Tips To Reduce Your Use of Paper Towels

     If you happened to miss our tips for reducing your use of paper towels in your household on Facebook over the last five days, I've decided to share them on the blog as well. Our journey started in December 2015, when we decided to reduce paper towel consumption in our kitchen.

     Our key to reducing their use in the kitchen is to have a basket of washcloths at easy reach on the counter instead of a roll of paper towels. Spilled something? Grab a washcloth. Need to clean off the stovetop? A washcloth will do! Really greasy fried foods? Wet a washcloth to wipe your hands on instead of a paper towel. The possibilities are endless.

     Our second tip to limit the use of paper towels is when cleaning, whether it be the house or a spill, use rags. I've cut up a few old t-shirts and have a small crate with t-shirt rags in underneath the bathroom sink. They're quick to grab when cleaning up. Once they're dirty, toss them into another container or bucket, and after the bucket fills up wash a bleach load of rags in your washer.

    (Bonus Tip: Don't toss wet rags into the bucket, or you'll know it in a few days! I leave mine to dry out on an aluminum pie pan first.)

     Can you smell the bacon? The third tip I'd like to share with you on limiting paper towels has to do with all those fried foods you love. We used to toss piles of bacon, egg rolls, donuts, and fried chicken onto paper towels to sop up all that grease, but now, we found that using a splatter guard over a kitchen plate allows the grease to drip through.

     (Bonus Tip: If you have a spray nozzle at your kitchen sink, it really helps to clean your splatter guard afterwards.)

     Cloth napkins can be used for more than keeping the crumbs at bay in our fourth tip. We certainly used paper towels in place of napkins when it comes to greasy foods, or when you just run out of napkins and forgot to add it to your grocery list. There's added bonuses to using cloth napkins:

• If you weren't too messy, cloth napkins can be used for more than one meal before they need to be washed. 
• Cloth napkins can easily be dampened to clean sticky fingers. 
• Fancier napkins also work great in place of paper towels for lining baskets for chips and rolls during picnics. 
• They're reusable! 

     We currently have about 20 cloth napkins (all thrift store buys, which cost 50 cents or less each), which last the two of us about a week. That's $10 or less for multiple years' supply of napkins!  I haven't purchased paper napkins since last year as cloth napkins also reduce our use of napkins, and not just paper towels!

     Ewwww! I pondered long and hard about sharing a picture of my toilet to the world before I posted this last tip, but alas, I just had to.  Believe it or not cleaning the bathroom is not my least favorite chore, but it does lead us to our fifth and final tip on reducing paper towels.

     Once you get really dirty rags that the wash can't clean, use them to clean the bathroom, and toss them when they're done. For me, the toilet is one of those places that I just can't clean with a rag that is going to be washed, and maybe touch my kitchen floor. Although the rag is washed, the thought alone makes me cringe a little.

     I hope you have a few new ideas now to try around your house. Is there another way you reduced the use of paper towels in your own home? We'd love to hear it!

Free Up Freezer Space

Is your freezer so full you just don't have room to fit more in?  Are you stuck with a tiny apartment-sized freezer, but would love to prepare meals in advance?  These quick tips will help you make the most of your limited freezer space.

TIP 1: Storing meat.  A family pack of meat runs between 5 and 6lbs, which is perfect for this quick tip.  

Instead of keeping your meat in its original packaging, separate it immediately into portion-sized packages.  To do this we use fold top sandwich bags (cost is about $1 per 100-pack at a big box store) and gallon-sized freezer bags (cost is around $7 per 50-pack at a big box store).  A 1/2lb of ground meat can easily fit inside a fold over sandwich bag, fold the top over, and then pack 12 of those packages into a gallon-size freezer bag, label the bag, and stack.  When using freezer bags for this purpose, I found that zipper bags hold up better than slider bags due to how tightly they will be packed, and in having to open and close them with regularity.  

TIP 2: Storing soups and sauces.  If you're like us, you probably want to have some quick meals on hand.  We found the best way to do this is to use easily stacking freezer containers for premade soups (such as lentil soup, homemade cream of chicken soup, or chicken pot pie) and sauces that can't be canned.  The key here is to get sturdy freezer containers, which come in a variety of sizes and all stack together nicely.  The ones we have, shown right, actually come in three sizes (2 cup, 3 cup and 4 cup), and have a place where you can write in the date and contents with a dry erase marker.  Once you're done with them, wash them up, and they're good as new!  We got ours for just $3.50 for 2 cup (5-pack), a 3-cup (4-pack) or 4-cup (3-pack) from a local store.  

TIP 3: Flatten when you're able with soups, crockpot freezer meal packets, and vegetables.   This works wonderful when we are trying to jam as much garden produce into our freezers (yes, we have deep freezes these days, but started out with just an apartment-sized freezer) as possible.  Essentially, you're making file folders out of pint freezer bags (around $3 for a 20-pack at a big box store) and quart freezer bags (about $7 for a 60-pack at a big box store).  Label your bags, freeze your bags flat, after insuring all the air is out of them, and then stack like you would file folders in a filing cabinet.  You can also stack them inside freezer bins if you have them.  When using freezer bags, I've found that regular zipper bags hold up better than slider bags.

TIP 4: TV dinners for all.  When tv dinners first became popular in the 1950s, the frozen dinners came in an aluminium tray, which you heated in an oven and actually ate on a tv tray in front of the television with the rest of your family.  They were popular, and eventually became the plastic tray'd meals that we see in grocery store freezer cases today.  We currently make a spin of family-sized tv dinners using aluminium pans from the big box stores, which you can pick up for a couple of dollars.  Take the lid off, and pop them into the oven, and you're ready for a quick dinner while you clean up from the garden, or catch up on some housework.

The aluminium pans stack wonderfully in the freezer, and can make a full course meal for two, or a main dish for more than two, whereas the small loaf pans make great single serve meals or a side dish for two.  The key, is to get only one or two kinds, which stack nicely so you don't use up too much of your freezer space.  If you're careful with the pans you can easily wash and reuse them, although you will have to replace the lids.  (A simple "new" lid can be made from aluminium foil and cardboard.

