GROWING OUR OWN FEED SCOOPS - A HOW-TO ON MAKING A RENEWABLE UTENSIL FROM A GOURD

This was a fun one!

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After many years of wanting to, we finally grew some of our own birdhouse gourds and dipper gourds this year. I think that growing useful things besides food is a great idea and it can be a lot of fun too. Although we had this idea a bit ago, we finally got around to making our prototype today.

HOW TO MAKE A GOURD SCOOP

For a while now, we've had some dried gourds hanging up waiting for us to do something with them. They've been dried, and are also full of very useful seeds, but we simple hadn't taken the time to do much with them yet.

Unlike the big, round dipper gourds that we bought from Pa Mac and unlike the birdhouse gourds, these ones looked more like big spoons or scoops. Since we often have to scoop animal feed, we thought that we would try making a simple prototype scoop out of one.

The only tool that we used for this project was a utility knife with a sharp razor blade in it. Again, this was a very simple prototype.

By making one horizontal cut along the gourd, basically removing the top in the process, the portion that is left behind should be able to function as a scoop. I had to be really careful with this part.

Here you can see how much was cut off the top. While it wasn't exactly a "perfect" cut, we were aiming for function and not beauty here. Now we just had to remove the seeds and dried membrane on the inside to make it functional. This was a simple job, especially since the gourd was completely dry inside and out.

These seeds are valuable too. We can sell, gift, or barter with them if need be, and we can plant the next generation of gourd plants with them too!

TESTING OUR PROTOTYPE

Soon the @little-peppers were excited to take our new homegrown scoop for a "test drive." We chose the rabbit feed to start with.

The scooping part of it went just fine. Now on to the dumping the scoop out part.

The dumping part worked pretty well too. For the other animals, it is just a matter of getting the feed scooped out, without any narrow target to dump it into. For the rabbits though, the feed troughs have rather narrow and small openings. Ideally, we could use a different cut to make a different shaped scoop out of the gourd for the best results.

It still got the job done, but now we know how to improve on this design. Also, it'll still work for the chicken feed, or for some of the other animals. I'm not sure if any of you have ever enjoyed growing your own utensils or tools, but we really enjoyed it! We will have to see what else we can come up with.

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-gourd-scoop (the proof selfies are harder with this new camera)

Until next time…

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GIF provided by @orelmely

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