Although summer is only a few weeks old, there’s an area just inside our front door that’s starting to collect summer shoes.
They didn’t arrive all at once, they slowly started accumulating a few weeks ago, and the pile grew slowly enough that we really didn’t notice until all of a sudden we were wading through shoes every time we went out to check the mail.
Clearly something had to be done. Continue reading
Plenty of hose length is the modern homestead equivalent of the irrigation channels the Egyptians dug into the banks of the Nile when they were inventing civilization. But unlike the Egyptians’ floodwater ditches, garden hose can get out of hand!
So for just as long as we’ve had garden hoses to tangle, we’ve been thinking up ways to keep hoses neat and tidy so you don’t trip over them or run them over with the lawn mower. And wouldn’t you know it, many of them are sized at five gallons. Continue reading
Growing your own meat is a cheap and healthy way to provide a nice chunk of your own protein. Fish have some of the highest feed-to-weight-gain ratios because they don’t have to expend calories holding their bodies against gravity. The water they swim in does most of that for them. That’s why mammals had to return to the oceans before they were able to dominate the evolutionary tree as the largest living animals on earth.
I challenge you to think of a better airtight storage container than a 5 gallon bucket. They are the perfect size for nearly anything that needs to be stored secure from oxygen and moisture.
If a container is airtight, it’s also watertight. That’s a key factor because water is often more damaging than air. Too much moisture causes mold for instance, which ruins more than just food! I’ve seen a sleeping bag completely ruined by mold. Properly stored in an airtight 5 gallon bucket, that expensive sub 0 sleeping bag may still be usable today.
Remember that broken plastic bucket handle from yesterday? We already found a great new use for it.
Things break around the farm. They break a lot. If we had to go hire a repair guy or buy new parts every time something broke, repair costs would eat up all the egg money!