Tarps from those chicken feed bags

Tote made from a Purina Layena chicken feed bag.

You may remember back in March I wrote about turning those woven poly chicken feed bags from Purina's feed into tote bags.  They make great shopping and tote bags because they are plastic, water proof and very sturdy. I can sew one up on my handy sewing machine in about 20 minutes.

My collection of poly feed bags was growing however.   Rumpke wouldn't take them for recycle and my green self hated to put them in the trash. 

Then my good cow Violet had a still born calf and I wrapped the body in the tarp I was intending to loan to my mother as a base for her couple of yards of mulch that was to be delivered this coming week. The calf had been dead in the cow about 24 hours (and that's another story!) and stunk to high heavens!  So I left it in the tarp and had my excavating friend bury it all together.

That left me with no tarp. And that's when I decided the collection of poly feed bags might come in handy.

Hen inspects tarp made from various woven poly feed bags.

With a pair of scissors and a role of duct tape I was able to fashion a roughly 10 x 10 foot tarp that should work just fine as a base for loose  mulch.   I simply cut the bottoms off the bags and slit them down one side. Then I opened them up, laid them out on the driveway and "stitched" them together with duct tape. That is, I overlapped the edges and taped them together. I also turned the whole thing over and added some reinforcing tape on the back side.  As you can see I have quite a collection of poly bags - and more coming every day. 

My next project is to make smaller tarps to lay on the clean chicken house floor, especially under the roosts.  I am pretty sure I can just pick up the edges of the tarps and bundle the chicken litter out the door and over to the compost pile.  It should save time and keep the litter dust at a minimum.  I'll keep you posted.

Folded tarp ready to deliver to Mom.