Monday March 6, 2023 Guerneville CA.
It showered this morning and quite by the time I got it going and the sun came out for a nice day.
Chicken mulch pen mulch
One of the things I did today was put some more mulch in this pen. It’s the pen I feed them in.
As you can see, it’s pretty muddy from all the recent rains.
Rodent bait stations
Before I got the mulch for the pen, I finished off these two rodent bait stations for my brother. I needed to cut down the planter pots my brother rounded up for his lids. I got the tools and cut them down a bit.
Here’s the finished product I will give to him to set up over in his gardens.
Comments
Deb, in comments had some useful suggestions for me on the rodent problem.
I forgot to mention earlier that I’d tried all the bucket traps with not much success. There are lots of YouTube’s about all kinds of these bucket traps. They look like they’d work. I tried some of them and found them not to be effective. I think I caught one rat, but that was it. You see, once you get one of them, rats are real smart and you likely won’t get anymore. That is true of any trap you use, that’s was after a long time watching them on my cam, I gave up on traps. I tried many types of them with the same result. Rat’s also seem to be borne knowing stuff as most of them wouldn’t mess with the buckets or even go in one I tried with a hole in the bottom.
I did add some salt to the baking soda and plaster of Paris and there is water in the chicken pen where the bait stations I was watching is and no luck with that either. One of the reasons they come to the chicken pen is for water as there is a constant supply there for the chickens.
Every thing I tried did not work until I started using the store bough stuff with the rodent station I showed you.
The trouble with most people trying these YouTube things out is they haven’t watched what is going on with a cam for a long enough time and just keep passing what others have said on. One of the problems with watching them is it’s very hard to tell them apart to figure out what’s going on. I had a mommy with four young ones that I could tell apart. The ones that were in my attic and destroyed my garage. Almost everything I saw on YouTube failed, so I kept at it, thinking out of the box as they say and finally had some success.
Anyway, thanks Deb.
Mulching the chicken pen
I got back to the mulch and went over to my brother’s where I knew there was some nice redwood mulch and loaded up the wheelbarrow several times.
And brought it back to the chicken’s pen and dumped it in there.
It didn’t take long to finish off that project.
Planting peach trees
My brother Tom said he was planting the peach trees he bought, so to take a break, I went over to see how he was coming along.
With all the rains, he had a pond there, which should drain shortly.
He was just planting his last tree as I arrived.
He planted them all on this mound, six of them and will plant some other trees on the rest of the mound.
Clouds
As I walked back to my house I could see some clouds starting to move in which meant we’d likely get a rain shower soon.
When I got back to my place, the chickens wanted to get into the front yard and were waiting at the gate to be let in.
Watching clouds
I sat around chair hopping the rest of the day, watching the clouds slowly move in.
Black clouds started to come in and I thought, surely a big rain shower would hit soon, but it waited until after dark.
Nice day.
Thanks for the explanation Bob, I have only had to deal with mice, traps work for them, they seem to follow the scent of the one that went before and do the same thing. I suppose that is why rats are used for lots of experiments, much smarter than mice.