peds

Well, yeah... they are... among many other things. South American asparagus in our shops in January shouldn't be a thing of course, but you can't just wave the global beef industry problem away because of it.

Delicious. I used to make hundreds of those at a time as canapés for fancy weddings. Take one sparagus, snap it, peel the skin off below the tip with a y-peeler to expose the yellowy-green flesh beneath, do that for 1.4 times the number of guests (bit of a ballache for weddings in triple figures). Drop them into a large pan of salted water for 3 to 4 minutes, fish out with a spider into a large bowl of ice water, chill, drain, dry. When dry enough, wrap each spear in cured ham to hide the yellowy-green flesh you exposed earlier (err, yes, actually it was very important to peel it... don't ask questions you don't understand the answer to), line them up as you go with spear tips level, and cut them all down to the exact same length, removing the stump end as necessary. Stack the spears in one box between blue towel, put the trimmings in another box and tuck it into your go-home shoe. When you get home from work at 3am, fry a handful of the asparagus and ham trimmings, add cooked pasta, add cream, add parmesan. Egg yolk if you want. (Pro tip: save the woody butt ends and peelings, make a quick velouté soup with them, pass through a sieve or chinoise, load into a spuma gun, charge with 2 hits of laughing gas and squirt it into a shot glass or, better yet, an espresso cup with one of your dainty little ham spears on the saucer instead of the teaspoon, and you've got an asparagus cappuccino, a fancy little amuse bouche that will distract your esteemed guests from their tedious lives for just long enough for them to consider tucking a few more dollar bills into your g-string at the end of the night.

Ah, don't think I do. PM it to me there.

Planted 2 cypress back in the hole yesterday, only missing 5 of their 6 stems! They'll be fine, it's bareroot season after all...

Ehh... my biggest is a 357 with 18"... I might leave this mess to the bigger boys.

He was ambiguous about what to do with it, he just wanted the immediate problem solved first though. I'm sure someone could do it by themselves, slowly and safely, but I'm happy to admit when something is beyond my skillset and technological capabilities. Half of them are above head height before the stems are even inside my longest bar width, and some of the rootplates are visibily just itching to go. After playing around in much, much smaller windthrow as a team of 4 with a midi digger just yesterday, I'm not convinced dicking about by myself on much bigger stuff would be a good idea. I wouldn't be able to finish the job by myself, so I'll not be offering to start it.

Close enough, Calry, so halfway to Leitrim from civilisation. I'll forward your details to the guy if you want!

4 of the same size and a baby. I wanted to acknowledge it's presence while minimising its significance compared to the immediate neighbours.

I just went to look at a job in someone's back garden, 4.5 easy-enough ash to take down. He asked while I'm there, could I have a look at some fallen trees up in his field? Big trees, well beyond my paygrade. Biggest one is close to 100cm across, 8 or 9 of them in total. I recommended a couple of people better equipped than I to have a look. What machinery would you need, minimum? 12 ton digger with a grab, maybe even a pair of them?! Access is shite... long walk across a boggy field, a digger could manage it obviously, but not much else...

Jeez, I know. Such good eating. I'm sure it was just a bad batch. Fish, fire, and salt. All that's needed.

I'm picturing big escaped leylandii hedge now... pretty much swallowing the neighbour's front garden.

Someone dropped me off a carrier bag full of mackerel a little over a year ago, they were still swimming an hour earlier. I duly set about preparing them for the freezer, around half of them had worms, and one of them was more worm than fish. Put me right off them it did.

Johan? J.A.R.V.I.S? Juggernaut?

Excellent, I'll give it a rewatch. It was like the film Memento.

Ah shit, I watched them in the wrong order, it made the plot difficult to follow.

It sure was. Photos start halfway through the day too, should have seen the place at 8am! Carnage.

Tidying up some wind throw. What a mess! Managed to plant a few of them again, they should be fine... 20250106_151744.mp4

What's the results? Do we need to get Dad's Army out again?

I feel the reception might have been a little warmer if the post had been worded as a request, rather than an instruction.

Oh, lovely.

Absolutely no argument from me.

Those are pretty. Would you consider drilling twice through the block, countersinking the holes on the bottom, threading the rope handle, and tieing two stopper knots on the underside, sat snuggly in the countersink holes? Don't want to sound picky or anything.

Not me, unfortunately, I never went down the route to getting any guide qualifications. There was a oft-told joke back in Chamonix, "What's the difference between a mountain guide and a large pepperoni pizza?" The pizza can feed a family of four... I can hold my own on pretty much any given mountain, and I've definitely never caused the death or disappearance of any of the people I've brought into the mountains, but I wouldn't legally be allowed to say "Follow me!" to a group of paying customers out there. Tempted to get an International Mountain Leader cert one day, that would open a few doors. Mightn't be enough for the BAS, though.