TIP 5: Use freezer bins/baskets if you have the space.  Not everyone will have the space to use freezer baskets as catch-alls, but I love these plastic baskets with holes in that allow the air to circulate, and can catch all of those half-used bags of vegetables and random single-packs of meat that are floating about.  You'll notice that we use them in our deep freezes for all of our bags of roasts and steaks.

These baskets come in four different sizes, ranging from a shoe box size to almost 11" x 14" x 10", and cost anywhere from $1 to $5 each at big box and dollar stores, depending on the size.  (We actually love them so much that we use them for our produce bins, yarn and craft bins, for all the clothing that doesn't fit nicely into our two dresser drawers, and in organization of our bathroom closet.)

I hope these tips help make some room in your crowded freezers.  What do you do to save space in them?

Autumn's In The Air and Garden (Wait, What?)

Whitey naps in the most unusual places to
avoid autumn chores.  

     It's officially autumn here (okay, we're way past autumn now and almost in spring, but try to bear with me) with the changing leaves, the dipping temperatures, and the farm cats' fur getting a little fuller.  With autumn comes another time too though: the time of unrealized dreams as there is not enough time to truly finish everything you wanted to get done the previous growing season (which is why a what-should-have-been-done in autumn blog post is being written in February, while the second snowstorm of the new year is upon us, and they're calling for another one early next week).  There were projects that will never be started... others that won't be finished before the cold winds whip across the fields and the snow blankets the ground.  That part of autumn took its course on our garden as we attempted to scramble to prepare for the winter snows to be upon us in January.  (Yeah, we're running behind, but at least we got it winterized before the first snowflake hit the ground.)  

     We've been searching for the perfect way to put our garden to bed this year (i.e. the 2015 growing season), whether we rough it up with animals, cover crop it, or prepare a semi-lasagna garden bed for spring.  We need, desperately, to add some fertility back into our soil and kill as many weeds as we can find so next year won't be nearly as rough on us.  Next year, like this year, we have dreams, and dreams mean work; work that might not have the ability to get done if we need to spend too much time on the garden.  It's a delicate balance, and leaning too far in one direction might tip our entire lifestyle on its side, leaving it kicking for a while as it tries desperately to stand back up again.

The first step of our journey was tearing out the weeds and remnants of the
plants that were in the garden.  Unfortunately that also meant my beloved
marigolds in their beautiful fall colors had to go.  

     We've been intrigued with a number of mulching, fertilizing and winterizing ideas throughout the past year on the variety of blogs I view on a near daily basis.  The one that caught our attention the quickest was entitled Create an Instant Garden with Sheet Mulching from Homestead Honey, which shows how the lasagna technique worked for her and assisted in keeping the weeds at bay as well!

     Since we already had a garden area, and weren't starting from scratch we skipped over the first layer of cardboard and/or newspaper by accident and went straight to everything else after we tilled the area that was planted the previous year.  After finding the mistake the next morning, and figuring we probably needed the extra barrier between the two, we decided instead of undoing and redoing all of our work to use this as an experiment: keep the part we had done on the first day as is, and then put the newspaper layer on the rest of the garden.  If the weeds end up being especially thick in the first part, then obviously we needed the newspaper layer.  If there's no to little difference, then going through the hassle of spreading newspaper in the wind for days on end, can be avoided in future years.  In most of the new section of the garden, we didn't bother tilling first, but figured we'd lay the newspaper across the grass that needed killed, and see if it worked.

Layer One

Our first layer (after our original mistake) was newspaper as it was something readily available to us, and something we already had piled ready for recycling (in a variety of ways).  Having had a mess with newspaper in the past, I'm still skeptical on this as last time we used a newspaper base in the garden I had to pick it out of the neighbor's fence up the way as we're in a fairly wind-swept area.

There's three options to make this less of a windy mess for you: (1) Wet down the newspaper with a garden hose so it becomes heavier.  (2) Layer heavier layers on top of the newspaper quickly.  (3) Use cardboard instead of newspaper as it's heavier to begin with; however, wetting it down still wouldn't hurt.

Cost to us: $0 with a lot of stock piling

Layer Two

Our second layer would be leaves, another readily available source to us.  Our leaf-coated trees were still, well, leaf-coated, when we started winterizing the garden; however, my mother and her neighbor were eager to assist our gardening efforts (especially since it meant less raking for them)!  The composted leaf pile at my mother's house from leaves of autumns past was the first truck load, and a heavy one at that.  The second, a very compacted truck bed of leaves from the neighbor's yard.  The loads would continue to be alternated throughout the project until we finally got enough for the garden.  My original estimate would be 13 loads for the garden; however, it appears we were right on track (or close to) that estimate.

Keep in mind if you're spreading fresh leaves in a wind-swept area (like ours), some, or all, are bound to blow away unless you weigh them down.  Even the simple idea of soaking them to the bone just won't do.  Water dries, and once those leaves are even semi-dry, they're stuck in the bushes and hanging out of the neighbor's fence down the way.  That's where layer three came in especially handy.

Cost to us: About $1.75 a load in gas (we made about fourteen loads, and managed to somehow rake up a lawnmower dump trailer load from the lawn to add even though all of our maples' leaves were still green at the time!)

Layer Three

Our third layer was manure, and a lot of it.  Although we have chickens, their manure would have to be heavily composted before we could safely use it for growing any plants without the risk of disease or burning the plants with too much fertilizer, and since our now Phase 2 compost bin was not working out the greatest (that's another project that needs to go onto Phase 3, just as soon as we get "spare time"), we couldn't take the risk of spreading fresh, highly concentrated chicken manure on the garden.  We needed to outsource.

