Processing the Harvest

Veg isn't always perfect, but it's still veg

Happy Christmas all :santa clap:

 

Bad filming, but should be contrast from the expected spring explosion.



And I got more chicken fence up, and shortly we are off on a Christmas drive to see a bit of decorations.

 

Colne, There are a hundred chickens in the Crypt of St Pancreas, I wish you could see the show, an installation by someone who is fascinated by their hybridization, and then, one of the plinths in Trafalgar square holds a giant blue rooster.

 

Hi sesame, chickens.....


Zigs, quick thing in your admin role; I seem to have run off the fourth regular person at this thread - not that I am bothered, scroll wheels exist for those who need them, but I am sure I will not become less provocative because I did not know I was being so; raising Christianity at Christmas and all. I know spring will bring on some JS Mill Utilitarianism versus Leibniz Best of all Possible arguments on carpet bombing - and law of unintended consequences involving black plague and slavery, or quite likely even Goodwin's law and the Frankfurt school......... or whatever, I do ramble here. So if it is time for me to move on let me know, doesn't bother me.
And I understand if GC is not really about the way this thread has headed, and as a carpenter my talking of philosophy must be appallingly sophomoric to any who know about such things, and dreary to those who do not care.

And so chickens and fish - the winter compost pile seems a bit squalid looking as the chickens run about on it for scraps (never anything from a plate, only food leftovers which are untouched - or made just for them or fish caught for them or fresh garden veg scraps). But if I had panned around you could see it is in beautiful, forest. One of the depressing kind of youtube videos are homesteaders as lost people with their chickens in makeshift pens, and dug over lands all about, trying to grub out a self sufficient living. I watched a mature Frenchman in Costa Rica or where ever giving a whole fish he had found to his chickens and talking of natural living and thought OMG, I hope I never end up like that. The point of these Christmas videos is to show winter gray as it will just go wild in the burgeoning Spring, well and to see the animals in winter.

So, chickens, too many of them really, but I can remedy that anytime.

 

You can talk about what you like within reason Colne, but with so many members on the forum, don't be surprised if some of us don't agree with what you say, that's why we have forums, to interact, otherwise we might just as well be reading a book

Just had a look back to the begining of this thread, i'm still eating some of the stuff I mentioned in the first few posts

 

OK Zigs, I just thought if GC would prefer gardening topics be stuck to I should move on wile it is winter and the beginning. Now it the interesting time, the grey and bare time - like Wizard of Oz, and it will soon burst into colour. If I needed to move to 'Urban 75', or such site I should definitely like to do I before the gardens get running. Zigs, I notice this thread gets views - what are those? Just non-members wandering by?

I did not get around to mentioning it, but Christmas day I opened the mailbox which had gotten a delivery the day prior - and there was a bank statement, a card from my parents, and a Jury Summons. I have been summoned for jury half a dozen times but only got selected once. Here a couple times the needed numbers of jurors are called and the attorneys on both sides ask a couple questions and strike off any that may go against what they want. Many have said the most important part of a trial is picking the jurors and usually someone who sounds sharp is struck by the defence attorney.

So January I have my own trial, where I plead not guilty on the ticket for the undersized fish, and jury duty, a week apart. And, was why I was interested in the Magna Carta. Henry the II started the jury trial in Britain, around 1200 (Magna C was 1215 as I am sure you all remember from school) as a way of getting people to select their trial be held in the Royal Courts he had just established, and he wanted to be popular, as a way of taking more power from the Barons; who made their own law and delivered their own justice. Any person of importance was then given the privilege of being tried in a Royal circuit court by a jury of their peers. They liked the Jury of peers option, naturally. By the way, this is from Frankish law - the Jury; which Henry borrowed from the Crolingians.

The Barons used trial by ordeal - where one carried a red hot iron bar, and if burnt were guilty - trial by combat - the winner won, - or before the Baron or his judge and they asked their questions of you and witnesses and passed judgement - even 'pressing' was used to determine guilt (torture by weights placed on your chest - one pled guilty to stop it, or died horribly, attempting to prove their innocence.)(no lawyers back then). Henery II's jury trials were very popular naturally, and so the Royal government was now to make more laws, and judge them - and so all of us in the Anglosphere have Juries. (my ticket will just be herd by a judge in Magistrates Court - where evictions and small claims, and traffic tickets are heard).

