Now that we're officially on day 21 (we started incubating at 3:40 pm), we've already got a second egg pipping. Hopefully more will start soon, because chick 3.0 seems a bit lonely (and loud).

Shades of eggcitement with Vincent Price as Egghead and Adam West as Batman---Speaking of which in your agrarian situation, do bats have any place in your plans? The are a good source of insect control, so I was wondering.

We love bats, and we do have a healthy population in the area. On warm evenings, I can usually see at least a couple circling overhead, snapping up bugs. We don't do anything to encourage them (except for having a nice swamp to breed mosquitoes...), because everyone I've talked to says that bats are hard to tempt into bat boxes. I'd really like to have a bat box sometime, though, so I can collect the guano...

Hmm... It shouldn't have surprised me that any discussion about bats would have lead to fertilizer.

Guano can be a first step to making gunpowder too, so I should also remember the virtues of guano. :P

Roland can probably chime in, but it seems to me (without doing any research) that you should be able to use any high nitrogen manure (like chicken poop) to make gunpowder too?

Dung heaps were indeed a common source of potassium nitrate. Especially when the ashes from wood fires were added. There were specially built nitre-heaps made for creating potassium nitrate.

Another method is to let urine decompose in straw for some months, wash out the calcium nitrate with water and filter it through wood ash to convert it to potassium nitrate, followed by drying.

The big disadvantage of black powder is the high amount of solid combustion products, causing fouling of guns. Apart from reproductions of older guns, I don't think many modern firearms would be suited for using gunpowder. Smokeless powder (based on nitrocellulose a.k.a gun-cotton) has been around for around 150 years now, and is much more powerful.

Search for "exploding apron" for an interesting story about the discovery of nitrocellulose. BTW, don't try that at home, unless you want to blow yourself up and your house. Guncotton by itself is not very stable.

That's interesting --- I've heard the term "black powder rifles" but didn't realize we'd moved away from gunpowder for most guns. I guess making our own ammunition isn't as easy as it might be.

If you want to make your own ammunition completely yourself, you'd basically have to go back to a flintlock smoothbore musket or rifle muzzle-loaders. For those you only need;

• charcoal
• sulpher
• potassium nitrate
• lead
• flint

The first three are needed for the propellant (black powder). Lead is used to cast bullets (no metal jackets in those days) and flint is needed to ignite the gunpowder.

And just think all the above is from the tail end of the digestive tract. Ah well, remember the old saying, "Hay is the first stage of horse shit", or whatever other animal you're giving it to.

Roland --- And, presumably, the further back you get in gun technology, the less safe it becomes. I think that's one of the last DIY projects I'd actually undertake.

Vester --- It seems like most of the things I love most come from the tail end of an animal. Eggs, compost...

If you want to make it yourself, black powder is probably the least dangerous.

More advanced propellants like guncotton or its derivative smokeless powder are made by chemical processes that are not very suitable to DIY due to the nature of some of the materials (strong acids) and the required precise control of reaction parameters like temperature and purity of reactants.

Well, I wasn't saying black powder was the most dangerous to make, just to use. I figure that gun's are already dangerous enough without homemade ammunition (but, then, I'm a bit gun-phobic.)