Kim Goodwin

Looking for a book on animal tracks for a 4 year old niece, I stumbled upon some neat potentially homemade "toys" that are labeled as being Montessori school tools.  I didn't go to a Montessori school, so I don't know if that's a marketing ploy or not (could someone who knows about this confirm for my curiosity's sake?).

But check these learning tools out.  I would have loved this as a kid because I liked learning and figuring things out.





I would love this animal puzzle still!  As an adult!  I need to make something like this puzzle, that is so cool.



And here's a fantastic idea, amigurami food.  Lots of us on this thread could make these toys.  What a great idea.  I think I'd add a small crocheted rug with places to put the veggies - like a toy garden.



All of those are on Etsy, too.  I'm amazed people will buy things like this -  things that my grandmother and uncles made for my sister and I and we really didn't fully appreciate how special they were.  Times they are a changin'.  :-)

Janet Reed wrote:Hey there!  I’ve been making good ( and bad) gates for the life of our farm.  Are you looking for pretty?  Are you trying to keep the rabbits out.. but are you also trying to keep anything in? Ie dogs etc.  Please give a bit more.. How high is the garden fence?

Trying to keep rabbits, jackrabbits, and peccary (javelina) out.  Fence is only about 4 feet high.  No need for pretty.

But the true purpose of this thread isn't just personal, it's more to create a good list of many ways to make gates, for many applications.  So please do share any forms of garden gates you like.

Could people tell/show me your methods of making garden gates?  I'll start with what is probably the simplest - but clearly not the most pleasant - method: leaving one fencing free, possibly adding a stiffener to the free end, and tacking it closed with hooks or bungees.  We've been living with that one long enough.    We are expanding our garden and want some better gate options.  I'd love to see other people's methods.

Here is a picture of what I'm talking about.  That's not on a garden, obviously, but instead it's on a "car corral" - a spot for keeping our car safe from rabbits while parked outside.  It's temporary, hence the rather wonky gate.

There is another way to go about it if one can't stand the taste, or is having a hard time being consistent in eating it.  My husband and I can't stand the taste of liver, but we eat it regularly for tooth health in particular.  We eat it raw, frozen, cut into small chunks that you can swallow.  It's the frozen liver pill method.  Works great that way.

The easiest way to eat liver when you can't stand the taste

I tried other methods before that, including cooking it really well with lots of garlicky breading.  It still tastes like liver.  We were finally able to stick to eating it when we did it in frozen chunks.  We keep little containers of the chunks in the freezer, and break a few free each day.

This is a picture from the website mentioned above.  I suppose you could also make cooked pills, but we do the raw thing because we believe there are more health benefits.

My husband added a couple points about teaching birds to eat pillbugs.  It would probably be easier and more effective to start with a chick. Ours was a young bird.  they are developing tastes around that time.

Also, he suggested collecting a bunch of pillbugs and putting them into adult chicken's food, so they might all get a taste.  However, that would only work if you want to let them all go in the area of the garden with the pillbugs.  

I find it rather destructive to let a bunch of chickens loose in very many areas of a garden, so I found it easier in the past to figure out who was the smart one and just let that one do the work.  But we have had lots of success with loose ducks in the garden, as long as plants are above seedling stage.

Jay Angler wrote:Kim Goodwin wrote:

Incidentally, we could grow asparagus, garlic, artichokes or cardoon, tulips, echinacea, and a few other medicinal herbs and flowers without issue in them. So strong flavored or bitter plants seem to not be on the pillbug's favored menu.

That makes me wonder if you were to put some of those leaves in a blender and make a fairly strong "drench" for the wood chips just before planting/transplanting seedlings, would that be enough to discourage the pill bugs until the plants were large enough to cope with some pest pressure?

Wow, that's a neat idea.  I grew cardoon mostly for composting anyways. They are so productive. It would be easy to try. I don't live in Oregon anymore, so someone else will need to! I'm in the desert SW now and the only places I've seen a pillbug problem are where - drumroll -people have tried to "amend" the desert soil with lots of chip-based compost!  It's so predictable, once you know what to look for. That wood-chip/bark compost is never fully composted, too. I've found there are always splinters. Once it's fully composted, the pillbugs seem to diminish.

As for how to teach a bird to eat pillbugs - if you are doing this with semi-tame chickens or ducks, here's one way I've experienced. Let the chickens loose while you work in the garden, digging specifically. Like with a fork or shovel. See if any of the chickens pay attention to what you are doing.  Throw some a few worms or bugs you encounter to get their attention, and see who sticks around. If one sticks around and starts to watch everything you do with that shovel or fork, that's what I call the Smart Hen. (Or cock, etc...)

If you have a little smartie-pants that one will start following you around in the garden and watch carefully for everything you expose. That one is usually a little more intelligent or trusting or both. You can feed him or her new things, like pillbugs, and they will usually get enthusiastic about it and then do it themselves. Some people think chickens are all alike, but in my experience they have wide ranges of intelligence and comprehension, curiosity and motivation. And it's easiest to teach the one who shows the most curiosity.  Over the years I've had a female smart duck, a smart hen, and a delightful little smart rooster like that as well.

I've had terrible pillbug problems develop from using wood chips and woodchip-based compost. I stopped using it because of that issue.  I've caught them in the act of eating all sorts of seedlings including small transplants.  I looked at them very close up - they were definitely eating the plants.  Lettuce transplants would be gone in a couple days.  They seem to like plants very tender.  

At the time, we had cedar raised beds full of the woodchip-based compost.  At it's worst, you could find thousands of pillbugs along the edges of the cedar inside the beds. They made little burrows that concentrated at the edges.

