Badgardener

Account now mainly dormant, but feel free to PM if you need to contact me.

Definitely better than the devil sites, but dear gods you people need to learn how to be silly: yes, it’s all terrible - but have some grace under fire. This performative seriousness won’t sustain you.

He/Him:

Last Notes

2025-10-08 19:27:26 UTC

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Nominative determinism in action.

2025-10-06 17:34:16 UTC

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At the end of the day, Farage *is* Reform - it's literally his company. Benefactors, useful idiots and protected-characteristic tokens will come and go, but it's essentially a space occupied by Nigel, with plenty of directions to it in the mainstream press. It'll stand until Are Nige falls (which, too, shall come to pass).
If Reform had at least 50% of the polls, Kier's current behaviour would be one of two possible solutions (the wrong one, but at least logical). But they have 30% - the easy 15% and the moderately difficult 15%. The next 5-15% are MUCH harder to get hold of, because most people (in our household, at least) think he's an ashtray-scented, racist grifter.
But 70% of people would actively vote against him, and just need something worth voting for. A fair few of those 30% would probably hop back across, too. Is there enough time either for a change in leadership, or the rise of the Greens?

2025-10-06 08:39:15 UTC

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It's a symptom of the current state of politics that a party for which 70% of the electorate would NOT vote is the runaway leader in popularity polls.
But rather than looking to unite that 70% with - I dunno - moderate, socially responsible, non-genocide enabling policies - the current government is instead trying to win back a few of the 30% by mimicking Farage, and in the process alienating ALL of the former group. They're literally turning their backs on 70% of voters to try to get hold of 5%, who aren't ever going to be their friends.
It's not that Farage is cruising to victory, it's that most of us can't see a coherent strategy emerging to sideline him. Fortunately, even with Starmer in charge doing nothing, Trump-association will do for Farage in the next couple of years - but as with Brexit, he'll have left his skidmark on the fabric of society.

2025-09-12 08:28:15 UTC

#FootpathFriday
#DogsOfMastodon
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2025-06-13 21:53:37 UTC

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Nearly 300 people died. Can you perhaps not make flippant jokes about it?

2025-05-04 06:48:06 UTC

This week's contraption.
I do a LOT of soil sieving - in my work, large garden projects have soil removed/added by the lorry load, but with smaller ones, I'll bag it up and bring it home to be sieved, mixed with organic matter and then re-used elsewhere.
I'm also opening up the large 'compost' bins, which in reality are just aged cold piles of sticks, grass cuttings and chicken poo.
So it was a long overdue project to make a wheelbarrow frame for (much) quicker processing: the frame itself has a fixed one-inch mesh for initial sorting, and there's a removable half-inch mesh for finer grading afterwards.
Put about half a dumpy bag of waste soil through it yesterday, and will do about a cubic metre of compost today, mainly for throwing into the beds.
Should have done this AGES ago.
#Gardening
#Compost
#Chickens
#JoinIn
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2025-04-18 18:23:28 UTC

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Big fan of woodlice. Whenever I turn over a log or stone in the garden, a big bunch of them are there, acting nonchalantly and *not at all* as though they were just having a clandestine meeting/Jerry's birthday party.
There's a whole societal structure going on in there, No Humans Allowed.

2025-04-02 20:55:55 UTC

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Oof. Sorry you've had to go through that. Better days ahead.

2025-02-15 09:09:18 UTC

The workshop I built for my wife after the first lockdown, mainly to stop her from taking over mine(!)
I’d always been intrigued by the idea of stitching a shed and greenhouse together, so knocked this up. The idea is that the greenhouse captures solar heat in the winter to help heat the workshop - it seems to work, and the shed is very heavily insulated with polystyrene collected off the local beach over a summer and put through a garden shredder.
With a small radiator, the temperature gets up to about 22C very quickly, even with outside temperatures around zero. When they’re about 8-10C and upwards, no heating required.
Built mainly out of free stuff (greenhouse, roof tiles, much of the frame, insulation, copper ridge, windows, door).
Please ignore the oil tank. We inherited it and can’t afford to change systems.
#shed #greenhouse #woodworking #workshop #gardening #maker #JoinIn #crafts
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2025-02-01 21:17:39 UTC

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I was back up in Derbyshire a couple of weeks ago. Down here in Cornwall, 'hedges' are double-skinned stone walls with a soil centre, but up there hedgelaying is still very much alive. The village still has an annual hedgelaying and ploughing match.

2025-01-10 18:39:36 UTC

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That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me all day.
I dug it on purpose, for money. I like building drains - provided you remember water flows downhill, they're not complicated.

2024-12-24 16:33:50 UTC

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All joking aside, I'm working on the Don't Encourage Them principle of invisibility.
Plus, no hablo Espanol. Pequeno. All that jazz.

2024-12-22 09:28:14 UTC

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I can only speak to UK farming, and then mainly in the livestock/dairy sectors, but the mechanisms of suppression are the same through much of the developed world.
We seem willing to talk about keeping utilities like water in public ownership, but have thrown food production to the wolves in end stage capitalism - and we’re seeing the inevitable results.
Imagine if countries were having to import large chunks of their water supply from halfway across the world, subject to political forces and dodgy alliances? Why then do we do the same with our food supply?