Big Mid-December Update!

After talking about it for over a year now I finally got a proper chicken coop!  With the help of my parents I got a Suncast shed, which with my brother’s help I erected yesterday and completed today. 

Of course the chickens need a way of getting in and out of the coop, and here it is. 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the only problem is convincing the chickens that they should be INSIDE that building!  Hopefully the heat lamp I placed inside, as well as moving their feeder and water bucket in there helps…

And now for some “Frozen Chicken…”  In other words at the time of this writing my chickens STILL haven’t realized that the new, heated building that houses their food and water supply is a good place to be…

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 In Other News…

Also today I finsihed off my “bonus” roll of Kodachrome 64.  Hopefully I’ll be mailing off both rolls this Tuesday, as I sent a question to Dwane’s Photo to see if I could get my empty rolls back (I want them for use as display pieces). 

That’s all I have for now…  So until the next update…

Sunflower harvest, speedlight guts and more…

I realize that I’ve been awhile in posting, and that most of my more recent posts have been strictly about photography.  The first is just plain laziness, and the second I have taken care of by adding a Flickr photostream to my sidebar. 

First:  the Fall of the Sunflowers

It’s been over a month and a half now, but my sunflowers finally ripened and I cut the heads down.  Here is a photo taken just before the harvest.

 

One of the astonishingly-large heads that we harvested!  Most weren’t quite this big, but…

 

 

 

Just to give you an idea, this is about HALF of the harvest!  All in all it equated to about a half-bushel of seeds.  I’m rather impressed, especially since only about half of the plants actually made it to harvest!

 

Of course most of my corn is still in the field (I need to deal with this), most of what isn’t has already been fed to the chickens. 

 

And just one more quick thing…  Have any of you ever wondered what was inside a speedlight (standard camera flash)?  I had purchased a Sunpak Auto 411 Thyristor (a fairly powerful late 70s flash) off eBay.  When I got it the thing didn’t work.  So I tore it apart to see if I could find the problem.  So far no luck, but luckily for you I photographed the innards for all to see…

Click the picture to see a larger, annotated version on Flickr. 

Hopefully I can get this sucker working; it’s fairly small but when it does work it packs a surprising punch! 

 

 

 

Well that’s all I have for now.  Hopefully I won’t go so long without a post again…

Home Ag: Sunflowers

In addition to field corn I also planted about 120 sunflowers, which I have neglected to post pictures of until now. Sadly they are well past the "pretty" phase, but that's not why I'm growing them...
These plants are all over 10 feet tall, with most having a head measuring over a foot across. Fortunately they are "droopy," which deters wild birds from stealing my crop.








And here's a picture with me holding a soda can next to one of the lowest heads... Yes they really are that big!
I believe that I lost maybe a fifth of these plants to rabbits that ran under the electric fence, however there are still PLENTY of flowers left over!

Home Ag Update: The corn is up!

Finally about "one third to half" of my corn has sprouted! So far the first two planting days' worth of corn is up, with the rest about a week behind. And at least so far it looks like I have a very low mortality rate (as in by far and away most of the seeds have sprouted)!
Here is a picture of once of the further along seedlings, as well as a few of it's neighbors. However as you can see some weeds have sprung up, and though I had hoped not to need to I may wind up having to spray the corn patch with 2,4-D (I can't use Round-Up, as only about a third of the corn is guaranteed to be Round-Up Ready). This won't kill the grass, but it will take care of the broadleafs. We'll see, if the corn grows fast enough I won't have to spray at all...
That's all I have for now. More when the results are more dramatic.

Home Ag: Fixin' the Cistern!

NOTICE: Second post today!

I feel very fortunate that my house came with a cistern; a now all-but forgotten source of fresh water. A cistern is a large underground storage space for water, which is generally supplied by rain collected by the house's roof.
My cistern is located on the north wall of my house, and has no clear design feature for filling it. I plan on using aboveground courrogated drain pipe to move rainwater from the eaves through the access hatch visable in the picture, and to use a sump pump to actually use this water to irrigate my crops.
In order to do this I need to run both a water pipe and an extension cord down the raised hole on the right side of the picture, and fish them out through the access hatch to attach them to a pump. Most likely this will be easier said than done, but in the end will be well worth it, as this is a source of FREE water for irrigating both my garden and my lawn!

