Selfsufficientish.com

Pretty sure the root won't mind being buried back in the soil.

In other news: Our Stella cherry is now gone . Sadly, it was a victim of its own success and literally outgrew our garden!

The mild winter seems to've had an upside, then - very good for getting 'those' jobs done! I excelled myself the other day and put in 2 6-foot LED-lights in the garage. Damn fiddly when you're perched atop a ladder in the 1/2-dark and you've never touched a fluo tube before & don't know what goe...

We're still harvesting chard!

Black bags with fork-holes work well but take 3-4 years (well, ours did) to make marvellous mould. I don't know whether sun or shade makes a difference - black bags would heat up in the sun & might speed the process.

This year's lot are in blue bags. Will report back in 3 years' time :)

Right then! You can't exactly say I rush this stuff, but it's finally all done! All through the summer there were 2 types of day: type 1: too hot to inflict manual work on anyone (except if you're some kind of evil slave-driver) type 2: p!ssing with the_ I was going to say the finest British rain bu...

We're growing stuff here at Chateau Renewable, but this year's been an odd-un. What with the drought (my back aches!) the fact I've still not got the gravel down (see 'RenewableCandy's Hardcore Challenge' thread...) so there's nowhere for salad pots... I'm NOT asking our nice nighbour to do the whac...

I rather like the idea of wood-smoked herbs... Meanwhile, for heating 2 rooms I can recommend the Clearview Pioneer (4 kW iirc) or Vision (5kW). They've both now got Clean Air certs. They don't (as far as I know) do back-boilers, but I seem to recall a version that had an oven on top of the heater. ...

FINISHED! Well, the shovelling of hardcore is over, at least. Now all that remains is the wacking AND THEN... two more tonnes, but this time of nice round gravel which by all accounts is far easier to shovel than hardcore. I've raked it all out to nearly-flat and the rotten-est wood's going away bit...

Well, I fully admit the 'less-than-a-week' thing has gone for a burton but there now remains just 1/2 a tonne, ie the job's 90% done and my back hasn't complained. Neigbour-lad says he'll investigate hiring a tamper-thingie and I've offered a fee for doing that bit of the work. Meanwhile here's some...

Communication between plants is becoming well documented. I have seen time lapse video of invasive climbers showing them waving the tendrils around until they contact a suitable support. Beans do the same, and always in the same direction iirc. Can't remember whether it's clockwise or anticlockwise.

Willow for coppicing at boggy end. Orchard at drier end? I'd make a forest garden if I had a field, but that's me... I'd go for that option too. Even if the trees do nothing else, they eventually make firewood. And a wildlife reserve. And improve air quality. etc. In a separate incident, FoE are pe...

Several letterboxes on doors near us have little home-made notices saying 'No Charity Bags Please'. I don't know whether these are respected or not: I need to put one up and find out! We get one of the s*ds practically each week, always for something we've not heard of and which is probably a scam, ...

When our 2 were little we lived in Glasgow and it rained a lot. I mean, A LOT. Playing outside when you could only just walk was simply not an option. My mum bought us a telly. I watched Channel 4 News and Taggart (and The Last Train - anyone remember that?) We had a vid player and House Rules, whic...

Here are some people who've done approximately the same thing as me, though I remembered to lay the membrane in the right place and am not going to need those nifty plastic gravel-holding matrix things because Economy (plus we're not driving on it): https://www.littlehouseonthecorner.com/lay-a-grave...

Oooh I do like the look of that!

Pedantic aside: apparently originally a pantry was for keeping bread, and a larder for keeping fatty food.