General Craft & DIY discussion

From dog houses to barns, what have you built or want to build for yours? What were the considerations? Did you read any books on the subject? If so, what were they?

I designed my bat house based on a document I got from the local extention service about 15 years ago and also based on a wonderful resource online at www.michigan.gov/dnr (Michigan Department of Natural Resources) that publishes public domain information on helping a wide variety of critters from bats to bears to bunnies.

The Bat House hangs about 17 feet up on the side of the Fox tower. Do they use it? I don't know... I do run into them regularly as they find hidey holes along the roof edges of the old buildings on the farm. To further encourage them, since bats are threatened now by a disease, I incorporate hidey holes whenever I restore a building by leaving a half inch gap along where the wall meets the roof so they can get under the soffit.

The hidey holes do get used as evidenced by bat droppings on the trim below!

Now what do I do about that bear......

I built a bat house, but have never seen any signs that it is being used. I do have a bunch in my big, old tobacco barn & throughout the woods. We have a lot of shagbark hickory & hollow ash trees.

I got my plans from the 'Backyard Wildlife Habitat Kit', sold by our Extension Office for $5. It's a 3 ring binder with all sorts of good lists & plans in it. I've added to it by printing out more stuff from their site. We moved 600 miles, so it was a great resource for seeing what bugs, plants, snakes, trees & such that we should be looking for.

We feed the birds in a lot of different ways. We have a couple of store-bought wild bird seed feeders, the tall kind with springs on them so they close if a squirrel gets on them. We don't have to worry about them, but it helps conserve seed when flocks of starlings drop by. When a few of them get on there, it closes up.

Some birds don't care to eat out of the upright feeders & prefer a tray. Cardinals are probably the most common visitors to that feeder. We have one store-bought metal tray with a wire grid on top of it. I also made a wooden bird feeder with a tray below it that they love and we have several thistle feeders for the finches. We have a lot of gold, house, & purple finches.

We have suet feeders & buy the cakes by the case. They only go through about 1 a week though since I also have peanut butter feeders out. That's just a 10" or 12" tall piece of wood with a hook on the top & two 2" holes in each side with a 1/4" piece of dowel for a perch below each hole. We buy the cheapest chunky peanut butter that we can. Usually I only fill them up twice a week, but when there is snow on the ground the birds hit them hard. I just filled them up Friday & they were empty by yesterday afternoon. I'm going to fill them this morning before we go get the new pony.

We also have a peanut feeder. It's a 3" tube of 1/4" hardware cloth & wooden caps on both ends. I put a pipe down the center so the peanuts are only 1 peanut deep around it. Makes it a little tougher to fill, but without it, they couldn't get to the center ones & they went to waste. I fill it about once a week with roasted peanuts in the shell. It's been a big draw for the woodpeckers.

Even for my dedicated squirrel feeder the little buggers still like to raid my neighbors bird feeder!

Had turkeys out there yesterday cleaning up the sunflower seeds the squirrels dropped. I went to spread a few seeds for them but scared them away and haven't seen them since. (the seeds of course dissapeared!)

Theres a pileated woodpecker hanging aound. Big bird.. about 16 inches long. I often see him (and hear him) out working on the dead trees. I leave standing dead trees as "birdfeeders" though I'm thinking of making a bird feeder since I have extra sunflower seed.

And I leave a few seeds and soybeans occasionally for the mouse living up in the rafters in the garage in a old roll of felt. Mice can't get in the house, but every other building has one or two resident mice. I don't mind... mice are a welcome part of the faarm (outside!) as every critter from a snake to a coyote considers the poor things as snacks!

We don't like mice, but always have a fair few around. Even though the dogs & goats scavenge most of the grain the horses drop & we keep the feed area swept clean, they still find plenty to keep them going. The cats & dogs are both good at catching them. I'm a pretty good mouser myself. I usually catch a mouse or a vole or two every year while mowing. I give them to the dogs.

We see turkey just outside our fields fairly often, but they won't come in. I keep them mowed too short, not to mention the dogs & horses tearing around. The few times we've had big birds in our fields, the horses usually run them off because they're curious.

We have a lot of different kinds of woodpeckers. The little Downy ones drink out of our hummingbird feeders in the summer. We also have Hairy, which look the same, just an inch or two bigger. Up until this year, we've seen more Red-Breasted than Red-Headed woodpeckers, but this year the population has turned around. I saw 3 or 4 Red-Headed ones out on the feeders this weekend & only 1 or 2 Red-Breasted.

