Kathleen Sanderson

That's good to know about the bucket nest boxes. If I ever have chickens again, I will remember that. (While I hope that my daughter will outlive me, in reality, that's unlikely, due to her many health problems. If she predeceases me, I probably will get a few chickens, just a handful. Eggs are good food. And I like chickens.)

I've had chickens for most of the last fifty years, and have had quite a few different coops - and several kinds of chicken tractors. My recommendation is a chicken tractor. A small one if you only plan to have a few birds, and possibly one of the bigger ones made like an A-frame or a hoop-coop if you plan to have a larger flock.

There is a caveat: if your land is very uneven or steep, tractors probably won't work. Birds can escape under the sides of the tractor with even a small unevenness that creates a dip (and predators can get in the same way, although leaving a 'skirt' of wire laying on the ground around the perimeter of the tractor will help with both escapes and predators).

Tractors have both pros and cons. One of the biggest cons is that they need to be moved regularly, with daily moves being ideal. They need to be built to be easy to move, or soon they won't be getting moved. If you will be moving yours by hand, it needs to be light enough for the smallest person moving them to handle easily - my first attempts functioned well, but were hard for me to move without help. My best small tractor for moving by hand turned out to be built out of 'rabbit wire,' the welded wire used for constructing rabbit cages. My tractors had no bottom, but the wire is stiff enough to hold it's shape without the bottom and even without any other frame, as long as you don't make the cages too large. I put the doors on the top; if you build one of these, make sure you can reach clear to each end from your door, so you can reach all of the chickens in residence. And I added tow ropes to each tractor - much easier on my back than trying to move them while bent over. If you do want a frame, use metal electrical conduit - it will last much longer, and be lighter, than wood. Plastic pipe, if it's UV resistant, will also work, but the wire will outlast it.

I had three of these tractors, 3' wide and 6' long, and kept three or four hens in each (or up to twelve juveniles), which was plenty for us. To protect the hens from heat and rain, there were scraps of loose plywood laid on top of each tractor; removing this made them very light to move. It may sound inconvenient to have to remove the 'roof' each time you move the tractor, but I found out the hard way that an attached roof turned such a light-weight tractor into a sailboat in high winds - several tractors flipped over taught that lesson. And the plywood scraps were quick and easy to remove and replace.

I had intended to add a bucket nest box to the end of each of my tractors; we moved here before that got done, and since we learned how sensitive my daughter is to eggs, we no longer have chickens. But a light-weight nest box, accessible from outside the tractor, would make it easier to collect the eggs, and would keep the eggs cleaner (and less likely to get trampled and broken, which leads to egg-eating).

My tractors never had roosts in them; they were only 18"-24" high. The chickens didn't seem to suffer for that. Ideally, your waterer should be attached to the outside of the tractor, like the waterers on a rabbit cage. There are similar waterers that have cups for chickens to drink from. And for feeding, while I had feeders inside of each cage - which had to be removed and replaced each time I moved the tractors - now, I think I would just move them, dump their day's feed on the ground, and replace the plywood top to protect the feed from rain. The chickens are scratching around in the ground anyway, so there's no harm to the birds, and they aren't likely to lose much of their feed, either. If, when you go to move the tractor the next day, there's still visible feed left, either you've given them too much, or they are eating well from foraging inside the tractor (though it's too small a space for them to get much of their diet from it), or it could be an indication of a health problem, in which case you are ahead in recognizing it early.

I have had a stray dog tear into a chicken tractor made of chicken wire, but never one of these made from rabbit wire - it's much sturdier stuff. The only predator loss of birds inside one of these tractors I ever had was when I had positioned them too close to a hedge, and something, probably racoons, managed to reach through and kill several young birds. You do want to keep them away from any brush that gives good cover to predators. My three rabbit wire tractors lasted for close to fifteen years before we moved here, and should have been good for quite a few years more. The only real damage they took was one winter when a loose goat decided to stand on them (they were unoccupied at the time). And even that was fairly easily bent back into shape.

Probably the biggest pro was that my birds had clean ground every day, and I had no chicken coop to clean out, at least during the warmer months - where we were living at the time, we got quite a bit of snow in the winter, so the hens did spend the snowy months in a coop. Here, in southern KY, I would just keep them in the tractor year-round. It only took maybe five minutes per tractor to move them each day and get everything set back up (you do have to watch out for the birds as you move the tractor - they can get their feet caught if you go too fast, and may escape if you lift it too much).

One useful thing you can do with my light-weight rabbit wire tractors is use them to keep the paths in your garden clean. You can go down to as narrow as 30" wide tractors, if you are going to do this, so the tractors will fit between your garden beds.

