The goats needed some new things to play on, so an eagle eye spotted a pallet with a solid top and brought it home.
This is how I’ve started treating pallets in an attempt to slow down rot and insect damage:
Put the pallet out in the sun and ensure it’s dry.
Purchase a gallon of Boracare. It’s a borax and glycerin mix that soaks into the wood and will cause any insect that eats it to cease living. Once dry, the wood can be painted to prevent the weather from leeching the Boracare out (mostly by the sun). It’s safe to use for garden wood too (per the manufacturer, I called and checked). I don’t use it around animals that chew (looking at you rabbits) but I wouldn’t use pallet wood around them anyway as you don’t know what has been on it.
It’s a tad pricey, but you mix it 5 to 1 with water (water 5 parts boracare 1 part) for new wood so it goes pretty far.
Here’s my jug (and below is a link to amazon if you’d like to support my blog)
Then I use a cheap paintbrush and coat the pallets with the Boracare. You only have to do one side of each wood piece as long as they are under 4″ thick as it absorbs that far into the wood.
Then I let the pallets dry and paint them with whatever clearance paint I have on hand :).
Stay tuned for the secret, magical instrument that keeps my rabbit’s nails from being the Destroyer of Human Flesh (TM)!
I will soon unveil…right here…right for you…my secret. And no books to buy, subscriptions to start, videos to watch (yet).
Are you ready?
Got your wallet out?
Because …it’s….toenail clippers!
Wait…what??? Just regular human toenail clippers?
YES!
But seriously…I prefer the heavier duty nail clippers (like for men’s toenails) to any guillotine type animal clippers. Easier to handle and they don’t slip while you’re halfway done cutting.
My current set is these from amazon…because…they’re cheap enough in price that when I lose them (and I will), it won’t be a huge drain on the finances!
So you don’t need anything fancy. Just grab some nail clippers and go for it!
This post will be a post about posts….well, at least ones with hinges attached :). I snapped a few quick pictures to show some of the different ways I’ve attached gates to posts around the homestead.
First up is a galvanized tubing gate attached to a round wood post. I used an inexpensive (Harbor Freight) strap style hinge here. Drill holes through the tubing and put bolts with nuts on the gate side. For the post, the hinge is made out of a soft enough metal that you can bend it round with your hand or gentle taps with a hammer. The star head wood screws also help pull it in.
Next is one that was done for me. This is a gate that is simply a cut up piece of cattle panel. Another strap hinge was welded onto the panel for me. Then this time the flat part is simply screwed onto the post-this was a landscape timber so it had a flat face.
Third in the line up is another cattle panel gate. This hinge is actually designed to be welded on both sides…again, I had it welded onto the cattle panel for me and then a hole was drilled into the flat part and a lag bolt put on. As you can see, the zinc hinges start rusting almost immediately after being welded (the heat destroys the coating).
Last but not least, this required no welding at all! The gate is actually the spring base to a baby crib that I found by the side of the road. The square tubing it is made out of is thin enough that self tapping metal screws went right in. To attach the other side to an existing post with layers of fencing on it, pieces of #9 galvanized wire (fence repair wire) were put around the existing post and twisted together. This gate is a little floppier than the others, but since it only divides duck pens there’s not much pressure on it.
For some reason part of the intake for the central air is behind a door in my house. It’s a louvered door, which you’d think would be enough to supply airflow…but all it seems to do is collect dust. Have you ever tried cleaning between all those slats?!?! Not to mention if you happen to have the door in your hand when the a/c kicks on, it has enough suction to pull it out of your hand!
Since this summer is even hotter than last summer (high 90s for most of august with feel like temps in triple digits), I decided that I’d do something to try and reduce whatever stress on the main unit I could. Considering how much work it’s doing to pull the air in, removing the door and figuring out another way to cover the opening was one idea. So, door was removed. Pretty easy for interior doors, you just pop out the pins (carefully).
Then I had to decide…I didn’t want to leave just the opening there because there are bulky items (crockpot, pressure cooker, cooler) stored there and cubbies on the walls with lightbulbs etc. Screen door? Well, that would mean building another door and trying to match the paint…plus there’s the matter of the hinges. I didn’t want do anything that I could not easily reverse later, and changing hardware is hard when you have to match up styles that are older than me!
One shower later…aha! Beaded curtains!! Wouldn’t restrict the airflow, would only require a cup hook or two, and can’t be that expensive…right? Right?
So over to amazon I clicked. Andddd got some nice sticker shock! You want a $40 beaded curtain? You’re getting strands of…embroidery floss it looks like. Read the reviews and easily tangled strands of floss, plus they don’t hide anything at all behind it, not even a little. So I set my sights a little higher and…$150?!?!?! Too high too high! That’s “new door” territory (me building)!