The Pileated woodpeckers don't come around too often, but they do like the peanut feeder on occasion. A couple of years ago, we saw 3 of them in the woods one time - one was chasing off another - but generally only see one pair. Apparently they need or want a square mile per pair. We do hear them around us a lot, though. Their pecking is distinctive.

With all the dying White Ash, I expect the woodpecker population will blossom. Cardinals sure seem to be doing well. I counted 6 pair in the back yard yesterday & a couple more were around the feeders in the front. That's not unusual, though. Lots of dark-eyed Juncos, a couple of Blue jays, & tons of finches. It's a pretty wild mix.

Sounds like your going to the birds! This far Borth we don't have nearly the variety of birds this time of year... most of them go south to Kentucky!

We have one less female cardinal today. We were watching "Justified" & when it was over, we got p to find someone had dropped a well chewed one in front of my recliner. I guess it was supposed to be a gift.
;-)

The BBC recently reported that domestic cats kill billions of critters every year and are responsible for several extinctions. Yet without a cat on a farm the mice would rule the world!

I do take snakes and frogs away from Mystic Kitty if I can... at least she eats the mice!

She doesn't get many birds. I figure birds are like cats on the farm. On the farm there's old cats and there's dumb cats, but there aren't any old dumb cats.

We've never tolerated feral cats around. There's a big difference between a house or barn cat amusing themselves & one that's trying to survive.

Surprisingly there aren't feral cats around here... of course, between foxes, fishers, coyotes and traffic only smart well fed cats survive.

Are your bats having problems too with that disease going around... (some kind of white fungus hits them)? I see bats regularly in the summer... mostly when working on various buildings as they won't stay exclusively in their bat house. When restoring various old sheds I've taken to building soffits with 1/2 gaps to give them hidey holes.

I saw a fox near our horse barn today. He's living dangerously.

Yes, I did read about the bats & a fungus. Mammoth Cave is one of the big areas for them. We're thinking of going there with the horses & spending the night. They have an area for trail riding & the cave itself. I think it was reading up about that where I heard about it.

Animal populations wax and wane (compare the bee scare a few years ago when hives were dying out from a fungus)and hopefully resistant bats will overcome the fungus and rebuild the population. Like bees, life without bats eating bugs would be no fun at all!

Mamouth cave sounds like fun!

Honey bees are getting over their fungus or whatever it was? I thought they were still pretty endangered. Happy news if they aren't. I've always wanted to have a hive, but I'm allergic to hornets to the point that I almost died from a sting on my toe by one once. I got stung up by them badly as a teen. My cousin & I pulled a nest down on ourselves while clearing a fence row & each got stung over two dozen times. Wasps make me real ill, but Honey bees & yellow jackets just make me kind of ill. Still, I can't afford to get stung.

Some things bounce back, others don't. Chestnuts haven't, unfortunately. I sure hope the bees & bats do.

Hopefully the bats will recover!

I run into a ground nest every couple years. I consider it my bee/hornet vacination update!

(Not to mention my streaking/ 100 yard dash practice because I usually discover I've found a nest AFTER I get stung once and then I remove my shirt while running away!)

The last couple of times I've run into ground nests, I haven't gotten stung at all. I did get stung in the arm pit 2 years ago driving down the road with my window open. The worst thing was the 2 benadrylls I took when I got home. Even 1 of those things knocks me out. It was a yellow jacket, so no need of the needle, thankfully.

I tried combing the goats for their undercoats today. Didn't get much. They do have some very soft hair, though. We'll see when it gets a little warmer.

Goats would seem a much better source of fiber than horses!

Today I need to figure out a new way to hang the fans on the top of the stalls. They're regular box fans & we've been just tying their base to the top of board that the stall doors hang on with another piece of twine up to the rafter above. The horses have started playing with them, so I need to come up with something more stable (Pun!) after 5 years.

They need to be easily turned to point in or out of the stalls, depending on if the horses are in or out. Since they're 7 or 8 feet up, making something that is strong, light, & easy to deal with is a challenge. The sliding track of the stall doors is in the way, too. I have some ideas, though.

I think I'll weld up some brackets out of horse shoes, attach it to a piece of fence board with the fan mounted to another on top of that. A bolt in the center will allow the boards to swivel so we can adjust the angle the fans blow at. The horse shoes should keep the base firmly on the top board of the stall. Maybe I'll put a piece of light chain from the top of the fan to the rafter to make sure the top stays steady even when the horse pokes about with their nose.

Well, I'll see what works & post some before & after pictures.

All done & we had a nice ride, too. Pics are here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?s...

A solution after my own heart! Whatever works!!