As of right now the only function that my cistern serves is to provide a home for a single frog! Currently the cistern holds about two inches of water, and as you can see the wreckage of the old wellhead pump are still in there. Once I have a pump in there and connect the eaves to it, the frog will have to move out... Sorry, but I now officially need the stored rain water...

Home Ag: More Garden / Mini-Field pictures

Well this time it's more or less just pictures, since I've done some more work to the garden and want to show it off...











First picture: The garden (this year it's just a corn field) viewed from the road, with electric fencing installed and the first three rows planted. For this field I used "poly-wire" for the electric fence. Poly-wire is, in this case, comprised of three strands of PVC-encased fiberglass rope interwoven with three aluminum wires. The advantages of poly-wire, especially here, are enhanced visability to both people and animals (the "poly" in this wire is bright yellow and black) and ease of handling, which will be very important this fall when I will have to coil the "wire" back up before I cut the dead cornstalks down with my scythe.



















Second picture: The (most likely) temporary hookup for the garden fence, with three pullets and the rooster making a cameo. The gate handle is made out of nonconductive rubber, and a strand of highly visable poly-wire connects the chicken fence to the garden fence. Eventually I will probaly replace this system with a buried cable with a disconnect switch, but for the moment, at least, this system should work just fine.

That's all I have for now. More after my corn starts to spring up...

Is this... Corn?

I finally aquired my corn seed today, and all I have to say is it doesn't look the way I expected! Of course the corn seeds are much smaller than the harvest kernels, but the color is what threw me. I knew that the seed was likely to be coated (generally with fungucide and/or starter fertilizer) but I hadn't expected the color.
The reason the seed is multicolored is because the bag contains several different brands of corn. This is a very good thing, as diversity helps avoid problems. THis is the seed that was left over when the farmer cleaned out his planter this year; it is all high-end seed that should yield very nicely!
Now I just need to till under the jungle and actually put some of this into the ground...

Home Ag. prospects: Putting the Lawn into Production!

Let's be frank here; I don't like mowing the lawn. And I am cursed (many would say blessed) with a 2-acre lawn, a solid chunk of which grows at a near-rediculous rate. For much of the time that I have owned this property I have wanted to put this "jungle patch" into production, and grow a large garden. However my current job situation (extremely busy) all but prevents this (I don't have near the time or energy to maintain a garden with "traditional" practices, such as hand-pulling weeds and a mixture of companion planting and nicotine spray to manage insect pests). So I have come up with an alternative that also supports my poultry hobby; grow my own feed corn!

Pictured to the right is the result of my "homegrown" (quite literally in this case) soil quality test two years ago. Whilst out woodchuck hunting I "borrowed" a couple of modern hybrid dent corn seedlings (which are virtually dependant on fertilizer) and transplanted them on my lawn, just outside of the "jungle." I only used fertilizer of any sort (TSC-brand 12-12-12) once, WAY too late in the season. Yet the picture shows the results. The two surviving cornstalks, though decidedly stunted, each yielded an ear this size, very close to the size of the whole-ear corn sold commercially as squirrel feed! I'd say my soil quality test was a success!
I have currently staked off most of the "jungle," an area that measures 25x100 feet, and plan to till this area under within the next couple of weeks. By doing the math, and using the preferred planting rate for modern field corn of 36,000 seeds per acre, I figure this entire area would require about 1,200 seeds (which equals just under a pound of seed). The problem is that corn seed is sold in 80,000-seed bags costing between $70 and $400! I will need to talk to the farmers I know and see about buying a couple of pounds of seed...
I want to set aside the last few feet of this mini-field aside to grow a few tomatoes and a couple of rows of sweet corn, but that's all the gardening I have planned for this year. As I stated I simply don't have time to do more... The corn (both the sweet and field varieties) require minimal maintenance once established (especially since I'm not going for maximum yield, it's mostly for fun, and to put my land to use). Of course come fall I'll have 1,200 ears of corn to harvest (by hand!) and store, but I do have the space and (hopefully, by then) the time...

