Tiny Houses are Awesome

I agree with almost everything this guy is saying, except for the millions and billions of years, evolutionary crap. In my truck driving days, I passed this guys place about 8 or more times and always wished I could have stopped to check the place out. He's right on the Interstate 10 frontage road near Luling, Texas. I would seriously consider moving there. He is building a community.

Fabulous Fungus Among Us

On Saturday evening, we went to some friends' house in the neighborhood for dinner and to learn to play pinochle.  The hostess gave us the "nickel tour" and outside in the yard there was an area that had these beautiful golden mushrooms growing in the gravel path.

Yesterday we went back for another session, and this time I collected a bag of these mushrooms, since I'm of the mind that there are probably more edible mushrooms out there than we truly appreciate.  It turns out that my suspicion that these were edible was right.  Not only that, but they are considered excellent.  They are commonly called Golden Chantrelle.  Their scientific name is Cantharellus cibarius.  

Golden Chantrelles from my neighbor's yard.

I got really excited from reading about them in Wikipedia.

Chanterelles as a group are generally described as being rich in flavor, with a distinctive taste and aroma difficult to characterize. Some species have a fruity odor, others a more woody, earthy fragrance, and others still can even be considered spicy. The golden chanterelle is perhaps the most sought-after and flavorful chanterelle, and many chefs consider it on the same short list of gourmet fungi as truffles and morels. It therefore tends to command a high price in both restaurants and specialty stores.^[12]There are many ways to cook chanterelles. Most of the flavorful compounds in chanterelles are fat-soluble, making them good mushrooms to sauté in butter, oil or cream. They also contain smaller amounts of water- and alcohol-soluble flavorings, which lend the mushrooms well to recipes involving wine or other cooking alcohols. Many popular methods of cooking chanterelles include them in sautés, soufflés, cream sauces, and soups. They are not typically eaten raw, as their rich and complex flavor is best released when cooked.^[4]

Cantharellus cibarius. Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.

I still did my little safety test on them.  I take the tiniest piece I can to sample for taste.  If I were to notice the slightest bad thing, numbness or anything at all, I would spit it out and wash out my mouth.  These tasted slightly plain, not much different than porcini  mushrooms. You know, those plain white things you buy at the supermarket.  But they did have a very slight peppery aftertaste.  After waiting a few minutes to see if there was any negative effects in my mouth I swallowed it.  After a couple of hours, I notice nothing at all.  I'm sure now that these are the same Chantrelles that I see on Wikipedia and a few other web sites.


After getting home, I was in the wooded area next to the house when I spotted this interesting fungus on the ground.

The specimen growing in my woods

In my searching, the closest thing I could find that matched my photo is Ramariopsis kunzei. I have never seen one before today.  If I'm wrong about the identification, I hope someone reading this blog will let me know.  I have no intention of trying this one, because if my identification is correct, this fungus, while edible, is tasteless and useless.  I'd have to be in survival mode to be curious enough to try it, but I've made a mental note filed away just in case.

"The Sickener" Quite fitting for this picture.

Then there was this specimen just a few yards away near some ferns.

While it seems that the gills suddenly grew out of control and pushed the red cap into disfigurement, I'm pretty sure that this is a Russula emetica.  That's the closest thing I could come up with, and the name says all I need to know.
Emetica is Latin for "sickener" and according to Wikipedia it causes vomiting and diarrhea.  Supposedly there is an edible type in the genus of Russula (meaning "reddish"), but I'm not feeling that experimental.

Anyway, I'll try to remember to report back on how the Chantrelles tasted after I cook them up with a meal.

Of course, you are responsible for any risks you take in harvesting or eating any fungus or plant in the wild.  I think everybody should use some intelligence to figure these things out.  If you don't have the mental skill to do that, don't risk trying to eat anything wild.

I'm just too ferociously freedom loving to let anything stop me from discovering stuff within reason.

