen, went down to investigate leaving his wife and children upstairs. The burglar attacked him with a knife, he managed to grab another knife from the drawer and killed his attacker. He was deemed to be of sound mind and to have acted reasonably and with proportional force , the jury found him innocent and he was allowed to go free. By posting your intentions on this forum you have already shown premeditation, (and the police would find out if there was a serious incident) so the best advice is do as LeeGray said and also be well insured and enjoy the shopping trip with a load of fresh new tools.

Just found this which is interesting https://www.pestpurge.co.uk/2012/03/21/wasps-and-bats-unlikely-bedfellows/

But in this case they have to meet at the entrance. The wasps will be fanning to try and cool the nest. I was wondering if bats have a special method of tackling them by perhaps folding their wings forward as a shield and somehow biting their heads off. We saw a hornets nest being built next to a wasps nest in the rafters a couple of years ago and the hornets destroyed the wasps nest and ate the grubs.

Unpopular they are when you have the misfortune to make them angry, they are very hard workers and do a lot to clean up the environment for most of the year. All they ask for is a little sweetness at the end of the year for all their toil. We have a nest at the log cabin just above the door in a hollow area above the lintel. We have been in and out many times and have not even been buzzed even though they have always has a couple of lookouts at the entrance fanning to keep the nest cool However there is hardly any activity recently although there are still some to be seen in the entrance, none flying in and out. This space is shared further along the poplar log with some Pipistrelle bats who live in the hollow under the log formed by the full scribe method of cabin building. I just wondered if the bats had had enough of the wasps but wondered if they would cope with a wasp, or would they be killed by the stings.

Now Marla sings it like she really means it

Great minds think alike. We have a Pioneer400 in the office and use branch loggings which are perfect for a quick start and last long enough for me to do the normal book work and phone calls. We started with a Clearview 650 with twin doors which is great for the big logs but I prefer the single door stoves for a good seal. Aarrow Stratford boiler stove linked to Dunsley Neutraliser for the central heating. North Sea gas linked in but very rarely used, only when away. Very impressed with a Danish Aduro 9 air stove for efficiency. Similar I suspect to Morso Having a Danish wife of course had no influence at all! "Ten Best Stoves" articles seem to be everywhere https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/house-garden/best-log-wood-burners-burning-stove-a7456706.html

Now this is the only King Bee I recognise!

Buy some quality sliced bread, I prefer brown wholemeal Buy some decent butter and. cover three slices. Slap, slap, slap Buy some Norwegian smoked salmon slices from Lidl, half the price of anywhere else Schlaop, schlaop, schlaop. Buy a jar of decent powerful horseradish sauce and some Creme Fraiche and mix the two according to taste. spleayed, spleayed, spleayed Put the three lids on to complete thunk thunk thunk and Robert's yer mother's brother

Down with hot pants and up with mini skirts!

Here''s one for all you stump grinders!

Another version. I did like the country pickin at the start, not sure about the rest

Better start eating those beefburgers Stubby!

Totally agree with that. I saw a buzzard pick up a leveret for a bout 50 yards, it was screaming and the buzzard dropped it and settled in a tree nearby. Out of nowhere the mother hare came, I thought to comfort the apparently, little harmed leveret but instead she just jumped over it three times and then went off. I stayed around with the tractor until dark and there was no sign of a dead leveret the next day I have heard adult hares scream when wounded, which in fact stopped me ever shooting them again and that was when I was in my teens Vixens scream as has been said, Blood curdling! Munjac bark could be nearly a scream but not quite. Never heard a hedgehog scream or ever seen any evidence around the farm in 50 years of a badger killing one. The old gamekeepers used to suck the back of their hands to imitate a rabbit screaming to lure stoats and weasels out into the open to shoot them, as they were said to take young game or eggs. I have done this when I have seen a weasel disappear into a hedge, not to shoot it but just to see if it worked and it does. I have heard and read but only second hand that a stoat will pursue a rabbit for several hours. The rabbit will behave eventually in a very disorientated manner and can be seen lolloping through a field full of other rabbits pursued slowly by the stoat. The other rabbits take no notice as they know they are not on the menu but evntually the pursued rabbit stops and starts screaming even before being attacked as it knows there is no hope. Nature raw in tooth and............ Barn owls and Tawnys can make blood curdling sounds Last year my wife and I were awoken by a terrible screaming, which we thought in the end was a pair of Greylag geese seeing off a fox but in the morning we found a dead roe deer on the road which had been hit by a car which had badly broken its back leg. It was very upsetting to feel that the animal had suffered all that time when we thought that it was something else. Certainly the most distressing sound I have heard and do not wish to hear again

Cannot work out which one I prefer. You obviously need to eat a lot of hamburgers to play like these two. Kingfish is only 17