If you decide to go with tractors for a larger flock, and have a tractor or an ATV to use to move them, that would work just as well. There are plans online for the larger ones.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Roasting meat no waste hack:

Hacking on my cold while looking for "hack" in my email to locate this thread easily, I actually do have a hack I hadn't thought was a hack because I have done it for decades

I'll bet we all have more than we think at first pass

Yesterday, not up for elaborate cooking, I stuck a big turkey in the oven, partially defrosted
I know, is t must sit in there too long and get a bit tough

Well the first thing is use a really good covered roasting pot if you can -- it will pay for itself eventually

This monster beast was about 14 lbs

6 hours later...

Well to prepare it so it wouldn't stick and burn,
I halved a bunch of onions and stuck them under the turkey in the bottom of the roasting pan
Lid wouln't close at first but give it an hour or two and it will close up
I found out a few years ago that if you keep the skins on the onions, you can salvage all the onions
(Onions are cheaper than turkey and this way none of the turkey over cooks)
Anyway, after it is cooked I bag up caramelized baked onions in a ziplock and freeze them;

partially defrosted roasted onions are easy to slice
They can them be added to vegetables, spaghetti sauce, stew and soup, so no waste

Lazy hacking cook will settle for turkey sandwiches, remove the best meat, bag and keep cool, add water halfway up the roasting pan and return to oven with bones and tough meat, let it sit for a few hours
The best day, fish out bones etc, cool again, skim off fat, add root vegetables and anything else you need to use up or like in stews and you've got MRE's

My lazy cooking hack is to use my electric cooker (Instantpot style gadget, but Ninja brand) for cooking almost everything. I don't know if it saves electricity, though it may on some things (probably less expensive to heat up a small electric cooker than a large oven, for example). But it save me a lot of time; I don't have to stand in the kitchen watching things cook. Some things do need to be turned once, is all. It also doesn't overheat the house in the summer, which is a huge benefit.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Louis Laframboise wrote:What do you use as bait?

I have had success squeezing a raisin into the bait holder and this has worked beautifully. Upon simple observation, it looks like it is quite hard for the mice to remove the raisin without tripping the trap.

Good idea!

I use peanut butter for bait. Dear Wife is a PB lover and I take the last traces out of the empty jars. Since I reuse each trap many times it's important to refresh the bait. (Since deer mice can carry disease, I use a dedicated set of needlenose pliers and a flat screwdriver to empty and reset the trap without touching anything.)

I use hardened cooking fat from meat (usually from cooking hamburgers, which we eat almost daily - carnivore diet). It's free, we have plenty of it, and mice seem to love it!

William Bronson wrote:My weak sauce is : tarps are usually better than wheelbarrows.
For moving dirt, compost, leaves, woodchips, and brush over soft ground, a tarp is hard to beat.
If  the material is destined to end up in a raised bed or bin you can load a manageable amount in each load and simply hoist the load , rather than shoveling it bit by bit.
Tarps can ride around in a vehicle or tool bag , out of the way until they are needed.

This will be useful next week when I'm filling a couple of new garden beds!

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Hrrmm, I think I'm a bit OT with some of my responses. Weak sauce = subtle little hacks.

#4:
- After clearing a vehicle of snow, don't just yoink the door wide open. Crack it first, then open slowly. The last bits of snow sitting on the door seal will fall outside the vehicle instead of swirling all over the seat.

I try to remember to brush the snow off the top of the door before opening it, in cases like this. Too many times that I've had to brush a whole pile of snow off the seat before getting in!

I'm going to post a couple of mine, and *then* go read the rest of the replies!

1. When I go to the feed store, I've gotten over being too proud to ask for help loading the 50 lb. feed bags into the back of my pickup - the truck is a 3/4 ton 4-W-D (almost thirty years old, long since paid for, runs fine, and I only drive it once or twice a month, so, no, I'm not going to replace it with something smaller and more efficient). The height of the bed makes it hard for this short almost-seventy-year-old lady with a bad back to lift the bags up in there. I have the store employee stand the bags up on their ends in a row - poultry feed, goat feed, and dog food are easily accessible that way without having to shift stacks of bags around after I get home.

2. I have a cap/topper on the back of my truck, so instead of moving feed bags out of the truck to another location, I leave them in there. With them standing on end as mentioned in 1., it's easy to get at the feed I need at chore times. And, honestly, I've lost a lot less feed to pests and mold by keeping the bags in the truck, although I do have issues with mice from time to time.

3. Not sure if this counts as a tweak, but I got really, really tired of my water hoses kinking - wasted a lot of time untangling and straightening hoses, even when I'd bought supposedly 'commercial' grade expensive ones. Two or three years ago, I spent the money to get a couple of metal-wrapped hoses, and have never had a kinked hose again!

Almost forgot. 4. When I'm using my wood stove, I bring firewood to the house in a wagon. I've learned to park it very close to the bottom of my back steps. That way, I can use my backside to hold the storm door open while I pick up an armload of wood out of the wagon, and can pivot and get up the steps and through the open door easily. If I don't do that. I'm standing on the steps and trying to dodge the door while opening it with one hand and holding the heavy wood in the other arm. It's awkward. Someday I'd like to build decks at both the front and back doors, so I don't have to open those doors while I'm on the steps - that was poor design. People who plan to build a house might take note!

