2025 Quick Daily Posts

[fccs]

Sounds like an exhausting weekend.

[Serinde]

I'll say! Good work!

[richardandtracy]

I can certainly still feel my hands from gripping the branches & forcing them through the shredder.

Hopefully we can get on & do some more work next weekend. Next winter I need to lay the hedges properly, they're getting very thin at the base, more like a line of small trees. I've laid hedges in Devon on my parent's farm, and it's very, very hard work. To give an idea of what's involved, take a look at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgelaying, though being right handed unlike the person in the article, I prefer to work from left to right & lay the trunks down to the left. Never done it without binder twine to hold the hedge together after laying, but I've no idea where to get any here in Kent, so possibly need to try the more sustainable method of using stakes & brash already cut out of the hedge. Do need a billhook though, our local MachineMart sells them for just over £10.

Regards,

Richard

[Serinde]

https://mcveighparker.com/depot-locator? Or Amazon, since you know what you are looking for? Do you have a local agricultural college -- because you might interest them in teaching their students using your hedge -- it's what happens around here with dry stone walling.

[richardandtracy]

The thought of Agricultural students from Hadlow college on the weald coming over the scarp slope onto the agricultural desert of North Kent.. It's highly unlikely to happen. The students would probably need jabs first...
TBH on a good day the college is 35-40 minutes away and on a bad day (around one day a fortnight), you'd give up before arriving. I wish I was joking, though things are getting better slowly as the road improvements are getting finished at a glacial rate. And before the next set of 11,000 houses go in to increase the traffic problems back to where it was before the roads got fixed.

I wouldn't like to act as a teacher, I must admit - too rusty to be comfortable doing hedge laying in front of people who have never seen it done before. Last time I did proper hedge laying was 1989, so you see why I feel rusty.

Seeing that the nearest McVeigh-Parker suppliers was in Headcorn didn't surprise me at all - thanks for giving the link. The weald is where most serious agriculture is in Kent and Headcorn is smack bang in the middle of the weald. Agriculture on the dip slope of the North Downs in North Kent is almost a holding operation. How much can the soil be mined of nutrients before the land is sold off for houses? In 50-60 years at the current rate of house building North Kent City will extend in one mass of buildings from the M25 at Dartford to Canterbury, and north from the M2 to the coast. There are already houses on the wrong side of the sea defences at Conyer. (Yes, timber framed houses are on the sea side of the levee here: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3483694 ... FQAw%3D%3D The road runs on top of the levee/defense, and all the white houses are on the seaward side and at a really high storm surge I've seen seawater reaching the gates with ship outlines on them... Here's a view of the white houses from the wet side at low tide: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Swale ... FQAw%3D%3D)

In Devon I'd just pop into the nearest 'Mole Valley Farmers', the nearest to Combe Martin is South Molton.

Regards,

Richard

[Serinde]

Golly! I presumed the students would arrive with their own instructor!

Visiting my SIL & BIL last week, it's clear that the idea is to fill the Suffolk countryside east of Bury St Edmunds with houses all the way to Ipswich. The dolphins in the Orwell are in for a shock, as is the rest of the UK when there's no agricultural land to grown food on.

[Mabel Figworthy]

We've got a "Consultation meeting" tonight about our borough council's "preferred options" for future building. Besides several thousand houses to be built around our approx. 2500-house village (some of it on prime agricultural land) they are now also proposing filling one of the chosen sites with more warehouses to add to the enormous eye sores (much bigger than originally mentioned in the planning application) they've already built on some of our nice open fields. I predict heated exchanges tonight.....

[richardandtracy]

Good luck Mabel, hope it goes well and you get the results you want.

Regards,

Richard.

[Steam.Jo]

Welcome to the modern planning world Mabel.

Our local Town Bordon is having 17K extra houses added and it is already within a mile of my house. Have they done anything about expanding the Sewerage works that overflowed regularly before the houses were built to cope with the extra volume? No. Did they put in any new roads? Yes round the new estate but not to get too or from the Town to carry double the traffic they used to carry. They have had to put a new underground electricity supply to service the new houses = two years of closed roads and mayhem but none of the new houses are EV ready . The promised new shops have not been built so everyone has to drive 20 miles for their shopping. The local hospital has been knocked down and new houses built where it was, the replacement is planned to be some drop in treatment rooms in the not yet built shopping centre....

