It's good to be back.

[Ricard with an H]

I don't have much to offer other than do some reading, and catch-up.

So I opened a beer and started catching up, bought a smile to my face, a warm-glow feeling and got started trying to figure what I could do to contribute at a time not much gardening is going on.

Next season I have to use most of my raised beds for perennial wildflower nurseries, annuals don't do well because of the seed-bank and I had proved to myself ten years ago that well-chosen perennials will do well amongst seed bank annuals.

It took ten years to get the wildflower I nurtured from seed to get established, who was it who recently recommended a good way to grow cowslip from seed ? Too much love has led to many failures, successes during recent years have been where I threw seed into our gravel drive then kicked it around. Our gravel drive and parking are made up from what is locally called "Scalpings". Scalping are local stone ground into pieces of from 15mm to huge chunks. Scalping are usually spread over a bed of cheaper hardcore based on all sorts of non descript stone mixed with sand and gravel that forms an easy to consolidate layer. A lot of perennials love it but you have to get the roots going in the layer under the scalping.

Just thought you would love to know, as part of your ongoing education.

(Smile)

[oldherbaceous]

Good afternoon Richard, do you know what makes this forum so special? Well it is the fact that it doesn't matter how long you have been away, or even if you just post once in a while, you are always made to feel so welcome.....I know when i have had my quiet times on here, through hard times, when you do come back, you are always greeted with kind words....and there aren't many forums that can offer that.

You have always posted interesting posts on here, and long may it continue.

Glad you persevered with your jobs.

[Geoff]

It's easy to get distracted by silly problems. Central heating system kept losing pressure as shown by gauge on boiler and there was obviously air in the system but no sign of leaks anywhere. Had a annual service on the boiler and got him to check the diaphragm and anything else around the boiler that it could be but all was OK. 2015 we made some changes to the indirect system to the hot water tank as we took out a solid fuel Aga so I asked if the coil could leak into the hot water. He didn't think it could without us noticing. We live in a barn conversion, as you will have gathered from other posts, that we did in two phases for cash flow reasons. The barn had been built in 1774 and extended sometime later so between the two parts is a 2 foot thick rubble fill stone wall. I put in the central heating myself and I remembered one day I took it to this wall and ended it with valves then extended it when we did the rest so I thought "if it leaks in this wall will it soak away unseen?" All the pipework is at first floor level so got up the carpets and the floor and was pleased to find a leak, as pleased as you can be by a leak that is! So then had to think about repairing a 15mm soldered T-piece sat alongside a steel beam; no space for a compression fitting, difficult to drain for soldering. I tried external epoxy putty but I might as well have melted down a chocolate teapot! Cracked and employed a plumber. He used copper crimpable fittings that you fix with a battery powered compression tool, no need to be dry, no heat involved, worked great. Was here only ½ hour. I hadn't come across these fittings before. The point of this post is that it might help somebody else to know these are available.

[Ricard with an H]

It's good to share Geoff, I'm out of mechanical-services, heating and plumbing and I try to keep up. That's a new one on me.

Pin hole corrosion caused by a veriety of things can occur anywhere in a circuit including the coil in a cylinder if corrosion inhibitor isn't present and/or the copper tube is compromised on the outer surface by simple things like curing cement, the close proximity of steel under certain conditions with create a condition where the copper becomes sacrificial.

There was a period when copper tube didn't have much copper in it, this caused a lot of problems.