Shalom Y'all

Prior to S 510

The assault on freedom to grow, choose and eat healthy food is already here, even without S 510.

Go to this page and watch the little four minute video trailer for Farmageddon.

The government really is out of control and means to control you.

When Being Dense is Good

Have you ever stopped to really consider that the modern convenience of refrigeration is REALLY modern.  I mean, it has only existed since the early 1950s? Somebody figured out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics meant that it was possible to figure out a way to use chemistry and modern machinery to make heat flow  in such a way to cool things down, even in a tropical environment.  Amazing.

But modern, or should I say "post modern" man has become so irresponsible and lazy that he just takes this modern convenience for granted.


I'm pretty sure that anybody reading this has experienced a power failure and has had the experience of losing food and having to clean up the mess of thawed out freezers and refrigerators. Imagine the cleanup in New Orleans after Katrina.  Sorry for that mental image, but I've got a point to make.

What if refrigeration wasn't just temporarily gone for a few days? What if you were pretty sure that it was gone for the indefinite future?

Canned tomatoes and pickles

That's what we are planning on.  We still freeze stuff.  But we "can" a lot of stuff.  I put the word can in quotes because I have no idea how many people might come to this site and not understand this archaic term.  It's funny because the home, or do-it-yourself process doesn't involve cans, but rather jars.

Anything you see or buy in the grocery store that comes in a can, you can "can" yourself. (Why do I suddenly have this image of kicking legs and ruffle skirts?)  We haven't done it yet, but one of the next things we will can is chicken.

Left hand

Two things I need to type out at this point:  I just came back from a seminar about butchering animals.  I hurt myself pretty badly yesterday around noon. I was cutting up my spent tomato vines and other plants and in a rush I snipped my pinkie.  Okay, I really snipped my pinkie.  OKAY.  It's darned lucky I didn't hit the bone.  Picture to follow.  Shut up.  You know you want to see it.  It's a good thing there was a nurse in the house. She had me bandaged up and back to work in about 15 minutes.

So I'm sitting here trying to type and I've got duct tape on my left pinkie and it is seriously slowing me down.  Normally I can just type my thoughts, but this is like having a stroke or something.  It's taking forever to get the words out.  Now I know how stroke victims feel.

UPDATE:  Now I'm back to typing okay, but before I go back to doing any more gardening, I will have to bundle up the finger again.  So, where were we? Ah, the canning thing. I have to admit right here that Twyla is the one doing the canning.  I might help out with some of the prep work, like peeling and slicing, but she's the one who pays attention to the recipes and the time in the hot water bath. I chose to write about canning today because I went to a seminar last night at the church on butchering domestic and game animals, and the subject came up in passing when the risks of contamination were talked about.

Life is full of risks, but they are manageable when one uses caution and that rare thing called "common sense."  Sure, there is a possibility that you could get botulism poisoning from canned goods, even from store bought, factory produced food, but there are warning signs.  It wasn't that long ago that I opened a national brand can of tomato sauce and it turned out to be under pressure.  "DANGER!" I threw that can away.  Just use your head.

sliced for drying on silicone silpat

Canning is one of the safest and easiest ways to preserve your own food for long term storage.  With rare exceptions, most bad bacteria and other microbes that can harm you will easily die when exposed to temperatures of 140° - 160° F. Canning involves immersing the food and container in boiling water for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.  As the jars and lids cool down and you hear that distinctive pop as the vacuum sucks the lid down tight, you know you've got a good, airtight seal.

Apples, Tomatoes dehydrated

Another method of preserving food that takes up a lot less space is dehydration. For example; tomatoes are about 90% water, and it's the existence of that water that provides a medium for the microbes to rapidly decompose the fruit. Remove almost all that water and the remaining acid and other protective components will make the food last longer.  Vacuum pack the product and it will last for years.

