Build a Manger for Your Goats

For most of the year I feed my goats brush from the woods along with a little all-stock feed.  Goats love leaves, bud, and shoots; and it’s a simple matter to cut down a good load of greenery for them.  The problem comes in the winter when there’s no greenery to be had.  So, in the winter I have to feed my goats hay.  Hay is not cheap, and goats are messy eaters.  As much hay ends up on the ground as ends up in the goats.  So I decided to build my goats a manger to try and cut down on the wasted hay.  As usual, I used a lot of scraps that I had laying around the farm, but I did end up having to buy a few boards for this project.  Here’s how I built the manger.

First I assembled what scrap lumber that I could find along with some cedar posts left over from a fence project.

I used a chainsaw to cut the cedar into two foot lengths and split the logs in half with a splitting wedge.

I took an eight foot 2x4 and sawed it in half length-wise then cut these in half so I ended up with four 2x2’s that measured four feet long.

Next I nailed the cedar splits to the four foot 2x2’s so that they looked like two short ladders.  These will be the sides of the manger.

I cut some more 2x2’s to use for end pieces then nailed the sides and ends of the manger together.

To complete the bottom portion of the manger, I cut two 2x4’s about four feet long as a base and screwed the manger down to the base with some long dry-wall screws.

I wanted to put a roof over the manger to help keep the hay dry, so this is where I had to buy a few extra boards.  I nailed a couple of four foot long uprights to the ends of the manger to support the roof.

Rather than go into a lengthy explanation of how I built the framing for the roof, I will let you look at the pictures below.  They are pretty self-explanatory.

To cover the framework I cut two sections out of an old toneau cover that had come off of my truck.  It’s made of heavy plastic, and it worked really well. 

I used some old rubber weather-stripping to cover the ridge of the roof.

When I moved the manger into the goat pen, I drove four stakes next to the base and nailed the base to them.  This is to keep the goats from tipping the manger over.

As a final measure I nailed a couple of angle braces between the base and the uprights to make the manger more stable.

The goats seem to like their new manger, and they haven’t been able to knock it over yet.

Make Scent Blocking Spray for Deer Hunting

Deer have a highly refined sense of smell.  If you are going to be a successful deer hunter, you must cover up your human smell.  You can go to a sporting goods store and spend from four to twelve dollars on a bottle of scent blocker; or you can, like me, make your own.  Since juniper trees are common in my area, I like to make scent out of juniper berries.

First gather a double handful of juniper berries and needles.

Drop the juniper in a blender along with about 20 ounces of hot water.

Blend the mixture for a few seconds.

Strain the mixture through a coffee filter to remove the solids.  This can take a while.

Now pour the green, aromatic liquid off into a spray bottle.

Voila, you’ve made scent blocker.  Just spray it on your clothes, boots, and boot soles.  This mixture will start to mildew in the bottle after a couple of days, so don’t bother making a big batch.  If you need more it’s easy to make.

Peanuts – A Southern Survival Crop

If you live in an area where peanuts will grow; you must learn how to plant, raise, harvest, and cure them.  Peanuts are an outstanding survival crop that has long been raised in the southern United States, that’s right Virginia, they’re not just a snack or an ingredient of candy bars.  They are highly nutritious.

So what’s so great about peanuts?  Well for one thing they are loaded with protein.  Peanuts have about 6.7 grams of protein per ounce, more than eggs or milk.  Peanuts are also loaded with fat.  Not such a good thing if you are trying to watch your weight, but remember, in a survival situation fat is one of the hardest food substances to come by, and the human body must have fat.

Peanuts are really not nuts at all.  They are a legume like field peas and beans.  And like other legumes, peanuts actually improve the soil that they are planted in by adding valuable nitrogen. 

The first step in raising a good crop of peanuts is to make sure that you have your soil right.  Peanuts like a really light sandy soil, so if you have heavy clay you will need to amend the soil before you plant. In my part of the world you can buy planting peanuts at the feeds stores and many hardware stores. 

What you are buying is raw peanuts in the shell.  They look just like the ones that you buy at the circus, but they are not roasted.  The peanuts that I bought this year were $3.50 US per pound, and a pound of peanuts will plant a pretty good size bed.  This year I planted a small bed of about thirty-five plants, so I only used a handful of seed.  It yielded about a gallon and a half of peanuts in the shell.

To plant the peanuts all you have to do is shell them out and stick them in the ground.   

I plant mine about an inch deep and a foot-and-a-half apart in each direction.  No fertilizer is necessary, but peanuts do like heat and a lot of water.  Don’t drown them, but do keep the ground moist.  In a few days they will break the ground and start growing.

