Janet Baraclough wrote:

The message
from RDD contains these words:

In message , Janet Tweedy
writes
Does anyone have any recommendations for oak garden chairs/seats?

Trying to find a nice bench and also two armchairs but has been a slow
trawl through websites etc but either the benches are (at 6oo pounds)
way out of my league or they have solid backs.
far east).

Somewhere or other I saw a recent report about the legitimate, or
not, provenance of hardwood garden furniture in the UK market, which
you might want to look up in a websearch. IIRC, B and Q were beacons of
virtue, for once :-)

Heard reasonably recently on R4 the point that if you look at how much
renewable Teak is produced and how much furniture made from Teak is on the
market at any given time bearing renewable stickers that there is a huge
discrepancy B&Q have come out well in in that one too. Apparently they're
trying to do the right thing. Also commented was that they slowed down some
quarry project by pointing out to the supplier that they wouldn't be buying
product from that supplier if they ignored the local community protests
near to the quarry site. Last time I had to buy some extra compost (earlier
this spring when the heap was dormant and I wanted to get a lot of seeds on
the go), I popped into the local B&Q to find that the only compost with any
comment about peat use was their own brand which admitted to using some
peat although less than they had on previous years and an intent to make a
compost that performs almost as well without in the next couple of years.

On the down side, I recently decided to splash out on a couple of trowels
that weren't thin folded steel and went for what *looked* like solid
moulded ones. The polished appearance where the shank meets the blade
seemed to suggest that. The polished appearance was due to the weld being
polished out of sight, unfortunately it was also overdone and one of the
trowels lasted less than 5 minutes with a honeycombed structure showing up
in the snap. When I went to get the replacement I looked more closely and
it took me a while before I found one in the box without the telltale of a
bad weld. I turned up at the exchange counter with a dozen trowels. "This
one is fine, I'll take it. These 11 have major bad welds and will come back
to you if you sell them since they'll snap under any stress. As I left, the
assistant was heading back out to the garden section with the 10 intact
ones that were left after my flexing one to show the weakness

Warwick