Billhook

I am astounded! We certainly never heard a double ouch, or even a single one for that matter. Feel very sorry for him as it must have been a freak case of the perfect swinging log hitting an arm at its most vulnerable position.

This one will make you lot take a bit of extra care!

I know that sometimes it is difficult to see angles and forces involved, but to me the log did not seem to have enough velocity to do more than perhaps cause a bruise or trapped finger/black nail. This together with the fact that there was no "Aaaaaaaaargh!" or the usual stream of profanities, just the calm "I have broken my arm" with no sign of a broken arm or him nursing it. Did he break his arm or was he just commenting for groundie effect?

The new rules coming in on May 20th will mean than any vehicle over 40 years old will be MOT exempt. So a 1978 Landie would be quite tempting for a hard up arb worker. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/mot-exemption-cars-over-40-years-old-starts-20-may

I think the word he was looking for was"Discorporate" Frank Zappa explains.....................................

I thought "Huel" was the noise you make when you throw up!

I am not sure whether the capital cost of the disruption of installing a ground source will be more cost effective due to the slightly more efficient conversion, than modern air source pumps which have become a lot more efficient and are cheaper to install. https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/air-source-heat-pumps-vs-ground-source-heat-pumps/ Of all the things I have done, I think that the solar tubes have been one of the most efficient and reliable. I went on an installer's course in Wales and that saved a lot of the capital cost of the forty tubes on our garage roof. https://www.navitron.org.uk/ Need another cylinder, pump and pipes to the tubes, but basically on sun power for a lot of the year.

Good work practice to keep abreast of any situation that may arise!

Perhaps a vertical wooden blockboard or similar in front of the work bench so that you can shadow mark your tools and when they are not there it shouts at you. I once did some work for an old surgeon friend of my father. He was in his eighties at the time and every tool was laid out on the wall in front of him in the same way as his surgical implements were in the operating theatre. He could reach out and find the tool he needed without looking but this was combined with the discipline of meticulously returning all the tools to their place. In surgery you did not want to leave any tools inside the patient! My biggest problem, which I gave never really resolved, is putting down a tool or machinery part, being distracted and then spending the next hour looking for it. If I could have added up all the time I spend looking for things............... The surgeon used to frustrate me a bit as I was young and wanted to do things quickly and he spent ages putting tools back and tidying up. But he was far quicker than me in the end!

And another thing..................................! Land is so expensive due to lack of it and a vast population wanting it, that to go to Agricultural Mortgage Corporation and borrow it would cost over £300/acre a year just for the interest but £500/acre to pay the capital, whereas average farm rent for an arable farm is less than half that. Even at a rent of £100 acre many farms are making ends meet by diversification or living off the proceeds of selling a bit of land for building. Maybe a second job, a farm shop, a wood business or contracting. The point being that the farm itself if generally just turning money round. How are the young people of today going to be interested in a future like that? I live in a county with good arable land and know many farmers, some with large farms of many thousands of acres, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of farmers sons or daughters who want to stay and run the business. There is a perfect storm brewing.

Yes, our yields were well over 3 tons average by the late seventies. As subsidies came in the merchants and supermarkets were able to calculate just how much they could screw the farmers. That is what I meant about the subsidy being used to make food cheap rather than farmers rich. Good politics, keep the nation well fed and it will be peaceful, otherwise we would have the Vespacians of the world yelling "Wot, ten pounds for a loaf of bread, bleedin' daylight robbery!" Might just make people think a bit more carefully about what they eat and how much of it.

These two photos show the damage the cold East winds have done to both Beech and Yew

One more thing I would like to add is the question of subsidies. We have had subsidised farming since the war for reasons already mentioned. My father benefited from deficiency payments from the war until we joined the EU. These payments only stepped in when grain prices went below a certain value which was negotiated by the NFU with the government and was only a figure to stop farmers going under rather then making them profit. I never heard or saw any complaint about these subsidies in all those years. The trouble started when it became a political weapon to control farmers in the 1980s and turned into a single farm payment which was seen by many as a way of paying farmers to do nothing. This was quite correct in some high profile cases, but for the majority it meant running around like blue arsed flies trying to fill in forms and tick a load of boxes just to make a living. Most farmers would rather just be paid a fair price for their produce and forget subsidies. In fact subsidies are subsidising the general population to provide cheap food. This is made worse by the super markets making food so ridiculously cheap that people do not value it any more. Not only do we have a huge obesity problem causing a nightmare for the NHS, but also a huge food waste scandal, again not helped by sell by dates and demands for ever more exotic non seasonable food. The simple answer is to make food more expensive which would mean the end of subsidies and obesity but it would be political suicide. People laugh at me when I say that wheat should be £1000/ton. But in 1978 I was paid £100/ ton and a Ford tractor was £6600. The equivalent tractor is now ten times more at over £66000. The wheat price is not much different today forty years later at £140. it should be ten times this. A £1 loaf of bread should really cost £10. Bet you wouldn't chuck it out for the birds in that case!

