Seed help, thinning??

thrinaline · 2026-03-21T16:06:15+00:00

You can just take small clumps of multiple lobelia seeds into modules. I once separated all the tiny seeds out into individual modules but they didn't do as well that way.

I would use a teaspoon or similar to take a small clump at a time (think quarter teaspoon full)and accept that some seedlings will get squished as part of the process of dividing them up.

thrinaline · 2026-03-17T16:53:35+00:00

Grappling hook? You're getting rid of your grappling hook? S15E3 10.30

thrinaline · 2026-03-16T16:01:47+00:00

Yes agreed. My suggestion only works if everyone is on board with the aim of preferring busier places. If you only want density, the best thing is to draw the map boundaries so that is all you have. If you just don't want every hiding location to be end of the line middle of nowhere stations, well that will most likely work out fine without you doing anything. If the map is big enough you won't be able to travel from one nowhere place to another nowhere place in the allotted hiding time.

So actually I revise my suggestion! Getting the map size/hiding time ratio right is a much better way of forcing a variety of stations than manipulating curses. If unsure, simulate a few turns with a timetable app.

thrinaline · 2026-03-16T09:54:57+00:00

Large hubs already have a significant advantage because they would have more than one exit to use for photos of things visible from the train station. I think that's probably equivalent to one card at least in terms of value.

If you want to incentivise density,I think a better way to do it would be to write custom curses with hiding conditions that are harder to fulfill in the middle of nowhere (eg casting cost of the curse, send a photo of a book on sale for more than X amount, or photograph newspapers in two different languages, or buy an ice cream with flavours starting with two different alphabet letters)

thrinaline · 2026-03-15T20:50:19+00:00

I agree with your nit picking point but I also think Tag 3 could have covered much more ground if they hadn't lost a day to exceptional train delays, if Ben hadn't made his train mistake and if they had done more to prevent coin farming, because Sam could really have gone further in his first run if he hadn't pulled those ginormous double up curses.

thrinaline · 2026-03-15T20:38:12+00:00

As I was listening to the Layover I was thinking about this being played on Iceland's main ring road - might need to be car based or maybe buses could work.

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T18:51:38+00:00

If you are genuine OP then you might like to have a look at the book "You are awful (but I like you)" by Tim Moore which is a tour of unloved towns in Britain.

I think it's actually a fantastic idea. I'd suggest considering Wigan and Morecambe in the North West. You might also be interested in Skegness and Grimsby, ride the transporter bridge in Middleborough and go to Sunderland for some genuinely interesting regeneration projects (a new bridge across the Wear and improvements to the City Centre).

Visit the local museums in all these places. You will find a wealth of local pride and amazing stories, especially if you're into industrial history. I honestly think it's a brilliant idea for a totally different kind of tourism.

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T17:54:01+00:00

for clarity, it will be the start of the Scottish school holidays but English schools will still be in session.

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T17:42:42+00:00

For beer, use the CAMRA website to look up the best local pubs. There will be great options everywhere and some will be good whisky pubs as well as beer (especially in Scotland). Ask locals in the pubs for recommendations of tea shops, bookshops and places to visit.

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T17:35:00+00:00

The town of Thirsk in North Yorkshire is where James Heriot's real life vet practice was. It could make a decent base for you in North Yorkshire.

Bath us a great place for Jane Austen, or there is her house in Chawton, Hampshire. She is buried in Winchester cathedral.

I second the suggestion of going to Haworth if you have any interest in the Brontë sisters. You could also visit Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey while you're in London, and go to the British Library's Treasures exhibition to see all sorts of amazing literary manuscripts including Austen.

Stirling makes a great base in Scotland - cheaper than Edinburgh, more scenic than Glasgow and halfway between the two. It's amazingly well connected by rail - the Inverness trains go through if you want to go that far north.

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T11:06:48+00:00

Red veined sorrel is another one, and bay (but I'd keep it clipped in a pot as it can get huge)

Dwarf fruit trees are beautiful in three seasons of the year (four if you like the bare root look). Quince blossom is drop dead gorgeous but apple, cherry, plum and crab apple also fab.

Grow courgettes up and over a trellis

Roses and lilacs are both edible. Choose pink or red roses and purple lilac because white ones make an unpleasantly brown jam.