Finally I found one for under $70. They had a bunch of different designs too…and it looked like there were enough beads and strands to actually block some of the view.
I was a bit concerned about how light the color looked , but decided to give it a try. The fact that it was painted like the very door that used to be there I found funny.
Color me impressed! It actually looks better in person than the picture showed online by far, and is close enough to the wood color of the house. And when you’re walking by it, you don’t see a lot of the things behind it. First picture has some sort of mist to it (phone camera was dirty) but you get the idea.
Head on view (please excuse the mess):
Handful of the beaded strings for size-they are narrow tubes but they were all there. It’s made out of bamboo but still had some weight to it. I used the included cup hooks to hang it…I originally intended to hang it with a curtain rod inside the doorframe but I either measured wrong or read the wrong width somehow and it had to go outside the frame.
I’m very pleased and after seeing it I understand why the prices are so high! No idea how they paint each bead in the round like that, someone is talented that designed the equipment to produce this! I would’ve bought another one but they went out of stock :(.
This is a quick list style post of everything I took as a vendor to a local farmer’s market. Hopefully it helps someone not forget something! At this particular one I brought ducks, rabbits, bonsai, and pottery. In no particular order, here’s the packing list:
It rained…a lot ….6 inches in 3 days and still coming down. So the dogs can’t just stay outside and I end up letting them in and out a few times more than normal.
As I’m bringing them in, both of them looked next to the brooder and jump a foot back! Anything that startles the dogs is never a good thing!
So I carefulyyyyy check behind the brooder…and there in the shadows is a red and orange rope that suddenly coils up and tried to look fierce!
I don’t mind good snakes, aka nope ropes. I encourage then to hang out in the yard and am sad when one doesn’t win in a fight against a lawnmower.
BUT…..I draw the line when they go after my animals. There are enough mice and rats and even lizards, so when something eyes a baby quail I am not happy.
I managed to get the dogs inside and get help holding a flashlight to find the red rat snake.
Next thing Mr. Rat snake knows, it’s being grabbed up by a pair of rubber tipped grabbers and unceremoniously ushered out in the yard , rain or no rain.
A quick head count shows that I was right on time as the snake had not gotten into the brooder yet…whew. This snake was small enough that the wire on top would have let him get in for dinner.
It’s for these reason I try and keep some wire on hand…a grinder, tin snips, and 5 feet of 1/4″ hardware cloth later the quail had another layer of wire on their brooder. Then I did the same for the chick brooder to hopefully prevent any successful snake snacking!
Update: It’s been a month and no missing chicks of either type 🙂
I thought I’d share some pictures from when I built the goat raising house. I say “goat raising” because they will be outgrowing it, and I plan on using it as a nursery in the future.
The basic idea is an old chain link dog pen (10×10) that used to be my rabbit “barn”, a tarp roof, and pallets around 3 sides to prevent predator break ins.
Here you can see the basic house. I’ve put up the chain link pen, the roof, and half the sides. Missing in the picture is the shadecloth and the raised sleeping area I built out of pallets and cinder blocks.
I used landscape timbers and 2×4’s to build a roof frame work over the pen. This supports bent cattle panels which in turn support a tarp. I’ve found that just a tarp sags when it rains and seems to wear out faster.
The wood is held together with strapping, plates, and lots of screws. the cattle panels are tied to each other and the frame with UV resistant zip ties. I like to leave the ends long to discourage things from roosting/building nests there.
Against the sides I added wooden pallets, screwed together with 2×4 pieces and other cut up pallets. This stops the goats from pushing the fencing too far out and things from pushing the fencing in, as well as providing shade and a wind/rain break. View from inside:
And how it looks outside:
Once everything is tied/screwed together, tiedowns are added over the tarp (shown above is the roof to pen ties, not shown are the augers). So far this type of building has done well in storms.
Issues I’ve had are the rain blowing sideways into the sleeping area and not being able to cut the grass that’s growing between the pallets. I’ll eventually add another tarp for a bigger weather resistant area , and the grass is being handled by the geese for now.
I wouldn’t be able to figure out an exact cost on this one since I already had most of the materials. The tarp was $100. Pen cost me $300 new, I think they’re $400 and up now. Pallets were free. I didn’t count screws but I easily went through a box of those, and probably a dozen plates and different hardware. I already had the landscape timbers and 2x4s , also from the old rabbit pen.
Decided to start collar training the baby goats because of how hard they are to snag when they don’t want to be caught (aka any time there isn’t food involved). As they tend to get themselves into everything, I ended up buying cat collars that have a breakaway feature. Inexpensive enough that if (when) they lose them, replacing won’t cost a fortune. Multi colors to tell everyone apart, although they are pretty obviously not the same. We’ll see how long these last!
The little cat head is the breakaway feature.
(Update: Two days. They lasted…two days. Still looking for two of them….Time for plan B.)