Electric Fencing Pt. 2

Over the course of the last two weeks since I purchased the A50LIL fence controller I had it and two others fail on me due to a design flaw... Disgruntled with that model I returned the third defective unit for cash and purchased a second B10LI, identical to my original controller. For me this is a proven, dependable unit that more than satisfies all of my fencing needs, except for the possability of adding a Storm Guard module to the fence controller... However I have a feeling that I will probaly be safe without one...
I installed the new B10 on the fence earlier today, and put the old, "proven," unit back in the blister pack as a backup/secondary controller. I add the secondary because if I decide to use an electric fence around my garden the B10 is capable of running up to a month and a half on four "D" cell flashlight batteries, and requires no shelter from the elements. For common pest control a 6' ground rod driven only 4 feet into the ground is more than sufficient (as I learned when I purchased the first B10). This makes using electric fencing around my future garden easier, as I don't have to string insulated wires across my lawn (which would need to be reeled up every time I mowed).
Anyways, aside from my fence energizer fiasco I have made a few additional upgrades to my fence since the last post. First and foremost I added a lightning arrestor to the control post. Second I added a second 8' ground rod to the grounding system which, especially in dry months, will substantially improve the performance of the fence. Both of these are "invisible" upgrades (the ground rods and their wiring are completely buried, mostly so I don't have to mow around them, and until I finish the control post I'm not going to bother taking pictures of the lightning arrestor).
Third I finally re-strung the lower wire and added the second wire I had talked about in the previous post. The lowest wire is a mere 4" off the ground to exclude vermin, and as you can see already needs weed-wacking. The second wire is about 16" above the ground, and is the main predator control wire. It is between the average nose height of cats (or raccoons) and cyotes, the main predators that I am worried about. Any animal brave enough to climb the chicken wire will still have to deal with the tightly strung top wire, and with over 150 feet of it touching the ground an animal touching both this wire and the chicken wire is in for a nasty surprise!
As you can see both the Mighty Rooster and two of the pullets made a cameo in this picture. I think they have already grown significantly since the last post... With any luck my next post will be about the Henhouse.

Chickens Update

Finally, through only partial fault of my own, the chickens are outdoors... Now, the explination:

Yesterday I erected what was intended to be a temporary enclosure for the chickens. I didn't have nearly as much wire as I had thought, and had to improvise a coop for them... After several near escapes I thought I had the birds contained, and left for game night...
I was wrong...

When I came home at 1:00 the first thing I saw when I pulled in was what looked like a dead chicken. Fortunately it was still alive, but very VERY far from where it belonged. It turns out that it and one more bird had ran right under the electrified chicken wire. About an hour later, just as I was getting to bed, I heard a lot of commotion outside, and when I went out with my flashlight... NO CHICKENS!!!

The next morning after I got up I looked around and, sure enough in the pine trees on the north edge of my property I found five of the birds in short order. Soon thereafter I found the rooster in another pine tree by himself. After reuniting him with the hens I left for Tractor Supply to get supplies to make a much larger run for the birds. Here are the results:
The run is about 50 feet long and 15 wide. The chicken wire is topped with an electrified security wire, and the base is surrounded by a second electrified wire. Both wires are energized with a 6,000 volt pulse once every second, which (according to the fencer manufacturer) is enough to control all predators and livestock as large as bison! This fencer is rather overkill for my purposes, but it is a "weed clipper" unit, which means that it has enough power to literally "burn through" weeds. This is both good and bad: Good in the respect that out-of-control spring weeds won't negate the fence, but bad in the respect that the unit is more than capable of starting brush fires in dry weather... I plan on adding a seperate cut-out for the bottom wire, so I can turn it off during drought and red-flag warnings.
This fence was not as cheap as I had thought: All told it cost about $250-300 (mind you I had bought most of the electric fence parts three years ago, which accounts for just less than half of the total). This is the main reason for my advocacy of electric fencing: For what I spent on a 200-foot chicken fence I could've built a 5 mile cattle fence using a purely electric fence. The other reason is that electric fencing is very humane compared to the alternatives (such as barbed wire). The shock is rather painful (as I found out while testing the fence), but causes no actual harm to the animal. Barbed wire, on the other hand...

Now for some pictures...

My custom indoor electric fence energizer setup. It features a Zareba Systems 1/4 joule battery-powered controller currently running off of the battery from my big truck (which is currently out of commision). I printed off the "High Voltage" signs myself.













Four pullets enjoying the evening beside on of my pine trees.












And the Mighty (in his own opinion) Rooster... When the birds escaped last night he had picked his own tree to hide out in, and unlike the hens had actually climbed up into the tree to roost. His wings were the first to be clipped, so I doubt if his tree climbing prowess will be a problem...