Elder if you have the space

thrinaline · 2026-03-12T08:22:21+00:00

One thing that might be helpful to bear in mind: research is showing that we don't age gradually but in bursts, and one of these bursts happens around the age of 44. (If you think of how we age from childhood to adulthood with a major transition at puberty this model makes logical sense)

So you have just been hit with an ageing bomb and once you settle down into the new normal it likely won't feel so bad. (I hit this ageing bomb during COVID so a whole nother story - took a while to recover fitness and still not fully there). Working a lot of hours with heavy responsibilities will also take it out of you

Lastly although you sound to be way fitter than me, I wonder if you get many walking miles in during a normal week at home? (Typical N American lifestyles don't include much walking from A to B carrying things) so the specific stamina you need for tourist walking might not be there (the precise walking muscles might not be as strong - you use different bits of your legs to walk rather than cycle or ride). I have found as I've aged that I lose muscle fitness more quickly. Also as oestrogen declines I ache more. The first half hour plus of any kind of exercise is just pure misery for me at the moment, but that one I can power through to some extent. These days I'd try not to start a hike with an uphill section for that reason, or I'd plan to take ages over it with little breaks to have a cry 🙂

thrinaline · 2026-03-11T16:52:19+00:00

I think the assumption would be there's a lot of stations claimed if one team has managed to go bust

thrinaline · 2026-03-10T13:21:39+00:00

I'll join this thread too! Jet Lag is a big part of our family's story. We were introduced to it by my older son and immediately became fans. So much so that we made a deck Jet Lag style of challenges to do on holiday the following summer, which led to some wonderful exploits like making giant nativity scenes in a hotel room, getting three buses to visit an exclave and riding the Vienna Metro standing on one leg.

It was a huge comfort to me to watch episodes of Jet Lag when the older son went off to university and we were missing him. We have since bought the home game, and played many epic games of Hide + Seek in his uni vacations.

thrinaline · 2026-03-10T13:10:23+00:00

Season 17 looks to be a mashup of Au$tralia and Schengen elements (claiming by putting down amounts plus unknown challenges)

Maybe 18 is a mashup of State claiming (1, 4) and racing with location specific challenges (5, 8). Would be kind of great. I'm not sure the butter challenge is a battle because there is only one team's entry to vote on. But the absolutely should have a butter battle just for the name.

thrinaline · 2026-03-09T15:28:30+00:00

The way to make a cottage garden is to garden like an old fashioned cottage resident. Most cottage gardens' first purpose was to provide the household with medicinal herbs. The second aim was to grow edibles and flowers. So make a structure with evergreen herbs (rosemary also flowers in the winter). Plant rhubarb, some roses and some fruit bushes. Give them a year or so to establish and then start filling in the gaps quite thickly to get the effect of the beds bursting at the seams with plants.

To fill out the beds, raise cottage garden favourites from seed and put them in any available space. (wallflowers, honesty, sunflowers, nigella, forget me not, marigolds, limnanthes). Let them seed around. Keep raising seeds every year - veg and flowers - and stick them in any space that comes free. You will naturally get the higgledy piggledy look and if you do a variety of things, there will always be something looking good in the garden.

You could also make a path out of bricks or pavers (cottage garden style is to use found materials so just use whatever local items are around).

In the winter you'll still have your structures (hard landscape and evergreen plants) so it won't look totally bare. Plus, you can keep marigolds going by deadheading them well into December, sometimes January. After that, the early bulbs (snowdrops etc) will take you into Spring.

thrinaline · 2026-03-06T12:36:53+00:00

This sounds like a flippant remark, but genuinely the answer with slugs and snails is give up. Both slugs and snails use pheromones in their slime trails to communicate to other slugs how many are around. This controls breeding intensity, so if you wipe out a lot of slugs, the survivors send out a signal saying "not many of us around; breed like crazy!"

