So what tool or tools on your homestead would you call very useful? I have really enjoyed my Troy-Bilt “Horse” tiller since receiving it new as a gift in 1976. But it is not used nearly as often as some other “low-tech” tools around the place.
I was remembering how a lady wrote years ago in Mother Earth News about the one very useful five-gallon bucket she and her family used at their place. I checked it out in the M.E.N. archives and found the article.
In the article titled The One-Bucket Farmstead, in the September/October 1982 edition, Coreen Taylor Hart wrote:
“[W]e never could have guessed that our most indispensable piece of homesteading equipment would turn out to be a secondhand, five-gallon, white plastic bucket.”After reading the ways she and her family used the handy container I had to agree. She said they used the recycled vessel for everything from feeding the pigs to “mixing jumbo batches of bread dough”. To her long list of tasks I added carrying stove wood into the house. It worked great but I have found a better way.
A couple months ago I bought 50 pounds of cracked corn for the chickens. It came in a bag made of woven plastic, similar to that used in making many tarps. This feed sack works great for bringing firewood in for the stove. It allows me to carry much more than I could put in a bucket and keeps the bark and wood chips well contained. Come Spring I expect it will work great for hauling compost and other dry materials around our place. A smaller bag of similar material that had contained cat food now holds wood shavings we use as tinder in the stove.
Recycling feed sacks has a long tradition in our family. As a little farm girl in Kansas, my wife wore dresses her Mom made from cotton feed sacks.
By the way, if you are reading this, I expect you will agree that the World Wide Web is a very useful tool too.