Fortunately, someone on Craigslist had aged horse manure a few towns over and that became our first source for the smelliest of layers.  (I actually turned the corner to take a few pictures of our handiwork the one afternoon and went phew someone spread on their fields! when the smell from the garden hit me.  Oh, wait it was us!  It smells a lot more satisfying when you're the one to spread, and since it didn't smell like the chicken or pig manure that most of the farmers spread around here, I was really sold on the idea!)  We had to shovel it and pitchfork it into the bed of the pickup by hand from their pile as they had no other way to load it.  It may have been a bit of backbreaking labor, but it was free.

After taking one glance at their pile; however, we realized there was no way it was going to be enough.  So we started looking for a second source.  We didn't have to look too far as the landlord had a pretty decent stockpile on the next farm up.  Having both sheep and cattle, there would be plenty to go around there, and he had offered us some the previous year.  The offer was still good and we ended up with two loads from him as well.  

Cost to us: About $1.50 a load in gas for the horse manure (we made three loads)
Cost to us: About $0.25 a load in gas for the sheep/cattle manure (we made two loads)

Conclusion

I'm very interested to see if this will actually work come spring.  The composted leaves from my mother's house started sprouting around mid-November due to a warm snap we had, and hopefully that means all the seedlings in there will die in the extra brisk temperatures we are now experiencing (on some days), and the 30" of snow that we ended up getting at the end of January, just as we put our "autumn" garden to bed for the winter.

A "winterized" garden and greenhouse in January 

Building A Longer Growing Season

     I got a little misty eyed thinking about it as I glanced out across the front lawn this morning - that has begun to turn into our own garden paradise - and thought about my great grandparents' house.  I was fortunate enough to know my great grandmother, but was never able to meet my great grandfather who passed before I was born, and who had nestled in the back corner of their yard a greenhouse, which had seen better days when I was a child.  This cinder block structure with cracked glass windows, a scattering of pots and tables, and a door that I can't remember ever having been closed - this "dangerous place" that I was never permitted to go anywhere near - was all that I ever knew of the idea of an at-home greenhouse.  So, it should come as no surprise that when we tossed around the idea of adding our own at-home greenhouse, low or high tunnels, or cold frames to the garden, I was a little in-the-dark.  

Pappy, Dad and the Mr. working on constructing the first
wall, which would be a treat with my oh-so-wonderful plans!

     It should also come as no surprise that when I went to design what I thought would be a proper greenhouse after quite a bit of research, it lacked true size and building calculations.  You see, as a child my mother was the person who could wield a hammer and who encouraged me to tear apart VCRs, record players, cash registers, and any broken electronics we could get our hands on. (P.S. - a toaster is pretty boring, but VCRs offer perfect parts and connections to add to Lego sets to help power them.)  However, there were reasons my parents rented, and decided not to own their own home.  Among them was that my father's not much of a fix-it guy, and he will openly agree that he'd rather just pay someone else to do it, then attempt to fix something broken around the house.  So, aside from the things that my husband and very patient father-in-law and grandfather-in-law have taught me over the past couple of years, a handful of electronics, and some home fix-it shows on PBS during Saturdays throughout my childhood was about as far as the words "construction" had taken me in life.  

     As you will notice from my kind-of-scale drawing of what I planned to be our future greenhouse, rounding to 2" in building to make drawing easier was no difficulty for me; however, as I knew when drawing it 2x4s are not really 2x4 (stupid I know) so whoever was about to use my plans to build a greenhouse was going to have a little bit of fun.  That's when yesterday came into play... the day that my husband miraculously had off work during the busiest time of the year at his job, and he managed to convince his father and grandfather to drive almost two hours north to assist in constructing the greenhouse in an open field during a semi-blustery cold day.  (Grammy came too, to help me supervise.  My brother-in-law also came an hour east later that day, after being woken up by his brother twice, when they decided that another set of hands wouldn't be a bad thing, and helped us get it done a lot quicker!)  

Each wall needed to be carried down from their assembly
station (i.e. the driveway) to the garden, individually.

     The goals of the greenhouse were (a) to spend as little money as possible to construct it after our chicken coop costs were not as low as desired, (b) put as much light into it as possible for crops, but not block light from any crops that might surround it, (c) be able to regulate the temperature inside, and (d) build it just under the square footage that would have caused us to pull building permits.  Believe it or not, d was the easiest of the goals to reach, while a-c had added an extra twist in both the design and construction.  

Pappy working on the old screen door the landlord let us
use as the greenhouse's door.  

     We'd been scrounging up parts for some time now thinking maybe we'd get a greenhouse, low or high tunnel, or cold frames done sometime in the coming year once we finished construction of the chicken coop and runs (the coop and main run are at least done), finished laying out and preparing the garden for winter (we're part way there, and since this technically sits in the garden, we can stretch it and call this preparing for winter right?), and the handful of other things on our winter to-do list that made my grandmother-in-law pause at its length (especially because we rent, but have an awesome landlord that allows us to make this house and surrounding land feel like our home).  I would certainly say that everything we gathered for this project, if people, would be considered a motley crew!  It included:

• Two automatic basement vents, which the local rebuilt-it store had sitting in their original packages for a little while, and were not only marked fairly low price-wise, but also became 25% off during one of their sales.  After passing them by the first time, I decided to head back and see if they still had them.  Less than $8 later we had the beginning of temperature control, paired with an outdoor thermometer that we got two Christmas's ago from my husband's aunt and uncle that I hope to hang inside the greenhouse.
• Nine skylights, which we got free off Craigslist, and were presumably ripped out because the tenth one leaked.  So there were nine of the absolutely heaviest windows I had ever handled, with their frames in semi-decent condition.  At least it's double-paned glass and a couple of them can crank open if installed correctly!  
• A pile of broken decking and supports, which was also two pick-up truck loads of free building material off of Craiglist that was once someone's wrap around pool deck they had torn down.  Keep in mind when people tear things down, they don't necessarily consider that someone might be using the wood again so the pieces might not appear too pristine, but it was free pressure treated lumber, so no complaints here.  
• A handful of 2x4s and 2x3s, my husband found in a free pile along the side of the road on his way home from work in the pouring down rain the one day.  There has to be a good reason for him to drive a pick-up truck back and forth to work, right?
• Two louvered shed windows with their screens, which I found in a pile set out for the trash by one of the neighbors up the way.  The screens are torn to bits, and one of the crank handles is broken on the windows, but I scooped them up anyway.  How hard can it be to replace a screen or handle, right?
• Two monstrous windows that I found at the local rebuilt-it shop because eleven windows would only do three sides of the building, not all four.  Unfortunately, these double-paned glass windows would cost us, and did not come framed out, but they were certainly the right size (and 50% off that day), so $20 later, we got two windows that would just squeeze into the one wall.  
• An old screen door, which was from a pile of doors, presumably from the old farmhouse that once sat here, in the barn.  One that had three windows the landlord gave the go-ahead for us to use for free.