I powerwashed the ramp on the trailer tonight to prep it for nonskid tape I ordered. The ramp has a rubber mat on it, but it's gotten really slick. Poor Rascal went down on his nose backing out the other day when it was a bit wet.

This tape is supposed to have an epoxy glue, so I'm hoping it will stick. I might try sanding one section & not another, then see how it does. I had to buy 3 - 60' rolls of it online, so I have some extra to play with.

I just finished spending 20 minutes herding a Momma Skunk & her 3 kits off our property. Speedy helped, although one kit suddenly charged back at him. I pushed him back & the little bugger sprayed me across the shins. That earned me an attempted field goal with him playing the football. I tossed him over the fence & he passed the rest of his family, but wasn't moving. He was gone before I finished washing up, so no damage done.

Unfortunately, I think they went to ground in the pipe under the end of our lane. I hope they don't move into our woods tonight. The dogs will find them & that means dead skunks & stinky dogs.
:-(

Getting our dogs injected with an ID chip is pretty standard now. Apparently there are some cheaper chips that are pretty much a scam, though. They use a 900 prefix that doesn't tell which one of a half dozen companies they are or even keep proper records.
http://www.chicagonow.com/steve-dales...

Jim wrote: "Honey bees are getting over their fungus or whatever it was? I thought they were still pretty endangered. Happy news if they aren't. I've always wanted to have a hive, but I'm allergic to hornet..."

As I said in another thread here, I heard the bees are not doing well.
I haven't heard an update on the bats, but I did see ONE last summer flying at dusk. I hadn't seen any for a few years previous to the one last summer. Hopefully there will be more this summer.

some bat info for the northeast:
http://vermontcavers.org/

Carpenter bees have been trying to eat up my shop overhang for years. I'm tired of swatting them with a badminton racket, although it can be fun. I generally fill their holes with a small tube of "Liquid Nails" that I buy every year. I squirt it up into the hole & that kills them & their eggs as well as fills the hole. Still, I'd rather not have to, so when I saw an article on how to make a carpenter bee trap, I had to make one.

http://www.myfrugalhome.com/how-to-bu...

The trap was very successful, but I learned a lot & made some modifications. I mentioned it to a couple of people & now half a dozen want traps. Luckily, a friend is moving & she had a lot of jars.

My modifications & notes:
- 1/2" holes for the sides & lid top, 3/4" for the center hole work fine.
- I'm using odd chunks of wood about 5" or 6" in diameter at least 8" long. No need to buy special wood.
- My current ones that work well are cedar, but I'm making more of ash & walnut.
- I turn mine on the lathe to round the top & also inset the lid into the bottom. No real need, though.
- I drill them by eye since the only critical mark is the center & that's made by the lathe.
- I drill the wood with a spade bit since it's easier to angle, but keep the 1/2" twist bit used for the top in the drill press & use it to clean the holes afterward. It gets splintery & full where the holes all meet at the top. I make sure the center hole is the cleanest.
- I wax the top if it is going to sit outside since I believe the bees want dry wood to go up into.
- I'm using any kind of glass jar, mostly 16oz spaghetti sauce, & they're fine. Most plans use plastic, but I read they can chew out of that. I don't know.
- I put some water in the bottom to kill the bees faster. Otherwise they live for days & new ones can be hard to kill.
- I use a screw hook to hang them.

I made up 5 more carpenter bee traps tonight. I made 3 yesterday. Hopefully that's enough for now since I'm out of jars. They seem to be a real pain this year so I have friends around home & work requesting them.

Mine are working well, but I didn't follow the instructions exactly. I'm using 5/8" holes for the sides & center hole in the wood, 1/2" in the jar lid now. I've made them of cedar, ash, walnut, & sassafras. All seem to be working well. I hang them on my own porch to test. I've found placement is important. They work best if they're in partial shade to full. They don't like them if they get too hot. It also depends a lot on the day. About a month ago, I caught 5 in one trap in a day. Then it got cooler out & none were about. It's been warm for the past week, but I still wasn't catching any, then suddenly another half dozen wound up in one trap, none to 1 in the others.

We got some really crappy hay last summer & the goats haven't been eating it well. Normally, we just toss a flake into their house (a 4'x4'x4' cube with a 20" door cut in the front) & they eat most of it while the rest turns into bedding. They have too much bedding now, so Marg asked me to make a hay feeder to hang on their gate. She looked around for one, but couldn't find one she liked, so just hung a hay net.

I made one up out of scraps of rabbit wire. It's about 20" square, 4" deep at the base, & 10" deep at the top, so it fits a flake of hay nicely. I covered the back wire with some hardware cloth. I hung it by just weaving 2 pieces of brace wire down the back to cup the bottom & come up a foot or so. I bent them over the top of the gate & it's been holding up well.

