Rusty Hinge wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:
'Mike' wrote:
"Stuart Noble" wrote in message
news:chF9n.34284 Can anyone advise on this?


Do we not know how to 'snip'?

Something one has to tolerate,

Why?

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the original
question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might have other
things to do.

along with advertisements posing as signatures.

Nothing wrong with that - as long as they're not too prominent.


There's nothing wrong with any of it, but you either put up with the
bits you don't like or you go elsewhere.

The group's charter actually states that a sig.file containing relevant
- NB relevant - advertising, of no more than 4 lines, is permitted. To
be annoying (and more than a tad ridiculous) one trolling type chooses
to ignore that.

Ah yes, charters. They were all the rage 20 years ago. There was one
pinned up in our local post office saying that under New Labour you
wouldn't be kept waiting more than x minutes. It was soon replaced with
a sign saying "wait HERE until called to the counter". That's what
people are like

Stuart Noble writes
Rusty Hinge wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:
'Mike' wrote:
"Stuart Noble" wrote in message
news:chF9n.34284 Can anyone advise on this?


Do we not know how to 'snip'?

Something one has to tolerate,
Why?

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the
original question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might have
other things to do.

That's the point about snipping. You leave in enough for people to see
the relevant point, without having to wade through pages of extraneous
matter. I don't see why most of us should have to scan through pages of
stuff we've already read just to make life easier for the occasional
latecomer who can't be bothered to read the original question. And I'm
struggling to understand the circumstance in which a latecomer picks a
post and decides he needs to see the original question - how did he know
*that* post was going to be interesting if he wasn't planning on reading
anything earlier in the thread?

--
Kay

"K" wrote in message
...



I don't see why most of us should have to scan through pages of stuff
we've already read just to make life easier for the occasional latecomer
who can't be bothered to read the original question. --
Kay


Thank you Kay. Just look at some of the threads. Miles long, left by people
who should know better and rule the roost.


--
Mike

The Royal Naval Electrical Branch Association
www.rneba.org.uk
Luxury Self Catering on the Isle of Wight?
www.shanklinmanormews.co.uk

Sascha you say the kindest things don't you :-))

--
Mike

The Royal Naval Electrical Branch Association
www.rneba.org.uk
Luxury Self Catering on the Isle of Wight?
www.shanklinmanormews.co.uk



"Sacha" wrote in message
...
On 2010-02-02 12:58:37 +0000, K said:

Stuart Noble writes
Rusty Hinge wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:
'Mike' wrote:
"Stuart Noble" wrote in message
news:chF9n.34284 Can anyone advise on this?


Do we not know how to 'snip'?

Something one has to tolerate,
Why?

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the original
question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might have other
things to do.

That's the point about snipping. You leave in enough for people to see
the relevant point, without having to wade through pages of extraneous
matter. I don't see why most of us should have to scan through pages of
stuff we've already read just to make life easier for the occasional
latecomer who can't be bothered to read the original question. And I'm
struggling to understand the circumstance in which a latecomer picks a
post and decides he needs to see the original question - how did he know
*that* post was going to be interesting if he wasn't planning on reading
anything earlier in the thread?

Possibly they choose by poster - i.e. they think that person may have
written something worth reading. The person who started this nonsense
about snipping never does write anything worth readiing and is now on one
of his occasional rants about 'owners' of the newsgroup etc. The actual
subject of snipping is secondary to gettiing someone to answer him. As he
advertises his completely unrelated-to-gardening-wares in his sig.file his
posts are mischief making and attention seeking and don't truly have any
interest in newsgroup etiquette.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.com
Shrubs & perennials. Tender & exotics.
South Devon

Stuart Noble wrote:
Rusty Hinge wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:
'Mike' wrote:
"Stuart Noble" wrote in message
news:chF9n.34284 Can anyone advise on this?

Do we not know how to 'snip'?

Something one has to tolerate,

Why?

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the original
question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might have other
things to do.

As was said: /Do we not know how to 'snip'?/ - snipping judiciously
preserves the context and removes the dross - and believe me, in this
group there's an awful lot of that.

along with advertisements posing as signatures.

Nothing wrong with that - as long as they're not too prominent.

