Saturday 2nd February 2008
I had a visitor today, it was Tom! His car has gone, so he caught the train from Weston to Worle and then waked the couple of miles from the station. He has spent the last couple of days clearing his flat and he sets off for Poland on Tuesday.
I know he will be watching closely from his home country, I wonder if he will join in on the Forum?
When I scraped the garden centre koi on Friday, there were also Trichodina, so today I treated with Potassium Permanganate. I dug out my gram scales, I rarely have to treat for parasites, so they have not been used for many months. I laid a piece of kitchen roll across them and pressed the on button, this ensures that the readout will be at zero, I then started to add the potassium slowly watching the numbers increase. I needed to measure out 20 grams, when the readout showed 20 I realised the pile was too small, something was up.
I phoned Stuart T who only lives 4 or 5 miles from the farm to check he was home and drove to his house with my pot of potassium. I measured out 20 grams on his scales and the pile was more than twice as large!
I've had these gram scales for around 10 years, time for some new ones!
I can't remember if I mentioned it, but a coupe of weeks ago I broke the new lawn mower. I clipped a piece of stainless steel and the shock went up through to the recoil start system snapping the plastic center lug which holds the whole lot together. I tried to stick it back together with super glue, but was a waste of time and broke again. I put it to one side thinking it looked an expensive part and would have to think over how to fix it.
The grass is growing and I need to get the mower going, so today I set about a permanent fix. It took a little working out how I could do it, but feel confident that with a bolt down through the whole lot and some homemade bushes, it would work fine.
I'll have to wait until tomorrow when the thread lock has set to try it out, but I'll let you know. It really needed a left-hand threaded bolt, so the thread lock is important and is the only possible down fall.