Bonnie Johnson

Pearl Sutton wrote:I'm with Matt. Refrigerators and washing machines are what annoy me most.

Apparently Speedqueen washers, and i think dryers are made to be repaired and they last. I found this out too late after I bought my last washing machine.  So if I need another washing machine, I am going to get a speed queen.
Speed Queens are what they often use in laundry mats so it makes sense that they would last a long time and be easy to repair.    

I am haven't done the research on refrigerators so I can't help much there.

Cheap raised beds.

I make cheap raised beds from pallets.  Most pallets are heat treated and as long as the place you get them from doesn't spill oil or some other chemical on them, the pallets will be fine to use for raised beds.  Most of the pallets are made from oak and the oak will last for years. I live in Ohio and we get plenty of rain.  I have gradually replaced some of the raised beds walls with better materials as i could afford to.  I still have some made from pallets that are probably 8 or more years old.   And when the oak pallet is finally rotting out too much, you can toss the rotting boards into the bottom of another raised bed and it will just decompose in the bottom of the raised bed. If you want to spend a little, you can line the inside of the pallets with landscape fabric, or old feed bags.   I have watched videos and read articles where people use chicken wire wrapped around cardboard boxes to make raised beds. Probably a great use for old chicken wire.  Not sure how long it would last, as long as it gets someone started gardening.  

I use grass clippings from my yard (no pesticides or herbicides) for mulch around my plants. Keeps the weeds down amazingly well.  I mow fall leaves with my lawn mower and top off the manure and compost without about 6 inches of leaves in the fall.  Cheap easy free.

i also use old liquid totes the IBC totes to make raised beds.  They work very well for this.  I actually use the corners of the  IBC liquid totes to make goat feeders and the remaining middle part makes a raised bed. I get four goat feeders and a raised bed from one IBC liquid tote.

I raise cherry tomatoes on my deck in containers that hold 5 gallons. Sometimes buckets, sometimes old planters, doesn't matter, just needs to hold 5 gallons.
I can get three raised bed container from one 55 gallon plastic drum. I but them in thirds so I get a top a bottom and the middle section I have successfully raised sweet potatoes in these. I keep them by the water hydrant in full sun so I can water them easily.

I use composted manure so I don't buy any soil.  I have animals so I get plenty of great manure from my rabbits and chickens.  

You can easily raise potatoes in raised beds or containers, potatoes do not need to take up a lot of space.  I like the purple potatoes because they seem to never go away.  In fact, they have spread through my garden and grow all over the place.  I can't seem to get rid of them or keep them confined so i just let them grow.  

I think people who have never gardened before need to start small and simple with things like some lettuce, radishes, beans, and squash.  Then they need to add one or two things each year as they learn.   Lettuce is easy to grow in a small space in containers.    Seed saving and stuff comes later.  

I think another thing to keep in mind is growing stuff you like to eat.  If you don't like broccoli, don't grow it.  If you love tomatoes grow them. Tomatoes are easy to grow.  Personally, I love broccoli and tomatoes and most other veggies so that isn't a problem in my garden.  

The only soil amendment I buy is epsom salts.    And this year for the first year, I did buy some organic fertilizer to use on my seeds that I started in the green house.  Not really sure it did much so I don't think I will buy it again.

good luck,

I do not have sheep. I have goats.  I have watched videos of adult Rams killing people.  These were large rams, over 200 lbs, but I am pretty sure even a smaller ram could injure some one pretty badly.  That being said, when ever I have a buck goat even look at me crosswise (like he might even slightly be entertaining going after me) I get either an old wooden handle or a good heavy piece of PVC pipe and when he does it, I whack him right on the end of the nose as hard as I can.  I don't hit their forehead or horns, this encourages them to head butt.  Usually one strike on the nose is all it takes. They hate it.  They will cry and run and shake their head.  Their nose is very tender.  I have big bucks, one that is almost 200 lbs, one that is slightly over 200 lbs and one that is well over 200 lbs. They also have huge horns as they are mature Kiko bucks.  I won't keep a buck that continues to try to come after me as it is too dangerous.   However, if you are hesitant to get rid of this ram and I can understand why, you can try hitting him in the nose.

Now, while my bucks don't come after me, they do a lot of damage head butting things. They nearly destroyed their shelter last year. They ruined the fence separating them from the does, again. They head butted down the walls of the does winter shelter and head butted one of the hay feeders into pieces. They then head butted one of those big round wooden spools until it was a bunch of splinters.  I am contemplating trying these Ram Shields for when they go into rut.  I have not tried them yet. But perhaps they might work for you.  Or perhaps you might be able to make one yourself that would work.  

https://www.premier1supplies.com/p/ram-shields?cat_id=4

good luck!  