For those of you who have been following us for a while,
you may notice this is not the first time a project was being
worked on by a vehicle's headlights.  

This, paired alongside some lumber and plywood we needed to purchase to round out our building materials, would become the base for our new greenhouse.  

      The time frame my husband gave himself to construct it: one day.  Fortunately, I have in-laws who are willing to come at the last minute and work for food, even if it means by the light of a car's headlights, and this morning, after a full day's work (and full night's rest) I glanced out on our new greenhouse...

     ... which still needs a little work including framing out two windows, finishing fixing up and hanging the screen door, leveling the back corner (I told them there was a dip in the lawn there!), figuring out just what we're using for see-through roofing (we have two semi-pricey ideas, but are also open to other suggestions) that can hold up to winter snows and summer suns, and adding siding, gutters and rain barrels.  In the grand spectrum of things that really is just a "little" more work!

      Now, to figure out how I'm going to fill up the inside!  

Ode To The Osage Orange

     There's monkey brains everywhere.  They're lining the farm field.  They're smashed across the road.  They've seemingly found themselves in every nook and cranny they could find available.  And, before you start believing that we're harboring some genetically modified alien monkeys with green brains up here, rest assured that Pennsylvania Dutch Country is safe.

     They're actually the fruit of the Osage Orange, nicknamed Monkey Brains by the locals due to their brainy appearance.  

     Osage Orange dates back to the days before barbed wire when fencing an area used a lot more help from Mother Nature and a lot less assistance from modern machinery.  Fence rows were made from a variety of things back then: rocks, logs, waddle and daub, and a farmer's favorite, a living fence line.  By planting living fence lines, the plants would grow so incredibly wild and tight-packed that not even a hog could break through them.  Unfortunately for farmers, they would still have needed some maintenance on these fences if animals were around, as the BBC's Edwardian Farm demonstrates in their own hedgerow:

     Otherwise, it was a fairly good plan, and that's where the Osage Orange comes in.  

     A tree with inedible fruit shouldn't be the first thought for a farmstead, unless, it could be made useful in other ways.  An Osage Orange tree growing on its own will form a beautiful round crown; however, in a close-packed hedge row, it will form an impenetrable barrier with thorns so large that they would sometimes injure livestock.  Farmers, in both America and Europe, also found their wood useful for crafting with, including for bows, wagon tongues and wheels, and even fence posts and railroad ties.

     Although thousands of miles of Osage Orange fence lines were planted throughout America, there remains only smatterings in our area today.  Fortunately, there's one along the edge of the road right near our place, and I happily gathered some of the monkey brains.  Studded with cloves and decorated with a ribbon and some cinnamon sticks the Osage Orange fruit  makes a wonderful Christmas decoration that those of Pennsylvania German descendant have been using for some time.  We'll still be waiting a little longer before we put any Christmas decorations out around here though as it's not even Thanksgiving yet!  (Fall is also my favorite season of the year after all, so I don't mind an extended period of fall decor.)  

     What natural decorations do you like to use at Christmas?  

The Golden Egg: Part 3 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

This look-back is meant to thoroughly introduce you to why we have chickens.  Updates of our chickens' progress can be found on our Facebook and in additional blog posts. - The American Haggard Housewife

     Waiting on the lousy first egg was a trial to say the least.  Whoever thought that a single solitary egg could be such a long, annoying, and exasperating wait has never had chickens.  They are an investment in your money, your time, and your sanity, and that first egg, that lone golden egg, is the most expensive one of all.  

     Think about it.  If your chickens only lay one egg, no matter how much money you have invested in them, that egg costs all of the money, time, and sanity that you invested into the poultry enterprise, no matter how large or small it may be.  And, after recently totaling our personal investment into said chickens, I can attest that our first egg is one GOLDEN egg.  

     I still don't know which of the ladies laid it, but after referring to them as "freeloaders" since Week 16 as they were clearly interested in the expensive GMO-free organic grain we've been indulging them with, but certainly not in holding up their end of the bargain, there on Week 22 it was sitting in a pile of "manure" under the roosts.

     Sure, it wasn't in the proper location, and I'll have to get some "fake eggs" (probably golf balls or whatever else I can locate around the house) to move their nesting into the laying boxes, but who cares?!  It's an egg!  (Sure, we'll care later if they continue to not lay in the nesting boxes.)  

     Like my mother informed my cousin who asked last month if we had gotten eggs yet, "Of course not!  You know there will be 1000s of picture of that first egg."  Sure enough, she was right, and I had to take multiples of our XXS egg.  (For those of you who waited so long for your first egg, you probably ended up taking pictures too!)  

     And, when we finally crack it, there will probably be pictures of whatever it's made into a well, because it will always be our first egg.  It will hopefully; however, be the most expensive egg we'll ever have to crack, as the next egg will share the burden of the distributed cost and therefore each egg will be a little more cost effective in the end.  One can dream, right?  

P.S. - If anyone is keeping track, that was a whooping 157 days after we got the 3-day old chicks (so that's 160 days after they were born, we've managed a single egg).  

