Tuesday 4 June 2013

I know more than I want to know about agricultural waste exemptions!

This morning I 'lost' three quarters of an hour of my life  registering for New Agricultural Waste Exemptions on the Environment Agency web site.
Because we have land rather than just a garden and we are a registered smallholding we have to comply with waste regulations. Normal things like having a bonfire, building a compost heap or cleaning a ditch, which more or less everyone with a garden can do without any problems, we have to fill in a blinkin' form on the computer!
We had to do all this about 10 years ago and then re-register every now and again. But now they've jigged about with all the exemptions so we had to start from scratch. EVENTUALLY after ringing them up to find out why we couldn't get any further than  the first page and then having to search for a grid reference on another website and then going backwards and forwards from page to page. I clicked on the Submit bit and hopefully we are now legal. At present there is no charge for all this but I can just imagine that sometime in the future someone in a city office will have an idea to bring in more money and will start charging us.
 I think the most annoying thing is that the HUGE farmers like the ones who farm 10s of thousands of acres all around us and for miles right down to Essex, have to fill in exactly the same form as we do with our little 5 acres and a compost heap! And they can employ someone to do all their paperwork for them.
Yesterday and today the  sun is shining here on the edge of Suffolk but by golly the wind is cold. It's a north easterly so we are feeling the worst of it straight off the sea. Yesterday Him Outside worked for a customer in the morning and then cut the campsite grass ( sitting on the ride on mower isn't causing him any strain) and I got the small mower out to do all the fiddly bits of grass cutting. Today we've got lots more odd bits of gardening done mainly weeding and tidying and Him Outside was in the poly tunnel taking the side shoots off the tomatoes until it got too warm.
 Here's a nice sight- tidy ranks of healthy onions


 He managed to get in to see the doctor yesterday to get more advice on all the tablets that the hospital dished out without any discussion after the angina diagnosis, but when he stopped the tablet that gave him a headache he got the serious pains again and had to use the under the tongue spray for the first time. It's all such a sudden thing we don't know what he should be doing and what not to do.
I suppose he will get sorted out eventually.
Yesterday, at last, I picked up my needle and started a quick and easy cross stitch picture for a card and also got into the first few pages of Confusion- the third in the Cazalet family saga by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Finally I must say welcome to Dragonfly, a new local visitor to my blog. Thank you also to everyone for comments and advice re the angina issue - we need all the advice we can get I think!

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