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Quite a while back I got interested in this topic and did a fair bit of reading around ... Apparently, the reason why kerosene took over from olive and other plant oils was due to its lower viscosity - it flows more easily and doesn't clog up the wick as much. This means that it gets sucked up by th...

Thanks! A few days ago, I decided I wasn't going to wait any longer, and picked them! Now they're sitting on the table waiting for someone to eat them. Actually, there are places in Australia where growing anything is bloody hard. Tasmania for instance - has a climate similar to England, down there ...

Very, very cool ... now I'm wishing I also lived there!

Alas, I and my passion for recycling old jeans are stuck on the opposite side of the globe ...

Kfish.

Very impressive.

Believe it or not, using greywater has only just become legal in Brisbane, Australia - a few weeks before the general hosepipe ban!

The mind boggles ...

Kfish

Well, that is the original loo paper!

Cut it into squares, hang it on a nail on the inside door. Don't use the glossy supplements, though.

Kfish

Does anyone here have a recipe for melon wine? I have a glut of jam melons (like watermelons, only tough and white inside) because they grow like bloody weeds, and have filled the cupboard with chutneys and jams already! If anyone has tried making wine with rockmelons, watermelons or other similar f...

I'm very proud of my little orange tree! It's about two years old, lives in a (very large) pot and has produced two lovely big oranges despite being eaten continually by grasshoppers! Now the oranges are lovely and, well, orange, but how do I tell when they're ripe enough to pick? One guide I've rea...

Recycled jars are ok as long as they're not chipped around the lip of the jars (would ruin seal). Glass jars with metal lids are essential to avoid melting plastic with hot sugar. The lids with those pop-up circles in the middle are fantastic - you can hear them popping as the jam sets and the vacuu...

I'm sorry Muddypause, but changing gravity is not actually going to help. The mass of something is the amount of matter in it, the number of molecules so to speak. The weight, which would change with gravity, is the force which the thing exerts on the supporting surface. So if you go to the Moon, yo...

While we're on the topic ...

How does a cheesemaker climb a barbed-wire fence?

Caerphilly!

21) Cut out sides, cut across top, turn into kid's swing (note: you need the old rag tyres for this, unless you really want to hack through the steel reinforcing they use these days).

I'd love to collect rainwater from the gutters but our house was built in the '20s and the gutters are in pretty poor shape ... just thinking about all that lead paint in the rainwater! :shock: Brisbane's got a hose ban in effect at the moment, but it only applies to town water. They really don't ca...

Well, the first problem with Michel's 'operation of a float' is in the very first line (just as well, because my brain shut down after that, and I used to tutor high school physics students!) We manufacture the float (variable volume) in such way, that in state of minimal volume it weighs 10 kg UNDE...

Thanks for the tip on pressing. Tried first pressed cheese - BLEEUGH! :pukeleft: I'm not sure what went wrong - I cured the milk with yoghurt and rennet, left it overnight, drained it for a few days and pressed it for about a day. At that stage it smelt slightly "off" and had a slightly ac...

Awesome link! It's not often you get a commercial site that tells you to do it yourself :wink: My grandmother has a couple of lemon trees that have been fruiting for 15 years now, I'll have to go and get some seeds off her. It was funny, I had one from her that I'd left a while, when I opened it up ...