As if we didn’t already know that the climate is a bit messed up right now, I was amazed to see this springtime flower out in August.
But then, when we got as far as December…
I’d be tempted to suggest that there’s precious little chance of getting pollinated at such a late stage, but these days, who knows?
From the list of recall items for the Citroën C1…
(Most of the first 15,000 are from drivers for Evri. Possibly the same one. 🙁
My wife just had a message that a parcel she was expecting from the South American river place could not be delivered because our drive is a rough track and the driver though it was too icy to get down. They’d therefore left the parcel “in a safe place” at the end of the drive.
Boots on, torch in hand, I wandered down to the end of the drive (about 100 metres). There was no sign of ice anywhere. Well, there wouldn’t be. Temperatures reached 6°C here this afternoon according to the gauge in the dash of the car. And, in fact, it was raining.
Fortunately as it had only been a few minutes since the message was sent I found the parcel in the hedge along the roadside where pretty much anyone passing by could have seen it. Quite how that constitutes “a safe place” I’m not really sure.
Large bonfire (not mine, I hasten to add). 11kW overhead mains power lines…
Then who wants to risk eating one of these?
Not me. Prehensile tongue, anyone? Or should that be prehensile tongs?
… when you have over 100 years of combined tool-collecting in one place.
Honestly, I’m really not sure where they all came from. Some are mine, some are my father-in-law’s, some possibly came from my mother-in-law’s brother and so on. I’ve not even included the lump hammers and sledgehammers. I think it’s probably fair to say though that if I have something that needs hitting, I probably have the tool to do it.
Up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm and…
I came across the polycrub concept a few years back. It’s not hard to find examples on the interwebs, but simply put it’s a very robust and better insulated version of a polytunnel, originally developed for use on Shetland as far as I recall. It looks ideally-suited to windy environments, and the insulation should make it warmer than a greenhouse or polytunnel. In fact you’d probably get the area of a polytunnel with more warmth than a greenhouse for a price somewhere between the two.
To test the viability of using it for housing chickens when required by bird ‘flu regulations I bought a cheap, nasty polytunnel from that online river place. I’m sure I’ve written about it before. It turned out to be really quite poor. After the idea had been washing around my brain for a while I decided that I could possibly turn it into my own version of a polycrub.
I started with some old scaffold boards and fixed them to stakes hammered into the ground to provide a level top edge that the original frame could rest on.
Then I started covering the top with sheets of 4mm twinwall polycarbonate sheeting. The original polycrub designs appear to use much thicker sheeting, but mine is smaller and I needed it to bend nicely over the curve of the tunnel. I also had to fix wooden battens to the outside of the frame so that the sheets could be screwed to them, but that did actually help to stiffen the frame slightly.
I didn’t initially have a good plan for how I was going to do the ends. I want some vents to allow air to circulate and I want a door in at least one end, so for the time being I cut the end walls off the original cover and fixed them back to the frame.
I even started planting out inside before it was even finished 😀
Oh deary me. Does no-one use a proof-reader any more?
