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Adorable spouse and I built a cold frame in 2005. This let me buy plants as they came available 800 miles to the south of my garden, and hold them for 6-8 weeks. Then came climate warming, and voles, and general creakiness. Last year I realized that I had more use for mesh frames than cold frames now. So out it is coming. If you are interested in the durability of ground contact wood, see what happens to this product in less than 20 years. Image rotated so that this former corner is oriented with the bottom down and the top up. It probably would not have lasted another 3-5 years. 

I'll bet the cold frames provided a lot of fun at the time. So goes all wood in the garden, at least it will have fed the "woodlice". Probably why railroad ties were treated with creosote. Creosote is now considered so toxic that they have to sell new "sleepers" for gardeners. I live to tell the tale of the cough medicine in the 60s that contained creosote.

Wonder what a 'mesh frame' looks like.

I guess you didn't use cedar.

Quote from: Diane Whitehead on May 08, 2023, 08:51:09 PMI guess you didn't use cedar.

Cedar is a wonderful wood - maybe easier to come across in Canada 🇨🇦

Make your drawers 🗄 out of it and banish moths 🦋

" If you are interested in the durability of ground contact wood"

If you can get it,  Robinia pseudoacacia, commonly known as black locust, makes the best ground contact wood. It is considered an invasive species in some areas.

Quote from: MarkMazer on May 09, 2023, 08:32:44 AM" If you are interested in the durability of ground contact wood"

If you can get it,  Robinia pseudoacacia, commonly known as black locust, makes the best ground contact wood. It is considered an invasive species in some areas.

Honestly, nowadays, just get plastic lumber, it doesn't cost that much more than treated wood, and vastly less than dimensional black locust (unless you happen to be in the right place).

As for a mesh house, either all mesh, or impermeable roof sections with mesh around the sides. Protection from wind/rain...and critters!

Quote from: David Pilling on May 09, 2023, 07:07:53 AMMake your drawers 🩳 out of it and banish moths 🦋

I have received a personal communication about the above comment:

"That would be Eastern Redcedar...  Juniperus virginiana. Western Redcedar is Thuja plicata."

Plastic in the garden has limited life, longer if black, but it becomes very brittle eventually.

In the UK, if you can find it, sweet chestnut will last 20+ years in soil contact.

As for treatments, there are none that the amateur can legally use that achieve any real increase in life of the timber. The great white hope to replace creosote - commonly called CCA (copper, chrome, arsenic), now contains only copper, along with cypermethrin.

I can't remember the last time that I saw real timber railway sleepers, either under railway tracks or in farm supply yards (often the traditional, preferred material for building clamps). Garden centre "sleepers" are just standard softwood baulks, and they last no time at all in many soils.

Creosote is available to anyone with a pesticide licence. It was banned due to extremely low levels of chemicals such as dioxins. It is also available to anyone as part of shampoo formulations. 

I was surprised when a neighbouring house that was being renovated got plastic fences. There is quite a bit of plastic used in construction now - uPVC cladding. This house has some external plastic which has been exposed to the light and the weather for 60 years and is as good as new. ICI wonder product from the 1960s

So creosote aka coal 🪨 tar. I am a survivor of that too - there might be some coal tar shampoo 🧴 left, but there's nothing like as much as there once was. I used to like the smell 👃 of creosote as a child.

There was an episode where GSK (big pharma) were horrified to find out what was going into their Polytar shampoo and hurriedly took it off the market with promises it would come back, which it never has done. Some people depended on it.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creosote

UK labelling is usually Coal Tar Creosote - just a by-product from coking ovens back in the day.

I love the smel of creosote (still very much available outside of the UK/EU, I believe).
I also have friends with contacts/licences.......................
Do not be fooled though - creosote  is extremely unpleasant. Maybe 30 years ago, when creosote was "legal", I lived not far from a unit producing soaked/pressure-treated timber, and an employee fell into a vat of it. The manager threw him into his very expensive car and got him to the hospital in tme - a lot of the active ingredients in creoate are absorbed through the skin. The employee survived and it made local news.

Personally, I dissolve bitumen in it to form something akin to black tar varnish - even better protection than straight creosote.

Polytar Scalp Shampoo 150ml, Treats Psoriasis, Seborrhoeic Dermatitis, Eczema, and Dandruff, Soothes Itchy, Scaly Scalps, Contains Coal Tar : Amazon.co.uk: Beauty

Thanks for the link to Polytar - so it has come back. In June 2019 Thornton & Ross acquired the brand from GSK.
It seemed to vanish in the UK around 2012.

Google leads me to think creosote is not commonly available in the USA either.

No problem. Presumably Wright's Coal Tar soap is still available??
I have not searched.

A friend had seborrhoeic dematitis years back - it itched like you would not believe and caused hair loss - nothing else worked. They used Polytar every once in a while whenever an itch started.

How they produce the correct ingredients minus the trace nasties, who knows? Maybe just formulate umpteen phenols and cresols rather than use actual coal tar product - they are what you can smell and likely the active ingredients.
There are still coking ovens for steel-making so by-products will be available.

Quote from: CG100 on May 14, 2023, 02:00:03 AMNo problem. Presumably Wright's Coal Tar soap is still available??

To quote one source

"Wright's Traditional Soap no longer contains coal tar, but is coal tar fragranced."

They changed the name, they changed the ingredients, but the brand lives on.

Coke no longer contains cocaine, Mincemeat no longer contains meat. "Things" as the song says "ain't what they used to be". It's all a swizz.

For my unbearably itchy scalp I used a salicilic acid (asprin) preparation, but alas did not grow some meadowsweet to get the active ingredient.

LOL - "fragranced" - probably phenols/cresols - it is difficult to imagine anything else having a similar smell, so just using pure chemical components rather than the mixture that comes from coking ovens.

TCP is still available, albeit the phenolic ingredient(s) has/have changed over the years.

It is a long while ago now, but I used to work where TCP and DCP (tri- and di- chloro-phenols) were used and they arrived in 40 gallon drums form Coalite Industries (which probably means something only to UK readers). 
The drums were obviously filled with warmed/liquid product and were one hell of a job to get relatively small amounts out of at any one time (at normal ambient temperatures they are both crystalline solids). No doubt the usual/large usages used drum level quantities at any one time, and they just warmed the drums and poured the contents out.

Quote from: David Pilling on May 11, 2023, 05:16:26 PMI was surprised when a neighbouring house that was being renovated got plastic fences. There is quite a bit of plastic used in construction now - uPVC cladding. This house has some external plastic which has been exposed to the light and the weather for 60 years and is as good as new.

Missed that....

Probably the vast majority of garden products made from plastic, are made from 100% recycled, usually made black to disguise any unsightly bits and bobs in it. Boards for confining raised/no-dig beds are the obvious ones in the UK. So-called builders' buckets are another.

Like all plastic, most especially outdoors, it does become extremely brittle - I have had a dummy security camera in place for something over 10 years - that will be ABS, but the cover fell off and all but "shattered" a week or so back.

The uPVC gable and barge boards that were installed before I moved in 23 years ago, have been covered in algae to some extent for quite a few years and they can't be cleaned as the algae sit in little erroded pits in the surface - special paints have been available to refresh exterior uPVC for well over 10 years.

Exterior plastic will be fine until it has to be moved or take a load - fall against some 10+ year old plastic fencing and it will be no more. The same goes for uPVC fascias and the like - fine until something hits them or you need access behind them for some reason.