Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Wind is getting up around here.

You've been stocking up on baked beans again, haven't you, Bob? It's perishing cold here with a beautiful crescent moon in the sky. G'night, fight fans, I've got a zombie novel to finish reading.........

greenbee

You've got a moon? We've got rain again... my footbridge is about to disappear under water, and my drive bridge has very little clearance. The watermeadows at the back (behind my neighbours) are flooded, so I think I'll probably be surrounded by a moat soon...

Karmacat

Stay safe, greenbee, and everyone else affected by the floods.

mardatha

Hope this makes TPTB do something instead of sitting on their fat back ends poring over balance sheets. Trouble with privatisation is that they don't want to spend any money, they just want to hang onto it. Absolutely shocking the state the south west is in - it's like a third world country.
Been a bit stormy up here tonight and I woke at 4am with a dream that I was sitting in the desert alongside a chest freezer which was plugged into a bush. Don't ask cos I don't know! :rotfl::rotfl:

GreyQueen

Mar, you're weird, woman. What make of freezer? If if runs on shrubbery, I wants me one of those.

I dreamed that I peered around my bedroom curtain in the small hours and saw a police car parked up by a neighbour's flat. The polis do cruise into our carpark and lurk several times most nights, stay for a couple of minutes and then go. This is because there has either just been a crime here, or will be a crime shortly, so they try to get lucky.

So, nothing unusual to dream-me, so dropped curtain and back to sleep after checking time (3 am). Then there was a kerfuffle about 4 am and dream-me peered out and thought It's very light for 4 am in February. There were police searching the shrub beds, lots of them, looking for a knife. Then suddenly it was full light, there was a truculent community service type person being made to do our gardening and being supervised by police and there was a knife like a kitchen devil veg knife outside my flat. It was now about 10 am!

Sheesh, woke in a lather that I had overslept on a workday but it was still not quite half-six. At least it wasn't as bad as the fever dream I had when had a bad cold and I was being eaten alive by my bedroom walls.

charlies-aunt

The weather is getting very dire - up here the fields flooded in early December remain water logged and the grain and potato crops are dead.


Definitely time to start stocking up with food as food prices will be shooting up this year as more and more will have to be imported


Is it just me??? I cannot understand why the Government doesn't stop millions of pounds of aid being sent abroad and divert the funds to our own emergency flooding areas here?


Maybe this is too simplistic - but surely it would make sense to get our troops out of far flung war zones and back into the UK to help and assist our own citizens?


....I'll get me coat......

mardatha

Well that's too sensible for the govt isn't it!! God helpus pet, you're crediting them with something they haven't got lol - a working brain cell!

GreyQueen

charlies-aunt, I'm confused. Know winter wheat is in, but surely the spuds haven't been planted this early? Or are they spuds still in the ground from last year?

If the fields remain waterlogged it'll be a grim planting season. Ag equipment is blimming heavy, we're not talking little ole grey Fergie tractors these days. I've nearly been marmalised on the roads by humungous things more suited to the prairies of Canada and USA. They look like things which have escaped from a SF movie.

Bearing in mind that tatties are the staple starcy food here in the UK, anything which drives their prices up will be felt in just about every household in the land.

My lottie is on a site which is silty soil over sand, near the top of a sloping hill now, but would have originally been a river bed. Very populated with amphibians even to this day. Weekend before last, I walked up the grassed path and it squelched. Never known that before, it's very free-draining up there and dries out quickly.

It's tipping it down here today. At the weekend, I was higher up the river and could see that the levels were very high, although the flow through the city centre is regulated somewhat. Environment Agency had my 'hood down as at moderate flood risk, but if it did flood, it would be severe. The joys of living near a river.

[Deleted User]

I really think that if this weather pattern is going to be what we always have from now on that the days of the mega farm are numbered precisely because the means of working them are too big and heavy to be used when the ground IS waterlogged. I rather think what might happen will be using the smaller and higher standing fields and parcels of land to grow smaller amounts but in multiple places and perhaps going back to smaller tractors etc will mean we can still produce enough food to sustain the nation. Also maybe valuing hill farmers enough to pay them a living for the hardy stock that they can raise on the land that is not good for anything else but is still useable because it's dry. Then, if there are shortages people might, feasibly, start to perceive the wisdom of trying to provide some of their own food by using gardens etc to grow crops. Maybe it'll take a while for the penny to drop but as they say Hunger is the best sauce isn't it? Lyn xxx.

mardatha

Is all upland and hill farms here, mainly sheepies and some beef coos, no dairy. So don't suppose the farmers up here will notice much diff, just a wee bit wetter milder winter. But down there is where they grow food so we will all soon know about it.