Terry: Read your idea of putting in a concrete footing at the gates. We had three pens but only two entrances: one thru the main building and one from the outside. The outside gate closed so the bottom of the frame rested on top of a 2x12 board with latches at top and bottom. The internal gates allowed us to herd the birds from one pen to another to separate them by age. If you aren't opposed to recycling, old screen doors make excellent internal gates. Those with metal kick panels on the bottom are even better. We used fruit tree, oak and willow trimmings for the brush. Occasionally, we'd throw in a few flakes of oat hay to give them something to scratch and thrash in. One of the peculiar things about pheasants is that they can become cannibalistic in captivity. When that occurred, our vet suggested we put blinders (blinkers?)on the dominant birds. These little gems looked like solid Ben Franklin glasses and were attached by running a pin thru the holes of the blinkers then thru the nostrils of the birds. Sounds cruel but they were effective. The reason we didn't butcher the offending birds was they tended to be the best laying hens. We hatched the eggs (200 at a time) in large incubators. Carol

I second what Lilo said, Anne. Very apt quote in a time where so much is stolen for man's wants and needs, with barely a thought to the animals who are left homeless and scurrying for their very lives. We've have foxes, deer, even pheasants coming to the garden for a little solace from the ongoing building mayhem in our town. It sure iasn't the same place we moved to in 1962.

My Okie father, who was born in 1910, composted his whole life, as had both his dustbowl farmer parents before him, so I figure that my family has been composting continually for well over a century. (When someone was in college or in WWII, some other family member was running a pile somewhere.) In almost 56 years, I have only lived in one home that didn't have a compost pile---during a nine month stint I spent in Boston once. In the summer when we went to our camp, we put our compostables into a bottom-less trash can that my father sank into the ground. That was in operation for fifty years until an overenthusiastic snowplow guy plowed well into our back yard and drove it out of the ground. The lid was unscathed and I still have it. For some reason, my father or someone stamped a neat "1945" into it. The bin in our backyard at home was a three-sided, wooden box about 5 feet x 10. We dropped our household debris into the bin from the garden crib above it. When my father (the gardener) died, my brother, mother and I continued to add to what my family called the "mulch pile", but we never harvested from it. It was just the way we managed waste. For years and years. I moved out and began to compost at my new apartment. When my mother moved in the 80s I moved the contents of the bin along with her other household items. I planted a garden with some of my father's plants---Blue Flag and Solomon's Seal and bluebells---and used all of the compost in the new garden. Someone gave me a huge wooden box from Lockheed and I set it up at the new place for my mother's new bin. My stepfather later built another bin 5' x 8. Over time we added three mobile, wire bins. I have five bins going now here at our former cottage, plus an area about 7'x 20' that is under three feet of packed leaves and grass clippings, an area that will be planted someday. I covered an area about 15'x20 last year under about 50 bags of leaves, about, I can't really remember, I think over 50 pumpkins, six contractor's bag of seaweed, four bales of rotten hay, and a few bags of pine needles. It's shocking how much that shrank by summer's end. It's good looking stuff, though, so I thought that I should head to another area. I'm going to heavily mulch that area with chicken house litter this spring and plant something there.

So much fun to read everyone's responses! I never really thought about what "cooking" is, and I don't know that it's important to me to have a definition, per se. I prepare a lot of meals without actually heating anything...e.g. yogurt and fresh fruit, salads, sandwiches, plus the preparation of meat and veggies for my husband to grill -- he cooks, but without my prep, that couldn't happen. I like to cook a lot of things from scratch, but I do use supermarket ingredients such as dried pasta, butter, cheese, peanut butter, canned tomatoes, some canned beans, etc. I do buy supermarket bread, rolls and tortillas, but occasionally make homemade bread or focaccia or tortillas. I prefer fresh veggies, but do use some frozen; I cook beans myself and freeze them, but also use the occasional can of black beans. I like to bake - cookies, brownies, bars, muffins, scones, quick breads, the occasional pie or cake. I do make homemade pie crust. We occasionally order pizza, but usually just make it at home. My stand-alone freezer is full to bursting now -- besides a lot of beef, chicken, shrimp, spices, and butter, I've got black beans and garbanzos that I cooked, homemade Cornish pasties, homemade applesauce,and some cheeses. Tonight for the family's dinner, I heated up some of the pasties and applesauce (I'm going out with my book club...yay!). We do use some convenience foods...cereal, bread, Greek yogurt, the occasional frozen dinner, and some Purdue chicken fingers (hey, nobody's perfect!). Some canned soup. Granola bars and fruit cups for the kids' quick lunch box grabs. I didn't always cook this much from scratch -- it's evolved over they years. I used to use more convenience products, but have sort of gotten away from it over time. My mom cooked from scratch a lot, but used convenience products, too. Interesting that someone mentioned just-add-water pancake mix. I don't use that often -- sometimes I mix up the dry part of the pancake recipe, divide in in half, and portion the halves into airtight containers so I can quickly add milk, eggs, and melted butter to make from-scratch whole grain pancakes on a weekday morning. However, I usually keep a box of just-add-water mix in the pantry for those days when we are simply out of eggs or milk. Bon appetit, everyone!