peds

"A" next day, not "the" next day.

Did you not hear the OP? Some of the stems are really thick! But yeah, I'm sure a decent scythe technique would work just fine, personally I never found anything wrong with my Conan-style full-swing hack-chop. My trusty hook was the first thing I did when I bought a grinding wheel too, definitely a tool where it pays to keep an edge on it.

No offence dude, but it sounds like your slash hook wasn't lubricated with enough elbow grease 😉 The leaf blower inferno sounds like the cheapest, easiest, most effective, and most fun technique though!

Following the advice given earlier in the thread, I ordered this as a Christmas present for my dad and picked it up at midday today. Unfortunately the lunch guests we had didn't leave until it was turning dark so I've only managed 5 minutes of plinking, and I'm flying off again tomorrow so I won't get to play with it properly until I'm back in late January. Ah well. Quick question, the instructions say don't store it with a CO2 cartridge in it to protect the seals. How short-term are we talking about here? Can I leave the barely-used one in it until Christmas Day, can the same one be left in until late January? Is it even anything worth worrying about, are the seals a 5 second job to replace? How many shots from a single cartridge, are they considered a single-session expendable thing? Cheers for any knowledge dudes.

Until you suffer burnout like I did with my first hobby/job of cooking. Probably works out different if you keep it to 3 or 4 days a week instead of 6 or 7 though.

Oh yeah, just checked back: Yeah, given what percentage of that 1.25 acres is brambles, and how much free time I've got over the next few months, I'd just be chipping away it with the hook and loppers in whatever time I had, like I did with my 1.5 acres when we bought it. Not a big job, cheaper than buying anything fancy in, keeps you fit.

I removed a patch with slash hook and loppers, never grew back to any extent. I wouldn't want to do any significant area though.

I know someone who planted with rods cut two years previous and forgotten about behind a shed. I've certainly had chunks of willow from the top of a log pile start rooting when they've been knocked off onto the ground.

Outstanding. This is the kind of quality content I pay my subscription fee for. I was talking about this sort of thing recently with @AHPP. We were wondering if, given willow's enthusiasm for growing anytime, anywhere, is there any time of year that it isn't worth fedging? Because I have some I need to start, but it's always a question of squeezing another thing in in a busy schedule...

Currently making a tomato and shallot tart with the very last tomatoes from mum's greenhouse, my dad's sister and her husband are coming over for lunch. Also making a duck, plum, and cashew nut salad with last night's leftover roast; herby new potatoes, smoked salmon with capers, and a cheeseboard with some Stilton, comté, gruyere, a single-herd triple-cream Ballylisk (Irish camembert...); a brown soda bread, and seaweed butter. Mum made a chocolate cherry cake for pudding.

Pro tip: ...life becomes much quieter. Give it a try!

The same reason BBC wildlife photographers (or others) go and sit in the middle of a midge-infested bog for weeks or months at a time to get yet another photo of an osprey (or an otter, or an ocelot...) to add to our collection. I'm not saying they have or haven't "made contact", or are quietly observing from a distance without contact, personally I think this current episode is US military tech being experimented with; but it is entirely plausible that alien species would want to just come and watch us because we are an inherently entertaining species. The same reason I hiked into the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica to watch tapirs... howler monkeys... army ants... wild chocolate trees... hermit crabs... Because it just blows my tiny mind, man...

I have one of those I was supposed to be doing this week before I had to come back to the UK. It's still there, waiting, I'll have to do it first thing in January. Griselinia, with other bonus items scattered around the garden. She kept saying that other people had let her down, I didn't have the heart to join their number. Enjoy!

Are you controlling the squirrels at all? Tasty as they are, and all that...

Not my husky, not my IR camera. Cool picture. Edit In keeping with the spirit though, here is Albert the Second, 11 years old, born into a three-collie-household but now a lone wolf, still mourning the passing of the recently-deceased Jane, 14. In oak and chestnut.

Anyone heard about the impending alien invasion in New Jersey? There's a lot of focus on New Jersey anyway, but there are currently reports of multiple "orbs" all over the world... Miami, Cordoba, China... Lots of interesting pictures and videos surfacing, some more credible than others, of drones hovering about... some are obviously just planes flying around at night, which really does make you question the intelligence of anyone involved in the whole thing, but there are also some very convincing examples. The White House seems to be being rather shady on the subject too... The fact that yer man Kirby there (as the spokesperson for the US government) seems unruffled by the situation suggests that they are in fact a US military activity on a strictly need-to-know basis, and not visitors from another planet, as everyone desperately wants them to be... which, given the rise of drones in military application over recent years, is still wildly interesting. Anyone got orbs and aliens and drones in their feed?

Oh yeah, I guess so. Cheers boss.

What's a De Veg operative? I'm intrigued, why's the job specifically to be done on Christmas and Boxing Day? Not interested obviously, I'll be busy and drunk. But intrigued.

Righto skip, will do.

Oh yeah, Christmas. Best start thinking about shopping. What do you want for Christmas, team?

Good morning everyone. Drizzle here...

After seeing him wrestle a stepcut unsuccessfully before giving it another few slices with the hand saw, I find his content remarkably relatable.

I'm googling, and now I'm disappointed. I find myself wondering if parapent BASE jumpers (that is, a tandem flight of parapenters/paragliders, and the passenger bails in midair, to open their own wing on the way down...), or even slackline or hot air balloon BASE jumpers, etc., have any fancy name-brand technology available to them, like the Plummet or Freefall... or if they just rely on slipknots or fiddlesticks or even regular old unclipping. I remember seeing a video of one BASE jumper deliberately rappelling off the end of a rope. Pretty wild.

I thought you already did? Should we take a brief census by way of a poll...? Good morning everyone, I'm going to pull on my filthy clothes from yesterday and continue scrubbing the rat shit out of the corners of my folks' outbuildings. Have a productive day, all!

Luigi Mangione's brief manifesto: