Hey you dang woodchucks!

Quit chuckin' my wood!

We have woodchucks (ground hogs) around here.
The farmer who rents our field planted soybeans this year and the buggers like to eat bean when they are small and taste good.

I usually get to shoot three or four every year as I see them out in the bean field.

This year I shot five and was still seeing them! Plus they were getting really skittish. The beans have been eaten in a large semi-circle around my farm barn about 20 yards deep!

After shooting five I figured I had one left. I shot at him twice and missed (those are the only two misses this year) so he is being real spooky to get a shot at.

So I decided to set the live trap out and see if I could round up this last straggler. So what to use for bait??
I decided to try celery with a little peanut butter. Next morning I had a coon. Well great at least he wouldn't be after the chickens.
So I shot him and dumped him and reset the trap without bait. Next morning another coon, great again.

Next morning the trap was rolled over like a coon was on top and it tipped. So I took the trap and mashed down some tall weeds and stuck it there with the weeds on each side. It looks like a tunnel now running into the weeds.

I caught three more ground hogs since I have done that a little over a week ago.

So the score is Randy 8 - ground hogs ?

We'll just have to see how many more there actually are out there.

I am becoming a big believer in live traps. If I were fur trapping this one would of paid for itself in coon pelts quickly. I bought it a couple years ago when we had meat chickens out in a chicken tractor and the coons were getting them. It really does a number on the coons.

Still clinging to my God and my guns,
Randy

How to make balm of Gilead salve

If you ever wondered how to make black salve also call balm of Gilead.

I ran across this post from "freedom of the hills" that tells how to make it.

You can view it here; Balm of Gilead Salve

This is a great skill to have and a handy salve to keep on hand.

Still clinging to my God and my guns,
Randy

Knee High by the Fourth of July...

So goes the old saying to tell if you will get a decent yield of corn.

I was surprised with our wet spring the local farmers seemed to have gotten to that benchmark.
I even read that with all the advancements in technology they expect to get a good average year.

For me ... not so well,
My hybrid sweetcorn is about knee high but my saved Indian corn is lagging behind.
Everything was just too wet to plant on time, and then we were out of state for a funeral the first week it was dry enough to plant. I'll let you know this fall how the corn ends up.

Thinking of getting some buckwheat to put in the rest of my tinkering area.'

Still clinging to my God and my guns,
Randy

Be careful how you store your water.

We learned an important lesson yesterday about water storage.
We had bought a couple of those milk jugs of drinking water at the grocery and had put them in the closet.

The Mrs. had been smelling mold for a few weeks but couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

Well it seems those jugs start biodegrading and one of them leaked all over and soaked some cardboard containers and turned to mold.

Seems it was quite a mess (she had most of it cleaned before I got home(great wife I know)).

Never trust those flimsy milk carton type jugs for long term storage.

Still clinging to my God and my guns,
Randy