These Gourds will KEEP MOSQUITOS AWAY NATURALLY!

I can get in here and dig around and get hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm it's another cloudy day here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina I have been working as you can tell so today we're going to show you something pretty cool it's going to be kind of a quick little video we're going to show you how we're establishing Marten colonies on our farm to help control insects so we've got three different birds that we like to control insects with we'll talk a little bit about that we'll talk to you about how we take an old crusty gourd from the garden that we grew last year and we turn it into something beautiful and awesome that we can use for years and years to come to house birds to eat the insects on our farm come along we'll have some fun ain't afraid to work alright guys welcome to the farm welcome to the farm channel this is your first time that the Stoney Ridge farm please jump in pound that like button and subscribe to the channel we've got all kinds of stuff from bulldozers to birdhouses just good times here good country living and there's a whole lot to learn from people and even when I screw up I'll let you know I screwed up and will tell you what not to do and what to do so what my goal is today is to show you how to build the Martin bird house from a gourd that you can grow yourself now you can get these gourd seeds at your local big box store or you can order them online there are several different types of birdhouse gourds I prefer this type with the big bubble at the bottom and the big bubble at the top however we have a couple of different kinds we've got the long and tall birdhouse gourd like this right here this one's kind of the ugly duckling you can see it's kind of all wrinkly like a brain but they all have their own distinct little bit of character and that's what makes them fun that's what makes this a fun little craft and the way we're gonna fix these birdhouse is up they could last upwards of 20 years if you do it right if you preserve them right and if you take care of them year after year hopefully you'll establish a Marten colony on your farm or property and that will help control insects like mosquitoes so Martens are a tiny bird probably I guess about this big and they'll show up every year that's the wingspan they show up basically year after year after year once you've got a colony established it's tough to get them to come and they'll send scouts out early in the year the Scout will come out and then about a couple weeks later the whole flock will come in and they'll move in to your birdhouses so what we will do is we will have an entire colony of these birdhouses we'll put probably 10 birdhouses per colony we've got a total of about 20 to 25 gourds here and by each pond we're gonna put a Marten house now we don't want our Marten houses or a Marten colony right next to our honeybees because that could pose a problem but the way that the Marten catches mosquitos and insects is underneath its wings it has a pocket up underneath there so as it soars through the air it's catching the insects up underneath its wings to consume so it's really a beneficial bird to have on your farm you think about it some of the history of the Native Americans they had gourds and they had Marten colonies around there their establishments there there sa homesteads but around there tribes they had Marten colonies because if they didn't have Marten colonies and they had mosquito problems and they had malaria problems they had sickness problems so they learned how to use nature to keep from getting sick and that's what we're doing using nature to control insects and to control those flies that are around our cattle so it's really important let's get in here we'll dive in a little deeper I'll show you exactly how we take a Marten gourd a birdhouse gourd and turn it into a Marten colony type gourd so we're going to show you how we do our birdhouses and we also made some smaller birdhouses with our smaller gourds for chickadees and other types of birds that are smaller and we can hang those in the trees out in the backyard ok guys this is where we dry our gourds out and you can see some gourds did not make the cut so this is right over top of our chicken coop that's our outdoor chicken run and it helps to shade the chickens now if we get a gourd like that guy that broke apart we can just throw stuff right down in the chicken coop and the chickens will gobble it up you'll see these gourds have been out here for about a year and a half they're hard they're good these gourds right here will make birdhouses also so you got to think about that that's the holistic management of the farm right here the chickens are right here beside the garden the honeybees are right there the fruit trees are right beside the honeybees the gardens right near the chickens and right near the honeybees so holistic farm and homestead management cool ok let's start by showing you the tools that we're gonna need very very simple and we're just gonna pull the board out I've done most of these gourds but I say back like three or four gourds that I knew we're beautiful and I wanted you to see them so this is a perfect birdhouse gourd right here it could be a little bit bigger but it's just fine we don't want to get in a gourd that's this big and we don't want to get in a gourd that's tiny tiny so we want to make sure it has enough square footage for the purple Martin now you can research this a little bit on your own to find out if purple martins are in your area now what I do is I'll take our gourds and I just dry them outside on top of our chicken coop really you can just take a piece of mesh or net you want to get them up off the ground and you want them to dry out so these set out in the weather over winter and dried out over winter and over part of the spring and now they're ready to rock and roll now you'll see that on this gourd there are some like flakies stuff right here okay so we're gonna be painting these gourds so there are a couple different options and different tools that you can use I like to use just a plain old sanding sponge okay so we'll sand down the door but first we got to get rid of this stem right here so we'll take a pair of cutters these are my favorite they are Corona brand I'll post links to all these tools these are my favorite trimmers