There's a tire sealer called "Slime" that works like a charm. On my lawn tractor, the sidewalls on the tires were horribly cracked and the tires were obviously shot. On a whim, I bought a bottle of "Slime" and poured it in according to the instructions, and the horrible tires actually lasted another season with no trouble!

Slime is a green, gooey substance, and some of it actually seeped out of cracks in the sidewall, but it quickly sealed the tires. I've since used it to fix leaky tires on a wheelbarrow, hand truck, and, most impressively, on my Ford 640 tractor. Works like a charm. Which is good, because I used to have endless trouble with slow leaks.

On Slime Web site, they claim that the stuff never hardens and can be washed out with a hose if you want to repair the tire for real. I haven't tried this, but I believe it.

There are several variants of Slime: for tubeless tires, tube tires, low-speed tires, car tires. You can even buy bicycle inner tubes with Slime pre-installed.

You can find this stuff in hardware and automotive stores, and online. This stuff is great. It's the kind of thing you want to buy on spec and keep on hand.

A lot of the biggest problems we've ever had on the farm were related to unwanted critters trying to get at the chicken feed. Recently, we put some pullets into a pasture house and put a feeder inside the house with them as part of the transition. Since this was an open-front house, the local crows started coming in for lunch, which scared the pullets. Moving the feeder outside didn't get rid of the crows, but there's a lot more room outdoors, and their occasional presence didn't terrorize the pullets.

We once had rats in the brooder house. They were attracted by the feed but killed a lot of baby chicks when they were given the opportunity. Rats living in tunnels in the wood shavings are surprisingly hard to detect, so they can do a lot of damage and leave you scratching your head and wondering, "Weren't there a lot more chicks here yesterday?"

I've even lost chicks to hens. Not because the hens do anything to the chicks, but because they frighten the chicks, who then pile into the corners of the house to get away from them. Birds have very weak lungs, so the chicks on the bottom of a pileup can't breathe.

Raccoons and even goats will go to a lot of trouble to get at chicken feed, too.

So the moral of the story is that you either want your chicken houses to be absolutely tight against any kind of intruder, bird or mammal, or you want your feeders outdoors -- at least when the chickens are small.

If your chickens free-range, then they're entering and leaving the houses all the time, so making the house intruder-proof during the daytime isn't practical, though you can close it up at night. Outdoor feeders can save you trouble here.

What I try to do is to keep the brooder houses tight and not let the chicks outdoors at all. After they are moved to a pasture house, they get fed outdoors. There's a transition period that's troublesome -- they tend to be too scared after moving to go check out any outdoor feeders for a few days, so feeding them indoors is necessary. The house needs to be either made tight for this period, or the chickens need to be fed only small amounts of feed so they eat it all right away, and there's none left over to attract bigger chickens, crows, or whatever.

Of course, outdoor feeders have their own problems (they should be weatherproof and serve more as a chicken feeder than a wildlife feeder), but that's a topic for another posting.

I still have the car I learned to drive on -- a 1975 VW Rabbit. I like it, and Karen likes it better than I do. It's a classic economy car, one of the first modern subcompacts. Way back when, it got over 30 MPG pretty regularly.

It hasn't run in the past couple of years, but I got it running well enough today to get it onto the grass where I could wash it and check it over.

It has an undiagnosed problem that's making it run ragged, which I'll take to the mechanical geniuses at the Independent Auto Werks in Corvallis if Karen and I can't figure it out, and it needs to have the rust fixed and a new coat of paint. And a new stereo. Other than that, it's as good as it ever was, which was pretty good.

I don't really see the point in buying new cars. Cars last forever (at least, they do in areas where they never salt the roads), and newness lasts hardly any time at all. Nothing to get excited about. And if you want to impress your friends and neighbors, it's cheaper and more fun to do it with a classic car, which by now has acquired some personality. Not that my Rabbit is turning any heads right now -- or not in a good way. But I can fix that.

I was comparing the payload capacities of my various vehicles, and I was startled to learn that, while my Isuzu Trooper has a payload of 975 pounds and 18 MPG on the highway, the 1975 Rabbit has a payload of 715 pounds and 38 MPG! The difference between a subcompact and an SUV is only five sacks of feed? Unreal!

