Youtube user Nigel West has a
clever method of hacking a PetSafe
electronic pet feeder
into a functional automatic chicken coop door opener and closer.
The motor is a nice and slow
speed and Nigel explains in his chicken coop door
hack video how to trick the photo sensor of the limit switch with
some black tape.
It makes me wonder if this
project would work on the less expensive 2-meal
Electronic Pet Feeder.
This
is the time of year when I start getting a lot of questions about how
to keep chicken waterers from freezing. First, for the sake of new
readers, I want to rehash some of the basics.
If you want to do without an electric heat source, I highly recommend our Avian Aqua Miser Originals.
We kept chickens for years just by taking these small waterers in each
night and hanging them on a shelf in the kitchen. If I
accidentally left one out during a moderate freeze, I could let the
waterer melt just enough to decant the chunk of ice, pour in some hot
(but not boiling) water, and in a couple of minutes the nipple was
thawed enough that I could return the waterer to our chicken
tractors. Keep in mind that any plastic waterer will crack
eventually if frozen and thawed enough times, but this technique seems
to be pretty effective otherwise.
A couple of years ago,
Mark decided it was time to enter the twentieth century. (We’re
not so sure we want to enter the twenty-first.) We solicited
feedback from our readers and received a slew of great suggestions for building heated chicken waterers. Mark took his favorite and tweaked it to come up with the heat tape chicken waterer we used for the past two winters. Here in zone 6, the heat tape waterer does great for 95% of the winter, but does
freeze up a few times when nights drop into the low teens. I
generally just bring out an Avian Aqua Miser Original for those days to
make sure everyone has enough thawed water to drink.
At the end of last winter, though, Mark discovered a relatively cheap heated bucket that has no heating element at the side of the bottom, making it simple to install a chicken nipple at an appropriate angle.
We didn’t start experimenting last year until the cold weather was
nearly over, but early results suggest that this heated chicken waterer
may stay thawed even longer into the winter (although potentially with
more electricity use?) compared to our old system. Stay tuned for
later posts as we work the kinks out of this new heated chicken waterer.
My last post about tree alleys
lacked a big-picture photo to help readers understand what I was
talking about, so I figured you were due another post on the
topic. Plus, Kayla and I did a lot more digging and ended up
putting in a second tree alley, so the design has changed
slightly. Hopefully the diagram above will help you visualize what
the tree alleys will look like once they’re planted, with the thick
lines being apple trees, with coppiced black locusts sitting between the
fruit trees on the upper swale, and with hazels between the fruit trees
on the lower swale. The locusts are already in place, and just
need to be cut so they don’t shade the apple trees, but everything else
will be planted in late winter.
Here I’m seeding rye on
the newly-dug swales to hold the soil over the winter. Cardboard
is marking the tree spots so I don’t accidentally toss seeds there, and
to keep down weeds. The cattle panels will eventually be about
where they’re at, but standing up instead of lying down, and there will
be another row of fencing on the upper side to close off this tree-alley
swale into its own paddock.
One thing we’ve learned
already from this project is — don’t leave your cattle panels lying on
the ground over the summer! We thought we were going to build our
fences right away, so we just dropped the panels wherever last spring.
Half the work involved in last week’s earth-moving consisted of prying
the panels up out of the honeysuckle and moving them to the side so we
could dig.
The other thing we
learned is — dig carefully! This box turtle had already dug down
into the soil to hibernate, and she came up in a shovelful of
dirt. Luckily, her hard shell protected her, so no box turtles
were harmed in the creation of this post.
The one problem I foresee
with our tree alleys is that the long, skinny pastures won’t be grazed
evenly. Hopefully my trick of putting a chicken waterer
at the far end of each pasture will prompt the chickens (and,
eventually, sheep and/or pigs?) to move away from the coop and hit the
far end of each alley.