It's getting on toward spring, so we've used up most of the hay in the barn. We store it on big (6'x10') pallets that have a single sheet of plastic running under them all. I pick the pallets up each year & rake all the loose hay out, but I found a surprise this year.

In between 2 pallets I found a long pile of the gravel that's under the plastic. Looked like a dog or groundhog had dug it up. About a foot from the end of the pile there was a hole in the ground, but the plastic was unbroken for at least 3' all around it. The plastic wasn't bubbled up or anything. It's like the gravel was somehow dug up through the unbroken plastic. When I cleaned off the chaff, I picked up the plastic & poured the gravel back into the hole. It filled it perfectly.

I'm totally confused by how this was possible. I'm thinking aliens.

The goat hay rack I made up isn't working very well. The shape & all is great, but the goats keep rubbing on it & squishing it, so I'll have to make a stronger frame for it. Horse hay feeders are usually made out of welded 3/8" round stock. I guess I'll have to do something similar for the goats. Might be easier to buy a horse hay feeder & put a back on it.

I see all these people making things out of pallets on the web. I bent a 3/4" iron bar prying boards off one of the big ones (6'x8') today. The 1" rough oak boards are held on by 6-8 glue coated, twisted nails on each 4x6 & they often came off in pieces. Buying new lumber makes way more sense!

I use them to keep our hay up off the gravel floor. The end pieces are short & some are broken, so I thought I'd fix them up. I figured it would be a nice afternoon job. I might be halfway through. Whew. A lot more work than I thought.

I may have FINALLY fixed the leak in my fish pond's stream!!! I had to buy more pond liner & pull out several buckets of rocks & gravel to put it in, but I think I got it. It hasn't lost any water in the past 24 hours. While it's been frustratingly intermittent, it's always lost a couple of inches every day since I built it last year. Sometimes it would lose a couple of inches overnight & then lose 2" or more in an hour or two. Anyway, this is encouraging.

We've been using a portable mounting block that's only 22" tall. We're getting older & fatter, so some extra height with a bigger & generally sturdier platform on top made sense. I cut my raised vegetable garden in half this year, so I had 2- 2x10-12 for the project. The buried edges were a little eaten up, but basically they were in good shape. Other materials were a couple of 2x4s & some treated deck screws (TDS). It took most of the morning to make, but I had it placed by lunch time.

There were a few things about it that tickled me. I was able to find my framing square buttons & laid out the stringers properly on the first try. Neither should be a big deal, but it's been 15 years since I last made one & we've moved since then.

I only had a couple of feet of the old 2x10s left. I cut the 2 stringers & one tread out of one with the 2' of waste. 4 treads used up the other completely. Great use of recycled materials.

I used up most of my odd TDS. I keep a 5 gallon bucket with dividing trays in it filled with assorted sizes of TDS, drywall screws, & nails. Lately each time I buy more TDS, I get a different head. Phillips used to be the standard, but one batch was Torx, & now the standard seems to be #2 square drive. It's a PITA to constantly change bits in the screwgun. I've pretty much got them all down to square drive in all the sizes now, though.

Here's a picture of me on Red, my new horse, & the mounting block. The height is perfect, as you can see. We haven't put a stick on Red, but I guess he's 15.2h, so it's nice to be able to step into my bareback pad from a 28" platform. My bad foot loves the ability to dismount that way, too.

Marg loves her birthday present of new stall lights. It's hard to hit a home run on a present after almost 40 years together, so I'm tickled. The new LED strips took less than an hour to install & they're incredible. They replaced this 150 watt light.


The new lights are far brighter & spread the light out so there aren't as many shadows on the horse. Wish we could have done this years ago.



The dusty netting above is there to keep hundreds of starlings from nesting in the rafters. Before I put it up, they crapped all over everything constantly. Now a few still get up there & some can't get out, so it's a bit of a graveyard. Kind of gross, but not as bad as all the poop we used to have.

We've got the 300 bales of hay in that we'll need until this time next year. That's always a relief, especially getting it done before July when the foxtail (grass with a prickly head) comes in. It was a lot cheaper this year since about half came from one of our fields & a LOT easier because Russell got some new equipment.

There's only about 5 acres usable for hay, but we got better than 30 bales/acre - 167 total. As you can see the grass is really thick. Here the hay has been tedded, cut, & raked into windrows.


The first part of the new equipment hangs behind the baler. The hay comes out of the baler & is set in a pile 1 bale high, 4x2 wide.


