a slightly different herbal for you today!........
i have no idea if this is "origanal" or not, you might already know this one but i didnt untill the other day while i was cooking.
so let me tell you about a small i have been having first. being a farm with many birds we have a constant large rat population, we keep a couple of jack russels that roam the barns looking for rats and we use a large number of rat poison stations, infact we spend arounf £1500 a year on poison and rat control. the main irratation i have with them is the gnawing of the chicken arks where the rats try and get in, and some the other areas, they cause untold damage and it costs to keep repairing the woodwork they destroy.
so there i was cooking the other night (chilli con carne) and while preparing the chilli's (harabarno)sp? i got some in my eye
man that hurts like hell, but it gave me an idea !!!!!!!!!!
how about realy realy hot chilli oil painted on the bottom of the outside of the arks! surely rats would take a quick chew and be well and truly put off? then i got to thinking.......... fairly quickly it would wash off etc with the weather and be of no use and i dont have the time to keep applying it.. so this is what i am trying
i have taken a load of hot chilli seeds crushed them and used a solvent to exstract the oil, the reason for this is the hotest part of the chilli is in the seeds and is oil based plus oil soaks in the wood better (more of this in a min). i used hexane because we have it but parafin would work just as well, soak the seed pulp in your solvent for 20 mins then filter it, i used coffee filter paper. then in a small heat proof container gently heat it untill it lightly boils. be very very careful you dont get the solvent so hot it reaches flash point. once the solvent has gone you will be left with pure chilli oil thats very very hot.
now how to get it to stay on the wood??? well what i came up with was WAX!!! i melted some wax and mixed in the chilli oil, so all i do now is melt the wax and brush it onto the bottom of the arks. i then use a blow lamp (plumbers type) to heat the wax and make sure it sinks into the wood a little!
i havnt been using this long so i dont know how good it will be but i will keep you posted