Possum Living
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Possum living is a country term denoting how to live on just about no money. This is an excerpt from a country living thread about the high cost of chicken feed...
A couple of weeks ago, one of the hens died and I asked DH if he would deal with it or if I needed to. He said he'd do it but forgot. I put her in the trash can to keep the dogs away from her. By the next morning, that hen was alive with fly larvae, henceforth referred to as FL. DH still didn't deal with her. I would have done it myself when it wasn't so yucky. Before long, FL were crawling from under the trash can lid, falling on the ground and crawling away. Double yucky. DH finally donned surgical gloves, took the bag down to the west field and dumped the mess into a "grave." Then he hung the bag upside down in a tree to allow the rest of the FL to escape and threw away the bag. This whole episode follows along with "a stitch in time saves nine," right?
The dogs are good at killing varmints that wander into the yard and Wednesday morning there was a small possum out in of my garden beds. He was already in rigor. Hmmm. I used a stick to push the remains into an old bucket and hung it in the chicken house. That afternoon, I could smell it from 30' away but oddly enough, the smell wasn't so bad in the coop. There was a small mass of very small FL coming from the recently departed--nothing "dear" to me about a possum, thanks. The smell is now negligible and this morning, 1/4-1/2" FL are crawling down the outside of the bucket and the hens are scratching a spot under the bucket where the FL are landing.
This will work in warm weather but not when we don't have flies. I've read about people during the Great Depression cooking road kill to feed to their chickens. Not in my kitchen, not in my pots. Un-uh! NO. Ain't gonna happen.
I wonder how long this varmint will last. All I can see at present is loose fur. At one point, the entire jawbone was exposed.
Cheap chicken feed, indeed.
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ash to ash, dust to dust