Agree with this. I would class our farm as a very average arable farm. Nobody but me has seen the birds, bees and other wildlife, nobody has ever done a proper survey and by that I mean turning up for more than one random day. The guys who look after the owl boxes come about three times a year and report on young ones. A lot of the "Decline in wildlife due to modern farming methods" is what I call crapetition. Which is the constant repetition of a buzz phrase until people believe it to be true, without actually visiting a farm. There are certainly changes due to the amount of predators, Buzzards, Kestrels, Kites, Carrions, Jackdaws, Magpies, Polecats, Minks, Foxes not forgetting the domestic cats. Is it any wonder you do not see as many garden birds as in the sixties. They are here still as I hear Thrushes sing on my morning bike ride, but I do not see them very often especially in the middle of a lawn where they used to be seen. The Sparrow Hawks put an end to that We have had loads of bumble bees and I admit that the honey bees are in decline but for ten years I was in HLS organic and there were still no honey bees. More likely that they succumbed to a disease. We have breeding otters on the lake (fish and stream must be healthy) and loads of Pipistrelle bats as well as other species. (so there must be plenty of insects around to keep them going.) Trees have been planted, new hedges and pond scrapes and wild Bee orchids cared for as well as Marsh, Early Purple and Pyramids. I have a white car and the front is usually covered with insects on a warm night drive. I think that a greater impact on wildlife is the loss of habitat due to house building, new roads and bypasses and the ever increasing volume of traffic.

The whole thing will be like Groundhog Day. Before WW2 nobody bothered too much about farming as we had all the imports coming in from the Commonwealth and elsewhere. Then WW2 happened, which of course could not happen as WW1 was the war to end all wars. U boats managed to stop the imports and then it was dig for Britain, bread queues and rations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom I was born when my parents were on rations still eight years after the war. Then the reaction, we have all this land why can't we feed ourselves? My father was growing about one and a half tons of wheat an acre just after the war. Next thing plant breeding program, herbicide and pesticide program, fertiliser program, machinery program and education program of which I and many others were the beneficiaries. Result over four tons an acre of wheat by the 1980s and vast improvements in many other crops. There were problems such as DDT and mountains of grain and wine but these were addressed and the environment is in pretty good order now in spite of the nay sayers. However the changes to farming in the last thirty years have meant that a lot of land has been taken out of production for greening, housing, maize for digesters and fallow so again we are back to a 1930s scenario where a lot of food is imported to feed a rising population. This together with lack of innovation, education, pesticide bans and decline of many institutions through lack of support, together with very few young people wanting to become involved. ( No farmer's sons that I know) The first bread queues after the next crisis will start the whole process again but it will take forty years to put right.

To a certain degree you are correct! (pun intended) That window is our bedroom window and faces due West and was taken at three o'clock, confirmed by the tree shadows. There are four massive beech trees in the hedge and although they had no leaves, they did provide some shade, so true shade may have just been high twenties.

Very true. Does anybody make a vented paper bag?

I'll second that. I bought a mk1 combi in 1996 for £2500 from Jas Wilson. It has never let me down I fitted a 3 phase motor for work in the yard, wheels and drawbar for towing behind a car. Of course it comes with three point linkage and pto for taking into more difficult places and I am sure it would not be too difficult to fit an engine to drive the pto if you wanted. There are more fancy ones which move the wood sideways for you and shift the static axe more easily but they are more expensive and complicated, besides you need some physical activity on these cold days. Personally I prefer the circular saw of the Combi, as opposed to the chain saw of other makes. A WP36 would probably cost nearer £10,000 whereas a Palax could be found for less than half that https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Palax-600-Combi-Firewood-Processor-Log-Splitter-circular-saw-For-Tractor-PTO/312121973937?hash=item48abeb5cb1:g:Xs4AAOSwPsBa50Iw

With a bit of luck it will be their suicide note and they will be replaced with a more representative body.

And this was this morning. Sun is shining but showing a minimum of 1.2 degrees . Quite a difference to the 34.3 degrees posted on April 16th!

Judging by the amount of people who buy small packs of kindling from our local garage at £3.50 a pack, I would agree. It would just be a question of the cost of the bag and bag tie and the faffing about. In this case you could also leave the twiggy bits which should mean that you do not need to put in a relatively expensive firelighter and you can advertise your product as being natural and organic, with no added pollutants or plastic bag waste! (I do not think that calling it "Green" would be a good advertising slogan!) Perhaps they would be more popular for starting BBQs without the firelighter contaminating the food.

Mike Tyson aged 21 5' 10" 214 lbs BMI 30.6 Would you go up to him and call him a fat barsteward? https://bodywhat.com/?1=a4n9fw2r&2=r92b49a0

I was wondering if there was any future in putting the loggings in a smaller paper sack, similar to the charcoal bags, like a small potato paper sack. It would be lighter for women to carry and just chuck the whole bag on the fire so no mess. I think it would work well to start a fire as the bag would act like kindling.

This was taken this morning and I foolishly decided to go down to the yard to nail some felt down on a roof. Drizzle plus a stiff North East wind meant I was billhooking frozen! Click to choose files Max file size 7MB Insert other media