Lloyd George

Goat food....my girls eat it like me on a bag of jerky...

and there is always guerilla hay...I mow field headlands, and a couple of unoccupied farmhouses out here, and it all goes into the haystack...Goats love the variety of crap in it, as do the pigs...the pigs get pretty much anything organic I find for them...tonight they get a treat..chicken liver cooked into a swill with some old sweet taters...I love my pigsposals..seriously though..a good scythe, stop along the roadside, someplace safe, and a few swipes produses several armloads of hay...haul it home, spread it and dry it, or feed directly if needed.....don't discount haylage made in garbage bags either....

I have a 55 gallon barrel with a spigot attched, which sets on a trailer behind my tractor..and 20 feet of garden hose that flows into a PVC wand about eight feet long...I can roll up next to a bed, and spot water every plant in it in just a few minutes...for the places I cannot get a hose to...

Couple of things..five gallon buckets hung on posts connected to drip lines and fed down a row works well..and for portable drip...a gallon jug with a screw top and a nail hole in the side at top..fill it, set it next to the plant with the hole down..slow water and a good recycle...

The smaller ones are usually not too efficient..and they are damned difficult to dig through..unless you just to not have room..ge a larger model..read the spec sheets to see how much energy it is projected to use over time...

It is easy to make a freezer smaller...not so much in the other direction. one can freeze gallon jugs of water to increase thermal mass and make the freezer smaller, effectively...plus the jugs are great for hot summer days...toss a couple in to your livestock water, so thaey can have cool fresh water...pretty much anything on four legs appreciates that...

I really don't know how well it would work...since I make all my hay by hand, I really need to build myself a scoop rake that i can push along to gather a windrow...think of the same thing but with me pushing...I don't have many animals..so it is the best use of my $$ to do it that way..

I bale by hand too..need to build a better baler...going to put one of Tiller's int. models together...hopefully soon...

three or four layers of newsprint, and a nice thick layer of mulch, then a cylinder of wire around each, and a flock of geese...maybe a couple of southdown sheep...southdowns are grazers, ad will not browse other than an occasional taste..

scored two Wagners, and a Griswold at an auction last week..plus an unbranded griddle..for two bucks...

Fred, you are right of course, I went through a CSM, but it is a giant PITA...it does have its uses, and I still have it...bu I doubt I will ever use it again....there is a cat down in TX with one 72" who cuts giant slabs for high doller tables...

My assumption is that the average user is looking to make farmstead lumber...I can cut a 20" wide board easily...but rarely do so, ans I usually making 2x for framing or some fraction of 1x for siding, flooring, fencing..etc...

When I want slabs, I call a buddy with a swingmill...I honestly think about the best value in recovering opportunity wood is a good sized swinger...can pack into the big monster logs or set and little guys brought to it..


I sure do love my Woodmizer though..I don't work for them..but they are wonderful machines...

So..Everybody in the south that gardens grows green beans...sorta like keeping bacon grease..it is a rule...but when you get fifty or so bags of green beans put up..like the first day of picking, and you drown your neighbors in green beans until they are ready to shoot you on sght..whaddaya do? WEll..it is too stinking humid to pull hte vines and hang them..they just get moldy..not so good...and I have not gotten around to building one of htose super wham-o-dyne downdraft dehydrators, nor a rocket mass stove powered green house...soo..I took a big sheet of heavy poly...pulled all the bean plants, and laid them out in a windrow on the poly...cut a 55 gallon plastic barrel into two big open napkin rings to hold open the ends..and rolled the whole mess up like a burrito..then stuck a fan in the end..been getting 100-110 degrees of heat out the exhaust end all day...and the whole mess can be folded up and stacked in the corner of a shed until the buckwheat comes off in october, or I get a batch of hay about to get rained on..or the corn needs drying because I want to get in a cover crop instead of waiting for it to field dry...etc etc etc...seems to work, and dirt cheap...

I think it depends on slope...the beaverslide is not the issue, in fact, if you were to have a nice large slope facing south, and built a pier off the top of it...dump the hay into a cage below it..you don't need the beaverslide...truthfully though I think I prefer a hayloader or similar..not as big, not as hard to take down the road to the neighbors.....

Now what would be a cool toy, is a hayloader that empties into a pike basket..a cone cage with a wooden spike up the middle..pack the hay in..flip the cage...instant haystack...