Dead Good Ideas Return

Recorded: 6 September 2026

Location: Scottish Highlands

Duration: 26 minutes

Featuring: David Stanley & Alison

Topics: Van life · Family life · Birthdays · Harveste · Honesty boxes · Dead Good Ideas Graveyard · Stomplings · Beyla's Beasts · Scotland · Portugal · Olive trees · Kids · YouTube · Knitting

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About this episode

David is now 58.

To celebrate, Alison made a lemon drizzle cake which somehow became a burnt raspberry chocolate ganache cake.

He ate most of it anyway.

From there we wander into the Dead Good Ideas Graveyard, where one old idea has started moving again.

Harveste began with a simple frustration: food growing everywhere, produce going unused and no easy way for people nearby to know it exists.

The latest version starts much smaller.

Honesty boxes.

Find them, see what they sell, see whether they're stocked and create the beginnings of something bigger without trying to build the entire food system on day one.

We also talk about another project from the graveyard, Stomplings, Beyla's first wildlife video, Wolf's relationship with YouTube, Scotland beginning to wind down and what might be waiting for us when we finally get back to Portugal.

Around the table

• David turns 58
• Finding a six-year-old birthday twin
• Alison's disastrous lemon drizzle cake
• Raspberry and ginger jam
• The Dead Good Ideas Graveyard
• Why wasted fruit in Portugal started the Harveste idea
• Honesty boxes as the first practical version of Harveste
• Why app builders nearly killed the idea again
• Deciding to build it ourselves instead
• Stomplings and gamified nature walks for children
• Why time with the kids matters more than building everything at once
• Beyla's Beasts and the first Wendigo hunt video
• Wolf's brief starring role and emergency edit
• Trying to reduce mindless YouTube watching
• Scotland moving into autumn
• Portugal coming back onto the horizon
• Olive pruning, fallen trees and what might be waiting on the mountain
• The number one Portugal priority: build the kids a treehouse
• Alison learns to knit two socks at once

The Dead Good Ideas Graveyard

We have a habit of coming up with ideas, getting excited about them and then discovering that time, money or actual life has other plans.

Some deserve to stay buried.

Some don't.

Harveste is one of the ideas we're bringing back.

The original thought came from Portugal, where we kept seeing olives, oranges and other fruit growing in huge quantities while plenty of it simply went unused.

At the same time, people were still buying imported produce from supermarkets.

That disconnect stuck in my head.

Harveste starts smaller

The original Harveste idea became too large and too expensive.

So this time we're starting with something much simpler: honesty boxes.

We see them all over the Highlands, and people staying or eating nearby often want to know where they are.

The first version is about creating a useful map and database: where the honesty box is, what it sells, whether it has stock and enough information for somebody nearby to actually find it.

If that works, we can build from there.

The important bit is not trying to build every future idea at once.

One useful thing first.

Two days trying to put one pin on a map

The latest generation of AI app builders promised that we could describe what we wanted and have it built for us.

That wasn't quite our experience.

The front end could look convincing, but behind it were missing data fields, integrations, paywalls and plenty of manual work.

After spending two days failing to get one reliable map pin working, we changed direction.

Instead of paying for increasingly complicated builders, we're building the project ourselves and hosting it alongside the other things we already run.

Another idea from the graveyard: Stomplings

Stomplings was a kids' walking idea we built previously.

The aim was to turn walks into something children could interact with: spotting wildlife, plants and other things along the way, recording what they found and making exploration feel more like a game.

It worked.

What didn't work was trying to build everything while also running a business and raising four children.

So Stomplings may return too.

Just not at the same time as everything else.

Beyla's Beasts

Beyla now has her own YouTube channel built around something she genuinely loves: animals and wildlife.

Her first video is a Wendigo hunt, inspired partly by a creature from a Roblox game the kids have been playing.

We went out, filmed it and edited it together.

Wolf also managed to become a memorable part of the episode by deciding that the middle of filming was the perfect time for what can politely be described as a wild wee.

That section did not make the final cut.

Portugal is back on the horizon

We're now into the final stretch of our Scottish season.

Autumn is arriving, work is beginning to slow and Portugal is about two months away.

We're looking forward to getting back, but we're also slightly curious about what state everything will be in.

Last time we left, around 55 trees had come down in bad weather.

There are olive trees to check, ground to prepare for next year and plenty of pruning still to do.

But Alison has already established the first priority.

Build the kids a treehouse.

Notes from Dave

This one was recorded very late after work, so it's shorter and slightly sleepier than usual.

We record from a handful of bullet points and then wander wherever the conversation goes.

Harveste is still being built. Everything we talk about in this episode is where the idea stands now, not a promise that every feature mentioned will exist tomorrow.

Episode 7 also contains the first signs that our Scottish season is beginning to wind down.

Portugal isn't quite here yet. But it's getting closer.