Ticks they suck, literally.  When I lived in north Central Arkansas, we could stand on our porch and have the wind blow the seed ticks onto us without leaving the house.   Had a dog get loose overnight and when we found him in the morning, we stopped counting after pulling over 200 ticks off of him.  In Ohio and people claim ticks are bad, I just say, well you have never been to Arkansas or Southern Missouri.  

Keep the brush down, mow.  
While people suggest Guinea Fowl, my experience with them has been less than  stellar.  Plain ole chickens work well.  

Here is what worked best for me in Arkansas.  Sprayed my shoes and socks with in insecticide. These days, I use Cedarcide. Works against the ticks and the mosquitoes and even keeps the flies away.  If it is warm out, wear shorts. You can feel the ticks going up your legs easier and pick them off. This works with chiggers too. I could feel the chiggers hit and spread out when walking through the vegetation then I could wash them off. If you wear sandals it is even better. Ticks and chiggers can burrow through your socks and you won't feel them until later.  I don't wear long sleeves either, I can feel the buggers walking up my arm and pull them off before they attach.  When you get in the house, you take your clothes off and you do a tick check if you are alone, use a mirror, if you have a partner, then check each other.  

I tried the tuck the pants in the boots and all it did was encourage the darn things to crawl up my pants and burrow in through the waist area. I would rather pull a tick off of my legs than off my butt or worse.  

Cedarcide also has granules that you can use on your yard and around your house. I have not tried them.

If I had a lot of problems with deer ticks, I would use tick tubes around my house and farm. You can make your own using toilet paper rolls and some cotton. You treat the cotton with an insecticide and mice find the toilet rolls with the cotton and use it for nesting material.  The mice get the insecticide on them and the ticks on the mice get killed. Mice are a vector for the ticks that carry lyme disease. You could use an organic type insecticide in the tick tubes.  
Anyhow, goodluck and I hope you stay disease free.

I tried the hoop style covered in plastic. it worked for one year, then the plastic got ripped up. The plastic was the sheet plastic you buy in a roll at Lowe's or Home Depot.  I then bought plastic from the greenhouse mega store that was supposed to last for 5 years.  Some of it is still being used for covering plants over 5 years later, but the hoop house just didn't work well for me.  So on one of those good years when I sold a lot of goats, I used some of the extra money to build a green house that was framed in pressure treated lumber.  We covered the exterior with the polycarbonate stuff that is single layer that you buy in sheets at lowe's or home depot.  It has the wavy corrugated thing going on.  Well, after one year, it got brittle and you could break pieces off with your fingers or if a board leaned against it too hard, it wold crack and break. I was so freaking mad.  Spent about $1200 just to cover the green house it is a 10 foot by 10 foot and we even covered the roof with it.  

At our local livestock auction people bring in other stuff to sell that sometimes there are piles of windows.  I bought two piles of window for $6 dollars each.  I removed all the brittle polycarbonate on the walls and replaced it with windows.  I put a metal roof on the green house and insulated the roof.  It works pretty good and I wish I had just bought the used windows in the first place and saved myself all the hassle.  The windows don't hold in the heat as much as the polycarbonate stuff did, but they do okay and I don't have to worry as much about things getting too hot. I only use the greenhouse in the late winter early spring to start plants.  I save a couple hundred a year just starting my own tomato, pepper, broccoli and cauliflower plants.  

So I would suggest if you want to use the windows to cover a greenhouse, look for local auctions that sell all kinds of stuff. We have several in our area, look on craigslist and perhaps facebook.  

I do have a piece of the stuff that looks like corrugated cardboard polycarbonate and I use it for a window on my chicken coop.  If I could afford to cover a greenhouse with it I would because it is tough, it has lasted for over 10 years and is still going strong and it is still flexible and not breaking.   But I cant afford this stuff right now.  

Just my experience with different materials , hope it helps

Brian E Schreiber wrote:No, I did NOT know, until speaking with a cattle farmer yesterday, that fermented grass(hay in his case) was used. . . He explained how in the winter here in Minnesota he feeds 2 to 1 ratio of dry / "wet" bales to his cows.  The wet round bales were wrapped in plastic so they did not dry over the winter months.
My concern, mold, you address by hand picking it out.  Somehow that does not seem very time / cost effective for a big operation so I figure you only are keeping a couple cows vs this guy's 150.  Also, your hand bagging, double bagging . . . just too . . . MUCH!

