[langdon]

just thought today it would be fun for people to write in what they have so far in their opinion
invented for their smallholding!
big or small, maybe you might just shed some light on someones situation.
look forward to reading some cool ideas
langdon

[humphreymctush]

I used to be quite squeemish so I designed and built a number of poultry exexuting machines. Some of them looked like medieval torture devices, some more Heath Robinson or Wallace and Gromit. The yuck factor of wringing a chickens neck however is now preferable to the extremely dark humour of these machines in action.
By the way they were all humane and efficient incase anyone was worried.

[Budo1]

Something realy quite simple ( *cough* and thats not just me lol) i have been struggling to conserve on the amount of hay used with the rabbits... they scatter it , jump on it and s*** on it and then will not touch it. I wanted mangers so that they could have fun scrabbling at it and less waste when feeding. i bought manger which were ment o be large but were awful and held less than a handful.
Im always looking for alternative uses of standard items and whilst in local pound store garden section picked up several very large half round hanging baskets... stripped em down to bare basket and fixed to side panel of hutches... jobs a good um  lol... not exactly and invention but saved me a packet as the the OTH had found some feeder manger at 8 quid!! and was about to buy a load of these... the alternative at a pound each i could'nt go wrong 

[Womble]

Easy, for me it's got to be The Chicken!!

[bazzais]

Two bit of angle iron drilled and bolted together - attach a rope to it, the other to your vehicle.  Put your fence inbetween the angle iron, tighten the bolts - pull the fence taught. Best fence tensioner ever if your on level ground.

Get the back cab wire mesh off an old 4x4, grind it up into strips, fold in half and nail to a telegraph pole - excellent feeder.

Get a pallet, preferably one of the blue quality ones that your not sposed to have but they still leave with you at delivery time (should charge them storage!) knock a few rungs out intermittently - make an excellent creep feeder entrance.

Caravan chassis's make an excellent base for chicken sheds!! and are 'mobile' for any fussy planners.

Old fenceposts are excellent for a number of things like benches, tables, doors.

Get some old beers kegs and cut them in half for water buckets (they never break!!)

Old gas canisters make excellent stoves if the front is cutout - and my brother is particularly good at making BBQs from them when they have been cut sideways (obviously we dont do that ourselves as we find them like that and just paint them up lol)

All scrap seems to have a value on a smallholdering, its no wonder that most of us must have piles of 'useful' stuff around.

Ta

Baz

[knightquest]

I've only got a back garden in Birmingham Baz but I've got the 'useful stuff' in abundence too. I do like to make things out of scrap too. I suspect your list could have gone on a lot longer eh? 

[bazzais]

There is never enough space for 'useful' objects - even if you have acres!!

Its nice to have a bucket of bolts, corner of wood, pile of pallets, stash of angle iron and a bonus if you have a cache of old plate aluminium off an extinct caravan.

There is no better invention that bailer twine though, got to have that tied on every gatepost incase you need it.

Ta

Baz

[langdon]

been collecting very good quality timber recently and now have too much lying around as we use it.
today had one of those thoughts
collect some pallets and make a structure that keeps them in e.g.
i collect the timber at 6ft in lenght all different sizes, so with some of the planks nail two on the back of some pallets ( floor )
again use timber to support the upright pallets and again for the top.
then just slide the wood in!!!!!!!!
dont know if i have put it across well but i can see it in me head
photo will follow
langdon

[knightquest]

Looking forward to seeing that Langdon 

I've been asking everyone to get me pallets....... they have and now I need to build a shed to keep em. Oh well 

Ian

[Fleecewife]

When we first moved to our smallholding there was NOTHING here - no bits of wood, pallets, odd bits of metal, all the things you have listed which are vital.  Took a while to build up the stashes but now we have most of what we need for everyday 'inventions'.
The most useful thing we thought up here was to bolt the hen houses down onto concrete pads, and build sheep shelters around four concreted in strainers.  It's quite windy up here and even the heaviest constructions blew away in 100mph winds, so everything has to be tied down and nothing left lying about to become airborne missiles.

[langdon]

WOW

[OhLaLa]

Fleecewife - how do you keep the roofs on the sheep shelters? Gets a bit windy here too...

 

[Fleecewife]

Hi OhLa La.  Our main sheep shelter is made of half-circle corrugated tin with the back filled in with wood (was originally for the pigs which we don't have any more).  This year we moved it along a bit so we could get at the manure for the garden, and raised it onto a wooden base wall, which is attached to concreted in posts. Everything is bolted using heavy duty bolts, but it still has to be tested by a high wind.  We had a HelpX worker here this summer who built a new sheep shelter in another field and that too has to be tested - I'm not convinced he fully understood what the wind can be like. We are also changing the flat roofs on other shelters to apex types, as we think they may catch the wind less.  Roofs are always a problem but we find that not having too much of an overhang to catch the wind, using battens over the tin where bolts are to go through and using plenty of bolts helps.  For the hen houses, we put well-pinned-down chicken wire over the top of the fabric based roofing felt (the heavy kind for under slates and roof tiles) to prevent it tearing and blowing away.  Nothing is foolproof and big winds are always a worry but by avoiding flimsy structures and pinning everything down with more bolts than we think we need we give ourselves a better chance.  Before we came up with bolting houses down onto concrete bases, we used to throw ropes over the roof then tie them onto stobs hammered in at an angle - this idea came from the practice on windy islands of using fishing nets over thatched roofs and weighting them with rocks.

[bamford6]

a trip to the tip always get the old ballcocks off the header tanks i then bold them on to a plastic container plastic water pipe and thats a 5 gallon water feeder that lasts yeres .have one  in most off my pens .