Peanuts will grow about eighteen inches to two feet tall and put on small yellow blooms, and then they will do something really unusual.  The stems of the plants will bend over close to the ground and put off small dark tendrils called pegs.  These pegs will actually grow down into the ground and a peanut will form underground at the end of each peg. 

Peanuts will also form in a cluster around the main roots of the plant.

You want to pull you peanuts when the vines first start to yellow.  Pulling the peanuts at the right time is a little tricky.  If you pull them too early, the nuts will not have completely formed.  If you squeeze the shell and feel that it is not filled out inside, you will know that the peanuts are not ready. If you pull the peanuts too late, some of them will already have sprouted underground.  This is easy to see.  The problem is that you can not pull the plants at a time when all of the peanuts will be perfectly ripe.  It’s like trying to pull a tomato plant when all of the tomatoes are ripe.  It just doesn’t happen.  So you need to pull the peanuts when most of them are ripe.  You may have a few that aren’t filled out, and you may have a few that are over ripe; but that’s OK.

If the ground is too hard, use a fork to loosen it a little; but stay well out from the plant and be careful.  Pull the whole plant and don’t remove the peanuts.  When you have a bundle of plants about as big around as your arm, use a string to tie them in a bundle (shook).

Hang the shooks up under cover to dry.  You can shake them a little to remove some of the dirt but don’t wash them. 

Leave the shook hanging to dry for a week.

When they are dry take them down and remove the peanuts.  Again, don’t wash the nuts.  If they are dirty just rub off what you can with you fingers. The vines are very rich in nutrients so you need to either compost them are feed them to your stock.  If you use them for feed, go easy as animals can founder on too much at one time.

Spread the picked peanuts out in a dry shady spot and let them cure for another two weeks.

At the end of the two weeks they are ready for use.  You can shell them out and eat them raw or you can roast them in the shells for snacks.  Be sure to save some for next year’s seed.

The Balanced Approach to Chemical Fertilizers

At the risk of alienating some of my readers I make the following statement, “I do not use any chemical pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides on my garden, but I do use some chemical fertilizers.”  I use chemical fertilizers as part of what I like to think of as a balanced approach to soil amendment.  Some people will only use organic methods of soil amendment, while other people think that organic growing is a waste of money and is more of a philosophical statement than an actual gardening method.  Let me explain my reasoning for a balanced approach to soil amendment and then you can decide if you think it makes sense or not.  Here are my reasons for using both natural and chemical soil amendments in my garden.

Reason 1: You can’t raise food without putting nutrients back in the soil.

Everything that grows in your garden represents nutrients that have been taken out of the soil.  If you save every non-edible part of the plants that grow in your garden and all of the peels, cobs, rinds, etc from the food that you harvest; and compost all of that and return it to the soil; you will still be removing the nutrients that are contained in the food that you eat.  You can rotate your crops so that you plant legumes that add nitrogen back into the soil, but this alone will not be enough to make up for the nutrients that you remove.  You can bring in outside organic materials and compost them, as I do; but consider this. My garden is about 3000 square feet.  To cover my garden with a three inch layer of compost would require about 750 cubic feet of compost.  This would be a 10 foot by 10 foot pile that is 7 ½ feet tall.  And since organic material shrinks down by as much as 75% as it decomposes, this means that I would have to start off with as much as 3000 cubic feet of compostable material.  Who has the time to do this?  So the alternative is that you have to bring in some kind of concentrated soil amendment to add to your garden, which brings us to fertilizer.

Reason 2: Organic fertilizers are not all that organic

So I think I’ve made a reasonable case for having to add some kind of amendments to the soil, but the question is, “What kinds of amendments?”  Many people who follow the totally organic method of gardening use natural sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.  Some people use animal manure for a balanced fertilizer.  Blood meal is often used as a good source of nitrogen; bone meal and rock phosphate are used as sources of phosphorus; and hardwood ashes or granite dust can help provide potassium.  Let me address these one at a time and tell you my feelings on each of them.

Manure

I use manure on my garden, but only the manure that I rake up out of my goat pen.  I am about to get back into raising chickens, and I will also use their manure in my compost pile.  I don’t buy manure.  The bagged manure that you buy at garden centers and big box stores is usually packaged and sold from feedlot operations.  The cattle that produce this manure have been injected with steroids and antibiotics.  They have been treated with worm medicine and sprayed for ticks and flies.  They have also been fed large amounts of salt to increase their weight by water retention.  All of this stuff finds its way into the animal’s manure.  Doesn’t sound all that healthy or organic to me.  If you are going to use manure I would suggest that you use manure from unvaccinated, grass fed animals only.  Ditto to everything above as it applies to factory raised chickens also.