I run 35 head or so of adult goats. We have been kidding since the end of November so we have added another 30 kids with more to come. We have 3 pigs, 3 horses, a steer, chickens, and rabbits. I will probably bring in two or three calves here pretty soon.  Round bales of hay first cut are anywhere from 45 to 75 dollars right now.  I go through about 45 round bales each winter. If I can cut that down by feeding my own small scale silage, it will help our small farm make a little money or a little more money.  Last year I also raised over 700 roosters which I sold live. The roosters like getting extra grass clippings even when I have them in chicken tractors. It also cuts down on how much feed they eat.  I figure a good grass clover silage probably is coming in at 15 to 18 percent protein.

Technically bales that are wrapped are called haylage.  Silage is chopped up forage with sometimes chopped up green corn stalks (they have corn that is specifically planted for making silage) and sometimes they add some grain to the mix. Then they ensile it in either the stand up silage towers (they don't use those much anymore) or they pack it down into bunker silage that they drive tractors over to pack it down and sometimes they tarp those and they now have tube silage where they use a chopper to force the silage into the tube and pack it so their isn't much air in there.  

For my test bags, the disc of mold on the one bag ( the fresh mown in the afternoon grass) was small, in once piece and I could grab it and it came out and stayed in one piece.  I had a good 45 pounds or so for silage left for a few minutes or work. So that was no trouble at all to remove and that is the silage I am going to make this spring from fresh mown lawn with no drying done to it.  The bagging is simple.  I am sorry if I didn't describe it good enough. I put a plastic bag over the end of the lawn bagger from the lawn mower. I dump the bagger bag over and hold onto the plastic bag and let the bagger contents dump into the plastic garbage bag.  Then I push the air out and fasten it shut. It wasn't that hard the first time and it was easier the second time.  If I can get enough barrels to hold the silage I will move to using barrels but the barrels have to be air tight and have clamp on lids and I would need a lot of them.  So until I have enough extra barrels, plastic bags it is.  

You can actually make small scale silage with your lawn clippings. i did test bags of silage last fall and they turned out great after fermenting in the plastic bag for 6 or 8 weeks, they goats loved it. The lawn mower silage smelled great to me too.  Our lawn is fertilized by a chicken tractor and it has a lot of clover in it also some plantain, and a few other edible weeds and of course grass.  This spring, I am going to make a lot of silage with my lawn mower. I mowed late in the day on a dry day.  I double bagged the silage in plastic  garbage bags and you can reuse the bags if they don't get holes in them. You can also use five gallon plastic buckets with a tight fitting lid or barrels.   I will be cutting down on the amount of hay I need to feed to my goats, steers and horses.  I think my chickens will like the silage in the winter and I have read that you can feed it to rabbits which I might experiment with too.

I dumped the clippings out of the bagger directly into a plastic garbage bag and double bagged it. Then I pressed as much air as possible out of the bags by kneeling on them. I tied the top shut on the inner bag as tightly as possible. And then I tied the outer bag.  There was a small disc of mold right under the the bag closure that came out in one piece.  It was about 8 to 10 inches in diameter and about 1.5 inches thick.  I tossed that to compost. The rest of the silage was great. The test bag where I used partially dried clippings had a lot more mold about three inches thick all over the top of the bag and down the sides. I didn't feed that as it wasn't as nice smelling.

If you didn't know fermented feed (silage) is often fed to cattle. So a little fermentation of the grass clippings won't hurt the cow.  I used to feed fresh grass clippings to my horse when I was a kid. My horse loved it and she never had  problem with it.

I feed fresh mown grass clippings to my rabbits, goats and pigs. They eat it fast enough that it doesn't ferment.

I used to use our horses to mow the lawn and weed eat with the goats.  However I had to stop doing that when I put in fruit trees and berry vines/bushes.  The goats destroy them. Also the horses were knocking over the trash can with the rabbit pellets even with the lid bungeed down so they could eat it. Yard is fenced in over an ace.  I do still run a small chicken tractor in the yard, a 5 foot by 10 foot long.  I also have the goats and chickens fenced out of my garden!

About four or five years ago, my husband bought me a battery powered Stanley xd self propelled lawnmower and wheel barrow also battery powered.  I love them both, but it was taking for ever to mow the lawn. So two years ago, we use the tax refund that mostly generated by our ranch/farm to purchase a Green Works riding lawn mower with bagger that is battery powered. I can now get the lawn mowed in about 45 minutes instead of several days. I use the lawn clippings to mulch the garden, feed the rabbits, goats, and pigs and sometimes chickens.  Last summer i used the bagger to make some test bags of small scale silage. The test silage was a great success and I am planning on making a lot more silage this spring, summer and fall.  

