Getting Rid of Snakes and Other Homesteading Advice

There are all sorts of old wives tales for keeping snakes away and scaring them away once they are on your property.  I’ve found that the best way to get rid of them is to corner them right after they have eaten a meal of chicks or eggs, when they are a little sluggish, and is the only time I see them anyway, and then catch them!

I can usually handle them just enough to get them into a feed bag and then tie the top up tight, after which they go into a five gallon bucket with a tight fitting lid, and then it’s into the back of the pick up and they are re-homed in an isolated area with no houses or chickens.  They will always manage to get out of the bag while in the bucket, so be prepared for that when removing the lid.  They won’t be happy either!

Don’t ever put a snake in a bag in your car without it being in a bucket with a lid…unless you really WANT to run your car off the road into a ditch.  There are better ways of turning snakes loose.

As far as other homesteading advice……

Always cover your outdoor-stored hay, even if the sun is shinning brightly when you leave in the morning.  If you don’t it will surely pour down rain before you get home in the afternoon.  On the other hand, if you WANT it to rain, leave your hay uncovered.  It worked nicely for us yesterday.  We probably got a good 3 inches before I got the hay bales covered.

If you stop on the way home at a fast food restaurant and eat, and then feel like you are suddenly covered with ticks from head to toe, don’t panic.  Calmly pull the car over to the side of the road and examine your itches.  My itches yesterday were simply a really bad case of hives…..caused by something I ate at an Arby’s restaurant I am assuming.  A Benadryl tablet and a nap cured them without incident.

If you have baby birds living in the pillars on your front porch, don’t stick your face up too close to try and see the babies.  You quite likely with have your face badoozled by a mad mother or father bird as they exit their nest in a panic.

Don’t try to fix your electric fence in a thunderstorm.

If the goats wake you up in the morning by knocking at your front door for milking, don’t make it a habit to give in to their manipulation or you will soon be milking them in your living room on THEIR schedule, which is probably more than twice a day, and those times will certainly be most inconvenient, like at  4am, or just as you’re getting ready to leave for work, or right after your evening shower, just as you are getting into bed…..no matter if they were milked just 2 hours ago. 

If it’s over 90 degrees outside, the inside air temperature in your house will likely rise about 20 degrees over that right after 4pm, so if you plan to spend a restful evening in your living room watching tv or reading, you really will need to put an air conditioner unit in….and preferrably BEFORE July or August rolls around…after that, the sheer effort of getting the thing in the window will cause you to sweat so much that you will likely short it out before it ever gets plugged in. 

Clothes hung on the line outdoors DO NOT dry quickly when the humidity is high. In fact, they often do not dry at all, and will begin to sour in a matter of hours.  However, the sourness does not bother black ants or other bugs which will quickly make homes in your line-dried clothing.

When getting rid of a wasp nest, the number of cans of spray you will need to do the job is directly related to the size of the nest.  I’d advise about 1 can of spray for every inch your nest is wide.  So, if you have a nest that measures approximately 10 inches wide, you will need about 10 cans of wasp spray.  And the spray will probably need to be repeated every night for 10 nights or so…after which either you or the wasps will be dead, and it doesn’t matter who goes first, without either one of you, the other party can live in peace.

All holes, tears, etc. in those big, long, orange, extension cords should be repaired immediately.  Don’t wait until you are using it, and get zapped when handling the thing.  It’s just not worth it. 

To get rid of ants…..well, I’m not sure the best way, we’ve tried all ways, but have settled on sevin dust sprinkled at the base of all the wall joints in the house.  It works, but I’m not sure how long we’ll live…..

And that’s about it for my homesteading advice for the day.  I’d love to hear your comments and if you have any advice I can include in a future post, please pass it along.

Fifty Five Thousand Pounds of Manure

That’s the amount of horse and goat manure I figured I have left to move.

Wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow full.

A whole years worth.

I calculated its weight in pounds by adding up the hay we feed the animals each week, which is somewhere in the thousand pound range and timesing it by 52 weeks in the year, and adding a little for good measure.

I did not, however, add in the weight of the 20 inches of rain we’ve got this spring,  nor the additional weight of grass, grain and whatnots they find in the field to eat.

Nor did I add in the weight of maggots, flies, dung beetles and earthworms which have all made their home in the inches-deep manure bed.

Fifty five thousand pounds is about all my mind can fathom.  And it has a hard time doing that.

My most recent plan was to use my lawn mower and the garden cart I finally got wheels for, to move the manure from the pasture to the garden, but the lawn mower, with the garden cart attached is now stuck in the garden, possibly forever.  It was no match for the 6 inches of hay I had already put down when I drove it up in the garden with a 500 pound load of wet manure in the cart.

The worst thing is, I’m having to lay down the manure and hay over top of grass that’s four feet high.  If I had followed the instructions I found online for building a layered, no-till garden,   and layered the whole garden at one time last fall or even early this  spring, I’d have no weeds whatsoever.

