Category: Farm/Country Living

Here’s an old trick that might help you: if you sprinkle hydrated lime on top of your compost heap, pets and wildlife won’t dig it up, flies won’t land there, and there will be no smell.

Not that compost heaps are supposed to smell if you do it right, but our compost heap has broiler-processing waste in it — such as blood, feathers, and offal — which are mighty tempting to your average raccoon. Trowel on some hydrated lime, and voila! Problem solved.

This came to mind when our dalmatian, Sammi, went for an unauthorized dig in the compost heap. Yuck! Shame on us for forgetting the lime.

Hydrated lime should be available in any building supply or farm store. Feed stores carry it for some reason — don’t ask me. It’s a slightly caustic, very fine powder, so don’t get it in your eyes when you use it. It doubles as a soil amendment. It’s good for your compost heap.

I’ve also used it for hen repellent. The hens don’t like it, but it doesn’t seem to cause them any distress. They just avoid areas with a heavy dusting of hydrated lime. I use it to make them stop laying in inappropriate places. (I discovered this by accident; I thought it would be a good thing to add to a dust bath, but they avoided it instead.)

Several people have asked me if they can get email notifications for new blog entries, so I’m trying a third-party notification service called “Bot-a-Blog”.

Just click the “BOT ABLOG” button near the lower right-hand edge of the page and sign up for an account. (Let me know how you like it.)

Another, probably better alternative, is get your feet wet with RSS, as follows:

1. Go to http://www.igoogle.com and follow their “Create a home page in 30 seconds” instructions.

2. Bookmark the page, or make it your homepage.

3. Click the “Add Stuff” link near the top of the page.

4. Find the “Add feed or gadget” link and click that.

5. Enter http://www.plamondon.com/b2evolution/blogs/blog4.php?tempskin=_rss2 into the box and press “Add”.

6. Click the “Back to iGoogle home” link, and you should see “A View From the Farm” on your iGoogle home page.

That solves the immediate problem. The iGoogle walkthroughs and help pages are worth looking at. You can add any page with an RSS link (see below)to your iGoogle page.

Practically all major Web sites, blogs, and forums have RSS feeds. The titles of the most recent articles, events, or postings will appear on your iGoogle page. The iGoogle page becomes your window into the Web. Pretty nifty!

Since I live in the country, my water comes from a well. Let me tell you about my well. It’s 140 feet deep and delivers a quart of water per minute. That’s right — one quart. The rule of thumb is that a well isn’t adequate for a home unless it can deliver five gallons a minute, or twenty times more than what we have.

Here in Oregon’s Coast Range, we have the irony that it rains like crazy half the year (60-90 inches in my neighborhood), but the aquifers are very poor. The dry summers and the lack of water mean that agriculture is difficult — we only get one cutting of hay a year, for example. It’s not uncommon to have no rain at all in July and August.

Not only that, the water quality is poor. Iron and sulfur, plus the inevitable iron and sulfur bacteria. These bacteria are harmless, but they clog filters and make it impossible to filter out the yucky taste.

Oddly, our sharply limited water supply encourages us to ignore normal water-conservation methods. We have an antique high-flow toilet and an immense antique bathtub. Low water pressure has induced me to disable the low-flow features on our sinks. True, we have a front-load washer, but the fact is that the real savings come from not watering the lawn, and none of that other stuff matters at all. The only things that ever ran us out of water were leaks, watering, and running the big ice machine we use as part of the broiler-butchering business. If you have limited water, you learn what’s important and what isn’t. Nickel-and-dime stuff like faucet restrictors don’t mean anything.

Today’s project is to get the Chemilizer chemical injector going . This is a chemical metering solution that puts a measured amount of the chemical of your choice into the water as it flows by. The chemical of choice is chlorine. It worked great for one bucketful of bleach solution and has mysteriously stopped doing anything.

Like everything else that actually works, chlorine comes in for a lot of flak, but I expect it to do the job. It not only kills off the slimy bacteria and will thus make it possible to use filters again, but it gets rid of the iron and sulfur, perhaps making the filters unnecessary.

If I can get the thing to work at all…

[Later] Well, that didn’t work. I guess the unit is busted. I’ll get it replaced and try again.

[Even Later] Okay, it works now. Someone at Chemilizer saw the post and we exchanged emails. My problem was self-inflicted — when the instructions say, “Lubricate lightly with Silicone lubricant,” using Vaseline instead because you’ve lost your can of silicone lube doesn’t work. D’oh!

I had a brainstorm a couple of years ago about the problem of keeping fresh eggs and frozen broilers cool at the farmers’ market: salt-water ice. A saturated solution of salt water freezes (or melts) at zero degrees Fahrenheit. Not only is this cold enough to keep frozen broilers frozen, but it’s cold enough that water condenses as frost, not water, on the sides of salt-water ice containers, and frost doesn’t drip onto the egg cartons.

(One the ice inside the container melts, the ice on the outside will melt, too, but it works like a charm until then.)

This works so well that I’m surprised everyone hasn’t always used it. Blue Ice, for example, claims to be “colder than ice,” but it doesn’t seem to be. (Condensation drips off Blue Ice, rather than forming a layer of frost or ice.)

Used plastic soda bottles make good salt-water ice containers. To make a saturate salt solution, add one four-pound box of pickling salt to 1.5 gallons of hot water and stir until as much of it has dissolved as is going to. Pour into used plastic soda bottles and freeze in a freezer that’s below zero F. When you need to keep something cool, toss these bottles into the cooler, then back into the freezer when you get home. Simple.