Chickens Pt. 2

Well after owning chickens for two weeks I have realized two things. 1: I in no way regret my decision to get them and 2: they are very messy birds! As of right now I am having to clean out my waterer at least twice if not three times daily because they keep fouling the water with depleted bedding... However the birds are progressing nicely, and have already doubled in size, with the exception of my rooster (pictured) who has almost tripled in size!
These are "Straight-run" chickens, meaning that there is no way of knowing what breed they are. However judging from their current plumage I have at least three if not four breeds. Most of the pullets (hens) are showing dark brown plumage, and are most likely Rhode Island Reds, or a descendant of that breed. The cockerel (rooster) has so far maintained his overall yellowish color and is most likely a white breed. And two of the pullets have noticeably different plumage than the other three, however it is still too early to be sure...
I will keep you posted on the birds' development, and will have pictures as soon as I move them to larger quarters (right now they are borderline overcrowded by the box I am keeping them in, making their care burdensome and any photography options poor at best). This week I hope to move them to larger quarters out in the old bar, I will take and post more pictures then.

Home Farming: Chickens

With my busy schedule I decided that I couldn't take the 2-3 days nessasary to prepare and plant a garden this year... So I decided to go for the other aspect of agriculture that I'm interested in, and to buy some chickens!
This is my flock of six as they looked a week ago. They've already grown, and are well on their way. I plan on erecting a henhouse on the concrete slab located on my property, however I have time to wait on that before these birds are big enough to require such housing.

Home Farming

I believe that the content of this post more accurately reflects "Hobbies and Interests" than "Home Improvements," so I will post it here instead of on my Home and Bar Improvement blog.
Within the last few years I have been steadily developing an interest in agriculture; both in the growing of crops and animal husbandry. To this end I have decided to make an attempt at at least some level of homesteading (the practice of growing and/or raising that that one needs to survive).
First and foremost I plan on planting a garden to grow those vegetables that I love the most: Tomatoes, carrots, sweet corn and asparagus. The last of these requires special care and growing conditions, which I have the means to provide... In addition to my planned vegetable garden I plan to plant at least two asparagus rows; one planted with a "local" variety of asparagus from my family homestead of Grelton, and the other with a commercial "High Production" variety.
As for my garden I plan on planting a variety of vegetables I enjoy, including but not limited to carrots, lettuce, string beans and sweet corn. I also have a desire to grow dent corn, but that desire more reflects my desire to make my own beer than that of growing my own food...
In addition to the usual garden vegetables I also would like to grow dent corn (as I already mentioned), grapes (which I would like to aquire from clones of family grape vines) and my own hops (which can be purchased from home-brewing suppliers, however it is too late this year to aquire the hop roots). I have the land and growing conditions to accomidate all of this, and though I am in preference of natural farming practice I am certainly not opposed to the use of commercially-available chemical fertilizers (from my decidedly limited experiance I like TSC-branded 12-12-12 fertilizer).
As far as pesticides go I tend to prefer the deterrance route (electric fencing), however I am an advocate of an old, effective and totally human-safe insecticide. It is made at home by boiling one full-size pouch of chewing tobacco in one quart of water. After boiling the tobacco is strained out and discarded, and the resulting "tea" is sprayed on the desired plants. Cigarette tobacco (which is considerably cheaper) can also be used, however suger will need to be added to make the mixture "sticky." Since the tobacco is prepared for human consumpion it is completely safe to eat, even without washing. However the nicotine contained therein is lethal to most insects. It is notable that this mixture is water-soluable, and will need to be reapplied after watering or rainfall.
As I said I am also interested in keeping livestock. I had originally planned to have more land than I do, and to live in the country. As such I had wanted to keep 5-10 head of cattle, and pasture then over a "rotated range" of 3-10 acres in three "zones." By moving the cattle between these zones it ia supposedly possible to raise saleable cattle without the use of commercial animal feed or feed corn. However with my property it is doubtful that I would be able to grass-feed more than one or two steers, and I don't have either the housing for those steers nor the money to build one.
As such I am considering raising chickens, which are considerably smaller (and thusly easier to feed). I belive that by fencing off a fifth of my property and fabricating a henhouse I could easily house at least a dozen hens.
I have read that by raising a kitten alongside the baby chicks is the best way to deter rodents (as the resulting adult cat will be accustomed to the chickens, and vice versa, yet the cat will remain agressive to any intruding vermin), and if I decide to erect a henhouse this is what I plan on doing, in additon to the double protection of both chicken wire and low-level electric fencing.
Thouch I would like to keep cattle I doubt that it would be possible given the limited amount of land that I own. However a gerden and mini-farm are dreams that I have not given up on...