NOW AVAILABLE! Bawk, Bawk: Part 4 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

Our New Farm Equipment

     I've seen plenty inventive cost effective ways of plowing on homesteading blogs from pigs, dogs, horses, tractors, rot-o-tillers, and even people power.  We were looking for a cost effective solution as well, and stumbled across Mother Earth News' article from 1982 and quickly found what we imagined to be our simple solution!  (Or, so we thought.)  Since Craigslist is the new newspaper classifieds, we figured we'd start there and eventually found a poor man's tractor for a reasonable price, followed by an assortment of attachments for reasonable prices.  They all needed a little bit of elbow grease to put them into working order, but to the Mr. they appeared to be a treasure trove of possibility (and to me, I admit, a fairly rusty-looking pile of metal that still had glimmers of its old red paint scheme with their remaining rusting and bent model number tags in a disarray).

     When our David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor was new back in 1951, it would have come straight out of the catalog from Sears, Roebuck & Co. and had an astounding 14 attachments to its name, with over a dozen other attachments added to its fieldwork arsenal throughout the next decade.  Now it's 2015, and that 64-year-old antique is beginning to show its age.  I've had more than one relative raise their eyebrows at the notion we are attempting to "Farm with an antique!?"  But, it's so much more than 64 years of painted and manicured rust!  Toted as a time-saving and labor-saving device, the 1952 catalog boasted that it could "Do more work than seven men" with tools that were built like large farm implements.  Behind this metal beast was a 2 1/4 horse power, "super power" engine "for top performance and heavy work"; an engine that is now dwarfed by the power of the one that sits on our portable generator.

In 1952, this was a reasonable advertisement in the
Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog.

     The original David Bradley garden tractor had been released in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression and the line continued through 1964.  During this time the country was gripped by depression, its eligible young men (and married men like my great grandfather) turned out to wartime service, and then came back with a boom to a multitude of veterans marrying, raising families and finding the stereotypical American Dream in suburbia with a small rancher surrounded by a manicured lawn inside a white picket fence with a happily barking dog and two children.  It was picture perfect America.

Ad for the David Bradley Tri-Cut in 1958

     As a twenty-first century woman, I can attest that a lot has changed since the apparently picture perfect 1950s when this garden tractor was considered the workhorse of the "sun-down farmers" suburban home.  Every advertisement for the garden tractor during the decade showed a man behind the handles tending to his vegetable garden.    Where's my tractor to play work on?  Apparently, I'd have to wait until 1958 when the David Bradley Tri-Cut (lawnmower) with a push button electric start and no clutch but "simple levers" came onto the scene with a woman on top of it.  Don't worry, I could "mow in comfort and safety" as the machine actually does "all the work."  Thank goodness it's 2015, and I might actually get the chance to play work with our Super Power too!

     As I previously mentioned, our David Bradley Super Power was showing its age.  We somehow managed to lug the thing home, not kill ourselves or the machine as we unloaded it from the back of a pick-up, and get it safely to the ground so we could fill it with some gasoline and new oil and test it out.  (According to the man that sold it to us, it has been running in the spring, and we had done a few quick movement tests before we bought it to show that seemingly what needed to be operating was.)  So in went the fluids.  The Mr. wrapped the pull-start cord around the motor, and gave it a yank as I held onto the handles while positioned on our sulky.  Nothing.  We tried again.  And again.  And again.  Still nothing.  Greeeaaatttt.

     That's when I realized that antique second-hand machinery from a catalog was actually a blessing.  Unlike the multitude of automobiles, trucks and machinery out there today that is computer-chipped, something from 1951 (when computers were the size of an entire room) isn't about to have a chip in it, so it becomes a lot easier to fix it yourself.  Sears, Roebuck & Co. made our lives even easier.  You see, every David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor would have come from Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog so it would have been shipped in parts packed inside wooden crates to the individual who purchased it.  That also means that it came with a 19-page instruction  manual on how to assemble, troubleshoot and run the machinery, and the engine itself came with a separate 19-page instruction manual as well detailing the same three things.  That computes to 38 pages of help for us!  Thanks to the multitude of David Bradley collectors out there a website was already created that had gathered all the manuals we needed, and if a manual tells you how to put something together, then you can be sure, you can also take it apart!

I'm still not sure what was easier, seeing something first
hand or looking at the two-dimensional sketches of a
machine, as both appeared quite foreign to me.

     Throughout the course of the next few weeks we got to try our hands at a variety of tasks, and the Mr. got to attempt to teach me what various parts were on the David Bradley.  There was the disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling a carburetor whose fuel reservoir looked like a heavy snow with the float cemented firmly in the middle of it... taking apart a stuck engaged ball lock clutch (thankfully we couldn't get it started our first time or I would have been in for a wild ride)... tracking down a replacement glass fuel bowl as ours was cracking on the outside and held together with wax, but still sound-ish on the inside... tracking down a replacement clutch facing as the one had rusted and broke into seemingly a zillion pieces... and finally replacing the original spark plug with a new one after we couldn't get it to spark (later to find out that the old one sparked anyways as there was a different issue.  Don't worry the original plug's back in the garden tractor now.)

     After spending hours and hours, we got what I once thought was a very rusty, non-functioning, over-priced lawn ornament running (with an additional two hours of help from our landlord's farmhand who appeared a little skeptical at first).  I have to admit, I was more than excited!  Finally our own piece of garden? farm? equipment working!  There was only one problem (other than the oil spewing into the air like Old Faithful and the gasoline running in a steady trickle down the edge of the engine like a slightly dried up Niagara Falls): once you made the needed adjustments it was either in constant motion or no motion at all.  Ugh.  Back to the shed it went, where we tore it apart even further this time, but at least with the satisfactory feeling that we saw it run... away down the driveway that is.