I found that out when trying to decide where to put some tomatoes and I pulled back some thick layers of hay and saw nothing but rich brown dirt underneath with gobs of earthworms and a few leggy mushrooms.

Whatever.

So, even though I got my garden cart wheels fixed, I found that it stays stuck more often than unstuck when driving around in thick layers of wet hay and manure, and my old wheelbarrow wheels don’t like to hold air….and my new plastic manure fork, which I just bought, is no match for the heavy stuff I’m moving, so I’ve had to go back to the metal fork I’ve had all along….not having the plastic fork or good tires was the whole reason I didn’t get the manure moved when it was a more manageable amount….like only 20,000 pounds or so.

So, I’ve learned my lesson.  Maybe I need smaller horses that eat less?  Or maybe plastic horses that stay where you put them and whose plastic bale of hay lasts forever and never  creates anything wet and messy that needs moving.

Growing Onions in Hay

I’m a wanna-be gardener.  Never really good at it, and I lack essential tools of that trade, like a garden tiller and such.

But, wanting to get into growing more of our own food, I came upon a cool idea whereby you layer paper and then mulches such as old hay, manure, compost, etc.  We’ve probably got more manure, old hay, paper feed bags, old boxes, etc. than anybody needs, so this type of gardening sounded just perfect for me.  Best of all, by layering, you do not need to till.

I started the layering a couple months ago and I will say that when I pulled the mulch and paper back, it was a wonderful planting medium underneath.  A couple weeks ago I decided to set my onions right in the hay and not go down to soil level.  The hay was old and wet and partially broken down.  I checked on the onions and they have all started popping up through the hay!  I did plant them a little close, but they should be far enough apart to grow a decent size onion.

When I planted the tomatoes I decided to go down to soil level and set the plants in the dirt.  Once that was done, and it only required digging back a  small amount of soft dirt, I then mounded wet and then dry hay around the plants, right up to the leaves.  They seem to be doing very well.

If I get out to the store today I will get a new manure fork.  The handle broke off my old one, and although I have two extra handles for it, no amount of W-D40 has been able to loosen that screw that needs to come out so I can put the handle in.  So…I’m buying a new one and have tons and tons of rotted manure that can go in the garden.  Some of it is in a pile, mixed with hay and is growing grass over top of it!

And my manure tea is still sitting in a bucket waiting to be sprayed…kinda scared of that big stinky bucket though.  I have to strain the stuff before I can put it in the sprayer…sounds like a disgusting job!  I’m not sqeamish at all, but some things are too much even for me.

Happy Gardening.

New Hay Colics Horse

Earlier this week I picked up some new hay, just cut this year.  It is a grass/clover mix and is nice and dry and smells wonderful!  The horses loved it.  The clover content is low, which is why I wasn’t too worried about it causing problems…but my little grey mare must have decided it was a bit too palatable and ate more than her share.

Tuesday when I came home from trimming horses, there she was , all sprawled out in the sun, while the other horses were down in the shade.  I had just picked up some baby guinea chicks and needed to get them out of their small cardboard box before they suffocated and so was washing out a rubbermaid tote to put them in and so I watched her while I washed.

She was up and down, up and down.  Rolling up near the fence, then hiding behind the garden fence, lying down…in the sun.  She wasn’t swating flies or trying to graze.  I got the chicks out of their hot cardboard box and into the bigger tote with food and water and then went and drew up a syringe of banamine for Amira.

By this time I was in somewhat of a panic because I lost a horse to colic once, and this colic looked kind of serious.  I couldn’t remember the dosage  for the banamine.  (Banmine is a powerful pain reliever and is what vets use for horses that are colicing.)   My computer was out of bandwidth because we had watched too many videos the day before so I couldn’t look up the dosage.  Finally I thought to look on the label, and yep, there it was…in tiny, tiny, print…the dosage.

I hoped I was reading it right.  I had to wash out a syringe because it was the only one I had that would hold the 5 CC’s I’d decided she needed.  (I have been meaning to order new boxes of syringes and needles but haven’t gotten around to it.)

I went back outside once I’d gotten the banamine shot drawn up and found Amira covered in pine needles, hiding behind the compost pile, groaning.  I gave her the shot, and she didn’t flinch.  She was letting the horse flies eat her up and she was covered with blood from them and over heated.

I let the banamine work while I went and found a halter and lead rope.  By the time I got back to her and put the halter on, she was willing to get up and even walk.  I took her out of the sun and put her under a huge walnut tree with a tie hitch in the back yard.

I got some of my peppermint soap and gave her a nice long bath.  I rubbed and massaged her back and stomach and she seemed to really enjoy it.  The horseflies didn’t appear to like the peppermint soap much and took off.

After her bath I walked her around the yard and up and down the road for a while.  Finally she started putting her head down to graze and looked much happier.  I put her back out into the pasture that’s on regrow so she could graze and I would not need to give her any hay.