Once 8 bales fill the rack, a gate is opened in the back which leaves them in the field all ready to be picked up & set either in the barn for stacking or on a wagon by the front end loader. It grabs them all at once, a huge savings in labor.


If you've ever dealt with hay bales, you're probably as excited as I am by this innovation. No more dodging hay bales as the kicker shoots them at you while stacking on a hay wagon or, worse, picking them up off the ground & tossing them on to the wagon. In the barn, it's just as nice. He set them in the aisle & we dealt with 8 at a time, only having to toss them to the side & stack. It was fantastic!

When we first moved to our farm 14 years ago, I had to get 2/3 of it fenced in. The north third, which is the field pictured in the previous message, was already fenced, but it was pretty old & bad. Actually it was crap, but good enough to get by. There was a hedge row with old wire fence grown in, some new wire fence that wasn't braced properly, & a 4 board fence that was just horrible. The last was put up incorrectly in almost every way possible.

Board fence is one-sided as far as stock is concerned. The boards need to face the animals so if they rub or reach across it, they push the boards into the posts. Otherwise they'll push the boards right off the heads of the nails. It looks prettier if the boards face outward though, so that's what they did. They also put it down on a slope so the animals & tractors skidded into it if the grass was even slightly wet. If that wasn't enough, they put caps & facia boards on it which just hold water & rot it out a decade sooner & then they painted it which doesn't help at all.

Anyway, I've wanted to tear it out & replace it since we got here, but it's a big, expensive job. I finally saved up enough money after paying off our other major debts. All the stimulus money & tax returns were put into the fund, too. I wound up adding some extras that I would have done myself if I was in better shape including redoing the paddock fence. I'd put up a 'temporary' one about a decade ago & had never gotten around to doing it right.

I got on well with the crew & the company despite making a number of changes. I documented them all really well. https://earth.google.com/web/ helped a lot since I could edit pics of the field, draw in the fencing, & even measure the lengths of the runs. I made up a document which detailed it all & marked all of the braces, gates, & such. My estimate was only $30 off on an $11,000 job. Pretty close! Not too surprising since I know the business. My first job was fencing close to 50 years ago & I've kept practicing ever since.

It helped that I loaned them a tool for gate trunnions that made their job a LOT easier. They'd never seen one before. It's just a piece of old galvanized pipe I cut out of a house years before with a tee on the end, but the size & length make it work really well & mine is well worn in. Garrett, the crew chief, said he'd been thinking of making something for doing it & they had just been discussing it on the last job.

It surprised me that they weren't familiar with galvanized pipe, but it turns out they're all my kids' ages so they haven't seen it. It's a relic of the past & the last was mostly replaced in the 1980s, the decade in which they were born. I'm sure some of you remember how pipes used to clog up with rust back when we were younger.

It's just odd sometimes that the adults I deal with are so young. They look the age I keep thinking I am. Self deception? It always reminds me of that saying, "Inside every old person is a young one wondering what the hell happened." Yeah, that's me.

I got the gravel in yesterday for the double gates. Terrible driver, a surprise since they're usually excellent. I gave him instructions & he told me what he was going to do, but he wound up not doing anything right. On the third try, I just had him dump about 2/3 of the load by the gates & the rest on my stock pile. The man was hopeless. I had to bring 6 buckets back off the pile to get the grading right, so the job took longer than it should have, but we got it done.

Here's a picture of it. The dirt in front is a swale so water coming down most of the hill won't wash out the gravel. I dug that while waiting for the driver. The gates are 2-12' gates, the posts are 8' apart, & the fence is 4' high to give you an idea of scale.



The load was 23 tons & cost $480, that's $130 more than it was 3 years ago. Behind the new, larger pile, you can see my old stock pile. We use it up quickly at times. Lily & Pip butts are visible, too.



The picture below is taken from my shop & shows most of the fencing on the south (shop) & east sides of the same field. The left gate post is about in line with the double gates on the other side of the field. On the left & right, you can see plum trees in bloom.



Taken from just inside the north field at the shop gate, the picture below shows the south fencing & about 200' in the distance (west) along a neighbor's field. Pip is just in the picture, too. He's a big help.



Here's Cloud in the paddock which got new fencing on 2 sides. It's stock wire with an oak board on top. The paddock is just south of our house.

Jim wrote: "I got the gravel in yesterday for the double gates. Terrible driver, a surprise since they're usually excellent. I gave him instructions & he told me what he was going to do, but he wound up not do..."

Sounds like you are getting your energy back. I hope you are better!

I enjoyed seeing the pictures of your place...so beautiful.
I'd need a ranch hand to maintain all that .
You're a better man than i am, Gunga Din.