Volume wise, this method is great because of how much food can be packed in such a small area. The jar of tomatoes you see on the right is approximately a dozen, and they are not even tightly packed.  I could add almost a dozen more and re-vacuum pack the jar.  There are more than a dozen apples in the other jar.  All the nutrition is there with no added chemicals or artificial preservatives.  These were done just using the gentle heat of the pilot light in the oven, since we have propane for the stove and oven and central heat.  And while the tomato is not really "sun-dried" I dare anyone to tell me they can taste the difference.

dehydrated tomatoes

Since we only have a couple of silicone silpats, another way to lay out fruits and veggies for drying without sticking, is to crumple a sheet of aluminum foil and then flatten it out, then swab it with a vegetable oil.  You don't want to cut the tomatoes too thin. You will be amazed how a slice of tomato nearly a quarter inch thick will shrink down to a paper thin piece.  My next project is to create a dehydrating box out of some relatively cheap materials.  I plan on taking step-by-step photographs of the process, in case anyone would like to duplicate it.

Another thing you should know is that there are lots of things that don't really even need refrigeration.  Chances are that everybody reading this has mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup in their fridge.  None of those things need to be in there.  Seriously. Did you know that even eggs can go two to three weeks in just moderately cool temperatures.

Stay tuned.

So Sorrel

Back on the subject of herbal medicine . . .

For whatever reason, (our ancestors called it providence) I would pick this stuff as a little kid and eat it. I liked the tangy flavor.  Pretty amazing that I didn't accidentally kill myself by tasting different plants.  But again, that providence thing.  I have eaten stuff that made me sick, but didn't kill me.  In case you were wondering, daffodils are a powerful emetic. I learned that the hard way when I was 10. Ahhh, digression. But hey, this is my blog, not a Tolstoy novel.

Sheep sorrel in pot with acidic mulch

This little herb that I like so much is considered a nuisance weed by many.  Most people haven't got a clue what it is. To them, it's like crabgrass. This is called Sheep Sorrel.  Not to be confused with common sorrel or plain sorrel.  In reality, it's one of the most powerful medicinal herbs around. So much so, that it is one of the main ingredients in the Essiac® herbal tea treatment for cancer, even up to stage IV ("make sure your will is updated"). Burdock is another main ingredient and I'm pretty sure we have that around here and I will blog on that later.

Sheep sorrel, Rumex acetocella, is delicious in salads, but I even like it by itself.  Here is an excerpt from a website that sells the bulk Essiac tea:

Sheep sorrel is a rich source of oxalic acid, sodium, potassium, iron, manganese, phosphorous, beta-carotene, and vitamin C. The combination of these vitamins and minerals promote the glandular health of the entire body. Sheep Sorrell also contains carotenoids and chlorophyll, as well as citric, malic, and tannic and tartaric acids. 

The chlorophyll can serve many functions in the body. For one, it carries oxygen throughout the bloodstream. This is significant because cancer cells cannot live in the presence of oxygen. Chlorophyll closely resembles hemoglobin in its functioning: both are capable of carrying oxygen to every cell of the organism. When chlorophyll molecules carry oxygen through the bloodstream chromosome damage can be inhibited to effectively block cancer. Chlorophyll also helps block germs and harmful bacteria.

Single Sheep Sorrel leaf

Most of the other sites that I checked out say most of the same stuff. That first ingredient; oxalic acid, is what gives the sheep sorrel its distinctive tanginess, and it is also what gives it its one side-effect; diarrrhea.  BUT, and this is a big BUT, you would have to eat something like a couple of quarts of this stuff to get that effect, unless you have some parasite or other digestive ailment that reacts immediately to all this healthy stuff.  This tends to be true about a lot of things.  The FDA and other idiotic and unnecessary agencies are fond of telling the world that good things can be toxic if you take it in quantities that it would take a herd of cows to eat in a day  in high doses.  Don't get me started on the FDA.  Worse yet, don't get me started on people who think we should even have an FDA. Grrrrr!!

