Dalli

Sorry, been offline for a while. Thanks for your replies, its making much more sense now! How's everyone else getting on?

Hi All, I've also just started the course with HCC. Signed up about 6 months ago but with 2 young kids and setting up a new business I'm only now getting around to actually starting it! Is anyone else a bit confused with the portfolio of evidence? Is this just the work completed in the question booklet or is this separate? Good luck to all, be good to keep in touch as the months fly by!

Thanks for the advise, I'm confident enough in my maintenance skills but I don't know these new volunteers from Adam, hence not letting them use my saws! As there will prob be 3 different users I'll make sure it's serviced fairly regularly and that they use aspen. Thanks again

Hi all, I'm a former local authority countryside officer, before I was made redundant I set up a number of local community based volunteer groups to manage sites in their area. I've continued to support some of these groups on a voluntary basis, doing chainsaw work, spraying, writing management plans etc. anyway to the point- we have a new volunteer with one of the groups who has his nptc tickets and I've found some funding to put more vols through their chainsaw course so we are now in the market to buy a new saw. We have a very limited budget of £200, I've suggested they go for a secondhand machine but they seem to be set on the idea of getting a mitox. As a compromise I'm thinking of recommending a husqy 135 based on other peoples reviews but I've never used one myself so any first hand info would be great. It will be used for about 2 hrs every other weekend (over winter) mainly cutting multi stemmed willow up to 10" in diameter and the odd stump. Would the 135 be ok for this or would you recomend another saw bearing in mind we have a very limited budget!

We desperately need to stop the silt entering our rivers, unfortunately catchment sensitive farming projects are too fragmented. Widening our rivers to increase their capacity to hold water slows down the flow which means that silt is deposited and the rivers capacity is reduced again. I do think there is a place for dredging but dredging whole stretches of river is so costly it's not going to happen. IMHO EA are useless but they also have very little cash so it's up to us to do something about it. I would reccomend setting up a rivers trust to tap into extra cash and change farming practices to stop silt entering the river then restore the flow of the river and set up sections of river to use as silt traps which can be dredged. It all sounds so simple, if only it was!