right here so we'll cut that off and we'll leave a stub probably a little under a quarter of an inch okay and I've got a bucket down here oh let's get it this bucket has all the seeds and all the guts that were inside these gourds now you'll hear this gourd as I shake it like a maraca so you'll hear the gourd as I get what I do is I'll take my hand my palm of my hand and I'll cup it and I'll smack this gourd against my hand I'm gonna do it aggressively but not so aggressive that I bust or break the gourd so I'm gonna do this right here until I know I freed up most of the seeds and the guts it's like a paper like material it's inside this gourd okay so I'm going to read all that up then I'm gonna take my sanding sponge or I'll show you another cool tool if you don't like manual labor you can use something like this this is a works sander I've got all kinds of cool works tools you can actually hook up a little attachment on here and that will go to your shopback and it'll vacuum up all of the nastiness that comes off of this gourd you can do it like this or the old manual way which is just fine for me go buy some sanding sponges you can't have too many of these around the house and you just sand so I'll start right here at that tip and I'll kind of give her a little a little love at the top here okay and I'm just trying to get all the loose material off I just want it smooth and get all the loose material off as you can imagine if this set outside for a while it kind of got a little rough and a little bit nasty we're gonna get a little nasty doing this it's okay so we're just knocking the rough stuff off take about I don't know about a minute and a half per gory all right I kind of pre sanded this one a little bit it's not very nasty sometimes you'll get these gourds and they'll just be absolutely disgusting they'll have some really rough spots not that rough off so your paint sets in nice be sure you pay attention to the bottom here okay all those problem areas that you want some paint in so that preserves your gourd and your gourd lasts a really really long time okay next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna instill the hole inside this gourd now there are all sorts of schools of thought on what size hole to use this is a really cool hole saw from I believe it's from Bosch here is I'll post links again them down below but if I can find this on Amazon I'll post a link to it this is a hole saw that has just this little it's kind of a little flimsy cutter edge on it and it pops off just like that okay so that is a hole saw that will basically fit any one of these different sizes and it comes with all these and all that installs back on the hole saw for storage so it's pretty cool the size we're going to use for our purple martins is a 2 and 1/4 you can see right there 2 and 1/4 and we're gonna install it you see this and has a little hook right there a hook on this side and a hook on that side and that goes right into our little mount right here squeeze it into place hopefully this works out good on camera all right cool so we're good that little blade centers are bit centers into your gourd and we want to hold our gourd up and we want to look this one's pretty uniform size but we want to put our hole on the side that bulges out just a little bit that's what I like to do and I don't want it up like this because I don't want rain in it and I don't want it down like this because I want the birds to be able to access it so I want it just slightly tilted right there so I'll put it right on here you got to be gentle with this guys really gentle cuz this thing is fragile see how woody that is look at that a beautiful hole it cut a perfect hole and then you take your little puck and you chuck it in your bucket okay now we've got our hole all cut out right here inside is this seeds all kinds of goodies if you did your job before you poke the hole in it you can just dump your seed jobs so we'll take our bucket up here and look for out all of our seed okay sometimes you're gonna get one that's a little bit more stubborn like there's some of that paper like material of us telling you about right up in there and that has seeds in it too so I'll reach my finger in there and I'll get that paper ish material out okay now if you had a hard time doing that you can get a stick like this or this isn't really a stick this is a spoon and we cut the spoon down to fit right inside there I just took my sander and sanded the edges off that spoon and I can get in here and dig around and get it stuff I can get in here and get around and clean that guy out so it's pretty fun not everything goes right all the time guys and it's okay we're on YouTube it's cool so the next step here is to get my other drill and this is about a quarter-inch bit right here and I'm gonna see which way the hole faces and I want to put my drill bit in perpendicular yeah perpendicular to the hole so I don't want to do it this way and you think about this if I put a hole through the top it would swing this way which would make it hard for the bird to get in but if I put my hole across right here it swings like that which the bird can easily fly in and land but if it's going like that it's gonna be tougher for the bird to land and its nest in the wind so you want to think about that so we're going to drill basically straight through right up at the top I'm gonna angle my bit down just a little bit again be very gentle okay and then I'm gonna level out and [Music] make sure I'm um lined up level out go right through the other side that serves a purpose okay I'll show you what that purpose is here in just a second so you've got a hole straight through the middle that's for hanging okay and then down in the bottom you're gonna need some drain holes because it's gonna rain and and weather and and stuffs gonna get in here and if you don't poke some holes in there you're gonna get rot in the bottom so you don't want rot in the bottom I do three holes and if you look this is a divot like a belly button it's kind of like any belly button and I go right around that any belly button with three holes evenly-spaced like a coconut kind of cool so that's how I make the birdhouse gourd now there's more steps to this than just making the gourd okay so we've got to make a stand and we're going to make all this stuff in a future video and we'll show you how we make all that but we've got