 

And so I switched to Firefox because it was running slowly in Explorer and:

It is storming out! I heard you are getting it in England too. Lightning hit a tree right by by house which is an amazing blast, shakes the house, and rain was hacking down - but I got up at 7 a.m. to pull the boat out of the water, it was half full by earlier rains, so pumped it out and winched it onto the dock - my winch system works excellently!



And planted: onions all over, beets, romaine lettuce, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, chard, and dug up a Kioa blackberry I had made by burying the end of a running branch, which rooted, so cut it free and planted it into one of the good sized raised planters in my lawn.

This late spring I had bought 4 loquat tree seedlings at the children's plant sale for $1 each. Now they are a foot and a half tall and I planted two along my road. At 10 a.m. the expected rain started.

 

You could start another thread in off topic discussion if you'd like, something like the world according to Colne/ Colne's World, party time, excellent or something

We talk about all sorts on GC

The view count is visits to the thread by members, non members and spybots

 

Still, you gotta laugh

 

Spybots? I am very aware of all kinds of fauna even a passing knowledge of mythological and apocryphal ones, but have not kept up with e-parasites. Tell us about those.

A lovely warm day, wet, and now very foggy, 3:30 p.m. The bayou is a grey mud colour, right now cormorants and grebes swimming about - but today there were great blue herons, great egrets, osprey, and circling chicken hawks. I have not even let my birds out as it was supposed to keep storming - only has stopped, but I am having a pot of coffee.

My jobs are to finish the chicken fence, it needs a door made and framed with the 12 foot gap remaining wired close. The 6 foot tall, 140 foot circumference fence is done, enclosing a bit of woods for them to go out into till late in the afternoon, then they can then go free completely - but late enough that they will not stray so far as my un-fenced gardens, fruits, and flowers.

Next I want to build a rifle range in the woods to keep up my shooting. I am keeping my friend's (the one who's Chihuahuas we keep, Weasel and Lexie) top of the line pellet gun, a $400 one, very accurate, so I should shoot again. I was highly skilled with guns once, and expect I have not lost it too badly. Also my wife should shoot, I taught her basic shooting and I imagine that is gone now. I will just need scrap lumber and a couple hundred pounds of sand to make the pellet trap, and some kind of bench and table. I have a German RWS high quality pellet pistol that I have shot, probably, a hundred rats with - but no longer use it at all, which is a shame because any skill we have is bad to lose from being lazy.

And I picked up a 700 gallon per minute pond pump very cheap so am thinking very seriously of putting in a soaking pool on top of one of the pond spoil pile hills. I think 12 foot long, 6 foot wide, 2 - 4 foot deep. Have water plants in half of it as a bio-filter, then a under water seating spot for 2; like a hot tub, because the summer water is almost hot here. The snag is the pond liner is $150 and I have to be careful with money. Then the pump would circulate from the pond (at 8 foot lift from the pond the gpm is down to about 300, but still is a fair flow). Then trickle water falls back into the pond. Be pretty nice. Give me a chance to make some interesting features. I am good with concrete - I have a proper cement mixer and have made many, many thousands of pounds of concrete.........but best stick with the plastic pond liner I guess, be cheaper and easier, and easy to remove if wished.

The building the drop hammer and driving a steel well point another 45 foot (my existing well is 45 ft deep) has a snag, the heads are too big to go down my exiting 2 inch plastic well casing. Cost another thing, $240 minimum for steel pipe and a cheap well point. But then there is a chance I could get good well water, which would be nice - be 80 - 90 foot deep and good water is at 150 foot typically here - but that is for excellent water, and I just would like good. The money would be well spent on that I would guess. My well water is good for the gardens and pond and that is all.

Plenty of things I should do. Also I have some land to clear...............

