Mother's Down-Home Country Lore

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Consider yourself warned!

"The next time you butcher a goat," suggests Kitty Bunin of North Sidney, Nova Scotia, "saw the horns into cross-sectional slices, drill holes into each small disc, and you'll have ... goat buttons! Just one more small household necessity that you'll no longer have to buy."

Now that spring is upon us, you're going to need a feeder for those baby chicks. "And the easiest way I know of to make one," says Lawrence Hamilton of Yreka, California, "is to close off the ends of a piece of rain gutter. I borrowed the rain trough from my house's roof, but you can also round up a good supply of free gutter sections at the local dump, or wherever a building's been torn down."

Diaper rash troubling your baby? Karen Dermer of Idaho Springs, Colorado recommends the following remedy (which was handed down to her by her grandmother): Brown some unbleached white flour on top of the stove, stirring constantly until uniformly dark ... then apply the cooled, scorched powder to the Infant's skin after each diaper change. The young'un's bottom should begin to heal within a day.

Are you new at hand-loading loose hay on a wagon? Here are a couple of tips from a seasoned homesteader:

[1] Don't mound the hay up in the middle of the wagon's bed. Spread the load out evenly and take special care to fill in each comer firmly.

[2] Once you've filled the carrier bed of a short-sided (one with grain or side boards around its bed instead of a hayrack mounted on its back end) wagon, load the next few layers so that they overlap the sides of your hay hauler.

Then, when you top the whole pile with that final grassy mound in the middle, it'll have the broadest possible bass to sit on ... and will be less likely to slide off on the way back to the barn.

OK. Now it's YOUR turn! We've all come up with practical down-home, time-tested solutions to the frustrating little problems that bug us every day. Let's hear YOUR best "horse sense " idea.

Send your country lore to Nancy Bubel RD 1, Wellsville, Pennsylvania 17365. I'll make sure that the most useful suggestions I receive will appear in upcoming editions of this feature. And the home office editors of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS reg (the ones who work down in the mountains of North Carolina) tell me that a one-year subscription—or extension of an existing subscription—will be sent to each contributor whose idea or tip is printed in this column. —Nancy.

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