Those beds could grow very little until we figured out something to do with the pillbugs.  Incidentally, we could grow asparagus, garlic, artichokes or cardoon, tulips, echinacea, and a few other medicinal herbs and flowers without issue in them. So strong flavored or bitter plants seem to not be on the pillbug's favored menu.

We dealt with the problem by teaching a pet bird to eat the pillbugs. Turned out they are delicious, according to her reaction.  They became a favorite food.  Once we figured out she liked them, we'd put her in the garden beds and she would gobble them all up. In the process of teaching her to eat them, wild birds watched and learned!  After that, the wild birds took care of most of them and the problem faded.  That was a fascinating experience because I'd never seen wild birds eat them before.  But now, in the deep forest of western Oregon live a group of birds who like to dine on land shrimp.  :-)  Hopefully they will spread the word.

Here are my husband's answers. The last few are the same as mine. He was introduced to rural living by moving in with me.  :-) So he came to it later in life, but it was something he had imagined doing since he was young.

Lily Scott wrote:What drew you to homesteading?

Wanting to break away from society to a certain extent, loving being in nature and having space around me, developing more self-reliance and having a system of living that doesn't rely on as much (services, things, and activities) as most people are accustomed to.

Lily Scott wrote:Is it what you expected?

Yes.

Lily Scott wrote:How has homesteading impacted your overall quality of life and wellbeing?

I'm happier and healthier for doing it.  I've lived in big cities most of my life, and I love the peace and quiet and privacy of a very rural life immensely.  It bring me great joy to wake up to nature everyday and learn the habits and personalities of new creatures.  And I like physical work and helping create things, like landscapes, water harvesting and gardens, buildings, and caring for animals.

Lily Scott wrote:Do you currently have a profession aside from homesteading? (Freelancing, artist, consulting, etc.)  

Yes. Landlord.

Lily Scott wrote:If so, how has eco conscious living influenced your work?

We use much better building materials for house remodeling than most people.  Better as in lower toxicity and longer lasting materials.  Also, we use organic and permaculture principles when landscaping properties.

Lily Scott wrote:How has the pandemic impacted your way of living?

Not much at all, but that doesn't have a lot to do with homesteading per se. Our lives were already well suited to the current scenario from working primarily at home; to ordering a lot of our food from online or other sources; buying vegetables, meat and milk locally whenever possible; using books online; and we socialize rarely.

Hi Lily! Welcome to Permies.  This is an interesting survey, and I'm curious to read other people's answers, too.  Something you might consider is changing the title to make it more clear that it's a survey.  I suspect you will get more responses this way.  In the meantime, here are my answers.

Lily Scott wrote:What drew you to homesteading?

I was fortunate to grow up in the country and feel a deep connection with nature.  Of course, that alone doesn't draw a person to a homesteading-type lifestyle (ie. my sister and most of the kids we grew up with moved to cities).  I wanted to be in and live with nature as much as possible, and that drew me to information and people who were living in ways that I liked.  

It wasn't necessarily homesteading, as there were already a fair amount of homesteaders in our rural community and most of them did not live with the land.  Rather, they seem to have an adversarial relationship with it -  dealing with loss of livestock or crops by poisoning or shooting animals, ie, coyotes, hawks, jays, crows and any other animals that threatened their livestock or gardens, spraying fencelines with herbicides to keep the electric fences free of grass and working, spraying gardens to prevent bug problems, installing culverts and rock banks to control the streams, and getting mad at legislation that required things like fencing off streams to cattle don't wreck the banks... that's the sort of small farming I grew up around for the most part.  It didn't make farming sound like any fun at all.  I felt like there had to be ways do do those things differently, and that led me to read about other methods of homesteading, and that eventually led me to permaculture.

I wanted to live with nature, rather than against her.  And I really liked gardening and watching food, flowers and herbs grow. So I worked to create a life where I could be surrounded by that each day.  And I like learning how to fix and make all sorts of things, which is really useful when you live in rural areas. I was attracted to learning how to rely on one's self and nature more, and develop greater understanding of both.

Lily Scott wrote:Is it what you expected?

My process was a long, slow one because I already grew up in the country and already was accustomed to many aspects of the lifestyle.  I don't recall having many expectations.  I did learn that working with bees in the summer is more miserable than I had envisioned, but other than that, this life is about as much work as I expect it to be.

Lily Scott wrote:How has homesteading impacted your overall quality of life and wellbeing?

I've had to live in a small town once in my life, for three years.  That was miserable.  I loathed the noise and lack of privacy, and terribly missed having a garden.  So, if I hadn't done that, I could only imagine the answer to your question.... but my previous imagination was on target.  Living in the country, growing any amount of our own food, and having peace, space and nature around me is incredibly valuable to me.

Lily Scott wrote:Do you currently have a profession aside from homesteading? (Freelancing, artist, consulting, etc.)  

Yes. Landlord.

Lily Scott wrote:If so, how has eco conscious living influenced your work?

We use much better building materials for house remodeling than most people.  Better as in lower toxicity and longer lasting materials.  Also, we use organic and permaculture principles when landscaping properties.

Lily Scott wrote:How has the pandemic impacted your way of living?

Not much at all, but that doesn't have a lot to do with homesteading per se.  My and my husband's life was already well suited to the current scenario, from working at home; to ordering a lot of our food from online or other sources; buying vegetables, meat and milk locally whenever possible; using books online; and we socialize rarely.

This one is nice. I guess it's not exactly a rocket mass stove. I don't understand if the wood they use under the base of the pool will hold up long. Seems like if would burn or something. It's pretty though!