5 Effective Tips For Winterizing Your Chicken Coop

When you are building a chicken coop, taking care of weather conditions is extremely important. Especially for the winter months with sub zero temperatures. Failure to properly plan your chicken house can result in the birds falling sick. If you are keen to have healthy birds and eggs every day, then winterizing your chicken coop is very important.

Chickens normally fall sick when they have to face cold weather and moisture. So proper insulation and heating is required to keep the birds happy.

Here are some tips for winterizing your chicken coop:

1) When building a chicken house, plan for having well insulated walls. The insulation should be such that the birds cannot peck or eat them.

2) Have pine shavings on the floor and the shelves where the birds normally sleep. This will keep the birds warm and healthy.

3) You should have proper arrangements for heating the waterers so that water does not freeze. This is extremely important for having proper water supply for the birds. Alternately you may have to hand carry water buckets several times a day from your home to the coop. This can be a difficult task.

4) Anther technique that is used for winterizing the chicken coop is to have ceramic lamps for heating. These lamps just produce heat and no light. It is important to install the lamps at a height and location where no one can even touch them by mistake.

5) For certain chicken house designs you can have arrangements for having shower curtains on the outside. This will stop the cold winds and snow from making any kind of impact on the house. This technique for winterizing chicken coop may save you from having heating inside the house.

Do you know that a good chicken coop plan can cut your time and effort by half and also save you a lot of money on building material? To learn how to build a chicken coop that delivers maximum benefits without investing a huge amount of money and effort - Winterizing Chicken Coop

Homeschool Minute - Parts Of A House Fly

 

This is what we have worked on today. For the life of me , I cannot find where I printed the cards from. It is parts of a house fly. I also have parts of an ant cards. Cannot remember where I found the printable, but we love them. PLEASE _ if someone knows where the printable is from post it in comments! 

Little Man loves doing "parts of" activities. He loves to see how things are made and how they work. We also found a dvd at the library to watch about insects and it had some information in it about flies and ants. Gave him some blank paper and he drew flies that he was pretending were monsters and stuff. He did some math - addition - with some tiny flies that I had gotten at Dollar Tree during Halloween. There are 25 in a bag of these little flies. They really look life-like - Big Bubby came in from work this morning and actually tried to swat one. Anyway we have 50 of them and he used them to do some addition. A lot of fun. 

Homemade Crazy Fun Putty Dough

Pour 1/3 cup liquid starch on a old cookie sheet. Using A craft stick, stir in 1 cup craft glue slowly. After it starts to clump, let it stand for a few minutes. Put a small bit of starch on your fingers and knead the dough mixture. Now you can pull it, stretch it, roll it, and even use it to lift pictures from the funny pages. I let my son play with this at the kitchen table on the cookie sheet. Make sure not to get it on carpet or furniture. Little Man had fun with the Sunday comics. Store it in small, airtight container.

Our Food Storage Has Been A Lifesaver...

The last 3 months has been so hard for us. Hubby switching jobs and he's been sick, taking 2 weeks off for that. If we didn't have the food storage we would've starved! Our savings was used for bills and medical, so having the food helped a lot. Didn't have to worry about feeding all of us on top of worrying about everything else.

Having food storage is a good idea for any type of emergency. Not just disaster, weather, zombie outbreak, etc. It is a good idea to have food storage because anything could happen. You never know what could happen. Lay-offs, sickness, switching jobs, moving and more. There are many things that could happen to us that make having food storage a great idea.

The Healthy Prepper

The Healthy Prepper - A Resource Guide For Healthy Preparedness For You AND Your Pets! was a free book when this post was written.

The Healthy Prepper book reveals the preparedness secrets for thriving instead of just surviving and how you and your pets can be prepared for any situation in a healthy way. Information in this book is not like anything you’ve heard before in ANY prepper book!

In This Book You'll Discover:

* The #1 all natural item you should have in your preparedness kit that will knock out ANY virus - often in 24 hours or less!

* The absolute worse food to stock up on that most preppers buy a lot of.

* 2 little known and very unique methods that will make harmful insects want to stay far away from your survival garden while at the same time increasing the vigor, health and yield of your crops.

* How to create clean, pure, sparkling water out of thin air.

* What all natural items you should always include in your pet’s emergency preparedness kit.

And much, much more!

Also this book is meant to be a resource guide and not just an informative read. So many people only write about a topic and leave you scratching your head trying to figure out where to find what they are talking about. And if the product or resource written about isn't on the first 10 pages or so of Google then good luck finding it. This book is different. Links are provided in the book to most everything written about saving you lots of your precious time trying to locate many unique items you may have never even heard of. This is a true resource guide.

