Ferdinand

Thanks - useful. Yes I have a strong framework. I build 2m post-and-half-round things like tall horse fences. The blackberry is on one too.

I think that's a really interesting question @daiking- 'I've been reflecting having inherited my garden this year, and one of my notes has been that the South Side of mine is actually on the main entrance side where I park my car, away from the kitchen at the back which faces North. So I have decided I want a sitting terrace and a pergola that side with fruit growing on it (at which point I remembered that in the garden where I grew up mum used to have things called "vertical cordon" plums and a greengage, which is the most pleasant plum of all. So I want one of those by the posts of my pergola. It will have the solar panels on top and help shelter my office from running up to 35C by mid morning in summer. But that means I will probably want a gate for more security (or at least deterrence), and perhaps something slightly higher than my 5'6" front wall for privacy. I will do that by building a frame about 2" back which will have the already established Pyracantha climbing on it. I've always loved thinking about garden / house integration as part of the design process - inpspired by the likes of Lutyens and my-dad-the-architect. I would suggest try approaching this the way you did the house - start with a one page List of Requirements, perhaps thinking about scenarios - drinking gin on a summer evening, bar-b-cue with neighbours, private space for behaving like your avatar and so on, and perhaps visit some other gardens. Vertical Cordons:

Knife Block Clearance I have just purchased a big knife block from Procook on clearance. Currently available at £40 for the big one that takes 10 knives (up to 25cm blade in longest 26m slot). Or £25 for the small 6 knife one. Here: https://www.procook.co.uk/shop/special-offers/clearance Also, at Procook if you spend £60 you get a free large chef's knife or vegetable (chef's knife minus point) or santoku (with side scoops) knife from their X50 range, which are the one's I use and like. There are also offers for the above blocks with either 10 or 6 knives for about £230 or £130. Note that the current free knives have beech handles. I've virtually equipped my entire kitchen from Procook over the last 3 years, as I have a local branch.

Update to this. I have just purchased a big knife block from Procook on clearance. Currently available at £40 for the big one that takes 10 knives (up to 25cm blade in longest 26m slot). Or £25 for the small 6 knife one. Here: https://www.procook.co.uk/shop/special-offers/clearance Also, at Procook if you spend £60 you get a free large chef's knife or vegetable (chef's knife minus point) or santoku (with side scoops) knife from their X50 range, which are the one's I use and like. There are also offers for the above blocks with either 10 or 6 knives for about £230 or £130. Note that the current free knives have beech handles.

I said in my opinion, and I hope I am wrong. EWI tends to fall in a category called "hard to insulate" (or similar), which can get excluded from schemes designed to make max impact for minimum buck. For similar reasons they sometimes leave out "room in roof" houses. They can do a normal roof (above ceiling) type loft in an hour or less - I had one where I turned up 15 minutes late and they had already finished. But doing it on the slope is far more complex and takes days or a week or two. Similarly new efficient boilers are sometimes in, sometimes out. I have been having free insulation etc in rentals since ages, and sometimes complex ones are included, and sometimes excluded. The last time EWI was included here was a special local scheme which gave iirc 2/3 of cost capped at 4k or 6k grant. The ones I looked at still didn't add up for me as an investment - as by the time all the normal stuff had been done there were not enough savings opportunities left on the remaining energy bills even with the subsidy. The Council cocked up quite a lot of it by failing to consider ventilation when doing EWI on trad houses. That is why I am rabbiting on about ventilation and sweating detail. The next thing to check is restrictions - as they tend to include certain requirements to make sure you are making best use of the money (which is very sensible). An example was the restriction of solar panel subsidies to higher EPC bands, or sometimes by economic status of the occupant. An interesting wrinkle there for LLs is that you are sometimes more likely to get funding once you have already moved a tenant in rather than when you are renovating. You just need to understand the scheme. One obvious thing on the current one is to get your skates on, as it is iirc this financial year only. Again very sensible if part of the idea is to start the economy rolling. [Update: delighted to see that EWI has actually been included] Ferdinand

Can anyone recommend a brand of strong gardening gauntlets. My current adversary is a Himalyan Giant Blackberry. Cheers Ferdinand

Seconds and Co are quite big. Have you asked them how they have handled the IOW before? Do they perhaps have their own contacts? F

I normally use a staple gun.

You're lucky that the place has only just fallen to the Greens. You've avoided the bylaw imposing a fixed penalty notice for being caught in possession of a bacon butty.

When I did an at exhibition in a small gallery in Nottingham a bit over a decade ago, it cost more to park the car for some time each day than it did to hire the gallery. So .. Brighton. Parking and a bit of digging. £400-500 ?

I'll let you know at the weekend ?

I think you should do it in copper.

On topic: I think this will make you very popular with Sageglass Inc ? . Can I ask another totally .. er .. ontopic question of our tinted glazing expert (*)? (Berry picking exhibition in Derbyshire later this week). Do blue tinted sunglasses make blackberries easier to see amongst the leaves? Ferdinand * This is the defined as the person who can answer my question.

I can see at least two Medieval torture devices in this thread. Why don't you just fill it with banzai spikes, cover it with camouflage, and have done with it? Find some sheep and you have homemade mutton kebab. Sod your cellar.

Thanks for the comment. I tend to agree. But this is for my green vegetables ?, such as watercress and dill weed. 4000k would be for flowers, and I can't eat so many of those.

I don't think that is correct: "

I think that's the two chimneys from the top of number 73, and is why your plot at 75 has a big hump on it and is twice as wide as it should be.

Just a note that that was me quoting @jamieled, not me saying.

I am looking for some inexpensive LED striplights with a colour temperature of about 6000k-6500k. That is roughly "daylight". They will need to be linkable, and plug into the mains - so 240V or maybe a transformer. The product area may be shop display lights or under counterd lights. My application is as growlights for microveg, as I continue to experiment. I picked up the idea from an American site who recommend these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F2WMCP2/ I need slightly shorter ones 30-70cm long, as I am. I already have some designed-as-growlights LED grid things, but I want to try these too. Any ideas? Thanks Ferdinand

That's interesting. I can see a green fluff happening about that eventually.

If you thought about this for 5 minutes with a coffee you would get it - it is an experiment we all did at school: Find the volume of an irregular solid by seeing how much it raises the level in a container of water. In this case we only need an answer to about +/- quite a lot, so personally I would guestimate a third for any reasonably sized sort of gravel, but obvs it takes up more of the volume if it smaller. But the tolerance means we don't need a big sample. If i really wanted to know I'd do it a la probable Jeremy: 1 - Get a big measuring cylinder or a bucket or anything of which you know the volume. Find out where say the 5l line is (put in 5l of water and make a mark or measure the depth). 2 - Empty water and fill up to your mark or depth with gravel. Do the hokey-cokey and shake it all about to max the amount of gravel. 3 - Refill with water and see how much it takes to the same line. Steal a measuring jug from the boss. 4 - The difference as a fraction or % allows you to calculate the allowance you need to make. This method even allows for any voids inside your pieces of gravel. Personally I would add 25% to the whole thing afterwards just to allow for uneven rain to give me a buffer. Ferdinand

I haven't really followed this thread. However I would expect the number to be the volume of space for water, which would be minus the volume of solid gravel. Unless it has voids in the gravel, in which case the thread needs to continue ?.

In practice a lot of people with MVHR find that their washing dries so well inside that washing lines outside are redundant. Control condensation *THAT* well for many.

If you are well ventilated that should help control your risk of condensation, which is water vapour condensing from a wet atmosphere on a cold surface.

Have you got a local cavity wall insulation contractor? Can you do your design to use them?