Priya Mattison

correct, and that is a feature. it is the only way you find out what the annual discount is costing you when annuals are half your base.

Slight disagreement with the buy-mid-tier consensus. If your alternative is running all-seasons because winters are out of budget, a cheap winter tyre is still a large safety improvement in the conditions it is designed for. Ideal is better, but do not let this thread talk you into another winter on all-seasons because you cannot reach CAD 1,100.

They optimise for different things and the bundle is a real argument. Mullvad's pitch is the account model: a random account number, no email required, flat EUR 5 a month with no tiers or upsells, and five devices. If you already pay for a mail suite, the marginal cost of the tunnel in that bundle is small and switching means paying twice for overlapping things. I run Mullvad because I like the billing model, not because the packets arrive differently.

Water the soil, not the plant, and the whole timing argument mostly evaporates. I run a soaker hose under the mulch on a cheap tap timer and the leaves never get wet at all, so it genuinely does not matter to me whether it runs at 6am or 10pm. That said, if you are standing there with a hose and a rose fitting after dark, you are wetting foliage that will stay wet for eight hours, which is worth avoiding for reasons other than powdery mildew. The timer is a good buy regardless, mine paid for itself in courgettes the first summer I stopped under watering on hot weeks.

Also worth vacuuming the impeller well itself. Mine collected a felt of plant debris behind the magnet that put the whole thing slightly out of true, and it sounded exactly like a dying motor.

Fifty a year for one device is less than most people fear. It is the forever part that puts them off, not the amount.

So the question is really whether I can protect one specific window rather than whether I have the hours overall.

Water first, always, and roof first is shorthand for that rather than a rule about roofs specifically. Before you spend anything on the roof itself, check the gutters, the downpipes, the pointing and the ground levels against the wall, because those cause a very large share of what people diagnose as roof problems and they cost a fraction of the price. A wet wall destroys plaster, rots timber and makes any insulation you add later actively harmful, so every pound spent inside a wet house is a pound spent twice. Once the house is dry, everything else is a preference question rather than a damage question.

Downspouts and grading first is the correct answer and it is always the one that gets fewest upvotes because it involves a shovel.

Quick way to tell mites apart if you're worried: brown or reddish mites clustered in a dense mass directly on food are worth acting on, because at high enough density they compete for the same food and stress the worms. Scattered white ones are just part of the ecosystem.

I will disagree with three as a target. For a hobbyist on a small lot, two is the number that gives you almost all of the benefit: you get a comparison colony so you can tell whether a problem is the hive or the season, and you have somewhere to pull a frame of brood from when one goes queenless. Going from two to three adds work and risk without adding much you did not already have. I went to four one year because splits are exciting and spent the whole summer resenting it.

It compounds too, because the more hives you have the more likely one of them is doing something that needs a follow up visit midweek.

I want to gently disagree with treating this as a money question. The recurring cost of a hive is not really the sugar, it is the fifteen to twenty five hours a season and the fact that some of those hours are non-negotiable and land in the middle of the nicest weekends of the year. I have never once regretted the money. I have absolutely regretted committing to a swarm-season Saturday when something better came up. Budget the time honestly and the money will look trivial by comparison.

That's reassuring. I'd read "hot composting" as though the pile should stay hot for weeks.

It's on an exposed corner of the garden and we've had a windy fortnight. Tarp going on this weekend.

Partial disagreement with the dismissive answers. Blanket points chasing is close to worthless, agreed. But the targeted personalised offers some schemes push at you are genuinely valuable if you only ever activate the ones on your normal list and ignore everything else. I do about three minutes a week on that and it is meaningfully more than one percent. The trick is that it takes three minutes, not two hours, and involves no extra driving.

The line between the two is carbon content: above roughly 2% carbon by weight you're in cast iron territory, and most cookware cast iron sits somewhere in the 2.5 to 4% range, while carbon steel pans are down around 1% or less. That extra carbon can't all stay dissolved in the iron, so in grey cast iron it comes out as graphite flakes threaded through the metal: and those flakes are why cast iron is brittle and cannot be forged or pressed thin. It has to be poured into a mould, thick. Steel with far less carbon is ductile, so it can be rolled and pressed into a 2 mm pan, and that thickness difference is most of what you feel every morning.

Anaerobic leachate can also contain things you don't want on food crops. I put mine back in the pile rather than on anything I'm going to eat.

Also stop turning it every other day. That advice comes from tumbler marketing and it's mostly wrong: constant turning breaks up the fungal networks and stops the pile ever holding heat. Once a week is plenty, and honestly in a tumbler once you've got the mix right you can leave it alone for two.

The rat question is really a food question, not a bin question. Rats come for cooked food, meat, dairy and bread. A pallet bin with only veg trimmings, coffee and garden waste is rarely a problem; the same bin with last night's leftovers is a restaurant. If you're disciplined about inputs, the open bin is fine even with close neighbours.

A 12mm mesh over a barrow is the standard, and the oversize going back into the next pile is the best inoculant you can add - it's already full of the right organisms.