The government has now announced our local council has to build twice as many houses again. But where? They have spread that town out to the border of the National park and the council does not have planning authority in the same way over that land and it is owned/used by the MoD for training purposes.


As the locals cannot afford to buy the new houses they are being filled with people who were not born in the UK via a 40% discount from the Government which is probably cheaper than the Government paying for them to live in hotel rooms...

Jo

[Serinde]

17,000 houses??

[richardandtracy]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17K !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I do share your infrastructure concerns. There is little to no thought about water, sewage, electricity, gas (for a while), schools, busses, shops, doctors, hospitals. Just houses and ephemeral promises of affordable homes, play parks and other amenities, all of which evaporate before completion of the estates.

Regards,

Richard

[Steam.Jo]

Yes they are crammed everywhere and include those rip off retirement flats by the likes of McCarthy Stone. It was supposed to be a green town but that went as the number of houses required in the District went up. The old Army land is seen as fair game as it is brown field and has poorly maintained MoD Houses on it that they could be knocked down so they can cram in even more houses on the plots.

Where I used to live they started in 2000 building 70K houses and they are still going. With a falling birth rate one wonders where all the need is coming from.

Jo

[Roland]

Hello all. . I haven’t been here in a while.

We decided to buy season tickets to Mirvish, which is a group of theatres for live performances, mostly musicals. The season tickets are to the shows; MJ The Musical, Beautiful Noise, Shucked, The Outsiders, & Juliet, Tell Tale Harbour, and Some Like it Hot. Cost is about the cost of four shows.

They don’t start until around July though.

My sister-in-law and I decided to buy tickets to Lion King. Two days after ordering, I get an email that I can buy tickets, 2 for 1. Oh well! DH decided to buy 2 for 1 tickets to see Beetlejuice for our anniversary. (It’s a musical based on the original movie.)

And then, we have tickets to a baseball game too.

[Mabel Figworthy]

What a lot of lovely things to look forward to!

[fccs]

I almost bought tickets for & Juliet when it was down in Denver but my friend thought it sounded meh. Let me know how it is. I think it sounds super fun.

[Serinde]

We have had WEEKS of glorious sunshine. Also the usual cold nights for this time of year, hovering just the right side of freezing, but the days have been warm and hardly a breeze. Good thing, as our "little roof" (ie the one over the 1920s (we think) extension is being re-slated. Our blessed roofer (really, he is) has renewed wood battens, killed woodworm, and done some other jiggery-pokery with lead to make sure that water from the gable end actually flows OVER the new slates rather than underneath... (some cement put in god only knows when to do this job had separated itself from the sandstone). Some of the work, particularly renewing the Velux windows, was necessitated by storm Eowyn. But the lads who paint our house on an irregular basis have also (finally!) been able to get up to the gable apex to paint using the roofer's scaffolding. WIN-WIN!

Of course we all realise this is summer... and it'll be grey until September. Oh, and wet.

[Steam.Jo]

Well done for getting some trades people to do some work for you. I failed miserably to find someone to paint my kitchen for me and after a year had to do it myself, which took me two weeks All that stitching time wasted .

Jo

[richardandtracy]

We've had weeks of glorious cold dullness. When the sun comes out, it only warms up if you're out of the wind. Not fun.

Over the weekend I did more chainsaw gardening. Straight from the saw to the shredder. We're close to having as much firewood as we had before the winter. Just need time for it to dry.

Had another emergency call-out to MIL this morning. This time I got there after the ambulance. She woke up in a power cut and panicked because the lights were off.

Regards,

Richard

[Mabel Figworthy]

Glad to hear you are solidly roofed again Serinde!
Here the weather is gloriously sunny but not warm, which feels very incongruous. On Friday we're off to the family weekend (DH's side of the family) once again in the open two-seater as the saloon is still not ready, but it does have the advantage that you have views all round - in Wales the weekend before last it was wonderful seeing the kites fly overhead, sometimes quite low down.

[Serinde]

Did I mention that if it doesn't move, it's washed and on the line?