Gas mileage hasn't really improved all that much since 1960, when a Ford Falcon could get 30 MPG and seat six. So there's a huge range of history to choose from if you're in the market for a thriftier car. No one's holding a gun to your head to buy a new car that will never save enough money on gas to make the purchase sensible. The only important leap in automotive technology since my 1975 Rabbit was built was cupholders. But we lost 10 MPH bumpers somewhere along the line, so I'm not sure it was a fair trade.

[Edit: Never mind. This batch was a bunch of "Fast Cornish" broilers, which isn't what we ordered. The real "Slow Cornish" have been far too slow-growing for us, and we have reverted to the faster-growing birds.

Lesson learned: if you tell the hatchery that it's okay for them to make substitutions, always look at the shipping invoice to see what they actually sent you!

The rest of this article reflects my thinking at the time, when I still thought we had Slow Cornish broilers.]

The current batch of Privett Hatchery "Slow Cornish" broilers is turning out very well, dressing out at an average of over three pounds at eight weeks, in spite of a bout of coccidiosis at three weeks of age.

We put them on medicated chick starter temporarily, two sacks' worth, and they started getting better right away. They were already quite a bit perkier 24 hours after switching feed, and now they are a very fine batch of broilers indeed.

People on various discussion groups talk about the need to develop a new strain of broilers for pastured use, but they need to keep in mind the old comic-book maxim: "Never compose what you can copy; never copy what you can trace; never trace what you can cut out and paste down." There's no point creating a new type of livestock until you're sure that there isn't an old one lying around that does the job. Breed creation takes years, costs real money, and usually doesn't work.

The odd thing about the Privett Slow Cornish is that we think there might be two kinds. The last six weeks or so, we've had smaller birds that look less like a standard broiler, and this latest batch is bigger and looks more like a standard broiler. We will investigate.

Growth rate is very important to us, even though many customers prefer small broilers, because we sell by the pound. A four-pound bird pays the bills a lot better than a two-pound bird does. The labor in raising and butchering the broilers is about the same, regardless of size, and (as you'd expect with small-scale nice products) labor is more expensive then feed or any other single cost. So our profits are based on pounds of meat per hour of labor. High growth rates are money in the bank.

The option of selling older broilers doesn't pan out, not so much that it takes more labor and feed to grow a 12-week broiler than an 8-week broiler, but because customers complain about toughness after 10 weeks. When people say that the American consumer prefers tenderness to flavor, they aren't kidding. Toughness is a deal-killer.

So we're happy that the broilers are staring to fall into the right ballpark. Normally we do standard, fast-growing broilers, but there's so much interest on the Web in slow-growing broilers that we're making the experiment, partly for something to talk about.

We've got the energy crisis, we've got the foreign quagmire, we've got the wacky economy. Wait a minute -- It's the Seventies all over again! I did the Seventies already! Hey! No flashbacks!

Admittedly, people are getting the details wrong. Hybrid cars that combine fuel economy and conspicuous consumption? Gross! A fad for piercings that leaves young people with more holes in them than Bonnie and Clyde? Double gross! What are people smoking?

Look, if we're going to do the Seventies again, let's do it right. Attention, young people! Ditch the black clothing and wear pastels! Attention, politicians! Let's see more resignations! Attention, lunatic fringe! More conspiracy theories! (It was JFK himself on the grassy knoll!)

Let's all pull together and make this a groovier world.

That is all.

Anyone with a farm has an ongoing rodent problem. I've noticed that other "alternative living" writers deal with this issue the same way they deal with everything -- denial. (Of course, it helps that most of their readers live in the city.)

Once you've had an outbreak of rats in your brooder house and lose a whole batch of chicks to them (and you will -- everything happens to you eventually), you won't be able to regain the live-and-let-live attitude of yesteryear. But once you decide to make the area around hour house and barn a rodent-free zone, there are good ways and bad ways of doing it.