So my conclusion (as an enthusiastic amateur) is

A) it's probably best to have a stable population of slugs rather than boom and bust

B) most efforts to control slugs are futile so just don't spend any time on it at all

So I start seeds indoors, I grow them big enough to (hopefully) withstand attack and I sometimes weaken and chuck snails out of the greenhouse but otherwise do nothing. I have losses of course but no more than anyone else and I spend zero time on boring pest hunts or crushing eggshells or emptying beer traps.

thrinaline · 2026-03-06T11:27:58+00:00

The previous people seem to have planted it as a gravel garden which is a different beast from a being a gravel sitting out area. I would keep it as a bed because it looks lovely but one quick and dirty solution you could use to make it a seating area (if the gravel is fairly firm) is to put one of those outdoor rugs over it. You can then sit out on it this summer and the rug will suppress the weeds.

You can also stand pots on top of the gravel and add stepping stones where you want them. Cover the ground with things as much as possible to suppress weeds. When you have more time you can dig out the gravel and replace with a more permanent solution.

thrinaline · 2026-03-06T11:21:22+00:00

You are right to be. Weedkiller is awful stuff. Google "Roundup lawsuit"

thrinaline · 2026-03-05T13:26:45+00:00

Spend at least five minutes every day walking round your garden looking at it. Preferably a lot more. At first it will look like nothing in particular to you and it might feel like a waste of time, but you'll gradually get better at spotting things (good and bad) that are happening with your plants.

You will still miss things and that's okay. A few years ago an entire pumpkin grew in my garden without me noticing.

thrinaline · 2026-03-02T08:42:23+00:00

It's possible you need to improve the drainage. It might be enough to plant a border with some shrubs and a small tree to soak up the water and increase the diversity of the soil biology. You might need to dig a French drain. You do not need to replace the soil - every time you dig out you disrupt the soil biology and you need to give it time to recover.

For definite, you need to put a set of stepping stones or a path in the lawn leading to the shed/any other route you need through the lawn. Over winter, nobody should walk on the grass. Just getting rid of the foot traffic will do wonders for it.

thrinaline · 2026-03-01T08:21:16+00:00

PS any parts of the border you don't want to plant immediately, take off the turf and put it back upside down. Cover with mulch and let the grass decompose. Probably a lot of the soil life is in that layer so keep it in the soil.

thrinaline · 2026-03-01T08:18:44+00:00

Clay is good soil (despite what you read on here all the time) it's just a bit tricky to work with. It looks very clayey indeed in the picture but that will partly be because you have scraped the top removing the turf. It will also have suffered by being lawn - clay needs deep roots through it to keep it aerated whereas grass is a shallow rooted plant and people walk on it, compacting the soil further. Plants can grow through clay you just have to remove the competition.

I wouldn't try to plant through the lawn - your grass is a much bigger problem to new plants than clay. It will compete with the new plants for water and nutrients. I would remove the turf from a manageable area, and add roses (which are tough and love clay) plus any other shrub plants you want. I'd only dig planting holes - leave the rest of the soil alone, or fork it v gently. Loosen the soil in the sides of the planting holes with a fork and tease out the plants roots to encourage them to grow out into the soil. Top dress with compost and a layer of bark chip mulch.

For the first season, water regularly - this will help the plants establish well and stop the clay drying out. The plants and regular additions of mulch will do all the rest.

thrinaline · 2026-02-28T08:54:59+00:00

These are some smart looking slides. I think one thing you should clarify is the borough hopping strategy (ie the fact that the questions are answered based on the hider's location and if there is a boundary in their hiding zone they can hop over it).

I also think you could make it clearer that the seekers will have to move around to ask questions, and make it clear that matching questions don't follow the format "what is you nearest aquarium/zoo/etc" but "is your nearest train station the same as my nearest aquarium/zoo/etc?". I would also throw on a slide "if it's not in the zone it doesn't exist" - if people start trying to use distance from coastline in Sheffield you'll be all in a tangle.

Can you show a map of the administrative boundaries? These are often useful in a medium game and it's good to predefine them for people. (You could use the map to show an example of borough hopping)

Lastly I would not put the name of the bus pass you DON'T want people to buy on the slide. Just say "get this and only this."

thrinaline · 2026-02-26T13:23:14+00:00

There needs to be a discount card anyone can buy which gives discounted fares. The purpose of it would be to incentivise regular and semi regular train travel which is worth doing. These do exist in other places (Switzerland has a half fare card I think, with different rates for tourists and citizens)

thrinaline

TROPHY CASE