Colorado

[COChix]

Hey gang, so my ferment experiment never got off the ground. I finally
Found the aquarium heater we had in storage and it had a short. So can't try my project, on the positive note we were able to make room for the ferment bucket inside. I started feeding ff
Christmas, hoping to increase egg production and am hoping if they are missing something that the ff will take care of it.


Ok also, I am thinking about trying to organize a Colorado BYC meet and greet somewhere in the metro area. If people are interested please let me know. Also any suggestions to time and place to hold it would be great.

 

[Percheron chick]

There's a poultry show first Saturday and Sunday at SS.

 

[samsr]

I am struggling with my DAWG. She is a big GSP x St. Bernard mutt who has been smitten with a huge wanderlust. My 2acres are fenced in with an ancient livestock fence, and she is breaking it down, section by section. We are situated on a rather busy county road/Colorado hwy, and she's been caught in the middle of it several times. Good news is that neighbors I haven't even met are flocking to my rescue! They want to help me fix my fence. I am researching in-the-ground wire invisible fences. Did you know that you don't have to bury the wire. You can pin it to the ground, zip tie it to barbed wire, or even staple it to wood. I will probably order something today, possibly a Petsafe YardMax. I have her tied out for the time being, but she needs to run. Just when she's decided to be one of the flocks.

The invisible fences do work rather well. We have one going around my two acre property. My advise is to bury it where behicles will be running over it however. I have repaired it many times. The lawn mower and weed eater are not kind to it either. It didn't take long at all for my dog to learn the boundry lines. You may have to get the stuburn dog collar for a st bernard though.

 

[coop410silkies]

The invisible fences do work rather well. We have one going around my two acre property. My advise is to bury it where behicles will be running over it however. I have repaired it many times. The lawn mower and weed eater are not kind to it either. It didn't take long at all for my dog to learn the boundry lines. You may have to get the stuburn dog collar for a st bernard though.

Thank you so much, Samsr. It is good to know that these things work well. I have decided on the PetSafe Stubborn Dog. If I were to list 20 characteristics of my St. Mix, "stubborn" would be at the top; she seems impervious to pain. Yes, I have been thinking of how to protect the wire where it crosses the driveway (gravel, not concrete). Encase and bury in conduit, pipe insulating foam tubes, irrigation hose? Am researching this even as I type. Am planning to just zip tie it to existing fence and bury it at the gates and drive. For the immediate emergency, I want to do just the front and back yards, just to keep her out of the field where she gets out. Later, I'd like to do all of the remaining field. Will I be able to just splice in the additional wire? 2acres are a lot of wire to be searching for a break. Did you use some sort of a tool to help you, like an RF tool and an AM radio? Do you have a recommendation about this? What gauge wire did you use? Where did it tend to break?Recommendations? Did the collar irritate your dog's neck at all? Do you have to take the collar off if your dog is in the car and you have to drive over the wire to leave or return? With the Stubborn Dog fence, long contact points do not come with the collar, and I will be getting them for my dog's big ruff. Any other accessories you think useful or worth the expense?

I sure hope my dog learns to stay in as fast as she learned to get out. Any advice you can give me will be very much appreciated. Blessings

 

[suncatcher]

I knew someone who used the buried fence on their husky who had tons of hair, it worked great! Not sure what brand it was.

 

[coop410silkies]

Hey gang, so my ferment experiment never got off the ground. I finally
Found the aquarium heater we had in storage and it had a short. So can't try my project, on the positive note we were able to make room for the ferment bucket inside. I started feeding ff
Christmas, hoping to increase egg production and am hoping if they are missing something that the ff will take care of it.


Ok also, I am thinking about trying to organize a Colorado BYC meet and greet somewhere in the metro area. If people are interested please let me know. Also any suggestions to time and place to hold it would be great.

I haven't started fermented feed - yet. When I was making yogurt - a long time ago - I simply stirred a bit of my favorite live culture into milk, poured it into pint jars, and set the jars in my gas oven. The pilot kept them at the right temperature, and the milk became yogurt almost overnight. (When I used raw goat milk adding a live culture was not necessary.) The point, though, is that if you have a gas oven, the warmth from the pilot may be enough to facilitate the fermentation. Oven is pretty small, though.