I hate snap traps and glue traps, and I assume that ultrasonic pest control is a scam, so that leaves poison. While a mousetrap has the kind of lethality you associate with joke-shop pranks, poison is the real deal. Let's all be careful out there. The goal is to kill off the pesky rodents (preferably so quickly they don't know what hit them) without injuring any other creatures or yourself. The techniques should be pet-proof and safe to any little kids in the neighborhood that wander through. Extra credit for being non-messy and long-lasting, so that intermittent attention won't prevent the stuff from working.

Not that there aren't other methods. My grandfather once filled a washtub mostly full of water and put a layer of rolled oats on top. Then he leaned a board against the washtub to give a ramp that mice could run up. He assumed they'd do a swan dive into the wonderful-smelling oats. After several days, the tub looked just the same as before, so he dumped it in disgust, and much to his surprise, there were at least a hundred drowned mice under the floating oats! No doubt there are plenty of other methods that I haven't tried but work in the right circumstances.

This spring, I went upscale on my rodent control, buying store-bought bait stations for rats and mice rather than improvising them. This has worked very well, and I recommend this.

The Eaton Rat Fortress (shown above), is a big plastic bait station for rats and mice, meant to be left outdoors. It keeps the weather off the bait, and the wire bait rods prevent the rats from dragging entire bait blocks away to their tunnels. I hate it when that happens. By fixing the bait in place, the rodents have to eat it rather than hoarding it.

Also, when they gnaw on bait, little poison shavings get left behind. A good bait station hangs onto these so you can dump them responsibly, rather than leaving them scattered all over the place.

An allen-key bolt keeps kids from getting into the station, while baffles make the bait inaccessible to pets and birds. The transparent lid lets you see whether you need to add more bait. Very nice.

What I used to do was to nail bait blocks to pieces of wood or hide them inside lengths of plastic pipe. This was relatively ineffective. I hate it when the bait dissolves in the damp or when a mouse carries half a pound of bait pellets away one at a time and hides them in an old boot. I want the poison to stay where it's put and be a hazard only to the target critters.

For mice, Eaton makes a cute little bait station with all the advantages of the big rat station, except that it doesn't have a transparent lid. This works better than the D-Con bait trays I've been using indoors, for all the reasons listed above. The bait stations have a built-in lock that keeps kids and pets away from the bait.

I've been using these for over a month. For some reason, a lot more bait is being consumed around the house than around the barn. Go figure. I'm especially pleased by the effectiveness of the bait stations outside the house, since I selfishly prefer the rodents to keel over outdoors, where their decomposition doesn't stink up the house.

The only question in my mind is the effect on cats if they eat the occasional poison-fortified mouse. Last time I searched for this kind of information, I came up empty. The cats have always seemed just the same whether I have had bait out or not, though.

I always take the "trust, but verify" approach, which means that instead of anticipating trouble, I wait to see what happens. Often in turns out that "abolutely necessary" precautions aren't necessary. But sometimes it blows up in my face.

So I wasn't too surprised when some spammer left "comments" on most of the posts, offering to sell you pills to put extra lead in your pencil. I've tightened up the anti-spam features of the blog to see if that helps. If not, there are other things I can try.

After the most amazingly wet and cold spring ever, the sun is shining. Beautiful weather. I spent Thursday in the Bay Area on business, and got home late Friday afternoon. I put the rotary mower on the back of the tractor after 7 PM and got almost two hours of mowing done before the sun touched the western hills. These long days come in handy.

The grass was over knee-high, even though I had mowed it once or twice before it became too wet to mow again. Never seen a spring like it. Normally, my neighbors would be almost done cutting hay by now. They haven't even started yet. Strange year.

There's some whining coming out of the gearbox in the mower. Time to lube it up again. On these "bush hog" mowers, the oil seals give out after a few years and you either have to top them off all the time or use the trick on found on the "Yesterday's Tractors" forums: squirt in a bunch of grease along with the oil, which thickens it and keeps it from running out the bottom of the gearbox. I tried it and this worked for several years.

Last night's mowing was a triumph. I consider mowing to be a "success" if I only mow one water line and don't destroy anything else. It's a triumph if I don't break anything at all.

Things are awfully busy around here, and I was looking for a new PDA (Personaly Desktop Assistant, such as a Palm Pilot) to help me keep my act together. I have an ancient Palm-based Sony Clie, but it's sort of big and heavy, and anyway I was looking to reduce the number of things I lug around in my shirt pocket -- a PDA, an iPod, and a cell phone is too many.

