Paul in the woods

I guess you just mulch the growing spuds with compost and pull the tubers out with the plant at harvest? Although I'm working towards no-dig its not without problems. Firstly I needed to remove a fair bit of blackthorn, now I'm digging out bindweed etc. When I've look into what some of the most well known no-dig proponents do it becomes clear they use vast amounts of compost which isn't always easy or desirable to get hold of. There's still a risk of introducing persistent herbicides into the garden and I'm not keen on the glass, plastic and god knows what else in municipal compost. Hence making my own but that's taken a few years to do.

You should consider the no-dog gardening method (fence them out). Our lab has always been fairly good with the garden although she's a firm believer in pick your own. All sort fruit, tomatoes, peas etc, almost as bad as the chickens.

I've collected about 8 daleks over the years and tend to pile up compost material in a big heap to start hot composting and then fork that into the daleks to finish off with the worms.

That's the only place I recall seeing them, saw a few flying about and landing on me on the streets of Croydon. Wonderful things to see.

I assume RT thinks the designer should be left to work out the number of pages and the overall design. The client wouldn't know so you can't agree on a cost per page. After all, you could put all the content of your 20 pages onto a single page but that wouldn't be much less work and wouldn't be a great site.

Have you thought about bees? After paying out a couple of grand you can spend your spare time getting stung and in the summer months chasing swarms of bees about the countryside. Very relaxing.

I was going to warn that although hens can be lovely to look at and have scratching around the place they are also mini-dinosaurs and will happily rip apart all sorts of garden wildlife, snakes, lizards, whole nests of voles etc.

I built my coop from scratch and I'm not keen on plastic houses but it is easier to keep clean. There are cheaper plastic coops out there. I wouldn't say you'll save any money keeping hens, we did it because I can't stand the way chickens are farmed. Even if you ignore the law that bans kitchen scraps I think you're likely to need to buy layers rations and that's not cheap these days. Having said that they are great to make children a bit more aware of food and farming. Watch out for foxes, the number of people I know who said they don't have foxes only to loose their clock to a fox. Edit to add, if you're looking at a plastic coop I know someone who likes these: https://nestera.co.uk might be worth a look?

Yes, you seem to want to be a bit more self sufficient / reliant rather than make do without mains services. We've been going down that route for a number of years. Cut our own firewood, grow a fair bit of our own food, had chickens and have a few bee hives. I'd start off by asking what you want to achieve. Do you want to unwind from a busy life, safe money or want a bit more control of where your food comes from?

If there are power lines then speak to your local power network team. They are normally very helpful although it might depend on the actual risk to the cables.

Well, in my experience when highways fly tipped waste several meters into my property they claimed ownership but when the hedge right next to the road needs cutting the ownership suddenly becomes mine. Anyway, you can ask for a map which shows boundaries. Sometimes the highways do own bits of land and it will be shown on their maps. Our council has a specific person who processes these requests. On the other hand, if you had asked the land owner guy who owns the tree as it's worth £2k these days for firewood he may have claimed ownership...

I'm glad I did my DSC1, despite not needing it as I have my own land. I was granted an open cert after passing it. There's also the practicalities, buying a rifle, ammo, safe etc; and the extracting of the carcass, refrigeration, processing and storing all the meat. I'm still a vehicle and freezer away from eating the red deer on my woodland.

Rabbits are quite hard to find in lots of places, also most farmers will either have someone sorted for the rabbits or expect someone experienced and insured etc. Grey squirrels might be easier to get but hard to skin and not a great deal on them. Do you have much shooting experience? You might be better off joining a shooting club for a while to gain experience and to meet people who do hunt.

To answer the op, yes, speak to your local game dealer or stalker and you can buy a whole deer carcass butcher it yourself and freeze it. Or you could go down the rabbit, pigeon, squirrel route. What are you after? Matty, isn't it there any qualified stalkers around you who could help?

I would have thought of there's enough usable wood for someone to do the work then a felling license would be very likely. Any danger would need to be serious, this is from the FC guidance: An exception applies for the felling of a tree or trees necessary for the prevention of danger or the prevention or abatement of a nuisance. The danger exception could be said to apply only where there is an immediate risk of serious harm and urgent work is needed to remove the risk The nuisance exception could be said to apply only where there is actionable nuisance (i.e. actual damage or an immediate risk of actual damage being caused), or nuisance by way of actual encroachment. If you use this exception you will be asked to provide evidence of how the tree(s) presented a danger to people, property or infrastructure for example. Not all old or diseased trees are necessarily dangerous; you need to consider the risk they pose and demonstrate the exception is valid.

If you've got time on your hands I'd use a decent hand saw.

I'd stick to carving by hand. A decent knife like Mora 120 is fairly cheap and will easily slice through green wood such as lime. For a spoon I'd also suggest sycamore, field maple or perhaps beech. You'll be practising on your first few so don't worry about splits or sanding. Take care of your hands though, slow and steady and don't try to remove too much at once. If you're serious there's some useful inspiration over here: https://bushcraftuk.com/community/

Is it too soon after the ivy threads to come out in support of the humble thistle? Our bees and finches love them!

From the photo I'd guess the drive must be hard to use, with a electric/telecoms pole on the other side. The tree will just get wider as well.

This is why I wanted to try something small scale to work out if it's worth jumping through the hoops. I've spoken to the EA about something else to do with the stream and quickly realised there is very little logic to their rules - if you ask you have to follow them even if there's loads of other people not following them and causing more harm. On the note of low flows, I could cope with only using the power when the stream is in full flow. Even though it's still cold at night, because it's been dry we have much less need for heating. The need for heat and wet weather go hand in hand down here.

There may be rules but that doesn't mean they are followed. Farm slurry should be injected but old equipment can still be used to spray it so that's what's done round here. The sewage sludge has most of the water removed and is dumped in piles on the fields for a month or two. It's then spread using the same trailers that spread rotted manure, so just thrown out the back. It's mainly done before planting crops, such as forage beet but I've seen it spread on grass. (Obviously animals are not put in the fields immediately afterwards but I think it's only kept animal free for a month or two). There is plenty dragged onto the roads etc so possibilities of cross contamination.

Looks like galls of some sort.

One of Ben Law's books might be useful as he started out with overstood chestnut coppice iirc. It might be worth trying to contact him via his wife to see which of his books would be best and to see if he could offer advice?

We have a couple of acres of very rough pasture that could provide a feedstock. I also wonder about all the waste silage that's left to rot in the farms around here. There's a few wrapped bales rotting just down the road. As for the human waste, no mains sewers round here, or water, or gas. Some of the locals still look surprised when you turn on a light... The fields are frequently spread with sewage sludge which gets washed off into the streams and out to sea. I don't think I'd be causing any problem with a little domestic spreadding.

I've always thought it would make sense to recycle human waste via composting and then on to young trees, so human waste. II gather that may not produce much gas though but I can source an endless supply of cow manure, if I could be sure that was free from aminopyralid type weed killers that would be ideal. Actually, I think wood backed up with solar for autumn/spring/summer use seems our best bet. Hydro more of a long term prospect for when I get fed up with processing firewood.