The point I want to make here is: Why wait until cancer begins developing in your body before you change your eating habits?  And no, I'm not talking about eating like you live in a primitive country or giving up all your favorite things, but when I think of the average diet of most Americans, I shudder.  And don't get me wrong, I eat things that other health nuts wouldn't touch, primarily chicken, beef and fish.  But Twyla and I do eat kosher.  Certainly no pork or other animals not considered clean by Torah standards. I used to.  And I thought that giving up shrimp and lobster and oysters was going to be very hard, but guess what?  Not really.  Since I began eating kosher, I haven't had a cold, or any digestive stress or constipation.  I feel so much better.  Imagine that.  The creator of the universe actually knew what he was talking about when he told us what to eat and what not to eat.  For those of you Christians who think that Torah dietary laws are no longer valid, you need to go read Matthew 5:17-20, and then Acts 21:20-24, and those are just for starters.

Anyway, this is another herb in the long list that I will continue posting on.  See the archives in the right hand column to find my past posting on ginger.  If there's an herb you'd like for me to research and post on, leave a comment below.

B'rakhot Adonai,   Moshe

Gadgets, Tools, and Fools

Right after I was discharged from the Navy due to my inadequate hearing, I got a job as a mortgage loan processor. One of the underwriters that I worked with was a woman who made fun of the idea that you needed certain tools to do certain jobs.  I kid you not. She actually claimed that you should only need pliers to fix just about anything. Never mind that she didn't do anything like that for a living.  She just complained about how her husband had all these tools in their garage because he claimed he needed them.

Prior to attempting my Naval career, having been a Lieutenant Commander in the NJROTC in H.S., I had been a store manager for Discount Auto Parts, and had worked at a Ford dealership, doing brakes, air conditioning and various other repair work, and had even been a service advisor/customer liaison for the high-tech, ignition system, emissions control service area. I can tell you that the engineers who design cars are quite fond of designing machinery that require very elaborate and specific tools for maintenance and repair. There is a running joke that you can probably hear in any repair shop anywhere.

1st Mechanic: "Now why in the &*$^# did they make it THAT way?!?!"

2nd Mechanic: "The engineer probably caught some mechanic sleeping with his wife."

I give you that little introduction merely to emphasize how much I appreciate things that are simple and also extremely useful.  Some tools are simple and just do one thing and do it perfectly.  Some tools do really complicated things and require some skill to master.  So when you come across a tool that is incredibly efficient and simple and lets you do ten times more work with a minimum of effort, it's worth celebrating.  When it does so without the need for electricity or some non-muscular power source, it's even better.

That's why I love this little gadget:

This little baby cost us less than $30 brand new through Amazon and was probably invented a hundred years ago (I'm going to research that).

In case you have never seen one of these before, it is an apple-peeler-corer-slicer. Yep. All three are accomplished while turning the crank for about 5 seconds.  If all you want to do is peel, just undo the wingnut on the end there and swing the corer/slicer out of the way.  If you just want to slice and core, lock the peeler out of position.

Yesterday, Twyla and I processed 48 apples for making apple sauce.  Her very special apple sauce, and I highly recommend that you go see what she had to say about it on her blog. Now, had we peeled, cored, and sliced all those apples using a standard peeler and knife, it would have taken us a couple of hours, at least.  But with the two of us; me running the apples through the gadget and her trimming odd spots and cross cutting the slices into the stockpot, it took us a total of about 20 minutes.

It's very cool that the apples were free, and in fact, we could make a couple more trips to the source. Forty-eight apples made about six quarts of applesauce. We would like to do about a hundred more apples to be dehydrated and vacuum packed.  (I haven't blogged about it, but we did buy a FoodSaver vacuum machine.)