      A few days later, we pulled it back out of the shed into the driveway.  Apparently there was a ball bearing issue, or a gasoline issue, or a clutch issue, or a choke issue, or... we tinkered around with so much we're not quite sure what actually did it in the end.  There were no Niagara Falls.  No Old Faithful.  No perpetual motion.  Just a David Bradley Super Power with its fading paint looking a little sparkly after having who-knows how many quarts of oil and gasoline wiped from it.  The only thing left was to hook up the sulky and test it out!

     Surrounded by conservative Mennonite and Amish farmers, as well as small scale and industrialized farms with their tried-and-true farming techniques and implements, I once again saw us as the spectacle of the neighborhood as we each took a turn around the yard, proudly perched on the seat of the sulky behind a running David Bradley.

     Much to the Mr.'s dismay, I now see the operating David Bradley with a sulky as a riding tractor instead of a walk behind, meaning for him, it will be an even longer wait until he can get a real riding John Deere.  (For some reason, he disagrees...)

Cluck, Cluck: Part 2 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

This look-back is meant to thoroughly introduce you to why we have chickens.  Updates of our chickens' progress can be found on our Facebook and in additional blog posts.  - The American Haggard Housewife

Whitey and Purrball surveying "lunch"

      In the meantime (see Peep, Peep: Part 1 for the beginning of our chicken-keeping tale), our chicks had arrived a day behind schedule, which was probably for the best since we hadn’t even had the chance to remove the stumps quite yet.  We had settled on seven little ones - four hens and three roosters that were being split as layers and meat birds - which were being kept in a very makeshift brooder box in the wood shed (i.e. the old chicken house turned shed mentioned in the long paragraph you probably skipped in Part 1).  The little buggers are cute, but two of our farm cats, Purrball and Whitey, appear to believe they are lunch (which only goes to show that we’re probably right in not completely free-ranging the chickens). 

      There are a couple of pointers we discovered that I just want to add for any future chicken keepers when you talk starting off with very young chicks.  We thought we had thoroughly done our homework over the course of the previous year, scanning homesteading and chicken-keeping blogs, forums and books, as well as quizzing my in-laws who had been keeping chickens for a few years already.  It just goes to show, no matter how much homework you do on the topic, you'll probably never be fully prepared because no one, and I mean no one, will have the exact same experience that you're about to have.  Therefore some of these pointers we figured out on day one, while others were things that unfortunately took awhile longer.  Hopefully some of you might also have a situation similar to ours that allows some of this advice to be helpful.  

Your brooder doesn’t have to be beautiful just practical.   (Oh, I think I just saw some veteran chicken keepers flinch!)  As you can see from the picture, ours isn’t beautiful, but it works, and that’s what really matters.  Our brooder is the base of a large dog crate (which we borrowed from a friend that probably had no idea what her dog crate was going to get into over the course of the next few weeks), three window screens (two on the top and one wired to the crate’s door), some scrap lumber (to make sure there are no holes large enough for mice to get in and eat their food), old bricks and boards (to weigh down the top screens so visiting farm cats can’t get in before we can stop them), and a lot of wire to hold it all together. So our actual brooder cost us $0 as everything was either borrowed or things we simply had lying around.  I absolutely LOVE that price as it sounds a lot better than those all-in-one brooder kits you can buy online!   

(Note: We did buy the heat lamp and bulbs, on sale, and have them to use again if needed.  So although the actual brooder didn't cost us anything, the heat did, and so did the feeders, waterers, etc. that we would need.  You'll see some of those costs later.)  

Make sure your brooder can grow with your chicks.  Those little balls of fluff will grow and fast.  I don't think we were fully prepared for just how fast a chick can grow, but if you figure they could (and this is the very earliest and not the norm) reach egg laying age by 16 weeks, they are bound to spring up fast!  By week three we realized that seven chicks in a dog crate wasn’t giving them much room, so we improvised and doubled the size of their brooder.  They still have an area with the heat lamp, but also have a whole new area to escape the full-on heat, eat and drink (think of it as old-fashioned housing: a bedroom and a common area with a range).  To make this we used the exact same design and materials as the first brooder, adding an extra screen, some more boards and the other half (i.e. top) of the dog crate (wiring both sides of the dog crate together).  It really offers the chicks a lot more room to move around and they enjoy flying from one side of the brooder to the other.  This again was a nice $0 chick-keeping cost.

Use easy-to-clean bedding for the chicks as they will make it messy and they will toss it everywhere simply because they can.  Some people use sawdust or wood shavings like you’d use in a hamster cage, others go for straw.  We skipped all of these ideas as they would have cost us a pretty penny, and went with shredded copy paper from my father’s store.  It cost us $0, saved him a trip to recycling, and since it’s not glossy, it can be added already manure-coated to our compost for the garden.  By week six we did use start using straw (which we also got for free, see Early to Bed, Early to Rise) in the enlarged brooder on the side that had the waterer they insisted on continuously spilling.  (It was much easier to clean up straw then matted newspaper, although the newspaper soaked up the water better.  So in the end it's really a tough choice as to which kept the brooder cleaner and drier.)

Don’t pay extra for the screw on bottles for chick feeders and waterers.  There’s a reason these were made as quart feeders and waterers, a quart canning jar fits them!  Concerned that the glass might break?  Don’t worry, plastic peanut butter jars and mayonnaise jars also screw on to these bases!  That means our food and waterer bases cost 50% less than they would have if we bought the whole contraption, and we recycled some of the plastic jars we had sitting around. 

Prop up your food dish… prop up your food dish… just prop it up.  I cannot stress this enough.  The chicks (a) won’t have to bend down as far and thus will eat standing instead of laying next to the feeder, and (b) most importantly have less of a chance of knocking it over and spilling the feed (i.e. wasted money at the bottom of your brooder now), which they will do, over and over and over again.  We propped up both our food and waterer on four bricks that we found in the barn. 

