How to fix a garden hosepipe that was full of twists and kinks

I assume that lots of people already know how to do this, but I had to work it out for myself.

All you do is wait for a sunny day or two, lay out the hosepipe in the garden as straight as you can; remove twists and kinks by hand; stretch the bent bits; pin it down with stones if necessary etc.

Then just leave it for a day or two, hey presto, not 'good as new' but certainly much better and much easier to roll back into a coil.

How much moisture does wood lose when it dries out?

We once had a client who ran a facility for drying wood (to make wood chips for incinerators). I asked him how much lighter wood was after you'd let it dry out for a year, i.e. how much moisture it lost and he didn't appear to know.

So when I chopped down some leylandii branches a year ago, I weighed one chunk, marked the weight and date on it with felt-tip and tucked it at the bottom of the pile so I wouldn't burn it by mistake.

The results are in - original weight 2,107 grams; weight today 1,080 grams. In other words, it was nearly half moisture (it's still surprisingly heavy). I live and learn. I'll weigh it again in a year if it's still there.

Burning the sap from a cypress leylandii

Today I have been mostly...

... turning three old pallets into this. There's plenty more firewood in piles at the back (from a small tree we chopped down) but I can't be bothered schlepping it all over:

I am an extremely lucky bloke...

Today I have mostly been...

… removing a small jungle and a few last sad strips of rotting 'tar paper' from the roof of our shed and replacing it with two layers of 250 micron damp course. Let's see how long it lasts.






The gardening weather gods smiled on me, it was overcast but warmish, just right for this sort of job.

Just to cheer us all up after The Budget

Fun Online Polls: Snails & Christian countries

THe responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Have you ever thrown a snail into a neighbour's garden?

Yes - 41%
No - 28%
I don't do any gardening - 31%

Thanks for responding. that seems about right to me.

The Royal Horticultural Society society did a similar survey and only a fifth of gardeners said that they did. Maybe they did their survey face-to-face and people were somehow ashamed to admit it?
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This week's Fun Online Poll.

David Cameron made the claim, for reasons best known to himself, that England was a Christian country, which generated many acres of verbiage, response and counter-response, a fine example by Peter Hitchens here.

So that's the question: "Is England (still) a Christian country, and is that a good or a bad thing?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Girls Aloud & Garden snails

A low turnout but a high percentage of correct answers in last week's Fun Online Poll:

Which was not the title of a song or album by Girls Aloud?
Biology - 1 vote
Can't speak French - 1 vote
Chemistry - 0 votes
Deadlines and diets - 1 vote
Money - 1 vote
Pure maths with statistics - 30 votes
Whole lotta history - 1 vote
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According to the BBC:

A fifth of British gardeners have thrown snails over their neighbour's fence, according to a survey.

Some 22% of people questioned for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) said they had tossed a snail into their neighbour's garden, compared with 78% who said they had not.

Londoners were the worst culprits, with 30% admitting they had done it. Gardeners in Scotland were least likely, where 14% admitted they had thrown a snail over a garden fence.

Only a fifth? I thought everybody did it. My theory was, if there is a snail in my back garden, it must have come from a neighbour's garden, so all I am doing is returning it whence it came.

So let's see if we get the same responses here.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Easter Opening Times

Just going to throw this out there for debate...

Generally, I'm against bank and public holidays because they're a classic case of Bastiat's broken window fallacy - that you get a "free" day off, when in reality, someone has to pay for that and it's going to be the employee, so giving people a public holiday means either that someone gets less money or more realistically that they take a day off at a time when they'd rather not and creates uneven demand for roads, beaches, zoos with all sorts of bad effects.

But I do think that there's something useful about Xmas Day and Boxing Day in that it's a time when families get together, most people participate in it, and so they don't have to muck around booking time off as you have it by default. Two days means one day with his family, one day with hers.

When it comes to Easter I don't think it has that for most people, though. Where Xmas has become a time of merriment, a time for family and pushed out nearly all the Christian aspect and become universal, Easter really is more something for the Christians, who represent a rather small percentage of the population. Today is just Sunday for me - bacon sandwiches, roast dinner with the family, play Minecraft with the kids, watch The Man in the White Suit. And for most of my extended family, the same is true. It's just like any other Sunday, except I can't go and buy some plants for the garden.