peds

Well, what an absolute shocker! Who could have possibly foreseen such a thing?

Depending on your soil, some stumps can pretty much just be pushed straight down into the ground with the digger bucket, like you're pushing raisins into a bowl of thick porridge with the back of a spoon.

That's his overnight edging load, keeps it on a low smoulder so he can flare it up easily in the morning. Honest, guv.

To me, this is also the most important argument against homoeopathic medicine. Sure, water has memory, but it chooses to remember ONLY that one time you shook it around in a bottle with a lump of arsenic, and not the time it was a drop of sweat on Napoleon's ballsack, or the millions of years of being pissed out by pterodactyls...

Often wondered the same thing. I keep meaning to set aside the bigger chunks I find to experiment, but never got round to it. I took out an absolute monster of a fuchsia a while ago as well and wondered if it'd burn well enough to bother with.

There we go, that's all 200 of the bastards up on the house. Not the hardest thing I've ever done, but definitely not the easiest, either. Next I'll be focusing on the corners, flashing, and trim to tidy up all the edges. Scaffold comes down on Monday.

Only just saw this reply, sorry. Yeah I'd hate to as well, so I'm just thinking of other things for now and ignoring that bit until we get to it. Seems to have worked at every other stage of the build! I keep meaning to do a more thorough update of this, because the foundations were a particularly interesting process and I'll have to share some pictures of that one day. But here's where we are now. It's been a long month, but 98% of the cladding is now on, and the scaffold is coming down on Monday. Delivery itself was a pretty hectic day because the crane was supposed to have been collected a month ago, but they just left it sitting there. I was going to start charging rent for the driveway, but then the corrugated fibre cement cladding sheets showed up. We had just lowered the first bale of 14 sheets onto the top deck of the scaffold when the driver showed up to take the crane away, but there were still 9 tons of material parked in front of it so he pretty much had to help us at that stage. He's happy enough, he's paid by the hour anyway, and I gave him a bottle of wine and a few notes for his trouble. The dog was thrilled to finally be able to go upstairs for the first time ever, after I upgraded the ladder to the temporary stairs. Roofers did the roof, a pair of stout fellas and I did the walls. Heavy buggers, the 3m sheets on the shed are 50kg, but the 2.75m sheets on the house roof and walls are only 44kg. It's graft, you've got to manually position these things and lean your weight against them while screwing them in. It's easiest with 3, good enough with 2, and tediously slow as just 1, but you can wrestle them into position on the ground floor and prop them up with a couple of wedges. It's easier when it isn't snowing horizontally. Only got 6 left to put up, a little triangle on the shed gable. Corner shapes and holes for the doors and windows are cut with a concrete blade on an angle grinder. The roofers made their holes with a Stihl con saw, and I was pretty jealous. After the cladding comes a load of barge and corners, then I'll start thinking about gutters and window flashing.

Sungold are pretty decent.

I enjoyed that!

JFK BLOWN AWAY WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAAAAY...

Mine are squeezed into 18m2, they are starting to get cabin fever. Nine girls and two boys, both of whom are destined to be passanda as soon as I get the time to process them. Tricky to provide them with enough greenery, I throw them a few cabbages each week to destroy.

Where did you go?

That's the spirit, molly coddle the roots off of them. Drown them in acid. When I was planting for forestry I dug a wild bilberry out of the ground next to a patch of mature spruce, stuck it in an empty whip bag and carried it around with me until the walk back to the vans for tea. The stand was harvested later that year and all of the bilberry's relatives dead. The one I kept is still in a big tub, waiting for the chance to be set free under a suitable tree, along with a couple of cowberries. The kids can't leave them alone during the season. No jam has ever been made.

A lot of reading I've done suggests keeping blueberries and bilberries in big tubs unless you are already on their favourite soil type, so you can control their fairly-fussy environmental needs more closely. A common trick out here in Ireland is to mulch them with the long-rotted contents of old windrows in spruce forestry.

The same effect can be achieved by setting an oscillating desktop fan in front of your young seedlings for a few hours a day, when they are still up on the bench.

Sounds a bit like it, doesn't it. Yeah stupid to blame the truck driver, when it was obviously the tree's fault.

Now is the perfect time to do this: spread out 2 or 3 layers of brown cardboard under the tree, as far out into the grass as you are willing to go, and cover that with mushroom compost, rotted manure, mauldy auld seaweed, decent compost, anything you can fine. Top it with bark or woodchip if you want a pretty finish. Don't go too close to the trunk. For extra points, mix a load of biochar into the organic material you mulch it with. Feed the tree, it needs nutritients.

Scatter it with white clover or mustard, leave it for a year, plough it in, level it if needed, grass seed next year.

4 acres seems more petting zoo size, I'd say.

Jesus that's massive.

One mustn't forget that life expectancy statistics throughout history are hugely skewed by child and infant mortality rates, which is a problem we have only relatively recently solved. They weren't as common a few hundred years ago, but old people definitely existed. I forget where I read it, but I think it's been suggested that as long as you made it past your early teenage years, and excepting things like famine, war, plague, and such, you could generally expect to see a few wrinkles before you passed on.

Bully for you friendo, that isn't the global situation, and part of the problem is people like yourself who can't see further than the end of their own nose. I'm ducking out at this stage to carry on with my day, but I'll just quickly repeat the tired old fact that we are currently in the midsts of the most comprehensive mass-extinction event the planet has ever seen, and Mother Nature, or Gaia, or God or Jehova or whatever you want to call her, doesn't care if humans are carried along for the ride, we have to get ourselves out of this mess, we know exactly what will give us the best chance of survival, and for some strange reason, there are millions of people out there who are against the idea.

Haha, yeah... that's... not the direction this is headed buddy. What makes you think you can exist on a planet that midges can't survive on? You've got a weird idea of perfection, broseph.

I don't think you really understand what the word utopia means.

Yeah... that's nonsense.