There's nothing wrong with any of it, but you either put up with the
bits you don't like or you go elsewhere.

Newcomers to Usenet should abide by established protocols, and old hands
should set an example.

If people aren't prepared to do that, *THEY* should go elsewhere.

--
Rusty

K wrote:
Stuart Noble writes

/snip/

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the
original question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might
have other things to do.

That's the point about snipping. You leave in enough for people to see
the relevant point, without having to wade through pages of extraneous
matter.

Generally, I don't bother. If the beef isn't somewhere within sight at
the bottom of the screen, or pretty shortly after, I go on to the next
post, and sometimes, mark certain exchanges as 'read'.

--
Rusty

Sacha wrote:
On 2010-02-02 12:58:37 +0000, K said:

Stuart Noble writes
Rusty Hinge wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:
'Mike' wrote:
"Stuart Noble" wrote in message
news:chF9n.34284 Can anyone advise on this?


Do we not know how to 'snip'?

Something one has to tolerate,
Why?

Because within reason it saves latecomers going back to see the
original question. We don't all look at all the messages. We might
have other things to do.

That's the point about snipping. You leave in enough for people to see
the relevant point, without having to wade through pages of extraneous
matter. I don't see why most of us should have to scan through pages
of stuff we've already read just to make life easier for the
occasional latecomer who can't be bothered to read the original
question. And I'm struggling to understand the circumstance in which a
latecomer picks a post and decides he needs to see the original
question - how did he know *that* post was going to be interesting if
he wasn't planning on reading anything earlier in the thread?

Possibly they choose by poster - i.e. they think that person may have
written something worth reading. The person who started this nonsense
about snipping never does write anything worth readiing and is now on
one of his occasional rants about 'owners' of the newsgroup etc. The
actual subject of snipping is secondary to gettiing someone to answer
him. As he advertises his completely unrelated-to-gardening-wares in
his sig.file his posts are mischief making and attention seeking and
don't truly have any interest in newsgroup etiquette.

Oh, him.

I don't see his posts - my ISP or perhaps Eternal-September seems to
have blocked him.

--
Rusty

Sacha wrote:

The whole snipping thing seems to vary hugely from group to group. On
the whole - and this is painting with a very broad brush, I suspect -
Ammerican groups don't/didn't bother with snipping because, in the days
before broadband they paid nothing for the local calls that connected
their computers to the Internet. Here in UK, we paid by the minute so
if we had to download several inches of already read material, we were
wasting money.

This is true, but it's annoying to scroll down the length of two or
three screens only to find 'me too' or similar at the end.

--
Rusty

"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
...
There are special products (based on gypsum) which break up clay, but
these are not cheap for a reasonably large area and after a while the
clay
gets claggy again. They also make the soil alkaline.

The benefit of gypsum (as opposed to much cheaper lime) is that it does
not change the pH of the soil.

Quite right. I wonder where I read that it did?

Depends on the source of the gypsum. It's main use is in the building
industry (plaster board, plaster render for walls etc.), and one might
think that a builders' supplier would be a good source. A couple of
decades ago or so, most gypsum was mined. A lot came from northern
Europe (hence Plaster of Paris). Mined gypsum is slightly acidic. But
these days it's a cheap by-product from the de-sulphurisation of flue
gases from coal-burning power stations, and it's no longer economic to
mine it. The feed for the de-sulphurisation process is hydrated lime
slurry, which is very alkaline. Not all the lime reacts during the
de-sulphurisation; there's always a small percentage unreacted, which
makes modern plaster slightly alkaline. Great if your clay soil is
acid and you want to raise it's pH, but not so good if you want to
grow ericaceous plants like heathers or rhododendrons.

--

Chris

Gardening in West Cornwall overlooking the sea.
Mild, but very exposed to salt gales

E-mail: christopher[dot]hog[at]virgin[dot]net

Thanks for that. Be interesting to check the pH of various "clay cures" and
see if there is any difference between them.


--

Jeff

In message , Jeff Layman
writes
Great if your clay soil is
acid and you want to raise it's pH, but not so good if you want to
grow ericaceous plants like heathers or rhododendrons.
Raising pH makes it more acid does it not?
--
hugh
It may be more complicated but is it better?

hugh wrote:
In message , Jeff Layman
writes
Great if your clay soil is
acid and you want to raise it's pH, but not so good if you want to
grow ericaceous plants like heathers or rhododendrons.
Raising pH makes it more acid does it not?

