“Slime” Tire Self-Sealer Works Great

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.

Why Chickens Should be Fed Outdoors

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.

Are New Econoboxes Better Than Old?

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.

My 1975 VW Rabbit

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.

Update on “Slow Cornish” Broilers

[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.

Aw, man! It’s the Seventies again! Bummer!

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.