peds

Personally, I'd say the coffee grounds are doing much more important work on the compost heap.

It is, they were mostly hatched on Easter Sunday, perfect timing. The kids' egg hunt ended here in the chicken shed. The big chocolate egg and a handful of little chicks was a much better finale than two years ago, when one of our cats nearly eviscerated the Easter bunny right in front of them (a wild rabbit happened to hop through the garden at just the wrong time, and after being chased for a few laps, luckily he went through a hole in the fence just marginally too small for the cat). That would have put a dampener on the whole thing.

The easiest way to burn garlic is to not use enough of it. Simply quadruple the quantity of garlic in the pan, and it is four times harder to burn. With regards to chickens... they are the same as potatoes. All the goodness and all the flavour is in the skin.

This little mother clucker, only just a baby herself, is doing a grand old job so far. Six eggs hatched from a clutch of eight, the remaining two were dragging on so I took them away. Ah well. Great fun to watch. Mum is teaching them well.

I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but next time, consider frying your rice in your aromatics first, then push the rice to the edges of the pan to make a well in the centre - a well as wide as the walls of your pan and the adhesion of your rice will allow - and crack your eggs directly into it. Let them set for a short while before stirring, occasionally, drawing a little bit more of the rice into the egg as it cooks. You might like to add a little toasted sesame oil to the eggs at any time during this stage. It should go without saying that the best fried rice is made with shredded chicken skin, fried until crispy with the chilli and garlic before adding the rice. The sort of leftover skin you scrape from the backbone, neck, and around the cloaca of a roast chicken carcass before boiling the bones for stock.

Sorry, you'll need a 4th thread for that.

Could we please have a third thread called "Ivy MIGHT be a problem for some trees and old walls, but is generally a benign part of a healthy ecosystem."

There are blogs all over the Internet of people who do this, and they claim to never have problems. Having spent too many hours of my life cleaning the congealed and almost petrified grease from the insides and out of commercial deep fat fryers, it is absolutely not something I would ever consider doing. Keep in mind that by the time it has been used for a few nights in a restaurant, it isn't just vegetable oil, it's an amalgamation in various concentration of chicken fat, lard, beef fat, dairy fat, fish grease, the solids in suspension of various starches used in batters and breadcrumbs... and any number of other things.

While we are on the subject, here's another plus point for having your prusik below your device. When you are setting up to rappel, put your prusik on the rope first, before your device, then you can pull through enough slack to feed into the device easily, without the weight of your whole rope below you.

Here's a caveat: I don't use a grigri, I've never enjoyed them. They don't solve a problem I've ever had. But the theory is the same for any belay/rappel device. You need your prusik on a loop that doesn't reach the bottom of the device. This can be achieved by clipping it to a leg loop instead of your belay loop, or by extending your device up a little by clipping it to a short sling, which is larks footed to your belay loop. In rock climbing, I would always do this with my cow's tail, or personal anchor, with a knot tied halfway down it, so the belay device is halfway along the sling. Like this, your device is far enough away from your prusik knot to not interact with it, but close enough to manipulate. Now, this is where simple devices like figure-of-8s, atc, guide plate, reverso, whatever, are better than the gri gri: the hand that is milking the prusik on the downhill rope is also controlling the feed of rope into the device, leaving your other hand free to comb your hair or roll a spliff or sort out tangles in the rope, whatever you want. You don't have this luxury with the grigri, which needs a hand on it all the time you are descending. Edit: Petzl do hundreds of useful infographics for using all of their products and the situations you'd use them in. Just Google image search "Petzl rappel prusik grigri" and "petzl rappel prusik reverso" and you'll get a good idea of what's going on.

"Catastrophe knots", as they are sometimes called in the "roped soloing" rock climbing community, are almost always not worth the hassle as long as the other parts of the system are sound. A belay device and a prusik should really be more than enough.

That sounds like a hell of a lot of faff. I assume you've got one hand on the grigri and one on the lower rope? Have your prusik on a shorter loop, below the device, and milk it at the same time as you descend with your downhill hand.