We run about 35 head of goats on rotational 7 rotational grazing pastures. I follow the goats with a steer or two and my 3 remaining horses.  I raised about 700 roosters in chicken tractors in one rotational grazing pasture. Used the Green Works battery powered riding lawnmower to pull a cart with feed and water out to the chicken tractors and I used it to move the chicken tractors.  I can mow really tall grass with the Green Works riding lawnmower. I was surprised that it would go through grass a foot tall.  Can't use the bagger when you are doing that though.  I had to mow the pasture in front of the chicken tractors so I could move them. I would mow several days worth in front of the chicken tractors so the bugs and stuff would come back before I moved the chicken tractor.  I will be mowing part of the pasture to make extra silage too.  I also use the battery powered mower with cart to haul the roosters up to the house in cages so customers can buy them. I sell live birds. I don't sell processed birds.

I also used the Green Works battery powered riding mower to mow along some fence line so I would not have to do as my with my battery powered weed eaters. it worked better than expected so I am going to do more of that this year.

The small scale silage is hopefully going to help cut down the amount of hay I purchase.  I plan on feeding it to goats, horses, rabbits and pigs, and maybe chickens.  I just empty the bagger into a barrel or plastic bag and get the air out and seal it up.  I try to mow when it is dry in the afternoon and that seems to be the right water content.  I am able to reuse the plastic bags as long as they don't have holes in them. I hate plastic, but I don't have enough barrels for storage yet.  

I use a brush cutter blade on my battery powered weed eater to clear fence line so my high tensile electric fence will stay charged enough to keep goats in. I can take down 3/4 inch diameter saplings and rose bushes with the battery powered weed eater with the brush cutter blade.   I have also switched to using electric battery powered chainsaws for those times when i have trees come down on the fence.  

I still use the Stanley XD pushmower and wheelbarrow.  They both still work great. I use the battery powered wheel barrow more and I don't want to ever go back to having a push a wheel barrow or pull a cart by hand.

I am not sure how any backwash would get back into the tubing and flow upward against gravity to go to another cage.  When a rabbit pushes on the nipple the valve opens and water flows out. When the rabbit stops pushing, then the nipple closes.  The water flow would push out anything trying to go back up in the nipple and into the tubing.  

I had way more crap building up in the water bottles and they are very hard to get clean.  I do not have the flip top. Also I have had to replace the water bottles along with the ball valve nipple that goes on the water bottle. The plastic bottle part becomes brittle then cracks.  The water bottle nipple freezes and cracks easily on the plastic that screws onto the bottle. I can't use the bottle or the automatic system in the winter.  

I have not had a problem with disease transmitting through water.  I only bring in a new rabbit every couple of years to help avoid heavy inbreeding. I don't go to rabbit shows, and I don't have my rabbits where they can get in contact with wild rabbits.  Although I did have a doe successfully raise two out of four wild bunnies that were orphaned.  

I understand that it can tell you a lot about how an animal is doing by monitoring the water.  When I first installed the automatic watering system, I would go to each cage and check to make sure that the water was flowing. Now I can tell from looking in the 5 gallon bucket if the rabbits have been drinking enough water.  Also if the bucket is empty, I know to look for a leak or a bad nipple or a disconnected tube/hose from my dogs hitting the tubing. I have so many other animals to take care of horses, steer, pigs, goats, chickens, and dogs that it is a relief for me not to be constantly checking and refilling water bottles three times a day in the summer.  

I am glad your system works for you.  

when I was a kid, over 50  years ago, we scraped or poured out the bacon grease into a can. The can was kept by the stove so you could use the bacon grease to put oil in a pan so things wouldn't stick.  It was the never ending can of bacon grease.  I don't think my Mom had heard of Olive oil at that point in time.  It was either lard, crisco or corn oil or the ubiquitous can of bacon grease.  

Fast forward to today.  I don't cook bacon often enough to have bacon grease sitting around. If I did, and I had room in the frig, I would probably put it in there especially in the summer. However, I do render lard from our home raised pigs.  I cut up the pig fat and put in in the slow cooker with about a quarter cup of water and I let the slow cooker melt the fat. I then strain the liquid hot lard through a bakers sieve, what you use to sift flower over a funnel into quart jars. Then I put a new canning lid on it and it seals down on its own. This stuff keeps for at least six months in my basement at about 60 to 65 degrees.  So I suspect that you could easily store bacon fat the same way in either pint jars or quart jars.  

I made my own home cured bacon and hams from our own pig last year. It was easy and worked great. The bacon is awesome, but I just don't eat bacon that much and neither does my husband.  I don't keep a can of bacon grease sitting around because it would probably go rancid especially in the summer. I do cook bacon in a pan then saute up veggies and what not in the fat when making certain soups.  

You can also render chicken fat and duck fat and beef fat.  I have some duck fat in the door of my frig in a pint canning jar.  I raised and butchered the ducks so wanted to keep some of the fat. The duck fat does taste good for frying/ sauteing.  

good luck