PBS Forum

Quote from: David Pilling on March 13, 2023, 06:55:52 AM"Good News! Metaldehyde Slug pellets can no longer be sold or used in the UK, as of Friday 1st April, because they mainly contain a pesticide called Metaldehyde which poses an unacceptable risk to birds, dogs, and wildlife such as hedgehogs.

I believe that the ban is only for domestic/householder use - agricultural use remains legal?

Most? All? Slug pellets are cereal based, which is the attractant/food, the same as with rodent baits. The toxins are added at just a very few %. Hence they all mould pretty quickly if damp enough.

I am just outside of Leicester (UK). I have imported quite a few bulbs of numerous species from RSA over the past 3-4 years.

How any particular species reacts varies hugely (I always buy at least two of any species and they always react the same).
I try to order winter-growers in our mid winter and the opposite for the opposite. I pot-up and cautiously water them the moment that they arrive and keep JUST damp until the normal end of growing season irrespective of whether the show leaf growth or not.

So far as I recall, I have lost just one, which did make leaf, but not root - a Haemanthus (species - I would have to check a label).

Some species get in step with UK season immediately - they will make some growth immediately and go to sleep as you would hope here in the UK, some take up to 2 seasons to get totally in sync'.

Easiest, by far, Crinum. Slowest, probably Lachenalia, of all species. But that is just here and I have never imported Glad's, and have a few more new species/genera from last autumn that will need until the end of 2023 before I can comment with any certainty.

Rareplants UK export to the EU.
I hope to receive some F. welwitschii bulbs in the next few days from another supplier who does not.

Seeds of at least one other summer-flowering species have been offered recently, probably glutinosa, although I cannot remember where, but probably Silverhill or Lifestyle, possibly one of the mainland European suppliers.

An AWFUL lot of rubbish talked there if the bull terrier was UK bloodlines.

Over here in the UK, they have a very phlegmatic disposition and are actually very loving and lovable, although lots of people are wary because of their looks, and reputations transferred from bull-terrier breeds that are a result of the morrons at the opposite end of the leads.

No dog likes to share if they are there first, but how things go is down to the human at least as much as the dogs.

Most of the nonsense is down to people, NOT the dogs.

Terriers are terriers - up and at 'em, always at the ready, and then lick you half way to death.

Hounds, even minature dach's, are off into the far blue yonder after a scent if they have half a chance.

Etc.

Living as lap-dogs has done little to change what they were actually bred for. Thankfully.

Quote from: Robin Hansen on January 02, 2023, 09:31:43 AMHas anyone mentioned these problems to Silverhill. For a commercial website these problems are very bad and need to be corrected ASAP.

I dropped them a mail 2-3-4 days ago.

The current website is essentially unusable - you can only easily search for a particular species, not browse, and is actually worse than their previous site.

Just by way of information for anyone trying to use the Silverhill webite.

On my laptop, the only search that usually works on their new website is to search by full species name. If I search for albuca, for instance, a drop-down list appears that extends beyond the bottom of the screen/page but it will not scroll, so I cannot see the bottom of the list. If I select bulbous plant seeds, only page 1 reloads when I try to view any other page. If I select any letter, the search comes back to say Nothing Found.

It also runs mind-numbingly slow.

Molecular weight of pot' nitrate is 101, so 1M (N) solution is 101g per litre - pretty much 10%.

A milli-mol is one, one thousandth of a mol, so a milli-molar solution is 0.01%, as near as makes no difference.

If you hunt for long enough there are lots of reports about KNO3 treatment and "preferred" concentration and soak times vary considerably

The US weather is making a good deal of news here in the UK.
I am hoping that everyone stays safe.

My experience and memory in the UK goes back to two cold spells - I can JUST remember the long freeze of the early 1960's - I had not long since started school - that lasted weeks but did not get REALLY cold. The length of the freeze killed huge amounts of wildlife.

More recently we had a freeze that took air temp' down to -20C and windchill to -40C, and it snowed heavily - drifts were 6-8-10 feet deep - my garden was 6 feet under snow, although the field at the rear of the property was almost clear because of the wind!!! That was back in the late 1980's (I believe), and it lasted several days.

Statistically too small a sample, but interesting nonetheless.

I have not checked for around a week, but I had no germination in the seeds that I soaked.

In terms of smoke treatment - possibly Garham Duncan, online, suggests burning some light material on top of a pot, though mostly associated with flowering, rather than germination . When I have time and opportunity, I will burn a few dry leaves, straw etc. in something like a can from canned food and then wash the remians into a pot of seeds/bulbs.

Quote from: MarkMazer on December 23, 2022, 07:13:14 AMHe was arrested for going into the gold vacuum sputtering room and collecting gold from the machinery and cleanroom surfaces.

LOL - that reminds me of floorboards and the various jewellery quarters (districts) across the UK.

The floors of the various workshops were ripped out and replaced every so many years, and the old floorboards sold   

They probably are today as well.

The latest - all are still growing well enough - longest leaves on thianum are around 2 feet/60cm. Presumably because they are better established than a year ago, none show signs of dying-back as days have shortened.
The thianum will have seen temperatures down to 12-15C, the not-natans a bit lower.

I did repot one not-natans and found that all the roots, pretty much, were in the top of the pot, even though the clay pot that it is submerged in should keep all the compost aerobic. It put on a nice spurt of growth after repotting into a 5 inch/120mm pot.

The pic's tend to be of freshly imported, usually wild-collected, bulbs, but there are reasonable numbers of pic's online, of bulbs in bud/flower and bulbs appear to be no great size - 2 inches at the very most.

There is a very brief and old thread here on the website, but has anyone grown the plant beyond seedling?
Growing Rare Plants by Geoff Nichols implies that growing the plant once established is relatively straight-forward, but makes no mention of early growth from seed and transition to a normal cycle of "wet" summers and dry winters.

I have several seedlings from seed sown as suggested both in the archive here, and elsewhere online - surface-sown onto saturated compost, the pot half-submerged in a pan of (rain) water. (To reduce evaporation, I have used my usual method of fitting a cheap shower cap over the whole lot, so the seedlings will be sitting in water and in air near 100% RH.)

The US "big freeze" looks very like a UK normal winter north-south, and so far looks like what we had 1-2 weeks ago - -10 to -15 in Scotland, -3 or slightly lower in the south.

The variation that the UK sees is how long any one cold spell lasts, and when, and if it repeats in any one winter.

Quote from: MarkMazer on December 21, 2022, 07:08:58 AMA small amount of gold is used in almost every sophisticated electronic device and is widely used in the aerospace and glass and medical industries.

Gold is everywhere in electronics - a few years ago now, but UK TV showed a report from a factory on mainland W Europe (Belgium?), where they crushed old mobile phones and recovered metals from them. They were crushing a lot of phones, but were reclaiming an awful lot of gold.

Try the search on YouTube -  gold from mobile phones

Energy charges are variable to some extent, depending on supplier, and follow a complicated method of setting them in the UK. The whole UK operates on the same system/prices but maximum prices are set by a quango.

At the moment, electricity is around 19p per kWhr, gas is around 10p, but they are indirectly linked via the method used to set wholesale electricity prices.