Whilst not in the garden we have also been insulating the loft. I read somewhere that if everyone in the country did this we wouldn’t need to be building nasty new coal power stations. Better get to it then.
With a little research, Warmcel 100 seemed to be one of the most effective environmental materials about for insulating. It is made from fire-retardant recycled newspaper also treated with antifungal stuff. Lovely.
I bought mine from Natural Insultions who were very good value and quick to deliver. It came in nearly 30 bags which needed fluffing up before being spread around… which sounds a lot easier than it is. I was usually knackered after doing two bags and needed to save my stamina for playing and teaching guitar. I thought it was going to take an afternoon but it ended up taking nearly two months of little loft shifts.
We were very lucky that the landlord agreed to pay for it and trusted us to get it fitted ourselves, it cost around £300 and is supposed to save us over £100 a year in heating bills.
Nearly finished now...
Jakob gets stuck in
Filed under: Doing | Tags: burning, digging roots, garden riddle, laurel, lime tree, pallets, pruning tree, raised beds, tree
A huge day – we had eight people getting stuck in this week including the epic Dean ‘I like digging holes’ Firth and Angela ‘I live next door’ McSherry.
I started off by showing Dean a huge root which needed digging out and gave him the pick and a spade whilst I climbed up a nearby lime tree and began pruning branches overhanging another neighbours garden which had been causing some distress.
victory over the tree root
a spot of light pruning for me
The Pogo crew arrived a little later and made a riddle, which is basically a massive garden sieve, out of a pallet and mesh. With it we got all of the rubble out of the rear bed which had obviously been used as a dumping ground by the builders when the roof was replaced many years ago…
making a garden riddle
Using our home-made garden riddle
Around this point I hit the wrong button on the camera, so I must apologies for everything being a little blurry from here on… Austen pruned the laurel tree which is apparently not a good thing to use in compost as it contains arsenic! We found this out just after we had spread all of the cuttings all over the main bed – doh! We had a go at burning some cuttings but that was aborted, and Dean and Ben got all alpha-male digging in the pallets to edge the raised beds at the rear.
Trying to burn things
Building the rear beds
Austen up the laurel tree
A few weeks back, after showing Angela who lives next door around our fledgling garden, we had the joyous occasion of removing the fence between our two gardens to make one BIG one – happy days.
now you see it...
...now you don't
...and we moved it to here in case we need it again!
