Today I did something in my Garden

Spent the afternoon battling ground elder in the garden. My hands are in bits.

Can't quite believe this is the last "teen day" of April already! :eek:

Spent the weekend wearing out a bearing on my belt sander then fixing it (maybe - will put it to the test later). Currently building a pallisade fence for the West Bank of my herb garden. First task: knock the nails out of the hundred pieces of salvaged wood to be used; second task, cut a 7.5° slope on the top of each one to encourage rainwater (hah! as if ... :rolleyes: ) to run off the endgrain; third task, stick them together.



Four 1.25m sections there, three more out of shot, that'll divide the bank into two levels. If the sander works/keeps working, I'll sand them this morning and stain the fronts; and inspired by other contributions, I'm going to char the bottoms and the back, where it'll be in contact with the soil.

And for a bit of lighter exercise, sowed the next lot of bedding plants in plugs: petunias, "magic carpet", lobelia, marigolds, sunflowers, delphinium, zinnia and cornflowers.

looksee wrote: »

I had not taken on board comments about charring, would it give protection from contact with damp?

The supposed benefit (based on its use in ancient times in Europe and still today in the Far East) is that charring creates a tough water resistant/repellant layer on the outside of the burnt wood. There are (according to my cursory recent reading on the subject) all kinds of variables, not least of which are the type of wood and the wetness of the soil into which it is driven, but by and large charred wood lasts longer than "chemical" treatments. Does it retain its strength? I'll let you know in ten years, as I'm also going to use it on some 2.4m posts that'll mark the back of my new terraced bed!

Currently having an early lunchbreak. The sander worked ... for about ten minutes. Then started spitting orange sparks out of the motor. Did a quick hand-sand to remove the worst of the dirt and too-colourful sub-contractor's marks; the rest will have to be "character" if it shows through the stain. :rolleyes:

SnowyMuckish wrote: »

Horrible stuff! We have it under our hedgerow, how did you tackle it? I haven’t attempted to remove mine yet. If it stays where it is I’ll live with it, but got a suspicion it’ll make its way into the garden!

Not sure whether it's recommended but I'm digging it out.

looksee wrote: »

Lidl do an inexpensive flame thrower sometimes, I have one though I struggle to find a use for it. Works fine (terrifies me )

That's exactly what I used, thinking that it'd at least be better at charring wood than killing weeds (for which it's pretty useless, at least in my courtyard )

It does the job of charring, but I think a proper flame thrower - or at least a plumber's blow torch - would be more efficient on account of working with higher pressure.

Other uses for it - great for setting fire to a bonfire of brambles on a windy day when your matches keep blowing out before you get them to the starting point! I'm told they're very good for starting barbecues, but I gave up having BBQs years ago.

Yet to be proven, I think waving it around my winter-sown lettuce greatly reduced the incidence of slug-attack, either by killing the infant slugs in the soil or simply by cooking the soil in that area and making it unpleasantly itchy for the slugs to slither over ... In any case, I'll try it again next autumn.

hirondelle wrote: »

i'm intrigued- you are in France but don't do BBQs- may I ask why?

You may ask! Various reasons, the main one being inconvenience. If the day's catering is for (low) single digits, it's more trouble than it's worth to find fuel, get it all set up, wait for the fire to be "just right", then cook a small amount of food on it and have to supervise it for the rest of the evening. If catering for large numbers, then the person/people doing the cooking can't be at the table.

Probably because I'm in France, our meals contain relatively small amounts of hot cooked meat, and the menu is based on what food is being served, not a single means of cooking. In the fifteen years I've been here, I've never been to dinner anywhere where anyone's used a barbecue. Spit-roasted whole sheep or pig over an open fire, yes - all the time! - but no barbecues.

Way back in our first year, I did build one (recycled an old, defunct, range-style cooker that was in the kitchen. It got used for cooking that first year, and ever since has been relegated to being a place to rest stuff when trying to get to the stuff behind! :pac:

In the fullness of time, I'll replace it with a proper outdoor kitchen - gas hob, electric oven, fridge and sink. That'll allow us to keep the heat out of the house in the summer months, especially when preparing food for storage (jams, chutneys, pickles, par-boiled veg prior to freezing, etc.

Gaspode wrote: »

I had the same with a hoe this week - I drilled in the biggest screw I could find and then levered it out with a claw hammer. A lot of hard work!

Totally by chance I recently saw a "Repair Shop" video on just this subject, where the guy first centre-punched the rivets, then drilled them out. He next put the tool, it was a shovel, in a vice, and using a hammer and a short length of timber (about six inches of broom-handle, or similar), he just tapped out the remaining stub of handle. He then test-fitted the new handle and used a sharp chisel and a spokeshave to reshape the generic tapered end to the curvature required for it to fit in the shank of the shovel. He finished off securing it with two large galvanised screws of the requisite length, having first pilot-drilled, so as not to split the timber.

If you are not equipped with sharp chisels, a bench vice and a spokeshave you may have to improvise,but do make the effort, because I can tell you from previous experience that not adapting the handle to fit snugly will result in a shovel/ hoe, or whatever, with a wobbly head.