Author: Robert Plamondon

Robert Plamondon has written three books, received over 30 U.S. patents, founded several businesses, is an expert on free-range chickens, and is a semi-struggling novelist. His publishing company, Norton Creek Press, is a treasure trove of the best poultry books of the last 100 years. In addition, he holds down a day job doing technical writing at Workspot.

The Heating Season is Upon Us

It’s been cold out for a few mornings in a row, so I’ve built fires in the wood stove.

We alternate between heating the house entirely with wood and heating it mostly with wood. We have access to free wood from the neighboring Starker Forest (one of the many elements of their good-neighbor policy), so wood heat is especially attractive for us.

If cheap cordwood isn’t an option, sometimes you can find very inexpensive scrap wood. Nail-free scraps, such as you get from a pallet factory, are better than construction or demolition scraps. We used to get pallet scraps for $60 a cord. These were bone-dry and were really useful if our cordwood wasn’t well-aged.

One thing I’ve learned in my research is that starting fires in wood stoves is a lot easier if you use some cardboard along with the newspaper and kindling. Turns the whole thing from an iffy proposition into a slam-dunk. I learned this from this extension publication. Your tax dollars at work.

Spammers are getting clever

I’ve been seeing a new kind of spam recently: blog-comment spam. Actually, this has been around for a long time, but it has recently become much less stupid.

Before, spammers would try to leave comments on my blog that had some kind of explicit “buy our worthless junk” message, plus a link to their site. The spammers hoped to find unmoderated blogs where these comments would be approved automatically, and would stay up until the blogger noticed them and deleted them.

Now, the actual message consists of nothing but unfocused, non-specific praise for the blog. No ad at all. But there’s still a link back to the spammer’s site.

The goal here is not so much that readers of the blog will click on the link, since they probably won’t, but to fool Google into thinking that the spammer’s site must be important, since so many other sites link to it!

So now I delete all comments that contain nothing but empty praise and a link. I wonder how many bloggers are so starved for attention that they let such comments stand? Probably a lot. Might make an interesting research paper, if you’re in the psychology biz.

By the way, this blog uses the b2evolution package, which is great, but in the future I’m just going to go with blogger.com, and let Google do all my maintenance and updates and backups for me. The price is right (free!), and, frankly, they’re better at it than I am.

Got High Blood Pressure? Buy One of these Monitors

If you have problems with high blood pressure, as I do, you’d probably like to have one of the spiffy high-tech monitors like the Omron HEM-790IT Automatic Blood Pressure Monitor with Advanced Omron Health Management Software

This doohickey runs off four AA batteries and gets an accurate blood pressure reading in less than a minute. This particular model comes with a USB cable and software that will keep track of the readings over time. This is the top-of-the-line model and cost about $75 on Amazon.

I found this particularly useful because I’ve lost a lot of weight over the past year and I suspected (correctly) that my blood-pressure medication was excessive for my current weight, and my blood pressure was actually lower than desirable. My doctor is a great guy (Dr. Shawn Foley at Philomath Family Medicine), and he more or less turned me loose to tune my medication so I’m within his guidelines.

Another thing I found out was that I was a little intimidated by the process of having my blood pressure taken, and this tension made my blood pressure rise! So my medication had been tuned to deal with an anomalously high blood pressure. Taking reading a zillion times with this automated machine got me used to it, so now I get a truer reading.

Having the machine lying around allows you to check things like, “I wonder if this decongestant really is spiking my blood pressure like the warning says it might?”

The machine is a snap to use. Put on the velcro cuff, press the START button, and relax.

How To Build a Better Brooder House

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We’re replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

  • We’re using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even “once in a while” is way too often.
  • We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
  • The three windows wouldn’t provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
  • A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
  • It’s as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It’s good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
  • We’ll be insulating the roof. This isn’t strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here’s a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

Everyone’s Electrified by my Fencing Pages

Mother Earth News has featured my Electric Fencing FAQ in the Happy Homesteader section of their Web site. Check it out! No, not just my FAQ, but the whole section. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

Mother Earth News has been a great resource ever since I was a kid, with lots of hands-on practical stuff that you can cut out and paste down. It’s one of the few print magazines I still subscribe to in this Internet age.

Electric fencing resources:

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