Introduce them to the food they will eventually be eating is something I read on one of the homesteading blogs I follow, and it made complete sense.  For those of you that plan to have chickens fed completely on commercial feed this isn’t necessary, but starting at day three we let ours try some “real food” for the first time, still giving them feed, but also giving them “chick salad mix” (scraps of lettuce, cauliflower, red and green cabbage, broccoli, carrots, celery and/or peas mixed together), pumpkin and squash, mulberries, strawberry tops, and scraps from the garden harvest for them to peck at.  We offered these to them in a sturdy (I cannot emphasize sturdy enough as they will attempt to perch on the edge and will tip it over if it's not sturdy) planter base with some fine pebbles and dirt from outside to act as grit.  (They’ll use the small stones they find in the dirt as grit to help them digest their food.)  We’d also dump in potato beetles and caterpillars picked from the garden.  This offered us pure entertainment as well, watching them chase after each other to get the beetles. 

(Note: I've noticed when you can introduce a chick to "real food" is a hot button issue in the chicken-keeping world.  We used the theory that most free-ranging mother hens by the first week would have their chicks out free-ranging too, so why not treat them like a mother hen would?  We made sure to begin with "real food" that was very finely grated or chopped to allow them to get smaller pieces.  They still have broccoli on their list of favorites, along with shredded red cabbage, and now peach peels.)  

Check for Pasty Butt.  I absolutely hated this part as (1) I have a very weak stomach and (2) picking up those chicks scared me (and now chickens do).  You'll probably come to find that I'm not a massive animal lover here, although our top priority is to not mistreat our food sources whether they be animal or land and raise the layers and meat birds humanely and happily.  I have my moments with this whole love of animals (and my farm cats), and a husband that I got to explain pasty butt to and nightly he picked up the chicks to check. We didn't have a big problem with it except in the first week after they were shipped, and it could have simply been the stress of putting them through the mail and their new environment that caused it.  

Pasty butt is essentially where poop builds up and clogs their vent, and unless it is removed, it can be fatal.  (If you'd like to see pictures of it, google "pasty butt," and I'm sorry, but I'd like to keep my breakfast down so you'll have to rely on google.)  I've noticed, just like everything in chicken-keeping, everyone has their own way of taking care of it, so look around and do what you think will work best for you.  For us, we used a wet (and very old) wash cloth (with warm water!) and cleaned the vent until it became unclogged and then dried the bird off.  (And also, sanitized the heck out of that wash cloth with a load of cat towels, ensuring it would never touch one of our faces.)  We also noticed, if one particular bird got it, it was likely to also get it again, so always be sure to check that bird.  

Entertain them.  It’s like a two-year-old child; chicks need to be entertained too.  Not only did potato beetles and caterpillars do the trick, so did adding a bundle of fresh mint to the center of the brooder.  Hanging it from one of the screens did help to freshen the place up a bit and it also acted as a chick piñata.  Each morning I put one up, by the evening it would be down, the chicks somehow managing to figure out how to untie it or peck it to death.  (They also apparently will eat the fresh mint as well.)  

The chicks checking out their new roost.

Give them something to roost on.  (A thank you to my father-in-law for this idea)  Following his father's lead (as my father-in-law did it for their chicks), my husband made a roosting bar for the chicks to roost on near the heat lamp out of some scrap lumber he had lying around.  It's a simple design.  Take an approximately 18" piece of a 1x2 and with two screws, screw the 4" pieces of 2x2s or 2x3s to the bottom to form a bar.  The chickens want to roost, so why not give them something to roost on other than the tops of the waterer and feeder (which will constantly have to be cleaned out)?  

Be prepared.  I feel like such a Boy Scout for saying this, but it really is true.  You need to be prepared for just about anything and everything.  I was completely unprepared the first day one of them decided to fly out of the brooder when I popped the screen open to change their feed.  I was even more unprepared on exactly how I was going to get the chick back into the brooder without allowing the other six to escape.  I was unprepared for them to peck at me as I changed their water, and equally unprepared that I should check their water more frequently as they grew older (not because they drank more, but because their “chicken chase” games would knock over the waterer more often, leaving them without water to drink).

    To say the least, the chicks in the brooder were certainly keeping us on our toes, and by week six even our largest rooster was getting mighty eager to greet us each time we opened the door to the shed (with a very weak cock-a-doodle-doo reminiscent of a teenage boy's voice beginning to break).   They were also just as eager to escape the confined brooder (generally by flying at you) and find some more spacious accommodations.  Fortunately, the chicken coop was just about ready for that very thing, and we were more than ready to move them into their new accommodations. 

NOW AVAILABLE!  The Golden Egg: Part 3 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

Peep, Peep: Part 1 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

This look-back is meant to thoroughly introduce you to why we have chickens.  Updates of our chickens' progress can be found on our Facebook and in additional blog posts.  - The American Haggard Housewife

      For about a year now we’ve been toying around with the idea of adding more than just garden space and farm cats around here.  So, without any convincing (of us) needed, we had seven chicks on order for May, which arrived the day after their original “due date” of the fourteenth.  To begin with, we housed them in a makeshift brooder box made out of a friend’s dog crate (that was fun to clean up!), but just four weeks ago they moved into their “Pastured Poultry Palace.”  (I know big words for a chicken coop with a run, but let me live a little here… stop rolling your eyes…sigh…) 

The Free Range Dream

Reason #1 to have a fully enclosed run

      A flock of chickens, pecking happily in the grass on a sunny warm day, gobbling up the weeds and wildflower heads, sneaking tidbits of tasty earthworm, and otherwise happily living out their existence all while providing us with golden-yoked eggs.  There’s no feed bill, only the need to fill a waterer for them to drink from.  It’s paradise… completely unrealistic... and just slightly delusional.   

      The death of our free range dream is a hard one to take, but we knew it would be the best for the chickens, our sanity, and our wallets if we didn’t truly free range the birds.  For one, there were predators we’d have to contend with and lots of them.  If the cooper and red-tailed hawks didn’t swoop down from above during the day, the great horned owl and barred owls that live in our pines would be sure to get them at dusk.  Then there are the skunks and foxes to worry about, willing to claw, climb and tunnel to get to them.    And, of course, the friendly farm cats (not to mention strays) might be just as friendly to the chickens as they are to the songbirds at the bird feeders.  Needless to say, we saw a lot of issues with free range birds, especially since their new home was planned to be located rather close to the road, and decided that putting them in a sturdy building behind sturdy wire would be best, so we weren’t replacing them every two seconds and having to fight other animals for our food. 

