Feed the birds—for less. November 6, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: backyard bird feeding, budget birdfeeding, Deb Martin, Deborah Martin, Secrets of Backyard Bird-Feeding Success
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Do you love attracting chickadees, cardinals, bluejays, titmice, finches, juncos, woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other entertaining birds to your feeders in winter? Are you feeling a pinch in your wallet that’s causing you to have second thoughts about buying all those bags of birdseed? Here’s how you can bring in the birds without breaking the bank.
The trick is to realize that you don’t need all those fancy mixes. We’ve never had a winter visitor who wouldn’t eat one (or both) of just two kinds of seed: black-oil sunflower and millet. Just today, our friend Ben and Silence Dogood were following our good friend Delilah’s advice and buying rechargeable, ultra-bright halogen lanterns on sale at Tractor Supply. We appreciate our faithful battery-powered Coleman lanterns, but they’re best for finding our way around. Certainly not bright enough to read, cook or knit by without risking severe eyestrain or worse. Now, next time our power goes out, our rooms will be bright enough so we can enjoy entertaining and/or useful pursuits day or night.
But I digress. Point being, after adding two lanterns to our shopping cart, I turned to Silence and asked what else we needed. “Chicken feed and birdseed,” she replied. Well, the chicken feed—scratch grains and egglayer pellets—was easy enough.
But the bewildering array of birdseed mixes had us scratching our heads, as always. Most of the cheaper mixes have lots of cracked corn, proso millet (those round orange seeds), wheat, and even soy, all of which which most birds pass up. (Imagine being served a meal of mixed sauerkraut, liver, cream of wheat, and Brussels sprouts. Yes, you could eat it, but who’d want to?!)
And the pricey mixes seem to add high-end ingredients based on their people appeal rather than their bird appeal. (Not unlike canned dog and cat food named for luscious human meals. Our friend Ben doubts that those cans really hold anything resembling prime rib au jus or chicken Cordon Bleu, or that the dogs would care.)
After what seemed to our friend Ben to be a mind-numbingly long search among the miles of displays, Silence gave a triumphant cry. “Look, Ben! Look at this bag of beautiful millet!” The millet (small, round, white seeds, not larger orange ones like proso) did indeed look plump, fresh, and clean. “Now we just need a bag of black-oil sunflower seeds, and we’ll mix them when we get home!” And that’s what we did, storing the seed mix In a large lidded tin pet-food canister. We also tossed in some shelled sunflower seeds that Silence, who’d been busy cleaning out the fridge, thought might have gotten a bit stale, lurking as they were at the very back of a shelf. Waste not, want not, and shelled seed commands premium prices in the birdseed aisle.
If you love goldfinches and host them year-round like we do, you may be saying “But hey, I thought goldfinches ate Nyger (aka niger) thistle!” Fans of cardinals might be wondering about safflower seed, a supposed cardinal favorite. But the truth is that, while cardinals, unlike most birds, will eat safflower seed, it’s not their preferred seed (that would be black-oil sunflower). And in our backyard trials pitting Nyger against black-oil sunflower for goldfinches, the finches completely ignored the Nyger and devoured the sunflower seeds. Save your money.
If you’d like more great tips on how to save money and attract birds to your backyard, we have to give a shout-out to our friend Deb Martin and her new book, Secrets of Backyard Bird-Feeding Success (Deborah L. Martin, Rodale Inc., 2011). Deb shares hundreds of sensible solutions for feeding the birds on a budget, including which native plants will attract birds. We especially love this approach, since it requires no further expense or effort on your part.
Deb was interviewed by Irene Kraft in our local paper, the Allentown, PA Morning Call, this past Saturday (October 29, 2011). We urge you to read the article, “Bird Feeding on a Budget,” online (www.themorningcall.com) to preview some of Deb’s tips and proven advice. (She lives on a big wooded lot, and we can guarantee that she’s tried every single tip she recommends in her own backyard.)
We confess that the tip we found most intriguing was Deb’s habit of saving the seeds at the bottom of bagel bags, crumbs from bread, bits of cereal and crackers, etc., and freezing them. She also saves bacon drippings, beef fat, and etc. and freezes that. Then, when cold weather arrives, rather than buying those seed-enhanced suet blocks, she pulls out her stash of seeds, crumbs and fat from the freezer, melts the fat, mixes in the seeds and crumbs, and voila! Free homemade suet blocks. The article didn’t say how Deb shapes her homemade suet blocks, but given the standardized dimensions of most suet feeders and the ubiquitous blocks you buy to pop into them, we’d suggest saving the empty plastic forms from a couple of storebought suet blocks, then pouring your homemade suet mix into them and popping them back in the freezer ’til they’re set.
Another tip Deb shared that we totally approve of is saving and rinsing the seeds of cantaloupes and other melons, then drying them on newspaper before feeding them to the birds. We don’t actually do this, since our chickens get all our melon rinds and seeds, which they adore, saving us the trouble of rinsing and drying seeds. But having seen how much the chickens love melon seeds, we can believe they’d be a treat for some backyard birds as well, and again, they’re free!
Thanks, Deb, for another great birdfeeding book. For all you bird-loving cheapsters out there—like us!—we suggest that you head to your local bookstore or Amazon or B&N.com and get your own copy of Secrets of Backyard Bird-Feeding Success. Given the price of most birdseed mixes out there—not to mention the contents—you’ll recoup the book’s price with your first bag of seed!
