Recent content by Kimi BK

What about Bokashi? We use it in our outhouse and chicken pen. It has probiotics that changes the general smell to mildly sweet/sour like a subtle yogurt smell. Expensive to buy, but easy to make. I make it with free sawdust (more like tiny woodchips, not dusty) from our local sawmill.

Thank you all. Yes, we are plannng to use a cone and use the bolt gun, quickly followed by bleed-out. We helped a neighbor harvest a few birds -- she is "certified humane" which required the bolt gun before bleed-out. Hers was a non-penetrating gun and the ones we looked at were hundreds of...

We went ahead and ordered it. I'll let you know how it goes. We won't be using it on rabbits any time soon (don't have rabbits yet), so our first reports will be re: chickens...

Happy New Year! Fun to read about everyone's plans. We are still raw newbies. So we have LOTS to do in 2021. We will be doing our first chicken harvest in a couple weeks :oops:. If they start bullying before then we will be moving the boys out of the coed coop & run, into a temporary hoop...

Has anyone ever used the Ballista Penetrating Bolt Gun from bunnyrancher.com? Since most of the captive bolt guns we've found have been several hundred dollars, this $65 contraption sounds too good to be true... I think it would be easier for me to stomach than blunt force or broomstick, etc...

Thank you! That is sweet, finding bird's nests lined with your dogs' fur.

Has anyone ever used the Ballista Penetrating Bolt Gun from bunnyrancher.com? Since most of the captive bolt guns we've found have been several hundred dollars, this $65 contraption sounds too good to be true... I think it would be easier for me to stomach than blunt force or broomstick, etc...

Wow, this is so helpful! When we helped our neighbor, she is a "certified humane" producer and has the whole setup -- killing cones, stunner, scalder, feather plucker machine -- and we processed them to shrink wrap whole and freeze, gutting through the holes, etc. One thing is that we want to...

Yes! The tire bale house is vastly easier than hand-pounding individual tires as in a traditional earthship. Our landfill is only 7 miles away, which simplified the hardest part of tire bales: transportation (each of the 90 bales for our 1000 sq ft house weighs almost a ton). Here's a pic of...

Thanks for this! Encouraging to hear your story, as you are ahead of us on the path. Nice to have trailbreakers to follow! We bought straight run chickens and will eat the "extra" roos, and keep a couple for possible future breeding. We also don't plan to get into meat chickens, but at this...

Welcome!

Hey there! My husband and I are recently retired relatively new farmsteaders in NW New Mexico. We are still living in a tent camper, and are building a house out of tire bales, so have barely started our farming operations, but we do have a small garden, a 90' geothermal passive solar...