If you have a neighbor that ranges cattle you can get some good manure from them but be sure that you compost it in a good hot compost bed to kill the grass seeds.  I made the mistake of gathering up a truck load of manure from one of my neighbor’s pastures and throwing it straight onto my garden without composting it.  I am still fighting Bermuda grass ten years later.

Blood Meal and Bone Meal

Both blood meal and bone meal are by-products of the slaughter house.  The animals that are slaughtered are typically raised in industrial animal operations.  This means steroids, growth hormones, antibiotics, etc.  All of these unnatural products make their way into the blood and bones of the animals before they are slaughtered.  Again, this doesn’t sound healthy or organic to me.

Rock Phosphate

I have no problem with rock phosphate.  Rock phosphate is a mined product that contains about 20% phosphorous whereas the phosphorous in chemical fertilizer is also a mined product that has been chemically treated to extract a more concentrated phosphorous from it. 

Granite Dust

I have no problem with granite dust as a source of potassium.  Well, I do have one problem.  If you don’t have access to some kind of free granite dust, it can get pretty pricey.  A bag of granite dust costs about $25.00.  If applied at the recommended rate, and depending of the condition of your soil, this will treat about 500 sq, ft of garden.  For me, that would be about $150 to amend my entire garden.  That’s not horribly expensive, but it is a little steep.  One advantage of granite dust is that it releases the potassium slowly, so you don’t have to make an application every year.

Hardwood Ashes

Hardwood ash can contain up to 10% potassium, and hardwood ash raises the pH of soil; so it is a good fit for my garden which has very acid soil.  I cut hardwoods off my farm to burn in my wood stove, and every time I clean out the stove it is a simple matter to take the ash out and sprinkle it on the garden.  Wood ash should be applied at a rate of one to two pounds per 100 sq. ft. depending on your soil.  If your soil is already alkaline you may want to stay away from wood ash or be sure to balance out the alkalinity with a lot of compost.

Reason 3: Chemical fertilizers are cheap, convenient, and easy to use; but they won’t solve all of your problems.

Let’s face it, to obtain the same amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium found in one bag of chemical fertilizer from natural, organic sources would cost a minor fortune.  For example, I looked at a bag of cow manure at one of the big-box stores.  It was rated at .5-.5-.5.  In other words it would take 26 bags of cow manure to equal the amount N-P-K in one bag of 13-13-13.  And here’s the thing, plants absorb nitrogen on a molecular level.  They don’t know if the molecules are coming from manure, blood meal, or chemical fertilizer. 

Blood meal is rated at 12-0-0, but a 50 lb. bag of blood meal costs around $50.00.  Bone meal is rated at 3-15-0; but a 50 lb. bag of bone meal costs nearly $60.  Granite dust is rated at about 0-0-5, and a 50 lb. bag costs from $20 to $25.  If you add it all up, it would cost about $160 to purchase natural, organic fertilizers that would contain approximately the same amount of N-P-K that is contained in one $20 bag of 13-13-13 chemical fertilizer.  Now do you see why the grocery store price of organic produce is so high?

Of course chemical fertilizers are not the be all and end all of good gardening.  One of the big arguments against chemical fertilizers is that they only supply the three macro-nutrients (N-P-K) necessary for plant growth, while plants actually require an additional 12 or 14 elements known as micro-nutrients if they are going to have healthy growth and production.  I agree with this argument 100%, and I would go on to add that these are only the micro-nutrients that we know about at this time.  The scientific study of plant growth is still in its infancy, and I would be willing to bet that, over time, we will find many other things that are necessary for healthy plant growth.  So, the bottom line is that you have to do something beyond basic chemical fertilizers to address the need for micro-nutrients.

It is also argued that chemical fertilizers don’t add any bulk to the soil.  This is also 100% true.  If you have heavy clay soil, adding chemical fertilizers won’t change that.  If you have loose sandy soil that loses moisture too quickly, chemical fertilizers won’t change that either.  You have to do something else to add bulk to your soil and address proper water retention.

There is much debate over whether chemical fertilizers kill/repel earthworms and soil micro-organisms.  It has been my personal experience, using the methods that I use, that I have an abundance of earthworms in my garden.  I think that if you use nothing but chemical fertilizers, and if they are applied at a high rate; then this might have an adverse effect on earthworms and micro-organisms, but I don’t know this for a fact.  I wonder if the lack of earthworms and micro-organisms in some chemically fertilized soils might be more related to a lack of organic mater in the soil.  Again, I don’t know; but I would sure like to see some good scientific data on the subject.

