Alan Bowen

I have three or four of these cast iron corn shellers, Paul and yes they are that easy to use. If you would like to go through two bushels of ear corn every minute my engine driven sheller is great for that.

I have a large exhaust fan with a two speed electric motor and belt to drive it.  Back around 1986 I had to cut the concrete floor in an apartment to run a hot water line to the bathroom. It was two lines a foot apart at least 25 feet long. I was using a concrete saw so I opened the windows in that area and set my crazy powerful fan in the doorway. This fan would blow kids over if they walked in front of it within 20 feet. I made my cuts and shut the fan off. I am very glad the house next door was owned by folks that very close friends with the lady I was doing this for. I turned their whole back yard gray. It did rain that night so their yard was green grass again that next morning.

The stove I have in the basement is an older air-tight All-Nighter Big Moe. I love it. I can do a short hot fire or a long slow fire. It is all about how I put the wood in it and how far I open the two drafts. In the coldest parts of any winter I can do a 30 or more day constant fire that never needs another match. Ten or twelve hour burns are easy to do. This stove has been here for 30 years now and I know it well.

This has been an interesting read.
I have been taking a pain reliever that we buy at our health food co-op.
It is called IbuActin.
It has Hops, Bromelain, White Willow, Papain, Ginger and Tumeric in it.
Next time there I will look at the other pain relievers they have.

The one I was thinking about will be hard to find because it was on someone's own page.
I did just find this one though.
YouTube


The one I was thinking about used stainless steel trays about two inches tall and her rack held eight trays.
I am pretty sure she was using wheat.
This guy uses stuff we all can find.

Julia Winter wrote:I went to the Aprovecho video gallery and found this video:

Some of it is making your own firebricks, but that requires a kiln. It's probably easier to find a few firebricks.

Julia, In the video he is making Insulated Firebricks. I wouldn't make that stove with plain hard firebricks.
You can make something to fire them in by using a Harbor Freight weed burner and some thrown together fire box with insulation wrapped around it.

Todd Parr wrote:I've been thinking of making a kind of box inside my chicken run, say a foot wide and eight feet or so long maybe 8"-12" deep, and putting compost a few inches deep and planting my excess seeds in it. Then I could cover the box with chicken wire and the chickens could eat the plants as they grow up thru the wire. Like Tyler, I don't generate enough compost to feed my 30+ chickens and I'm trying to cut the feed bill, at least during the summer months.

I have seen a video someone did about a rack of trays where they had a tray of sprouted seeds every day to give to their chickens. For 30 chickens you would need three or even four of those racks full of trays but to me it really looks to be a good way to feed the chickens. I will scout around and see if I can find it again.

Tyler Ludens wrote:So I'm going to consider this experiment finished. I think the Chickens on Compost concept has merit, but my system is not yet robust enough to provide sufficient compost ingredients for more than about 3 chickens. Because so many of my chickens are growing youngsters, I don't want to risk stunting or even killing them by insisting they survive on depleted compost heaps. So I will be going back to the usual feed of oats and sunflower seeds plus garden scraps. The 4 Orpingtons who survived the snake attack are now in a paddock shift setup, but they will also be getting regular seeds.

I think a very robust permaculture system could provide all the feed for chickens using a combination of paddock shift compost heaps, BSF larvae, and homegrown seeds, but mine is a long way from that point. I think it would be interesting to see just how many chickens could be raised in this way. I think enough hens to provide a small household with daily eggs would be a modest goal. Raising enough chickens this way to have market eggs or meat birds would require a very robust system.

Like someone else said if you sprout your seeds you will get a lot more feed value out of them.
I really do appreciate this topic. Thank you for your good reporting.

Very cute but in the time it took him to do that video my sheller would be happy to shell 140 pounds of corn.

I do it this way.
This is only one of my three two hole corn shellers.
I can crank them by hand or power them like this video shows.
It was built between May and December of 1892.
I did a little research after I put that video up.
I also have one almost just like it that was the model they started making in December of 1892.
They started making this model in 1886.
It would have been a mill or a very progressive farm that had it.
It is interesting to me that both of them that I have were found on farms within 12 miles of where they were built.
The third one I have is a later model that just drops the corn out the bottom and the cobs go out the back.
I use this type at a show because of all of the Monkey Motion as I call it. They are just a better display.
The slightly newer one is what I will use here at home.