I carry an iPod not for music, but for audiobooks, so I can combine reading time with chore time and driving time. I've written about this before. I get most of my audiobooks from audible.com, which is a book club for downloadable audiobooks.

I also wanted WiFi access so I can check my email or surf the Web anywhere with a wireless signal, with includes my home and almost any public establishment, these days. (Wireless via cell phone is even more universal, except for the crummy signal on the farm.)

I looked at the current offerings from Palm and Blackberry, and almost picked one when a casual reference made me look at the Apple iPod Touch, the iPod that looks like an iPhone. Rather to my surprise, instead of being a mere MP3 player, it has WiFi, a Web browser, email, and most of what I want in a PDA. It also has a wonderfully conceived and easy-to-use touch screen that's perfectly visible in direct sunlight.

So I bought one. Problem solved. I combined the three things I carry around in my pocket to two. And it'll go to one if Verizon (the only carrier with a decent signal on my farm) ever supports the iPhone.

I've been very impressed by the iPod Touch. I love it! I bought mine at the Mac Store in Corvallis, Oregon, which is also where I bought my first computer (an Apple ][ in 1980).

A typical use for this device, besides reading email, is to look up information in the course of conversation -- what other movies an actor has been in, the definition of a word, answers to random questions.

Apple is a weird company, and when you buy their stuff, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Their products are beautifully designed but have a high failure rate -- seems like a contradiction in terms, but there you are. Your unit might fail, and its replacement might fail. It's the cross you have to bear. Their customer service is weird and infuriating. For example, when I wanted my first iPod repaired, they charged me money to evaluate whether they could repair it, and pocketed it when they decided they couldn't. My recommendation is to recognize that the product development people at Apple are world-class and the rest are maniacs, and just put up with it. Apple retailers are often extremely helpful and long-suffering because of this, and it probably is in your best interests to buy from them. Besides, my local Mac store had a better price than I found on the Internet.

Greg Hayslip at Chemilizer sent me an email about my problems with my chlorine-injector unit. Looks like the issue is that, when they say, "Lube the O-rings with silicone lube," they don't mean Vaseline. I figured it was something dopey like that. I'll find out Sunday. (I need chlorine in the water to get rid of the slime bacteria that clog the filters that remove the smell (and also the chlorine) from my iron- and sulfur-rich well water.)

Things have been busy around here. At my day job on the WANScaler group at Citrix Systems, we shipped updates to absolutely everything (including two brand-new products) within a short timeframe. Plus, I invented a spiffy new speed optimization and foolishly volunteered to do all the performance testing myself to help get the feature out the door. "How hard could it be?" I asked myself. A lot harder than writing a test plan and letting the guys with the right equipment do it, especially since I did it three times. This has left with with little energy left for the farm.

The broilers who had an inexplicable case of coccidiosis are fine now, through the totally explicable effects of a sack of medicated feed. Chalk one up for modern technology.

The older broilers, who are eight weeks old now and were totally coccidiosis-free, are a little disappointing in size, dressing out in the 2.5-3 pound range. We were hoping they'd be at least half a pound larger. There are Privett Slow Cornish broilers. We have a couple more tricks up our sleeve, but if the next couple of batches aren't any bigger, we'll probably revert to the fast-growing modern hybrids.

The issue is that slow-growing birds cost more to raise, because it takes more labor per pound of product -- and not many customer are willing to pay, say, $2 more per pound just for birds that we like better, but which don't taste any better. Worse, once they hit ten weeks or so, customers start complaining about toughness. So the clock is ticking.

Modern hybrids are lethargic and less fun to raise, and you need to raise them more gently and carefully than other chickens, but they sure grow fast.

And it's raining, raining, raining. I feel sorry for the people who rely on their hayfields, because the grass is all headed up already. By the time the weather is dry enough for haying, it's going to be more like straw than hay, and you only get one cutting a year here in the Oregon Coast Range. Another good reason to raise chickens instead. They don't mind a little rain, or even a lot of rain, if there's a roof to get under when it comes down hard.