We try to get machines that do not depend on electricity or other fuel, but we weigh the labor saving against how much the tool will help us prepare food for storage.  I already have ideas for how to make a manually operated vacuum pump for future use. If we run out of mason jars or vacuum bags, I'll figure out how to store dehydrated meats and vegetables in other ways.

If you have any questions, that's what the comments box down below is for.

Shalom v'yom shishi tov,  Moshe

Soft Shell Eggs

There are things that you get to experience in farming that you just never can when you live the urban or suburban or faux country life. There are people who have their summer vacation get-aways up here in the mountains, but that's nothing like living here full time and trying to create a place that can survive if "the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it" (TEOTWAWKI) takes place.  When you've always gotten your milk from the grocery store, you've never experienced milking a cow or goat and the immense difference in taste of raw, unpasteurized milk. I've had people tell me they didn't like tomatoes and then after I got them to try one of my home-grown, vine ripened tomatoes, they said, "OMG! That's what they're supposed to taste like?!?"

Golden Comet Hen with egg

You probably didn't know that from the moment they are picked, many vegetables, especially peas and corn, begin to deteriorate in flavor.  This is because the delicate sugars and the enzymes start to break down. That's why eating peas right off the vine in my garden is like candy. After they've set around in transit from some farm in California or Chile or Peru, or wherever, they just aren't going to taste as good.  I bring this up because not only do most people never experience how food ought to taste, they also don't experience a lot of the challenges that come with growing their own food.  When you get that burger or that fried chicken, or whatever, it is extremely far removed from all the steps it took to get it to your stomach. Those pretty white eggs come in a nice little carton after having been dropped by chickens fed a factory produced feed out of a machine, the chickens themselves fed by automated feeders, and the eggs are automatically sorted by size. You never get to see what happens when things don't go perfectly.

In reality, about 1 in 30 or so eggs fail.  You might get a longer streak with no problems, or you might have several in a row where the shells fail. Most of these cases, the parts that you eat are perfectly fine if handled carefully. A complete failure is when you open the door and there's just a busted egg laying in the bedding material. If the shell is all gone, this is a bad thing, because it means the chicken(s) ate the shell, which means they need calcium and aren't getting enough.  Time for crushed oyster shell.(BTW, humans can only assimilate decent amounts of calcium from vegetable sources, so don't waste your money on supplements from non plant sources). Otherwise, you can occasionally get an egg that is soft, as if the shell were made of thin leather.  Such an egg will be quite translucent, as the photo shows.

Translucent Egg

One of the problems with taking pictures is that they can't always relate to the viewer certain aspects. It is very hard to tell that there really is an egg between my forefinger and thumb in this picture.  I even turned the dimmer switch down on the halogen light to improve the view, but it didn't help as much as I hoped.

When you get such eggs, there is nothing wrong with the contents. You simply snip the end with scissors and empty the shell.  The resulting collapsed shell looks like the third pic.

It is fairly common for the first eggs from the chickens to come out soft like this.  Since they've begun laying, we've had about a gross (144) of eggs, and in the last half of that group there have only been about two or three softies.  What has really been amazing is how many huge JUMBO eggs and double yolk eggs we get.  I will try to remember sometime in the near future to buy a dozen eggs from the grocery store and  post a picture that shows a side by side comparison of our eggs versus theirs.

When we went to Asheville, NC to get rhubarb from Pauline, she showed off her chickens, and she also had some Golden Comets and some Black Sexlinks. She told us she had given some eggs to somebody and when she offered them more, they refused them.  Their reason?  "They were too rich."  Now THAT's rich!

An Ambitious Project

If you've never had to pay a huge bill for electricity or natural gas or heating oil or propane, you've either been miraculously blessed or you haven't lived long enough. I have nothing against fossil fuels and I don't resent the companies that produce and deliver them. Such fuels are incredibly efficient at delivering unbelievably great amounts of "work" with unbelievably tiny amounts of waste. In fact, we've become rather too efficient at making them burn without leaving enough carbon dioxide to replenish the supply in the atmosphere.  Currently, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 4/10ths of one percent.  It would be far more beneficial to plant growth around the planet if it were closer to about a full three percent.  More on that subject further down the page.