The kudzu eaters. November 3, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, gardening, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: controlling kudzu, killer kudzu bugs, kudzu, kudzu bugs, kudzu-eating bugs, Megacopta cribraria, natural kudzu controls, organic kudzu controls
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Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood are not fans of kudzu. Or at least, not fans of kudzu, Southern-style. We understand and appreciate that kudzu (aka kuzu), an Asian native plant, is valued in its homeland, especially Japan, as a useful crop. In Japan, every part of the plant is used: the massive roots (which can weigh 300 pounds) for medicine, the leaves and shoots as greens, the stems for baskets, the aboveground parts for handmade paper.
Here in the U.S., we’re not so lucky. Like so many invasive pests, kudzu was deliberately introduced here by Depression-era do-gooders thinking its rapid spread would help control erosion. Thanks, morons. We hope your graves have been blanketed with kudzu along with the endless mile upon mile of Southern landscape. Hillsides, forests, trees, cars, yards, buildings, buried beneath a suffocating mass of advancing kudzu: To drive through the South is to see a nightmare landscape, a horror story, in which everything has been swallowed up by this aggressively spreading vine, which can grow a foot a day and is impervious to every form of control.
OFB and Silence, who are from the South, practically burst into tears every time we drive down and see what kudzu has done to our homeland. So we perked up considerably upon seeing an article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, “Bug Battle: An Invasive Plant Now Faces Its Own Attacker.” (Check it out at www.WSJ.com.)
The illustration looks like a beetle to us, but the Wall Street Journal describes the dark green Megacopta cribraria as insects and bugs, not beetles. The insects first arrived in the U.S. as stowaways on a flight to Atlanta in 2009, and have spread from North Carolina to Alabama, prime kudzu country. Like kudzu itself, they came from Japan. Here in the U.S., they’re apparently known as kudzu bugs or “killer kudzu bugs.”
Sound like a miracle? Too good to be true? Well, sadly, yes. The Asian bug loves kudzu, but also eats another Asian import, soybeans. And since soybeans are a major crop across much of the U.S. (including up here in our own scenic PA), a soybean-eating bug is a threat to agriculture. USDA scientists are already hard at work trying to find natural controls.
Our friend Ben and Silence have a dream scenario: The bugs eat the kudzu. Once they’ve eliminated it, the USDA folks unleash controls that stop the bugs in their tracks before they get to the soybeans. End of story, happy ending. Likely? Uh-huh.
We can hope, of course. But even more important, we can hope that this latest imported disaster will stop folks like the ones who imported kudzu, multiflora rose, prickly pear, starlings, European house sparrows, water hyacinths, carp, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, ornamental grasses, knotweed, and etc. etc. to become a nightmare here on our shores.
Such good intentions, such disastrous, ignorant, ecologically horrific results. Stop, please stop. Let Mother Nature spread her bounty, and controls, as she, not we, see fit.
We’re baaaack… November 2, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: disaster preparedness, emergency preparedness, power outage, preparedness, surviving a power outage
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Gads. After being without power for four days, we’ve learned a bit more about ourselves. Living here in the precise middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, as our friend Ben and Silence Dogood do, our situation in a power outage might be inconceivable to those of you who have city sewer and water.
We’re on a well and septic system, have oil heat and a gas stove. When we first moved to Hawk’s Haven, we were quite smug about our situation. If the power failed, sure, we’d be in the dark. But we had lots of solar-, hand-cranked, and/or battery-operated lanterns, radios, and a weather radio, not to mention wind-up clocks and watches. We also had a good supply of long-burning candles. No worries, right?
Wrong. The first time our power went out during an ice storm, we realized that all our supposedly non-electric conveniences were electronically operated. No power meant not just no lights but no heat, no water, no plumbing, no cooking. Yow.
Fortunately, our gas stove still can be lit with matches, so we can still cook in a power outage. After that first horrific outage, we got a small but efficient woodstove for our fireplace and have made sure we had plenty of cured hardwood and firestarters, not just for warmth but to make sure our pipes don’t freeze. We have bottled springwater to drink and filled gallon water jugs for flushing. And our lanterns let us travel from room to room after dark without problems, though they’re not really bright enough to read by or see yourself clearly in the bathroom mirror.
This outage was pretty mean, we have to say. It combined severe tree breakage with early darkness and late light, resulting in 13-plus hours of pitch blackness, and unseasonable cold, at 25 to 30 degrees F. every night. Because the ground wasn’t frozen, we weren’t too terrified of frozen pipes, but still were very happy for our efficient little woodstove. And of course we ate out and, when we ate at home, used paper plates and cups, which we can eventually burn in our firepit.
Now that the power’s back on, we realize how grateful we are for our modern-day conveniences. Silence keeps going on about how fabulous it is to have light and running water, so she can wash her hands and brush her teeth. We’re thrilled to see our indoor thermometer creep up to 59 degrees F., as opposed to 47 during the outage. Our friend Ben is very happy to brush my teeth, take a hot shower, and flush the toilet.
But you know what? OFB and Silence have talked at some length about what we missed the most, and it was a decent amount of light. 13 hours of darkness is unhealthy; trying to read or do anything else in low light is unhealthy. The defining factor for us wasn’t cold, or lack of hygiene, or humiliating bathroom practices, as we might have expected; it was the super-short days and subsequent endless, sleepless nights.
As Silence said, once our power was finally restored: “You know, Ben, I might just stay up all night.” Water for hand-washing and dishwashing is excellent. Heat, light, and plumbing are excellent. But OMG, strong light to see by coupled with computer and other electronic services are more than excellent: They’re essential, at least for us.
Did you lose power? If so, what did you miss the most?
