Ryan Basye

I was reading "Cottage Economy" and read that he would feed the chickens the curds and the pigs the whey. It doesn't say how he went about it though, something I notice with a lot of these books, they tell you what you can do but not how to do it, at least in usable detail. Anyway, do I have to put every days milk on the stove and make "farmer cheese"? I would rather not have to use that much electricity every day. Can I just let it sit in a bucket and have different buckets for every day or can I pure it into a 35 gallon barrel everyday and skim out the curds that form? Is there a book out there that tells you how, in detail, to process milk into different things? When I raise chickens in my Salatin style tractor this spring I would like to use the curds as my protein source instead of having to buy meat and bone meal. Thank you for your input.

I bought 3 hot house hogs and used 4 hog pannels linked together and moved them every day to clear an area for a garden. It worked very well. I supplied them with corn and picked weeds for them. After they cleared an area I would scatter corn behind them and ran them through again. They really loved that, the corn would be knee to waist high and they would tear right through it. For water they had a blue medal hog bowl wired to the fence with a hose. For shelter they had a medal "pigaloo" that I dragged along. I some pictures in an album on facebook, look for basye's misty valley farm. We butchered them on the farm and they tasted pretty decent anyway.

I have been pulling a lot of ticks out of my Guinea Hogs and was wondering if I could prevent ticks. Luckily I have only had one on a piglet. Nobodys happy when I have to pick them up. Thanks for any tips.

This year I did what I have read about in biodynamic writings. I have been making comfrey tea (along with any other weed I find to through in) and when I find larva or adults I through them in the barrel to stew with the rest of it. I have two barrels and use one every other week so that each has two weeks to ferment. At the end of two weeks I "dynatised" the sollution by stirring one way with a canoe paddle until you get a vortex then go the other way until you get a vortex. Do this for an hour (it isn't so bad once you have done it a couple of times). I am happy to report that I haven't seen any beetles since I started watering with this mixture 3 weeks ago. Good luck.

In making a bread oven, they pile up a mound of wet sand in the shape you want and then form the cob around the sand. When its dry you take away the wooden door that you made previously and put where you wanted it, and then drag all the sand out. That is it in a nutshell. I suppose you could look at rocket stove to also give you ideas. Maybe you could put the pottery where the vermiculite or other insulation is supposed to go in a large rocket stove.

When I want to dig some thing deep, I take a post hole digger and dig a bunch of holes first and the clean out what's left. Kind of like in wood working using a drill and chisel.

Gene Logsdon or Joel Salitin once mentioned that animals like loose hay rather than baled and the big round balea least of all. Children like it a lot better as well, especially if you can climb really high in the loft when Mother isn't around, (but Dads there just I case).

I will collect my grass clippings in 55 gallon barrels. I put it right from the grass collector to the barrel after mowing it. I will jump up and down inside to compact it as much as possible. To top it off I use a large garbage bag over the top cinched down by a tire sidewall "rubber band" that I cut out with razor blades when I was buiding my tire walls for my root cellar. My Guinea Hogs got along on it just fine last winter on two year old left over silage from when I had sheep a while back.
I thought I was original with this until an old timer told me his landlord did it to feed his chickens back in the day. He said to pour hot water on it for the chickens. I haven't tried that one yet.