Michael Cox

We have loads of wild blackberry patches near us. For the past few years I have been going out in spring and trimming back the canes to encourage both better fruit setting, and to make it easier to pick.

Wild blackberries send up huge, long thick stems. The following year the side branches on these bear the fruit. If the long stems are trimmed back to about 3ft high, the fruiting side branches will be easily accessible and the fruit set heavier. It also makes it easier to do later winter pruning. 15 minutes with secateurs now, on a wild blackberry patch, can make a big difference later.

I do this long boundary fence lines in particular, where they grow against walls, and along field boundaries.

I missed a few comments here! Glad you enjoyed era 2. I really liked them, but the tone is very different from Era 1. Steris is brilliant.

Re the newspapers - there are some tiny titbits in there if you are observant, and have some awareness of wider cosmere lore. Not essential to the main story line.

I also anticipated the ending, although not the actual detail, but felt like it really did do justice to the characters' overall story.

Megan Palmer wrote:@tereza when you eventually manage to get your scarlet runners to grow, leave the plants in the ground, they are perennials and will come back again.

I've tried this here in the UK with no success. Once I tried heavy mulch in situ - no joy, they seemed to rot in the soil. A second time I lifted them once they had died back and stored them in the cold and dry, wrapped in newspaper. No joy there either.

I'm sticking with seeds until someone comes up with a hardy variety selected for overwintering potential.

I think this is climate specific - when I have mulched heavily with either woodchips or chop and drop I have had slug plagues. Our climate is damp and it just sets up for a slug explosion.  I'm trying to be more discerning now. In some situations it works brilliantly for me, like comfry around fruit trees, but around more tender/vulnerable plants or seedlings it is bad news.

Yes, absolutely. I'm a teacher. I could pick up online tutoring at somewhere between £40 and £80 per hour, which I could do from a comfortable heated office. I could easily pay for all my food just with a few extra hours of that - far fewer hours than growing it myself, and much less effort.

I don't grow food because of the time; I grow food because I like the process or gardening, like spending time outside and moving and away from my desk, and like bringing fresh produce in to cook immediately for dinner.

Could I set up more efficient "lazy" systems? Maybe. But getting to that point would require a bigger upfront investment of effort/materials etc... instead I'lljust keep plodding making incremental changes.

Take a look at this pruning technique to drastically increase fruit yield. I'm trying it this year with my mulberries.

You need to clarify what you mean by "safe".

Safe for the person handling it?
Safe for the longevity of the pipe work?
Safe for the biological systems downstream?

We live in a very hard water area. Toilets form hard and thick deposits of limescale in a matter of weeks. Our water has insanely high calcium carbonate levels. We choose to use strong hydrochloric acid to dissolve limescale. It needs care to handle safely for the user. But the end products once it has reacted with the limescale and been diluted with the water are benign - just calcium chloride and water with a marginally lower pH.

Reducing silt inflow certainly does help, in the sense that it delays the inevitable. The problem is that most large-volume reservoirs are in steep landscapes - because of the shape of the land and the presence of rainfall make for cost-effective investments - and those environments are by definition highly erosional. I would suggest that the majority of reservoirs are likely supplied by fast flowing mountain streams and rivers rather than meandering rivers in floodplains as seen that that image. I think that is likely the case in the UK at least, based on the dams I have seen.

I think the general answer is... only when either the cost to continue using it is too high, or a better alternative comes along.

The key term here is "willingly" I think. Many specific technologies get legislation passed to restrict them - I'm not sure that this counts as "willingly". For example, many countries have laws that restrict or ban technologies because their environmental impacts are too severe. Short of the legislation the companies/individuals benefiting from the technology would usually be delighted to carry on. It's the classic case of "the tragedy of the commons" where the cost is born by the wider community, but the profit is in the hands of those who exploit it. Everyone has an incentive to run an extra cow on the common land, even if that makes the land overgrazed and unproductive.

Other examples given above - like use of nuclear weapons - are also not really "willingly". They are agreements that have been reached due to international treaties, where huge amounts of political pressure have been a factor.

On the "what is better" angle - "better" is highly subjective. There was a comment above about societies abandoning agriculture. I haven't read that literature but I might suggest that it was "better" for their circumstances.

One specific case I do know of where societies have abandoned technologies is in early human history. So communities - particularly those living on islands or otherwise remote populations - lost their technology over subsequent generations. The theory was that a certain population size is needed to maintain skills and specialisation, and when populations were too small technological innovation stopped or went backwards. The book "The Rational Optimist" explores these ideas (I have issues with some of the authors conclusions about more modern events).

r ranson wrote:Bump

Wasn't me this time! Yay!

Thanks to all the mods etc... for a wonderful venue for sensible chat