In an attempt to help clear the foot…maybe two…of muck at the bottom of my pond , I’ve been using pond bacteria. It’s been over 8 months now and I think it’s helping. I say “think” because I haven’t gone in the pond in a while… but when I first started using this huge clumps of stuff would come up to the surface off the bottom. You also used to be able to sit and watch bubble going blurp blurp and then clumps of decayed stuff would float around.
After a few months of using the pond bacteria and aeration, only rarely do I get the floating clumps of ew and there are no more bottom bubbles coming up. I tried not doing the bacteria and ended up with a scummy film on top of the water….so back to the bacteria I went.
I ended up going with the one I could find on amazon because it was cheaper than anything else for the sizes that I needed. When I spoke to a couple of pond companies, they indicated that it was a good one to use (after telling them I can’t afford theirs!).
The bacteria (HERE) comes in a gallon jug. I just poke the seal (never had a leak in shipping either!) and walk along the bank squirting it in. Other types are in pellet form and you throw them in, and I’ve read about powders but haven’t found any for sale. So if your pond is gross, try out one of the bacteria offerings for a couple of months! Hopefully they keep the pricing down though…some of them are a bit high.
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 :(.
I have a pig. Well, I have several…but this conversation is about my boar. The girls have figured out if they tip their water bowl then there is no more water until the next refill! Him? Nope, just means now he gets a mud hole and he knows sooner or later he’ll get a refill. It’s hot..I get it…he likes mud! But, he needs clean water too…. And yes, he does have toys (dog balls, a tire on a rope to shove around, etc) so no he does not need a bucket toy.
This is the pig, eating off his…you guessed it…turned over food bowl. Yes, normally I flip it back over but this time he re flipped it just as I was pouring the food in…so he got a tray instead of a bowl. That’s a problem for another day.
So when I walked out to this…his water bucket thrown completely across the pen right into his favorite manure corner…a mudhole complete with hoofprints where his water should be…I decided it was time to try something else.
Prior to this, I have tried multiple different dishes from rubber to hard plastic to oil pans (new of course). I tried putting a brick in the middle of the dishes. I tried the dish in every area of the pen. I tried the bucket, including putting a brick in it. He’s pretty strong and more determined than a brick apparently!
Here is the next idea- it entails is making a ring around the bucket tied to the outside of the pen for the bucket to sit into. I then plan on adding a clip and clipping the handle to the side of the pen as well.
This is the wire, it’s fence wire from Tractor Supply (and I’m almost out!):
And this is what I mean by a loop that the bucket sits into. I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to reach into the bucket since it’s slightly off the ground, so I put a failed water dish (complete with brick!) as a step next to it. After taking this picture, he walked up from the other side and stuck half his head in the bucket so the step was not needed after all :).
How is it working? Well, I forgot the clip the first time. The bucket was thrown across the pen yet again. I put the clip on from the inside, clipping the handle to the thick pen wire…he trotted over as soon as I shut the pen door and started mouthing the clip attempting to take it off. Back into the mud pit (sigh) and I retrieved the clip. Clipped the bucket on it from the outside and so far it’s surviving the assaults!
