Category: Farm/Country Living

We’ve got the energy crisis, we’ve got the foreign quagmire, we’ve got the wacky economy. Wait a minute — It’s the Seventies all over again! I did the Seventies already! Hey! No flashbacks!

Admittedly, people are getting the details wrong. Hybrid cars that combine fuel economy and conspicuous consumption? Gross! A fad for piercings that leaves young people with more holes in them than Bonnie and Clyde? Double gross! What are people smoking?

Look, if we’re going to do the Seventies again, let’s do it right. Attention, young people! Ditch the black clothing and wear pastels! Attention, politicians! Let’s see more resignations! Attention, lunatic fringe! More conspiracy theories! (It was JFK himself on the grassy knoll!)

Let’s all pull together and make this a groovier world.

That is all.

Anyone with a farm has an ongoing rodent problem. I’ve noticed that other “alternative living” writers deal with this issue the same way they deal with everything — denial. (Of course, it helps that most of their readers live in the city.)

Once you’ve had an outbreak of rats in your brooder house and lose a whole batch of chicks to them (and you will — everything happens to you eventually), you won’t be able to regain the live-and-let-live attitude of yesteryear. But once you decide to make the area around hour house and barn a rodent-free zone, there are good ways and bad ways of doing it.

I hate snap traps and glue traps, and I assume that ultrasonic pest control is a scam, so that leaves poison. While a mousetrap has the kind of lethality you associate with joke-shop pranks, poison is the real deal. Let’s all be careful out there. The goal is to kill off the pesky rodents (preferably so quickly they don’t know what hit them) without injuring any other creatures or yourself. The techniques should be pet-proof and safe to any little kids in the neighborhood that wander through. Extra credit for being non-messy and long-lasting, so that intermittent attention won’t prevent the stuff from working.

Not that there aren’t other methods. My grandfather once filled a washtub mostly full of water and put a layer of rolled oats on top. Then he leaned a board against the washtub to give a ramp that mice could run up. He assumed they’d do a swan dive into the wonderful-smelling oats. After several days, the tub looked just the same as before, so he dumped it in disgust, and much to his surprise, there were at least a hundred drowned mice under the floating oats! No doubt there are plenty of other methods that I haven’t tried but work in the right circumstances.

This spring, I went upscale on my rodent control, buying store-bought bait stations for rats and mice rather than improvising them. This has worked very well, and I recommend this.

The Eaton Rat Fortress (shown above), is a big plastic bait station for rats and mice, meant to be left outdoors. It keeps the weather off the bait, and the wire bait rods prevent the rats from dragging entire bait blocks away to their tunnels. I hate it when that happens. By fixing the bait in place, the rodents have to eat it rather than hoarding it.

Also, when they gnaw on bait, little poison shavings get left behind. A good bait station hangs onto these so you can dump them responsibly, rather than leaving them scattered all over the place.

An allen-key bolt keeps kids from getting into the station, while baffles make the bait inaccessible to pets and birds. The transparent lid lets you see whether you need to add more bait. Very nice.

What I used to do was to nail bait blocks to pieces of wood or hide them inside lengths of plastic pipe. This was relatively ineffective. I hate it when the bait dissolves in the damp or when a mouse carries half a pound of bait pellets away one at a time and hides them in an old boot. I want the poison to stay where it’s put and be a hazard only to the target critters.

For mice, Eaton makes a cute little bait station with all the advantages of the big rat station, except that it doesn’t have a transparent lid. This works better than the D-Con bait trays I’ve been using indoors, for all the reasons listed above. The bait stations have a built-in lock that keeps kids and pets away from the bait.

I’ve been using these for over a month. For some reason, a lot more bait is being consumed around the house than around the barn. Go figure. I’m especially pleased by the effectiveness of the bait stations outside the house, since I selfishly prefer the rodents to keel over outdoors, where their decomposition doesn’t stink up the house.

The only question in my mind is the effect on cats if they eat the occasional poison-fortified mouse. Last time I searched for this kind of information, I came up empty. The cats have always seemed just the same whether I have had bait out or not, though.

I always take the “trust, but verify” approach, which means that instead of anticipating trouble, I wait to see what happens. Often in turns out that “abolutely necessary” precautions aren’t necessary. But sometimes it blows up in my face.

So I wasn’t too surprised when some spammer left “comments” on most of the posts, offering to sell you pills to put extra lead in your pencil. I’ve tightened up the anti-spam features of the blog to see if that helps. If not, there are other things I can try.

After the most amazingly wet and cold spring ever, the sun is shining. Beautiful weather. I spent Thursday in the Bay Area on business, and got home late Friday afternoon. I put the rotary mower on the back of the tractor after 7 PM and got almost two hours of mowing done before the sun touched the western hills. These long days come in handy.

The grass was over knee-high, even though I had mowed it once or twice before it became too wet to mow again. Never seen a spring like it. Normally, my neighbors would be almost done cutting hay by now. They haven’t even started yet. Strange year.

There’s some whining coming out of the gearbox in the mower. Time to lube it up again. On these “bush hog” mowers, the oil seals give out after a few years and you either have to top them off all the time or use the trick on found on the “Yesterday’s Tractors” forums: squirt in a bunch of grease along with the oil, which thickens it and keeps it from running out the bottom of the gearbox. I tried it and this worked for several years.

Last night’s mowing was a triumph. I consider mowing to be a “success” if I only mow one water line and don’t destroy anything else. It’s a triumph if I don’t break anything at all.