to make a stand to put it up in the over and a fence post over on the other side of the farm so we're going to slide it down in the way we can remove it every year you're gonna need to clean these guys out even if you just shake it out you need to clean it out and you need to get a little bit of 1/10 water to bleach yep chlorine bleach and you want to clean them out and you want to spray in there and that's what that does is that kills all the mites that the birds might have brought in so if you think about it birds getting mites they're little critters that suck blood and you don't want your baby birds to have blood suckers all over them so you've got to keep them clean you got to clean them at least once a year at the end of the season okay so like December you start planning you start cleaning them that's your winter time project for your farm let's show you how we take it from this old ugly brown gourd to something beautiful like this now we had some gourds I'm going to grab one right now some of these gourds were not quite up to par like the size was a little small let me grab one these are the smaller ones now I put a smaller hole in these gourds okay I wanted to hold it was an inch and a half and that will set up for chickadees and Tweety birds and stuff like that and the same principle goes I drilled the hole right there I'm gonna hang these in trees and I put my drain holes in the bottom just the same everything is exactly the same you can paint these any color you want to you're gonna be hanging these in the trees okay so if you want to go a dark color it's okay you don't want to go with the dark color on your birdhouse gourds okay you don't want to go with the dark color why because you're going to be roasting those little baby birds because black is gonna absorb heat so the darker the color the more heat is going to be absorbed into this gourd and what you want to do is reflect heat so we're gonna paint these white and I've got a set up down here for painting them here's what I'm gonna do I've got these little hooks that I made up I'm gonna take these little hooks and this is just a piece of fence wire and I'm I hang them up just like that in my hand and I'm gonna paint them and I'm gonna hang them up to dry let's get to that part so we're gonna have a cool backdrop of the farm right here this is rust-oleum American accents 2x paint and primer ultra cover okay ultra cover means it's going to cover all ultra good I guess you want to get a paint with primer okay and you don't want to get one that's just set up for metal or plastic so this says wood metal plastic and more this was purchased at Walmart I'll post a link down there if you want to just order all this stuff online and we also have this little trigger controller for our rust-oleum paint can that saves some serious finger fatigue when you're out here painting 20 something gourds okay so this little critter turns you into having a paint gun this thing covers really well it sprays really well if you have an option of buying a can of spray paint that has the fan spray versus the round spray in other words shooting a round spray versus the fan get the kind that does the fan spray those work really really well all I'm gonna do let's take this door and I'm gonna start in the most troublesome area so the most troublesome area of this gourd is going to be right up at the top here I'm holding it out far enough to hopefully not spray paint my fingers but you're gonna get paint on you so be ready okay now we've shaken our paint really good for probably a minute and a half something like that we're gonna hit this gourd now this is going to be our first coat of paint so kind of be liberal but understand that you're gonna be doing multiple coats here okay and this really is only gonna take us a few seconds to paint each gourd okay another troublesome area is going to be right around the mouth of the gourd right here so we want to make sure we've sealed that off really good if we get paint inside it's not gonna hurt anything ask questions guys if you have any questions about this as you can see it didn't take very long we're gonna put a light coat on here for our first coat and that's it we're just going to put a nice light coat on there and then we're going to come back tomorrow in the hot hot sunshine and we're going to put another coat so we're gonna let this sit overnight and dry and then we're gonna put another coat of paint on it pretty cool let me show you how I set up my little drying rack here so I took two sawhorses one sawhorse here one saw horse here and I put a piece of wire in between and I'm gonna go ahead and come out here and paint all my gourds do not do this on a windy day guys do not do it on a windy day or you're gonna be eating some paint so you'll need to wear a mask be sure that you're safe it probably wouldn't hurt to put a pair of rubber gloves on as we do this but we're just going to get busy with it I take back what I said about the top part being the hardest part to get to you need to paint the bottom the very bottom of the gourd first and then work your way to the top and then get the rest of it be sure you get around that hole really really good because that is like a sponge right there it's going to be soaking up tons of moisture and these things are going to be out in the weather so guys I hope you enjoyed that little video that's what we're doing today if you have any questions please post them down there all these gourd seeds that I'm shaking out I'm gonna take them and I'm gonna dump the bucket out on the fence line down there and then next year we'll have tons of gourds again so we need to keep this repetitive process going if we have some bad ones we can replace them but the goal would be to have a huge Martin colony so we could have as many as 40 or 50 of these over by our ponds over here helping control mosquitoes and bugs cool guys thanks a lot I hope you enjoyed this video please jump in pound the like button subscribe to the Stoney Ridge farm channel so much more fun stuff to come these are our chickens they're right out there those are our meat birds for the year there are a hundred meat birds out there we'll show you how to process them soon in a future video and there's all kinds of fun stuff so we'll see you guys next time on the Stoney Ridge alright don't ring Wow [Music] Pierce we've had some ways opposed to me stone Tyrion Oh