A house on the way there

Twyla and I traveled to a remote spot in western NC to buy an old porcelain on steel wood cookstove. The house it was in was being renovated rebuilt, by a 70 year old Viet Nam veteran who served with special forces and Navy SEALS. (Hang the ridiculous celebrities of today, this is the kind of person that impresses the socks off of me.) The house was probably built sometime before 1900, judging by the exposed timbers and such.  I wish I had taken more pictures. It was at the very end of a road that was only gravel a half mile after the winding blacktop ended.  I'm talking about a single lane blacktop that you could only go 15 mph on, not because of a sign, but because of necessity, and you wouldn't want to go any faster than that for fear of missing out on the great scenery.  It was somewhere north of the French Broad River.

1913 Karr: most parts removed

The stove that we bought from this gentleman was a KARR model built in Illinois in 1913.  A comparable model stove in really good condition on eBay would sell for about $3,000. Twyla spent enough time looking on the internet when we were trying to decide on what stove to get. We found the add for this particular stove in a publication at the grocery store.  The stove is quite a bit worse for wear than most, as you can see in the picture, but I'm Mr. Fix-it, and the sweat equity and challenge made the $350 price seem very reasonable. The first pic of the stove shows it after we unloaded it in the driveway.  The top sections and 100 pounds of other parts are sitting elsewhere waiting to be de-rusted.  There are a few things that need to be repaired; new hinges, etc.  I've got a vendor working on the estimate for all the exhaust parts I'm going to need to install this thing.  You can't see it from the front, but it even has a water jacket with plumbing connections so that it can heat water.  The next set of pics shows the place in the house where this baby is going to set. It's like the breakfast area off the kitchen, pretty much centrally located relative to the whole house.

Step one was to take out this built in shelving unit.  This is where you get to see the late 60s/early 70s decorating style. That nasty pattern was there originally, and then somebody built the shelving in a long time ago. The more neutral looking linoleum was installed around the shelving several years ago.

Then we went to Home Depot and found some 12" tile on sale for just 90 cents a square foot to install. Dark grout was a must. I've got a lot of experience doing ceramic tile, so it only took a couple of hours to install it, and the next day I put the wood trim around the perimeter.  Our hope is to eventually have all the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwood. I'm pretty good at that as well, and some 3/4" red oak would be perfect in here.

With some hard work and the blessings of Adonai, we will be pumping plant food out of the chimney come November.That's right; plenty of wonderful CO2.

If that information shocks you, you might want to stop reading right now, because this blog is going to be a big defender of genuine science and not give any quarter to the idiotic crap that passes for science in the major media. Consensus of people with Ph.D. behind their names is not scientific. And in case you didn't know, most of the "scientists" who have signed on to the global warming hoax have their fields of study in things other than meteorology or earth sciences that would be relevant to the atmosphere.  And even among those who seem to have relevant credentials, the information leak on the East Anglia University data fraud demonstrates that such people don't really care about facts, they just have an agenda to promote global socialism.  Facts are facts independent of opinion. Computer models that don't include vital variables such as water vapor and solar cycles are just so much nonsense. This is why over 17,000 credible scientists have signed on to a petition debunking the belief in global warming.  You should be able to find plenty of links on the internet by reasoned, rational scientists who have thoroughly debunked this hoax.  You can start with Dr. Ian Plimer.  If you want more links, just ask.

The thing that I love about real science is how experimentation and observation makes it so easy to debunk the garbage out there. My favorite example in this case, is that you can seal a greenhouse and pump more than ten times the normal amount of CO2 into it, and in a matter of hours the chloroplasts in the plants will detect the extra level of carbon dioxide and respond by stepping up absorption and conversion to energy storage, thus returning the atmosphere inside the greenhouse to the previous gas ratios.  This has been demonstrated over and over.  If we produce more CO2, the planet won't get warmer, we'll simply have more plant growth.