Other way round. High ph is alkaline.

In message , Stuart
Noble writes
hugh wrote:
In message , Jeff Layman
writes
Great if your clay soil is
acid and you want to raise it's pH, but not so good if you want to
grow ericaceous plants like heathers or rhododendrons.
Raising pH makes it more acid does it not?

Other way round. High ph is alkaline.
In the world of logarithms of reciprocals 6 has a higher value than 7.

--
hugh
It may be more complicated but is it better?

Chris Hogg writes


err.....

pH is the logarithm (to the base 10) of the reciprocal of the hydrogen
ion concentration in gram-ions per litre.

err... minus the logarithm ;-)

--
Kay

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:52:37 -0500, Me-G
wrote:


My garden has seen a lot of trampling by tradesmen over the past few
years. Retaining walls were destroyed, weeds, especially docks
flourished and, it seems, all draining material was washed away. The
garden is like a solid mass of clay.

Those responsible have agreed to "sort" the problem. They did dig it ov
er but the first heavy rain flattened it leaving puddles which didn't
drain for ages but did wash teh earth onto my paths: yewk: constant
cleaning and, as clay sticky so perpetually dragged through house.

They said they'd sort the drainage problem by digging in course sand.
However, I read somewhere that this would only serve to turn the clay to
a cement. It suggested that loam would also need to be incorporated
with the sand.

Can anyone advise on this?

The other matter is that they say they can't do that work just now as
it's a job for the Spring. Problem I see is that I will want it ready
for planting in Spring and given the lack of speed with which they work,
they could well call Summer, Spring. How early, ground being
sufficiently soft for digging of course, can I stipulate as a last date
for fixing.

I would have thought we'd want the last frosts to help break up the
earth to further help with drainage.

(Not really confident about using capitals at season names: dyslexia
rules KO!.)

All help on these matters gratefully received and much appreciated.



Two years ago I moved to a house where the only site for a garden had
a clay subsoil over 200 metres deep; the topsoil, consisting of a
layer penetrated by grass roots in an old orchard was barely an inch
thick.

Research of the literature seemed to show that gypsum would be of no
effect except on a clay soil suffering from excess salts ('sodic');
see, for instance http://www.hort.iastate.edu/turfgras...ion/gypsum.pdf.

A second option, which I had used with some success many years back on
an allotment in the UK , was to burn the clay; the resulting
terracotta breaks down into grit but no further. At the new site it
was too difficult to obtain fuel and the environmental impact of
burning it now seemed undesirable.

All that was left to try was an addition of coarse sharp sand and
compost. I had also seen the suggestion that the sand would just turn
the clay into concrete, but decided to go ahead anyway. I used about
3" of coarse sharp builder's sand and about the same volume of
commercial 'compost' - fairly inexpensive so probably recycled waste,
dug into the first spit of clay.

Most of this work was done in winter, but fortunately a fairly dry
one.

The results have been most encouraging, if involving a large amount of
manual labour as my site was too steep to manage a rotavator of the
necessary power. The top six to eight inches of soil has become
possible to cultivate even in wettish conditions (the slope helps).
No sign of concrete. The breakdown of the clay into small particles
separated by sand is as yet incomplete. The tilth is still too rough
to sow many seeds direct, so have adopted techniques of chitting seed
even of root vegetables such as carrot and parsnip, as well as sowing
into furrows of compost.

The advantage of 'improving' the soil in this way may not be to
improve its fertility - just the ability to cultivate it. This summer
melon plants from the local nursery planted in a well cultivated and
composted spot went nowhere. Some yards away on a heap of pure clay
dug out in the course of installing a new mains drainage system and
piled up to form the base of a future poly greenhouse, a melon seeded
itself. Encouraged with a bit of watering it spread and spread and
produced seven melons in the course of the summer.

As for the future, I am not sure if the clay will tend to wash out of
the sand/compost and reform a new dense layer beneath; from experience
so far I expect it to stay homogenous if dug annually, or even better
if rotavated.

Hope this is helpful.


redonda