Nomow bonus

Our council is testing out not mowing the grass. Grass on verges in housing estates, grass in parks and grass in public green spaces generally. A testing which started out under the banner 'no mow May', but is continuing into June. Some are pleased to be encouraging more natural growth, some are not so pleased to have untidy looking verges. Few worry their heads about how the council are going to make ends meet, given that they are starved of cash by successive central governments, keen to dump as much austerity on someone else as possible. But no doubt things will settle down.

In the meantime, I was pleased to find that not mowing the verges and banks down Blenheim Road has now resulted in a fine crop of pyramid orchids outside what was the Tchibo headquarters, orchids which had been noticed in modest numbers in the past, for example at reference 2. Some of them are snapped above.

The biggest one. Presumably they do not like the grass to be too thick or too strong; they do need some light. And presumably they do not like being mown - unlike some flowers which are either very low or very quick and which can handle mowing.

Home to puzzle over a flier from Surrey County Council promoting an outfit called Solartogether and their solar panels. An outfit mixed up with another outfit called iChoosr. An outfit which appears to act as an intermediary between householders, people who install solar panels and people who sell solar panels. 

There international angles, for example in the US, as can be seen at reference 7, from which the snap above is taken. Not much like the houses on our estate at all.

It would all be much more convincing if they were a bit more open about how they made their living. 

In the meantime we shall pursue our interest in replacing our elderly gas boiler with an electric boiler. On which, today's news is that such boilers tend to have rather short warranty periods compared with gas boilers, say 2 years to their 10, and that their heating elements have an unfortunate habit of burning out, which is expensive. I wondered whether this is down to people trying to keep costs down - for some reason simple electric boilers are a lot more expensive than complex gas boilers - maybe this is just down to volumes - and buying a smaller electric boiler than their house really needs. Too much strain and the element burns out.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacamptis_pyramidalis.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/trolley-516.html. At was was then Tchibo.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/to-chippenham.html. On the way to Chippenham.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/yarbridge-one.html. On the outskirts of Brading.

Reference 5: https://solartogether.co.uk/landing.

Reference 6: https://ichoosr.co.uk/.

Reference 7: https://www.ichoosr.us/.