Necessity is the Mother of Invention

One of the many, many jobs of the homesteader seems to be "potscrubber".  In the heat, I wind up scrubbing out feeders and waterers a million times a week, it seems.  I find the galvanized feeders to be the easiest to scrub out, but I only own a few of those.  Most of what I own are the feeders/waterers made from black rubber.  I find them indispensable--in the winter, if anything gets frozen to them, they can simply be twisted or banged and the stuff comes out and the dish is undamaged.  They're fairly lightweight, very sturdy, and very easy to move, depending on the size of the bucket, and they can take quite a bit of abuse.  The only thing I don't like about them is how dirty they get.

 
Unfortunately, over time, the rubber etches and the dirt is ground in.  It gets very hard/impossible to remove, even with scrubbing with a stiff brush under running water (ask me how I know that).  Since it's important that the dishes be kept clean, it means they need to be cleaned a lot.  Especially for these guys:

As you can see, they are standing on their feeding platform, waiting for breakfast.  They don't care if they stand on the platform or in the bowls.  Nor do they care if their feet are dirty or if they poo everywhere in the meantime.  So yep, I'm cleaning their bowls on a regular basis, because they get gross.

Well, last night as I was standing in the stream, scrub brush in hand, I had an epiphany.  If I would like to cut down on having to scrub the darn things so often, I need to get them up off the ground (that wasn't the epiphany, I already knew that).  But there was no way to do that, being as though the fence is wire and not sturdy enough to support the weight of the bowls.  Then it hit me: build a rack (that was the epiphany, just in case you were wondering).

Well duh.  It never occurred to me before, but there it was.  So I built it out of scraps, and this is what I came up with:

Taa daa! 

Ok, side shot:

Taa daa again!

All it is is a 2x3 leftover, with a cross brace on the top, like a "t".  From the short part of the "t", the two long arms project, angled slightly to hold the bowls better.  The angle is like this \/.  Then there's a little stop on the end, so the bowls don't fall off.  The whole contraption is screwed to one of the feeding platforms, which is the only sturdy thing in there that will hold it.

So now the feed bowls can be picked up overnight so they will stay cleaner.  Of course, It would help if Maybelle would stop standing in the bowl to eat,

but a girl can only ask so much, right?  Any little bit helps.