Preparedness for when

RAS

mardatha wrote: »

Am I the only peasant in here who doesn't know what a fig tastes like and has never even knowlingly seen one??? sob

In much of Europe they are peasant food, mar. Remember walking round a part abandoned village in Italy where the figs had grown out of control and seeded all over the place like weeds.

Only really eaten them fresh from the tree when friends asked me to join them in France one year and there was a tree in the garden.

However, one of my friends here discovered a tree laden with unwanted fruit a few hundred yards from home last year and I want to get a cutting. Definately not a thing for the allotment though nor possibly for you; 2010 reduced them to brown sticks.

PS, they sometimes turn up YS in one of the local supermarkets but not the same as freshly picked.

Si_Clist

On the subject of log stores, here's our main shed as built ...





before the nice new square-section water butt got some sun on it, warmed up, then in a few days turned itself into a more-or-less round water butt, and before I added the first extension to it.

It's 12ft x 8ft, home made from mainly new timber, and it cost us around £500 maybe 5 years ago. Since then we've built an additional 530 cubic feet of log storage for a total cost of less than £20, mainly from timber and scaffold poles scrounged from building sites and skips.

In the winter, we keep the rain off by hanging "curtains" made of scrounged polycarbonate conservatory roof panels in front of the logs. Not pretty, but it works

jk0

Si_Clist wrote: »

On the subject of log stores, here's our main shed as built ...





before the nice new square-section water butt got some sun on it, warmed up, then in a few days turned itself into a more-or-less round water butt, and before I added the first extension to it.

It's 12ft x 8ft, home made from mainly new timber, and it cost us around £500 maybe 5 years ago. Since then we've built an additional 530 cubic feet of log storage for a total cost of less than £20, mainly from timber and scaffold poles scrounged from building sites and skips.

In the winter, we keep the rain off by hanging "curtains" made of scrounged polycarbonate conservatory roof panels in front of the logs. Not pretty, but it works

Crikey, you guys have incredibly neat log stores. My logs aren't even the same length, so my log pile is somewhat messy.

Si_Clist

jk0 wrote: »

Crikey, you guys have incredibly neat log stores. My logs aren't even the same length, so my log pile is somewhat messy.

Ahah, those are bought-in logs, so they're all 10" give or take, and it's a doddle to stack them neatly when you're building against a flat wall, up from level ground

I'm not posting any snaps of the other log stores, which are full of odds and sods ...

GreyQueen

:T Serious shed envy going on here. Lovely set up, makes my ISP (Inner Saxon Peasant) go all cosy.

Computer Wiz has been and gone. I now have two power units; the new one in the tower and the old one on the rug. I also have the computer tower reconfigured slightly as it used to be DVD-CD-blanking plate and is now blanking plate-DVD-CD. On account of the new power unit's cables not quite reaching the back of the drives in their original position.

We also chortled over and then vacuumed out a lot of fluff which was behind the fascia of the tower. Oh, the shame of it. The Wiz has now trotted off to the pub with his beer money. He's got a couple of daze (sic) at his homestead then off to work again in Forn Parts (near Wales, I've heard).

I asked about the XP issue and he's betting that when some techies from companies paying for additional support for XP get their first patches on the paid-for arrangement, they'll cross check to make sure that there's nothing incorporated which links them uniquely to the company which paid for them, and if there isn't, he can see them smacked up on the interwebs toot de sweet.

jk0

Not sure I understood why you were changing your power supply GQ. Had it been causing trouble?

GreyQueen

jk0 wrote: »

Not sure I understood why you were changing your power supply GQ. Had it been causing trouble?

The fan was making a helluva racket and opening up the power unit revealed that there was a badly-domed capacitor about to blow in there. The fan was pimped with WD40 and could have gone on indefinately, but that thingummy wasn't going to last long. This is a 2002 computer. Whole job plus part was £25 so pretty pleased.

Disappointingly, it doesn't go any faster but it certainly is quieter now. At least it didn't have a dead mouse inside, which is what the Wiz once encountered in one of them. It'd got in and then electrocuted itself.

They probably tell legends of Marco Polo Mouse, who ventured to explore where no mouse had ever ventured before and was never seen again by all his mousekin.

Frugalsod

Si_Clist wrote: »

Ahah, those are bought-in logs, so they're all 10" give or take, and it's a doddle to stack them neatly when you're building against a flat wall, up from level ground

I'm not posting any snaps of the other log stores, which are full of odds and sods ...

Are you concerned that wood thieves/rustlers will find it on Google earth?

How long would that lot last? Do you break some up further to start the fires or do you get kindling for that?

GreyQueen

I'm guessing it'd just read as a shape from Google Earth. I know when I look at my allotment site on their, things I know to be sheds show as rectangles and some other things I know not to be sheds look similar.

Besides, a lot of the pix are years out of date, mine show my lottie in pre-2008 fettle. Dad pulls my leg about it from time to time, implying I haven't done anything on the plot...........

I'd be a bit more concerned with Streetview. We use it a lot at work for poking around our city when answering customers' enquiries. Lotsa details on there.

But not of my flat. You can't see the Towers from Streetview as you can't drive right up to it. You can see us on Google Earth, I have a printout from it. Good to know what the homestead looks like from the air in case I ever need to land my microlight on the roof. Or something equally bizarre. I like looking at places from above, it's all a part of my map fixation. I can navigate around the city by using the tall buildings if necessary. Tower blocks may not have the romance of The Angel of the North but if you know which ones you're looking at, and at what point on the compass they stand, you can pinpoint exactly where you are.

ETA Oooh, found a fab new-to-me site http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com

Incredible variery of stuff. You wanna make a sweater for a bald chicken? A power supply bike from a washing machine? Firestarters? PVC bows? Beware, if you wander in you may be gone for some time.

Si_Clist

Frugalsod wrote: »

Are you concerned that wood thieves/rustlers will find it on Google earth?

How long would that lot last? Do you break some up further to start the fires or do you get kindling for that?

It's not visible from the street and besides there's no vehicular access to it, so removing it down the side of the house and across the front thereof would be a very slow job indeed. Fraught too, as the house is very rarely unoccupied at any time :cool:

Very difficult to say how long that lot would last as it's all down to which woodstove we're burning on any given day and how long for. I'd hazard a guess that it's something in the region of two winter months whole-house heating + some hot water and some cooking.

We don't split it up for kindling, we use pallet wood for that, scrounged from building sites and skips and sawn up into 6 inch-ish lengths ready for chopping. It's a real PITA cutting up the pallets, but it's free wood