Mark Livett

Welcome!

I have a couple of books on coppicing but I am finding it very hard to translate what I am reading into actual practice, I have lots of questions but most of them are probably already answered in the books I have already got so I will lurk in the threads and see what I can learn in small chunks!

Denise Cares wrote:What is the proper type glue to use to bond styrofoam to other surfaces like metal and concrete? I would like to use some pieces to insulate a garage door and the inside lower walls of greenhouse. Based on several comments here, it seems that would work.  I experimented with Elmer's and wood glue but both dissolve the styrofoam. How thick would it need to be for any appreciable insulating capacity? I guess a thin sheet can be glued to another sheet and so on till desired thickness is reached.  Nice to see there are ways to re-use this material. It takes up space and can be rather messy when broken due to static electricity.

PVA glue does not melt the polystyrene. It is a decent enough bond if not too much load is put on it.

If you want to increase the insulation you can always glue on a layer of aluminium foil to each side.

How viable are the seeds if you scrape them off a loaf of bread?

I know that they have been cooked in an oven.

The only reason I ask is because my old landlord told me that he had poppies growing in the back garden where I used to feed the birds (with poppy seed bread). He never mentioned sesame plants growing. He did like the poppies but wanted to know if he was going to get a visit from the police.

I held off joining last year as I wanted to finish some other projects so I could devote more time to study around the topics.

Hopefully there will be a course this year.

Get a desk top diary and start writing everything you do into it, when you plant, what you plant, what the weather is like, what soil improvements you have made. Then write in what you need to do and the date on which it needs to be done.

I add seasol, a seaweed extract, and charlie carp to my various pots. Some you add weekly, some you add every two weeks until the growing season starts, some you do monthly for trees but weekly for lawns. So I write it all down and then I go through the diary and I write in when the next dose is required. So now I don't have to remember when I last treated the pots or the trees or the lawn, I just turn to this week's pages and I can see what needs to be done.

I know how much easier it is to show my wife a 3D model of a house that you can zoom around rather than just putting a plan in front of her. She can't look at a plan and make anything out of it.

Here is something I put together for an education centre


I used a free online program (Sweet home 3D) that allowed you to upload a plan of the house and then using the plan you can add all the walls etc. on top.

It isn't as nice as the one you designed but it did the job.

However before that happenned a lot of planning went on, a lot of changes and a lot consultation.

We didn't have the luxury of tracing paper, so all I did was get a piece of graph paper with the outline of the building and all the things I couldn't move, like the lifts and the columns etc. I laminated that and used an erasable marker to draw in all the walls, anything I liked I scanned in to the computer and emailed to my boss. I think it took about 20 designs just to get the basic layout of the rooms and after that we kept tweeking bits here and there. The place is built now and other than a few material choices that were out of my hands it is pretty much working the way I hoped it would.

The temptation is to go straight to the 3D model because that feels like you are progressing and pretty much finished, however as a tool for designing it was not much good, though if you want to sell the idea to someone, they will spend more time looking at the pretty presentation than actually giving you any useful feedback.

When I saw the topic I thought this was going to be some sort of rabbit containment system to stop them escaping.

An island in the middle of the lake which you can row over to and bag a bunny for dinner.

This is much better.

I was just concerned about using too many neem leaves which would make the whole thing toxic to all life forms it comes into contact with but you have already put my mind at ease regarding that. I just didn't want to start pouring the equivalent of bleach on my garden.

I will give it a try once Summer gets here and the tree starts growing.

Thanks for the idea.