Surprised I hadn't already posted on this thread. My tree choice is black locust. My back yard is full of them, and they spread like, well, weeds. But they make excellent firewood and fence posts (and rot-resistant lumber if you can get a big enough log to cut lumber from). They allow enough sun underneath to grow grass and other forage, so are good for silvopasture. The leaves are excellent tree-fodder, if your critters can reach them. They can be coppiced. They fix nitrogen. The wood has a lot of other uses, such as tool handles, furniture, and even boat-building (although it's a fairly heavy wood). And during their brief bloom time in the spring, they are both beautiful and fragrant (supposedly the blooms are edible for humans, but my trees are too tall to reach the flowers, so I haven't tried that). They are also excellent bee forage during their brief bloom period, though apparently they don't always produce huge amounts of nectar.  It's easy enough to keep black locusts from spreading by mowing or by grazing with animals that eat browse (goats, sheep, probably donkeys). The only major issue I have is that my enclosed front porch has a small gap between the porch floor and the house, and one of the root shoots of a black locust tree keeps trying to come up through that crack! We've cut it back several times, and finally got some chemical to paint on the stump, which will hopefully kill it back. Stubborn thing! But being hard to kill can be an advantage - they are very hardy and grow well in a wide variety of climates, including the high semi-desert of Eastern Oregon where we lived before we moved here to KY. They are used for land reclamation after mining operations, which should tell you a lot about how tough they are! They do tend to drop branches in high winds (few trees don't), so best not planted too close to buildings, but if you have one near a building, as I do, just keep an eye on it, and trim dead/dying branches out as needed.

My brother moved in next door to me a few years ago. He's got a lot of skills, and has a pretty steady stream of items coming into his shop that need fixed, anything from neglected maintenance to welding and fabrication of parts. Mostly farm and garden/yard equipment. Some of it would have had to go into a commercial shop, at high cost to the farmer who owns it. Other stuff would have been thrown out, ending up in a landfill. My brother gets paid a bit for some of it, but he does a lot of trading - he's gotten all kinds of useful stuff (that mostly needed to be fixed) in exchange for fixing other stuff. He's been given/traded for an old but working pickup truck, a DR brush hog, a walk-behind power wagon, a pressure washer, hay (which goes to my goats), a couple of lawn-mowers including a zero-turn riding mower, and a number of other things. The old pressure tank that he was given got turned into two useful items - a larger wood stove for my house, and then he fabricated a snow plow attachment for his side-by-side ATV. (We don't usually get a lot of snow here, but it has already come in handy.)

My brother doesn't know much of anything about permaculture, but what he's doing follows permaculture principles, whether he knows it or not! He's building ties in the community; recycling and keeping stuff out of the landfills; and making good use of what's available, rather than spending money on new stuff. And his network of contacts means that if we need the use of something we don't own, we can usually borrow it from someone, like a rototiller, or a horse-trailer, and that's a permaculture principle, too - sharing stuff, rather than each household owning one of everything.

For cattle (and horses, if you have some that aren't tamed down), chutes are a necessity. No human can hold a cow still if it doesn't want to be held still. Or a horse, for that matter (the BLM, dealing with mustangs off the range that are still wild, uses chutes at their facilities). For smaller animals, I've never had a chute, but if you had a large number of sheep or goats - or, I suppose alpacas, though I've never had any camelids, either - a chute would certainly save a lot of time, and might save some back strain, too. You will absolutely need some kind of pen setup that allows you to sort animals, though, and arranging the aisles and gates carefully can make them function much like a chute. It doesn't have to be terribly expensive to put together. T-posts and cattle panels will usually work, though if you have animals that are jumpers, you might want to spring for the more expensive - and taller - no-climb horse panels. For the small numbers of animals that's all I've ever had (a minimum of two goats, to a maximum of about forty sheep), we would just have a couple of small pens set up - sometimes portable ones. Put them all in one pen, and as each animal was caught and dealt with (whether medical treatment, shearing, or milked out) they were released into the second pen. Sorting for some purposes could really use an extra pen or two besides the basic and necessary two, though.

A big advantage of having some kind of chute system is that it prevents a lot of stress on the animals (and on the animal handlers). Quietly running them through a properly-designed system (see Temple Grandin's work on livestock handling facilities) is much better than having to chase and catch and wrestle with each animal. Do that very many times in a row, and you are going to be exhausted, I guarantee! And it's really not a good thing to have to do if you are working pregnant females. You could end up with them losing their babies.

I guess what it boils down to is, you have to figure out your costs with and without a chute system. Costs of materials to build your facility; costs of your time and energy with and without the chute; costs in terms of the potential consequences of stress on your animals. Then you can make an informed decision.