 

So in a bit we will get the tools together and make a door for the chicken fence, cut the hatch in the side of the chicken house and make a door so the birds can go to their yard and back inside as they wish. I am thinking of a hatch with a sliding vertical door. Then a pulley above and a string outside so the door can be lifted, and then at night, closed, without having to open the actual hen house main door. They try to squeeze past and escape if you open the main door wile not wanting them loose.

And wile the tools are out, build the pellet trap and put it in the woods. I am considering making a bench as well, instead of using some junk seating which one can pick up on the side of the road on garbage days. I have some 4 inch X 4 inch pressure treated fence posts I picked up and that would look less obnoxious in the forest than some plastic things.

I dislike doing carpentry - which, being a carpenter, is not good - but should make myself take the effort. We have some piles of scrap lumber we pick up from construction sites where the old stuff that has been wrecked out and is left to be thrown away. I do almost all my projects with this. I would love to be able to buy proper marine treated lumber but it is very expensive - so just worry about replacing whatever when it rots because then I can use free wood.


I also have a leaking roof to fix :( as I discovered from this rain - my library. Drat, but it is too wet to tackle today

Yesterday I planted a silvia and delphinium and lantana on the hill. As I go about my gardens I realize what a mess they are from absolutely zero planning - just find a plant marked down %75, buy one and stick it in. I have too many plants - and so many are planted in the wrong conditions as well. The lantana I put in wet soil; but that is where I had a space, next to the swamp hydrangea and persimmon on the pond side. Like the peach tree ($3) I put in solid clay, in mostly shade, which has died - I think - I just was trying it for want of somewhere better.

The hundreds of daffodils I bought for %75 off; I am down to a couple left, for in front of the house. Now I have 7 good iris corms I need to find a spot for. Does anyone else have a bad habit of buying stuff and then having to squeeze it in somewhere? Most British gardens are so nice one thinks they plan them. You certainly get a better garden for it - but that is not something that is natural to me; planning.


I have a bag of these we collected and need planting, they are leafing out:

 

You can see them here Colne http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/online/

They crawl your posts picking up on keywords, indexing them and then reporting them back to the search engines that sent them, then ultimately to the CIA & other security agencies, so if you were talking about explosives, bombs or catching undersized fish they'd know about it pretty quickly

 

Amazing! But I have no bothers about CIA, or even weird stalkers, but am aghast at the amount of data being vacuumed up by these robots! In the thirty minutes shown on your site this thread was hit by robots half a dozen times; they must be really fascinated by me - my mentioning of Afghanistan (where I have trout fished) must be like catnip to them. I mostly post here to have a place my parents can visit to see what my garden is up to when someone is visiting them and opens the site for them. (my mother has an antiquated apple which is so hard to use she does not log on anymore, although their wi-fi is still working.)

There is one site I do occasionally talk of Eastern politics on that is likely solid robots - incredible.

 

You mentioned the A word, christianity, islam, judism, mao, stalin and a German RWS high quality pellet pistol.



I bet they love you

Recon even GCHQ will be listening

 

How do these bots work? Is each post a draw to them, or do they just view threads constantly? If a thread sits idle do they completely leave it alone? I just had a quick look at views/posts and it seems 15 to 25 views per post is almost universal across all threads, with some getting 100 in exceptional threads like the one on capsicums.

The future is getting kind of weird - you being an exobotonist, is this why the huge SETI array cannot find life out there? Because alien life forms got too technologically advanced to handle it? Is Moore's law going to do for us? Soon recognition software will be able to identify every human as they walk past any linked camera, or drive past one. That will make life wrecking Facebook posts seem almost casual. I have been around a lot of criminals, groups were small crime is just an aspect of living, what will become of them, the unemployable underclass when crime cannot be gotten away with? Cash is phasing out and stuff can be watched and tracked as people can. Maybe like '1984' the slums and its occupants will be allowed their lawless life for reasons that are not apparent, reservations virtually.

Do you remember from algebra - asymptotes? Where the progress of a curve increases to infinity, but not quit infinity, but pretty much infinity. 1/x



That is computing and equipment progress, exponential on steroids. There is an inconceivable curve and it has just begun its vertical approach.

But I built the door, and the pellet trap, expect pictures.