Another thing you can try is removing the thermostat and heating element from the glass tube of the aquarium heater and substituting a light bulb for the heating coils - sort of like an incubator set up. Takes a thermometer and a bit of doing, but you can heat almost any kind of an enclosure with it. I used old aquarium heaters to heat old aquariums for starting seeds this way, mostly because I could not find suitable cheap thermostats at the time. Nowadays I might use one of those cheap Chinese Arduino things to thermostatically regulate a light bulb in a tub, box, or cabinet, or whatever. Again, like an incubator.

What I've been doing - until I get committed to FF - is pouring milk into a container of Scratch, stirring well, and setting it in a warm place. A small light bulb in a cupboard would probably work well, especially if I monitored the temp until I found the best wattage to use, but I just haven't bothered. The Scratch absorbs the milk, and, after a couple days, begins to have a nice yeasty smell - even without the addition of a starter culture. My girls - and boys - love this stuff, and they eat it all up before it has a chance to freeze.

Well, I'm NOT advising milk-saturated-Scratch - at least not until I've done some experiments similar to your project; all I'm trying to say is that you might have success fermenting feed with other methods of regulating temperature. Your project sounds great, btw, and, if I can find a source of cheap milk, I could easily see myself doing the same thing with my Scratch Stuff. Yet another thing to tweak!

Blessings

 

[coop410silkies]

This is the truth. Holy smokes, I'm doing the same thing!

Me, too.

 

[rf12345]

did anyone found a frozen egg outside of the coop? not sure what to make of it unless one of the chickens lays outside of box... (they have 4... plenty for 10 chickens and some still not laying age...) i keep finding eggs outside of the box... maybe i just keep them in coop for several days so they figure out where the eggs go again... same chicken seems to go 'brain dead' when it comes to laying eggs

 

[Percheron chick]

Sounds like magpies.

 

[coop410silkies]

Coop, you are going to have to shave her neck for the collar to work and the only thing is that, hopefully she is dumb, because the smart/ determined ones can figure out that they can run though the fence and then be okay, they just won't come back.  My neighbor's have such a fence and most times it works, but when something is up, their dog will just brave the fence and go for it. 
There may be some units out there now that address this issue?  Don't know.

Thanks for the heads up. Yep, I'm pretty sure she would pay little attention to a "stimulation." A little warning beep might stop her in her tracks though. I think, because I am attaching it to an old decrepit fence, she will have to remain in the zone of correction in order to work her way through the existing fence, and she might not want to do that. We shall see. If there were no fence at all, I would probably go with a YardMax fence. It is fairly new on the market. Most fences have a zone of correction that you can adjust, up to a few feet on either side of the boundary. The dog that goes through it can escape the correction on the OUTside once he exits the zone, and he will get re corrected if he tries to return. He DOES have to be fast, smart, and determined. (Could be a problem for the dog, though, if he has to stop and tear down - or dig under - the fence that it's attached to.). The YARDMAX, by contrast, delivers a correction on just the out side of the fence, and the correction zone continues infinitely; the dog will continue receive a correction until either the dog returns or the transmitter shuts it off after 10 to 15 seconds. You have to train the dog that the only way he can get away from the stimulation is by returning back to inside his boundary, and you do this while he is on a leash. When the dog steps, flies, or zips over the boundary, you have to pull him back, so that he understands where he is safe, inside the boundary line, where there's no correction happening. Some dogs move so fast back into the safe zone, you'd think they were teleporting. This fence is an extension of some current trends in obedience training with Ecollars and may turn out to be just as controversial. It is effective, though.

This all is just FYI, in case you ever have to look in to Invisible fences. I learned all of it yesterday and today. Your friends MIGHT be interested in the YardMax, but a lot of people think it's inhumane. If a dog is at risk, it may be worth considering.

Ohhhhhh, one of my two old rescued sheep is down, and the other is limping. The flock of hens is gathered about him, and I am going to have to call the animal disposal people.

. Thanks for your warnings and concern.