Carla Emory has a couple of paragraphs about home-grown rabbit food: "The old-timers who wintered their rabbits on food they'd grown themselves fed them such things as stock beets and cabbage in winter as well as their grain and hay. So can you. Pea and bean vines can be cured like hay and make an excellent hay substitute or supplement. "In season, rabbits like anything green, but you must be careful not to feed them plants that are outrightly poisonous, such as chokecherry or rhubarb leaves, or potato peels with sprouts or the ones that have been in the sun long enough to get even the slightest touch of green. Other greens are only mildly poisonous in the uncooked state such as pigweed, amaranth greens, spinach, comfrey, and Swiss chard--but for a creature with a small body weight like a rabbit, especially a young rabbit, these can be a problem too. Much of the reason that people develop a fear of growing their own rabbit food, or have had bad experiences with home feeding of rabbits is that they don't understand how very many greens, wild or domestic, are not fully safe to feed rabbits, and which are. Before feeding a leafy green or herb for the first time, check the list under "Edible for Rabbits" below, to see if there is a warning of any sort about it. Stick to feeding them human-type salad greens unless you know for sure a wild one is safe. If cooking is advised for a green or category of greens (the amaranth family), don't feed it to rabbits who, of course, would be eating it raw. If it's in the least toxic, don't feed it to them. If it might have chemical residues in it, don't feed it to them. "I plant extra rows of lettuce for them. And when I weed in the summer, I take along a bucket to put the pulled edible weeds for rabbits. Feeding this way you never have to buy a rabbit pellet and they do fine. When fed home-grown stuff, they'll grow a little slower (and more normally) to that 2-lb. butchering size. But it's far cheaper, and I have organic meat because conception on, they've been nourished with home-grown foods and greens, or hay and grain from a source I know is chemical-free. "Vegetables/Greens/Fruits: A combination of grains is better than a single one. A combination of veggies and greens plus grain and hay is better yet. Let your rabbits do some of the picking and choosing. They'll choose what they need. They'lll love much of what you offer of this sort, and it's a nice way to tame them--hand-feeding them some veggie treats. For pregnant and nursing does, variety is especially important. Offer the vegetables or leafy greens in season (the longer the season, the better). Garden and kitchen vegetables and fruit scraps can be included also, as long as they're not on the unhealthy list. If you're just starting to supplement a rabbit's diet in this way, go slowly at first until your bunny gets used to it. Limit what you feed so that surplus doesn't rot in the cage. Rotting surpluses are good for chickens or pigs, but not rabbits. In fact, rabbits can get sick from eating partly spoiled greens. Garden vegetables for rabbits, as for people, are mostly water. Greens are water plus lots of minerals and vitamins. Root vegetables are higher in energy supplied, lower in the mineral-and-vitamin department."

jmntnc Here is a simple sketch of the girder assembly I suggested. By all means use screws (3" or 3-1/2" deck screws are great) and glue or construction adhesive per john wa, ditto on the drilled pilot holes. The single large eye bolt photio posted by broke not is exactly the type of eye bolt I had in mind. The one he posted is a one piece "forged" unit. You can also get one piece "welded" units where the eye loop is welded back to itself. DO NOT USE any of the "unwelded eyebolts shown in broke not's first photo, they are strictly for light duty and could "uncurl" under a heavy load. The "welded" or the "forged" type are both OK and 1/2" size will hold anything the girder can bear.

Haahahahaa! Karen this is SO funny. I'm bursting into laughter reading these posts again, and remembering writing and reading them at the time. Well done! And my favourite part about Martha Stewart dropping in with her dish towel parachute!!! WAY too funny!

Yeah! Yes, food safe by the sticker! Problem solved. Pretty, too. The fork means general food, actually, and the wine glass means that it's okay for the things that soak up lead, like wine and honey. Together they mean stop worrying. :) I'm so pleased you found the sticker!! Re oven, you said that they're "serving pieces", and also that at least one absorbed a lot of water. That makes me think they might be terracotta but also could just be clay. The problem is the water. If there's more water in the clay than can get out easily when heated, the dish could crack, or if it's too rapid a heat difference, it could shatter. If you just want to warm it, rather than cook in it, it should be fine. It will have been fired at a much higher temperature just to exist, and it really is the water that's the issue. I had a pottery oven dish that cracked on the first use, so the company sent a replacement. That cracked on the second or third use, and I gave up. And that dish was specifically designed for cooking and I was careful about not causing a thermal shock from changing temperatures too fast. If it were stoneware, it wouldn't soak up so much water with the green beans. I don't think it would if it were terracotta either, but terracotta does darken. Both stoneware and terracotta are fine, unglazed, at baking temperatures. Just don't go right from the oven to cold stone (put it on a rack or trivet). But I fear your dishes might just be clay (pottery), at which point, at least try it with something not too wet if you're going to put them in the oven. Writersblock, people with high lead exposure from tins or cosmetics, or eating paint, showed cognitive deficits. Children are especially vulnerable, which is why it's so important to remove flaking lead paint. It tastes like candy. Painters used to chew on it too. But the epidemiologists and environmental health researchers look at statistical clusters using health, attendance, mandated test scores, employment records, etc., to find where there are deficits and do site investigations to see if there are pollutants that might be correlated with them. The fact is that people will survive if they can--you can cut and serve the air in parts of China, and people are surviving--but they weren't just fine, and things are actually much better now with a bigger population because while there are plenty of noxious particulates still being spewed, they're not as bad. There are some extreme examples of lead poisoning in history, where people actually died, but even with high exposure, they're more likely to go gently mad. Some of the other heavy metals are less obvious. There are therapies that can, at least sometimes, remove them from the body. I saw one report that a kid was diagnosed as autistic who really had heavy metal poisoning. Fine art painters who chew their brushes (like chewing a pencil) end up with heavy metal poisoning. They don't die. But it's not good. The great news is that unless the people who made PM's pretty pottery were lying thieves, we now know that no such thing is going to happen from using her dishes!!!