It's a flavour profile that would appeal more to people who are into things like anchovies, olives, marmite, pickled onions... It's a sour, punchy, complex range of flavours.

Also, Horse Radish, Black Currant leaves and even young Oak leaves can all be used to maintain some crunchiness apparently.. I almost said oak leaves, I've heard of it but never tried it myself; I'd never heard of blackcurrant leaves but I'll definitely be giving that a try. I've got 60-odd blackcurrant cuttings coming along this year. I'm currently getting about 3 gallons of wine from my 4 bushes, I hope to get considerably more in the future!

If those are beetroot from the garden, or from a market stall that supplies them with the stalks and greens still attached, after she's pickled the roots have her chop the stalks and greens into mouth-sized pieces along with a sliced carrot and leek or spring onion (and literally any other vegetable you have a glut of), minced garlic and chilli, and toss it all with 2% of the total weight of salt. Pour into a large jar with lid loosely on, and press the solids below the liquid as it leaches from the vegetables over the next week or two. Transfer to the fridge or a cool outbuilding. A ladle of this fermented vegetable mixture fried with leftover rice or noodles and an egg makes a damn good breakfast or lunch, one which I usually have two or three times a week.

Pickled is great, but have you tried red cabbage kimchi or sauerkraut? Edit: I suggest it only because I do a fair amount of pickling and fermenting, and the process for fermenting, in general, I find more enjoyable and with more versatile end results. But here's a quick tip to avoid mushy pickles in general: a bay leaf, or any other "edible" leaf high in tannin like a vineleaf, in your pickling jar will help maintain some of the texture of your pickles.

I tried to cut the lower legs off an old pair, but they absolutely f*cked my pinking shears and the kevlar fabric kept fraying regardless.

I think Leylandii, and cypress trees in general, are absolutely beautiful trees when left in the middle of a big field and allowed to do their thing. I think it's downright cruel to keep in a cage like most are. This one is in the wrong place, and the longer you keep it the more expensive it will be to get rid of when the moment comes. Put it on the ground and give the sunlight to something else.

An intelligent response clearly backed by logic and reasoning, but we are dealing with the consequences of the whim and fancy of the fairer sex here, and as such, your logic and reason have no place here. She has explained the maths behind it, and it seems that with the price she paid for it, even if it takes me a good number of hours theoretically working at just below minimum wage, we'd probably still scrape through with a cheaper floor than buying brand new. Look, what's done is done, okay? We just have to live with it.

That's just anecdotal evidence and really shouldn't hold any sway in the big picture, and without concrete proof of it being a swan, who's to say what happened. Could have just been a load of ducks taped together.

Like swan attacks.

She's playing a good game of it at the moment, asking " How should I do it," "How long do you think it will it take me to do my floor," and she will inevitably knock off a few hundred pieces, but we both know that I'll be the one scraping away out in the shed until the small hours. It's fine, she excels in other areas.

I've chatted to our digger driver, he's got a riddle attachment, so I'm going to stop using elbow grease and let him pile them up in a corner when we come to pull down the walls. Not sure what I'll do with all that free time now! I know... I'll peel the bitumen off of this 120m2 of reclaimed teak floor my wife has brought me and hidden on a few pallets at the back of my shed. I'm off to invest in a few new tools later, a few chisels, shave hook, might fork out for a belt sander if one jumps out at me. I've got some space in the woodshed to stack up the clean pieces before switching back to firewood mode, as long as I can get them moved by the summer we'll be grand. I can see I'm going to get bored of scraping out the crap from deep within the tongue and groove of each piece. Ah well. Any advice? Please, God... any advice?

Well that looks complicated.

I have two addenda. Firstly, pretty much the best way to join two rope ends together for any application other than a prusik loop is with the affectionately-named European Death Knot, or the simple overhand. By the time you've tied your first half of your fisherman's, your European neighbour in the tree next door will already be on the ground enjoying a croissant. Secondly, if you expect to be in a lot of trees needing a full rope length to descend and don't want the hassle of resetting an anchor half way down, bring your throw line up with you, cinch it onto the fat end of the cambium saver and retrieve your system with that. Google "tag line rappel" for all the info you need.