I could go into details about chlorofluorocarbons and ozone, but this post is long enough, and if you are really interested in this stuff you probably already know that it's a hoax, but if you need more information, I'll help point you in the right direction.

Chicken Arks

A beloved reader of this blog wanted more info on the chicken arks.  I also know of a dear lady friend who wants chickens, but her hubby is against the idea, ostensibly due to predators.  So herein, I will give some more detail about the arks and why they are working so well for us.  I will also give some basic instruction on the construction of said these movable coops.

Being very limited on capital resources, the goal was to make these arks in the cheapest possible manner while still meeting the requirements of A) not losing any chickens the the various predators, B) providing the highest nutritional standards of fresh vegetation and "other" natural foods besides the cracked corn and laying pellets, C) being able to move the chickens around the yard which both provides the fresh greenery and fertilizes future planting ground.

Most of the wood that went into the construction of these arks was salvage wood that I merely asked for and received from somebody down the road who had it laying out near a barn.  There are lots of such places in the area, and we have many more ideas for the use of such wood, but that's a subject for another post.  The point is: you can get a lot of stuff for free if you are just willing to ask.  The lumber was old pressure treated decking, well-weathered.  This is important, because you would never want to use fresh PT wood as something that the critters would be in constant contact with, due to the chemicals involved.  I think it is safe to say that this wood has since had most of the bad stuff leached out of it.  Of course, it is only the wood that is used for framing of the arks.  We had to buy some 1/4 inch oriented strand board (OSB) for the bottom and sides.  A  4' x 8' sheet costs about $8 (your price may vary).  I got the basic plan by googling "raising chickens" and came across http://www.raising-chickens.org/chicken-tractor.html which has a series of somewhat detailed photos to show you the basic design.  The size of their ark was too small for my tastes.  I wanted a design that would hold six chickens comfortably and provide at least a day's worth of grazing space.

I started with the idea that I wanted the base to be 4 feet by 8 feet for each ark holding six chickens a piece. That provides 5.33 square feet per chicken.  Now, if you are thinking  that seems like a tiny amount of space per chicken, just keep in mind that the chickens that lay your store bought eggs just sit in a cubical just big enough to lay their eggs and are just fed and watered by some machinery.  Our chickens get fresh air, sunshine, stray bugs, our personal attention and petting.  We pay attention to how much fresh vegetation they get.  And my next post will probably gross most of you out when it comes to feeding chickens.

We bought a hundred foot roll of the 48" rectangular wire fencing material.  I still have enough left to do a couple of more arks or to create cages of some other sort. The reason for using this instead of chicken wire is because it seems more open, but it is much stronger against predators than chicken wire. We have too many cats around here right now for snakes to be an issue.

There is enough space in the "loft" for a dozen chickens to roost, but there are only six, so they have plenty of room.  There is an opening in the middle of the floor with a ramp attached with hinges underneath. There is a rope and a pulley that I use to draw the ramp up to the floor when I need to move the ark. I attached a standard rope cleat on the end to secure the rope.  The pulley is hard to see in the photo.Ark One is about 40 percent heavier than Ark II because I was experimenting with design and what I learned from the first model, I applied to the second. To move the arks I made a single axle to place under one end of an ark when I want to move it.  It's very simple. Just a 2 x 4 with a couple of utility wheels fastened on with "shoulder" type lag screws; 3/8" diameter by 3" long, with flat washers. You should know that Twyla doesn't have the strength to move either of these arks.  I think most healthy men and some women could, but you need enough strength to pick up one end and use your foot to position the axle and then pick up and move the ark with the fixed handles at the other end.  If you are going to build one of these contraptions, you need to size it accordingly.

Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.  Thanks for stopping by the farm.