Be a Surthrivalist. Buy your copy now! 

Food Storage Recipe - Fireside Chicken Soup

Fireside chicken soup

Need:

2 tablespoon butter

1 medium carrot, sliced

1 celery stalk, sliced

1/4 cup mushrooms, sliced

2 packages of chicken ramen noodles

4 cups water

1 1/2 cup canned shredded chicken

2 tablespoon flour

(  you can exchange all of vegetables with dehydrated or freeze-dried.)

Saute the veggies in the butter. Add the noodles, seasoning packs, and 3 1/2 cups of the water.  Cook for a few minutes. Add he flour to the remaining 1/2 cup of water and then add to the soup. Serve. Sandwiches are good with this.

Food Storage Recipe - Chocolate Snowdrop Cookies

This is such an easy cookie recipe and great for the holidays coming up. I am already getting ready for all of the holiday cooking coming up. Hoping that family comes to my house this year.

Chocolate Snowdrop Cookies

NEED:

1 box of devil's food cake mix

2 1/4 cup of frozen whipped topping , that has been thawed out.

1 egg

1/2 cup of powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl , mix the cake mix, whipped topping, and the egg. Mix it well. Form into 1 inch balls and roll in the powdered sugar. Set the on a lightly greased cookie sheet a couple of inches apart. Bake for 10 - 12 minutes. Cool them on the pan before you place them on a plate.

YUMMY!

DIY Water Filter

To ensure that you have clean water , that is free of sediments, vegetation, etc, you have to have a good water filter. You will still have to boil to kill the germs, bacteria, etc. This is great for if you have a stream close by or some other water supply.

You can make one very easily. You need 2 clay flower pots. You will be setting them one above the other one. In the bottom of the upper pot you want to place a large sponge. A clean new one. Stuff the sponge into the bottom tightly so that no water can get by it.  You will also put one in the bottom of the lower pot. But the bottom pot also has layers of other filtering material , 1 layer of smooth pebbles, coarse sand, and then a top layer of pounded charcoal about 4 inches thick. On top place one more layer of smooth pebbles. This prevents the charcoal from getting all stirred around from the water dripping down from the upper pot.

The upper pot should be the largest and if the lower one is strong it should be able to set on it just fine. You could add two strips of wood as support. Put the two pots on a stool with a hole drilled in the bottom that is lined up with the hole in the bottom pot so that the water can drip down into a clean jug for using the water. The sponge in the upper pot acts to stop the worst of the impurities and should be replaced frequently. Very frequently. The lower pot should be fine to only be replaced about once a year. Only a bit of attention , with changing sponge in top pot once or twice a month and this should last you and with little care.

Guide to Trapping

Guide to Trapping was a free book when this post was written. Great survival book to have in your survival library.

From the description:

Trapping has become somewhat of a lost art, but interest in the sport is as strong as ever thanks to a stable fur market and a growing need to control mammal populations or remove nuisance animals. In Guide to Trapping, Jim Spencer covers strategies for successfully harvesting popular species such as raccoon, muskrat, mink, otter, beaver, coyote, gray fox, red fox, bobcat, skunk, and opossum. His entertaining and informative writing will appeal to trappers of all levels. Spencer discusses trap styles and the basics of establishing and working a trapline, including techniques for fastening and adjusting traps and a species-by-species review of trapping tactics for the country s most pursued furbearers. The field-tested techniques, carefully explained and illustrated, will help trappers make sets that deliver maximum results.

Homeschool Minute - Homemade Water & Landform Tiles

I had seen these water and landform tiles in a catalog and online, but just couldn't bring myself to pay as much as $$40.00 for the set. Like these Sandpaper Land and Water Form Cards. I thought about it for a week, thinking of ways to make some. First, I thought of going to hardware store and getting actual tiles and painting them etc. But, even that would cost too much for us. Thought some more. Was at Dollar Tree and it came to me...get some foam poster board, sandpaper, and poster paint.  Total cost was $5.00!!!!!

Frugal homeschooling!


I first cut the foam board into 10x10 squares getting 6 squares out of each foam board. I had printed some water and landform cards from pinterest, either Montessori Now or another one, and used that as idea of how to cut the sandpaper. Sandpaper being the land. Glued it on the tile, then painted the water with the blue paint. I left room at the bottom for writing what it is, like gulf, island, etc.


Great learning tool that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Little Man loves them. Has been looking, learning, and playing with them all day. Even got his small boats out to push them around in the "water".