She’s been fine since then and none of the other horses have had a problem with the hay.  There is no mold in it, I just think it was a little fresher than her normal hay and so she overate until she gave herself a stomach ache.

You know the old saying…too much of a good thing…

Amira, about 2 hours after her bout with colic.  All better!

My new guniea chicks.

Ciara, checking out the new hay. She thinks it's great!

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Naughty Ponies and Goat Milk Lotions

It’s my own fault.  I’ve been too busy to put up the fence..and crazy enough to think I could make it through the week on the little bit of hay I had left…my plan had been to graze the horses under supervision during the day, and feed hay in the dry lot at night.

I’ve been very lazy.

I just fed the hay and said “forget it.”

Now I’m almost out of hay and won’t be able to get any more until Wednesday.

So this morning I HAD to let the horses out to graze.  No other choice.

We do have a fence around the unused pasture, but it consists of just one strand of non-electrified tape. I could electrify it easy enough…that’s where the lazy part comes in.  It would require a bit of adjusting…adding some of those what cha ma giggies to the fence posts….insulators…that’s it!

It’s not as easy as it sounds…I won’t go into boring details..but suffice it to say that the posts need replacing…and so the fence would be temporary until I get the materials to do it “right”.

I’d just have to do it all over again.

So I’ve been waiting until I get everything together to make my new perfect fence.

And whoever it was I dreamt about last night that wanted me to board their horses…FORGET IT!

I can just barely keep the five in that I got!

I put 4 of them in with the goats this morning.  The goats have this long pasture, rather narrow in places..sort of like a alley way or a runway, only much wider (about 100 feet wide I guess, maybe a little bigger).

If you know anything about horses, you know that if you put them somewhere where they have a spot that looks good to run in, they will run in it.

And they did.

Lyrik jumped out of the fence to be with Caritas, who was just on the other side of the alley runway.

He was eating quite calmly and unaffected by the horse race that went on for what seemed like hours.  I stood by a tree and felt the air swirl as the horses ran by time and time again…from one end of the runway to the next.

Absolutely giddy.

Not me, them!

They dodged the trees, missing them by mere horse hairs.

Lyrik was on my side of the fence.  He knows better.  I can count on him to watch out for me.  He was cantering slowly, not galloping wildly like the mares and the crazy pony who started it all.

Smokey the pony started it all when I walked the goats back into their pasture after milking.  He chased them back out and then started running wildly through the woods, back and forth along the fence line, stopping just short of  running right through the end of the fence…bucking and kicking…yep, you gotta watch out for that one!

He’ll take your eye out with a badly placed rear hoof as he bucks while running past.

I finally got a rope around his neck when he stopped to sniff Caritas’ grain feeder.

He reared up and tried to run away again.

I made a note to myself that this pony is unfit for a child and needs A LOT of work to become civilized.  All horses here are require to be civilized.  Somehow he managed to slip through the cracks.

Well, he’s back in the goat pasture and the goats  are now in a new area for the day with lots and lots of browse.  Everybody is happy for the moment, including me.

Now I get to go have fun…now that the children are behaving!

I have more lotions to scent and bottle up and I’m making my first batch of whipped Shea butter today.  It will be available this weekend at the market if it turns out.  It should be dummy-proof, the recipe is quite simple….and I still have about 15 pounds of lovely shea butter left from my last shipment.  Yum!

My soap and lotion business is really about marketing my goats milk, but I’ve had a lot of requests for  shea butter, which  I buy in bulk to put in all my soaps, so I decided I’d go a head and do some of those up too. The shea I buy is a fair-trade variety and is unrefined with a kind of nutty, natural scent. It lasts for a long, long time.  I bought a small jar of it over a year ago and still have it, although I lost it when we moved and just found it the other day.  It’s still good and did not require a preservative since it contains no goat milk.

Other news is:

I have a male barn cat that turned out to be female barn cat that lives in the garage and not the barn, who turned out  to be pregnant and had two kittens yesterday morning.  I am all for spaying and neutering, but this cat got given away and somehow made it back….or something like that.  Anyway, she had two kittens on our front porch in the middle of  Lyriks winter blanket that I had put there to remind myself to wash it.

The kittens will need homes in just a few weeks, so if you know anyone who would like a cute kitten let me know.  One is an orange tabby male and the other is a  mostly black female with just a little calico coloring on her head.

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What a Difference a Week Makes!

I had three human kids and it took me a lot longer than this goat to regain my figure.  Course now we’ve got to get her headed in the OTHER direction, weight-wise.  Lots of grain, free choice alfalfa pellets, full hay feeders….it’s still often-times a struggle with high-producing dairy goats, to get them up to a good weight in time for appraisals, shows, and farm visitors.  The goal is to feed them really good while they’re  pregnant,  so they’ll have a few extra pounds after giving birth.  You can see that everything Mikey was ingesting was going to produce those 4 kids she had last Thursday.  And now she’s milking 8-9 pounds per day and it increases by a few ounces each day!