The final argument against using chemical fertilizer, especially from a preparedness perspective, is that it is not sustainable.  This is also true.  If everything collapses, you will no longer be able to run down to the feed store and buy a bag of 13-13-13 or anything else.  But the good news is that chemical fertilizers can be stored indefinitely if they are kept away from moisture.  I raise around a hundred ears of corn using a total of about 6 lbs. of chemical fertilizer.  I use more fertilizer on corn than on any crop I raise.  If I continue raising this amount of corn, two 40 lb. bags of fertilizer would last me for over 13 years.  By the way, a 40 lb. bag of fertilizer fits almost perfectly into a 5 gallon plastic bucket with a water-tight lid.  After the fertilizer runs out I, and everyone else, will go all organic, but by then I will, hopefully have plenty of time to compost, gather manure, etc.  I guess if I need potassium I can always bust up my wife’s granite counter tops, but then survival would probably take on a whole new dimension.

A Brief Summary of How I Amend My Soil

In summary:  My soil has a lot of clay in it and it is very acid.  I bring in sand to help keep the soil loose, and I turn in home-made compost and uncontaminated manure.  I use a pre-plant application of dolomatic limestone, Epsom salts, and borax. I turn in a light broadcast of 13-13-13 fertilizer before planting unless the bed is to be planted in legumes.  I rotate my plantings and try to plant all beds in nitrogen fixing legumes every other year.  I mulch every year, allow the mulch to decompose, and turn it in.  I use targeted side dressings of chemical fertilizers to boost the N-P-K content of the soil.  I use 10-20-10 for my root crops like onions, turnips, and sweet potatoes, and I also use 10-20-10 for my cucumbers.  I use one application of 13-13-13 around peppers, squash, tomatoes, etc just before they bloom.  I side dress my corn with 33-0-0 when it is knee high and again when it tassels.  I find that this program works great for me, and I get wonderful yields.

The Hand Operated Blackhawk Corn Sheller

I mentioned in passing to a friend of mine that I was looking for an old-time hand operated corn sheller, and that I had seen a couple on the inter-net but, since they are made of cast iron, the shipping was outrageous.  He called me about a week later and said, “I’ve got something in the back of my truck that you might be interested in.”  It seems that he had come across his late uncle Wallace’s corn sheller out in the barn, and it was just sitting their getting rusty.  He offered it to me on loan saying that it was just going to ruin in the old barn and that if he needed to use it he would know that I had it.  I told him that it sounded like a great deal to me, so I went over the next day and picked it up.  It was a Blackhawk sheller; patented in the late 1800’s and probably came into uncle Wallace’s possession in the early 1900’s.  It was rusty, but not real, real bad; and, to my surprise, it was mounted on a really nice collecting bin that would funnel the shelled corn kernels into a waiting bucket.  I dissembled the sheller, worked it over with a wire brush, oiled it good, replaced a couple of bolts, and re-mounted it on the collecting bin.  The collecting bin itself was very well crafted (uncle Wallace had been carpenter), and all I had to do was repair a broken leg and give it a good coat of paint. 

Shelling corn by hand is a pain, and since every little farm grew their on corn for food and livestock feed, these shelling machines were very common back in the day.  The way it worked was that farmers would grow a good size crop of field corn and let it dry out on the stalk.  For animal feed you would carry the corn, cobs, and stalks to the local co-op and have it all ground up into feed.  The corn alone was too rich, so you had the cobs and stalks ground up with it.  For people food you shelled the dried corn off of the cobs and carried the corn to the local grist mill to have it ground into meal.  You could pay the miller to grind your corn, but it was more common to pay a toll by allowing the miller to keep a portion of your cornmeal.  The miller would then turn around and sell the cornmeal to city folks or people who didn’t raise a corn crop.  There was a little mill still in operation close to my farm as late as the early 1980’s; but, sadly, it is now gone.  Turns out that this was the very mill that my friend’s uncle used to carry his corn to.

If you’ve never seen one of these shellers in action, they are really very ingenious.  They will shell an ear of corn and then spit the cob out in a heartbeat; much, much easier than doing it by hand.  I’m going to try out a little new (for me) technology here and attach a brief video of the Blackhawk Corn Sheller in action.

Well, the video worked on my preview, so I hope it works for you also.  Geez, aren't I just a technology wizard.  Before you know it I may learn how to use an ATM machine.