The proposed layout when completed

      Their free ranging compromise was our proposed chicken coop and run set up that when completed would continue 40 feet down the hill near where the old farm house once sat, and measure 20 feet wide at its widest.  At present the coop and first permanent run are constructed and utilized as we catch up on some garden weeding and other direly needed projects, and then we'll continue construction on the “tunnel” run and finish siding the coop as well as making a few additions to the building.  When completed, the entire structure - coop and runs - will be divided in two, which will allow us to keep our laying flock separate from our meat birds, while rotating them on "pasture" in an effort to decrease our food bill.  (We can always continue to dream, right?)  While I came up with the rotating design of the runs, my husband was the one stuck making my two-dimensional dreams a three-dimensional reality, designing and building a chicken coop, and figuring out just how we were going to put them where I planned.  In doing this he managed to not only create space for two flocks, but also for a single large one if we ever desired, having a removable wall in the chicken coop, which would turn the structure into one large coop. 

Poultry Prep Is A Pain

And a completely un-glamorous job

      Let no one tell you anything different.  Unless you’re buying a pre-fab chicken coop with pre-fab run, putting them into an already cleared spot of level grass, and you have absolutely no predators in your area to even consider, I repeat, poultry prep is a pain.  It’s a pain in your back, in your shoulders, and in your wallets.  We were forced to try to work around our other equally important projects (as we also happened to be trimming up berry bushes and clearing an upper garden for field corn – which never got done –, planting and weeding the lower garden, working on bricking the edges of our flower beds – which still is not done, although getting closer, nor is the springtime mulching –, and in the middle of canning season at the same time) to ensure that our flock would be well-tended when they arrived. 

      Let’s jump back in time for a moment to explain just why our poultry prep was such a pain for us, and why dozens of hours went into clearing the land, with this and just about every other project we do.  (I’m sure your painful poultry prep story will vary from ours.  I also apologize that you’ll have to contend with the historian in me for a moment, or skip the history lesson in two rather long paragraphs – your choice.)  The area we rent (yes, we have an amazing landlord) was once a very operating and typical Pennsylvania farm containing a pasture, corn crib, Pennsylvania bank barn, and farm house, all which presumably were fed off the old stone-lined well that still exists, albeit a little drier now, near the home of our chicken coop.  The property had been used as a farm at least as early as the American Civil War, and probably the old farm house dated from around that time.  Since the first aerial photographs of the property in 1937, there has been a lot of rearranging of the farm and addition of outbuildings, and the progression of pasture to farmland to lawn, not-to-mention the planting of trees. 

A sketch of what was and is still around the farm.

      The most drastic change occurred with the removal of the old farm house around 1990 when the rancher we live in was built.  The corn crib, being no longer in use, was taken down, but its foundation remained and is now used as our patio.  The upper and lower gardens, which took place of the old 1937 pasture, became overgrown and a sand mound was added in the new septic system in the same area.  A huge wind break of pine trees was added across the whole back of the property, separating the house from the fields.  The old chicken house was turned into a shed, and the Pennsylvania bank barn, complete with its cedar shingles on the inside roof, turned into straw bale storage.  The land where the old farm house once sat, with old well pump still intact, was overrun with maple, mulberry and ailanthus trees surrounded by bits and pieces of the original landscaping like autumn olive, osage orange trees, poppies, bulb flowers, berry bushes, and multiflora rose bushes.  And, THAT is where our pain begun, the very invasive ailanthus, multiflora rose and poison ivy, sitting in the way of our new chicken coop on steroids. 

So we cleared by hand (because for some reason we don’t own a chain saw) removing the ailanthus trees by the armful and hauling their remains to the old shale pit in the middle of the landlord's farm field in my step grandfather's former pickup truck (and our new-to-us truck thanks to him desiring a new one).

And cleared… our piles growing all the higher as we raced against the clock to haul everything off to the old shale pit in two weeks time (i.e. once the winter rye was harvested in the fields, but before our pickup truck’s tires could destroy the newly planted soybean crop).  P.S. – Sorry for the weird dots on the photograph by the trees, it’s actually a cat paw smudge on the lens I didn’t notice until after the photos were taken.  My guess is one of the cats wasn't fond of their closeup.  

  

Then we borrowed a chainsaw because let’s face it, our backs were getting quite tired by this point, and cut down the remaining junk trees.  We left the mulberry trees, osage orange trees and any maples we could find intact in the area to offer a little shade, if not for the chickens, for us, and to offer a harvestable crop for the chickens to eat.  We also left intact the field of poppies and two large autumn olive bushes that were part of the original landscaping around the old farmhouse.

And then we brought in the heavy equipment (a la landlord) to rid us of those awful ailanthus stumps, which was a long project to say the least.  Finally, we had a cleared area for the chicken coop, which just happened to luckily be much larger than the size we originally needed (and seemingly pre-tilled from the stump removal process).  And, with some added salvaged landscaping (i.e. bulb flowers, berry bushes and autumn olive saved from the area prior to the heavy equipment coming in) it was beginning to look like “home” for the chickens!  (Although weeks later in the very potholed landscape some "missed" ailanthus stumps were starting to re-sprout and the grass was growing rampant as the lawnmower could not yet make it into the area.  After a bit of precarious balancing of my daring husband with the riding lawnmower around the disappearing holes that could dislodge a lawnmower tire in a heartbeat, bits and pieces of the section were finally moved for the first time in August.)  

Watch for Part 2 in the coming months to continue the chicken tale, and see our first experience with raising baby chicks.  

NOW AVAILABLE!  Cluck, Cluck: Part 2 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure