I use a regular light bulb - heat lamps are TOO HOT! My light is on an extension cord with a metal-cone shield around it like the heat lamps, but it is not a heat lamp. I have had it for a long time. I think you can still get them at lumber yards and hardware stores - maybe WalMart too. I have it strung up to the ceiling and hung on a large teacup hook over their cardboard box. I laid aluminum window screens on the top to keep them in and safe. The lamp lays right on the top of the screens. It should not be too close to the chicks however. No closer than two feet anyway. You have to check it often until you figure it out. Much depends upon their brooder box (container). They need room enough in the box to move away in case they get too warm. Don't set the lamp over their water. I just use a large, carboard box for my Brooder Box (a lawnmower came in the one I am using now). No need to buy fancy equipment. They grow too fast to put out money for a few weeks worth of use, unless you are going into the chicken business for earnest. Put the box in a safe place where other animals cannot get to them and where they are out of any drafts and weather. In the bottom of the cardboard box, sprinkle just enough pine shavings (or you can use cedar shavings) to lightly cover the bottom (about $9 per bag). This is their litter and it is also their bedding, so it needs to be changed regularly, as you would any baby. Once a day or every other day, clean it out and put in fresh shavings. It scares them, but as long as you talk to them calmly when you care for them, they will eventually calm down. You can put the soiled litter in your compost pile. Their droppings are tiny beads, about the size of a pea, but very odoriferous. Change their water several times a day. Clean it out with Clorox bleach and water once in awhile to keep down germs and other icky stuff. Make sure they have fresh, clean, cool water, even on cool or cold days. They can go longer without food than they can without fresh, clean, cool water. If the chicks huddle together under the lamp, then it isn't warm enough. If they huddle together away from the lamp, then it is too hot. If they are scattered all around in the box, pecking and softly peeping, then the heat is perfect. If they are peeping loudly, then something is wrong. Check all of the above to see what is the matter. They do prefer to huddle together when they sleep however. As they get older, each week you can raise the light lamp up a little. During the day if it gets warmer where they are kept, and more and more as they grow bigger until they don't need it any longer - when they get their real feathers. I have noticed that chicks get so accustomed to the light that they are afraid of the dark, so I keep a nightlight on in the chicken house. If you ever need to move them or take them to the vet, box them up in a pet taxi or cardboard box with a lid on it after sundown, at night and in the dark. (you can use a flashlight.) Chickens don't put up a fight in the dark, even the meanest old rooster in the world. That is why foxes and other predators raid the henhouse at night. Easy pickins! The hens don't even make a sound. If you go to a feedstore, you should be able to find little booklets on raising chicks and chickens. Also, there are a hundreds, if not thousands of websites you can go look at. Everyone does it a little differently, but the basics are all the same. Mine are only three weeks old. Already they are flying about in the bottom of the box. They hop up onto the top of their watering pot (which gets pooped on - ugh). They also have started to hop onto my hand or arm when I reach in to change their food and water. I have just this week begun to give them very finely clipped bits of tender grass and chickweed. I use kitchen scissors. Chickweed tastes like juicy lettuce. They love it and fight over it, even though I put plenty in the box for every chick. This is normal chicken activity. You learn as you go. You make mistakes, but you become "The Mom" very soon. ~Annie

Mangoes, and 'maters, and mutts, oh my! Hahaha. Florida mimi, my little Maks loves my cherry tomatoes, too. He can carry one around all day long with breaking the skin on it. He just lies to toss it and chase it. And he was fixated for awhile on a low growing Meyer lemon I have in a pot. He was SURE that lemon was his yellow tennis ball, and would come to a screeching halt every time he ran by the pot, so he could stare at it and try to figure out how to get it down. (Of course, Maks is a nut case who also buries his own pee by pushing sand or leaves over it with his nose. I've NEVER seen a dog do THAT!) Trini, I love the image of the bulldog standing on a chair, hoping to get a mango! Silvia, you are so right about dog breeds. I've been fascinated by them for years, because they are all man-made, and with the exception of the really wolf-like breeds (huskies, etc), are all so far from the original design as to be completely amazing. There is no other animal on the planet that has been deliberately bred and modified to such extremes as dogs. And each breed DID have a purpose, from herding & protecting the flocks, to protecting the home, to hunting via running down the game, scenting out the game, digging up the game and retrieving the game. And of course, some were bred purely as companions. Dachshunds were bred to dig out and kill badgers, which are pretty ferocious animals. And their hunting instincts are very strong, even if they are mostly used as companions today. It doesn't matter if they or their immediate ancestors have ever seen a "varmint" before or not. They just KNOW they need to catch it and kill it. That can be a blessing or a curse, depending on what they see as being a varmint. Mine go after my black racers all the time, and it's only been by my immediate intervention a couple of times that the racer lived to slither by another day. Cat person or dog person? Me, I can't live without them BOTH. (Three huge cats 15 to 20 pounds each, and two small dachshunds at 10 and 11 pounds.) Marcia (Kathy, we hijacked your thread a bit...but still, dogs CAN be one good answer to a critter problem)

In the midst of all the grub and cannibalism reports, one little thing about voles stood out sharply to me in one of the posts, and was unremarked upon by others: The relationship of mulches to voles: I have very large gardens and serious vole problems (not moles), but this year I was keeping careful notes and it is the beds with the mulches that had the worst damage. Also the beds with plants that had been carried in large pots with a loose composted-bark laden potting soil for a summer. (I moved three truckloads of plants from my VA garden several years ago. In order to do that I had to pot them up in large pots, so they still have reservoirs of this transitional soil around them.) My native soil is a gravelly loan but I have expended a lot of effort to incorporate huge amounts of organic matter in the beds and been rewarded by the damned voles. In the newer areas which haven't been in cultivation for as long I had much less damage, even for similar (meaning identical) stock plants. So I'm going to be rethinking this. I make and apply dozens of yards of compost every year, a big component of it is composted wood chips which leave a wonderful texture but are apparently heaven for voles. Aside from my six cats (who easily kill a vole apiece per day), the only other things that seems like a good bets to me are paying much more rigid attention to removing scruffy areas late in the season and making a final big push to remove every vestige of landscaping fabric which provides cover for the voles. Has anybody made wire fabric or screen vole guards around the bases of shrubs? I only see above-ground damage up to about 6 or 7 inches, so that might be feasible. Do you think they would go over and then down in? My poor Exbury Az. had a hard time of it this year. Makes you want to cry to waste three or four years growth! But they don;t seem to have done thier usual damage to the Sib. Iris. I suppose thay are saving that for late April ....@#$%^&(*&?! Molly~

We put actual glass in ours. So glad we skipped on vinyl panels. They scratch and dull in time. Not windows. And a local glass company was almost the same price and delivered! We are not trying to winterize our deck though. We are in Washington State and that would cost way more than we can afford. We used some boat carpe for the floors, kept the carpet 3 feet in from all sides so it doesn't take on water from the 1/2 inch gap under the sides. We did have to insulate and enclose the tin roof above with tongue and groove so it doesn't get condesation. If you are building, make sure you use real roofing, not tin roof. They condensate big time. That was our one big mistake. We can store stuff out there, as long as we keep them in plastic bins. Nothing cardboard will last. Even though the dirt under the deck has a vapor barrier and we have rain gutters, it's not enough. For air flow we put in 3 large windows that are nothing but wooden blinds. I don't have pics of the tongue and groove yet. Besides a bit of moisture in the air, it's still pretty nice out there. We are going to get a propane heater out there. That will do it for us.