Bicycle Power for the Country Living Grain Mill

One of the things that I promised myself that I would do after I retired was to start grinding all of my own wheat and baking all of our bread.  I have owned a small Victorio grain mill for a couple of years, and I have used it occasionally with good results; but I felt that if I was going to grind two to four pounds of wheat every week that I needed to have a better mill.  I have wanted a Country Living Grain Mill for a while, and my wife finally took the hint and bought me one for Christmas.  I unpacked it and set it up about a month ago and started grinding away, so I thought I would do a post about my impressions of this mill.

First of all, everything that you have heard about the quality of this mill is true.  It is super well made.  You can look anywhere on the net and get all the specs about the materials and design of this mill, so I won’t belabor all of that.

I will make one comparison between the Country Living Mill and the Victorio Mill.  The grinding plates on the Victorio Mill are approximately 1 3/8 inches in diameter, whereas the grinding plates on Country Living Mill are approximately 4 5/8 inches in diameter.  So turning at the same revolutions per minute the Country Living Mill will process way more grain than the Victorio Mill.  But, here’s the drawback; the turning radius of the handle on the Victorio Mill is 6 inches.  That’s a 6 inch long handle turning a 1 3/8 inch diameter grinding plate.  The Country Living Mill has a handle with a radius of about 5 ½ inches.  That’s a 5 ½ inch long handle turning a 4 5/8 inch diameter grinding plate.  Guess which one is easier to turn.  But remember, it’s a trade off.  The Victorio is easier to turn, but you have to turn it a lot more times to grind the same amount of grain. Top, Victorio grinding plates; bottom, Country Living grinding plates.

Country Living sells an extension handle that gives you a little bit better mechanical advantage when hand turning the mill, but I decided to skip right past all of that and go straight to peddle power.  I kept my eyes open at the local thrift stores for a few weeks until I came across an old Sears exercise bike.  This is a super basic machine.  Just a seat, handle bars, peddles, and a wheel.  I picked it up for $9.99, and it was perfect for what I needed. 

The wheel has a hollow but rigid tire on it.  I was able to use a utility knife and trim off the outer half of the tire.  

The inner half of the tire remained firmly fixed on the wheel and since the tire was hollow, it left a nice groove to slip a V-belt around.

The Country Living mill has a large pulley on it that is already set up for a V-belt, so it would be a simple matter to link the bicycle to the mill once I had them both mounted on some kind of a platform.

Never one to waste a dollar, I dug around in the shop and came up with a couple of old two-by-tens and a two-by four that I could re-purpose to make the platform.

Before I could start cutting and building, I had to find a V-belt that would be long enough to go around the mill pulley and the bicycle wheel/drive pulley.  This ended up being my biggest expense on the project.  I bought a V-belt that is used to drive the blades on riding lawnmowers.  It cost me $21.00 and change at Home Depot.

Once I had obtained a V-belt, I did some rough calculations as to how long the platform would needed to be, cut all my lumber, and screwed everything together with some old dry-wall screws.

When mounting the mill it is important that the mill pulley is in the center of the platform where it will line up evenly with the drive wheel on the bicycle.

I used the mill as a template to mark where I needed to drill mounting holes, and bolted the mill down.

I wanted to mount the bicycle so that it would keep good tension on the V-belt, but I didn’t want it to be so tight that it would cause undue wear on the bearings in the mill.  I decided to nail a board across the platform that would hold the front feet of the exercise bike in place and keep the bike pulled back tight away from the mill.  What I ended up doing was putting the belt on the mill and the bike, laying the loose board across the platform, and then pushing the board (and bike) back as hard as I could by hand, and marking the position of the board.  I then unhooked the belt and moved the bike out of the way.  Now I scooted the loose board 3/8” farther away from the mill than my mark and then screwed the board down.  When I positioned the bike behind the board and reattached the belt, the belt was tight enough that it actually held the back end of the bike about an inch up off of the platform.  When I sat down on the bike it snugged the belt up nice and tight so that when I peddled the bike, the mill hummed right along.  It was not necessary to make any kind of permanent attachments to hold the bike down on the platform.

That pretty much completed the project.  

I did build a little removable platform that holds my flour bin under the grinding plates of the mill.  

I loaded up the hopper on the mill and did a little test run.  

It worked fine. Much easier than turning by hand, but still a pretty good workout.  Speaking of workout, be sure and remove the tensioning knob from your exercise bike if you build a set-up like this.  The mill will give you a good workout without adding any more resistance to the peddles.