Whats that smell??

We have recently adopted a new dog. She resembles a miniature lassie and, my daughter had decide to name her ginger. She was a stray that showed up on someones porch on the other side of town. So seeing the collie resemblance in her, we decided to adopt her in hopes of having a good herd dog that would help keep our yard free of cats (I'm allergic :( ) and other critters that might disturb our livestock.

So very quickly she became accustom to us and is running the fence outside, when me and the husband decide to take some eggs that our black bantam Cochin hen has been trying to hatch unsuccessfully and throw them in the wood. We know they are gonna be bad, possibly rotten. So my husband starts tossing eggs and one hits the grass and breaks and standing over twenty feet away we can smell the stink. If you have never smelled a rotten egg, be VERY thankful it is as my husband would say a smell that would "gag a maggot." My dog for some unknown reason decides to run over, roll over and roll back and forth on top of said rotten egg.....seriously... rolling back and forth as if she was getting some sort of thrill out of this nasty, stinky, rotten egg.

Right about this point I am thinking how am I gonna wash the dog without getting that smell on me. I don't even want that smell near me let alone on me. So I think back to the time that we caught a skunk in our live trap. There was no way of getting around shooting the skunk so our yard smelled so bad you couldn't even walk out the door without gagging. After the skunk sprayed about three times in the backyard there was a sheen on the grass and we sprayed it with vinegar and almost immediately the smell dissipated. Its like a magic trick. Vinegar of all things gets rid of skunk stench. So I sprayed my dog with some vinegar in hopes that I wouldn't actually have to get the smell on me and it worked. I still went ahead and bathed her after the vinegar had dried. But point being if you ever get a stinky egg or dog like me you don't have to let them "wear it off" as I have seen a lot of people do when their dogs get sprayed by skunks. You can use vinegar to bathe them. I just use the cheap white vinegar and it is only a few dollars for a gallon so it is not an expensive thing to keep on hand. We keep some on hand anyways for canning and cooking and baking.

I have heard of some people making apple cider vinegar from apple scraps at home but I have yet to venture into that endeavor. Maybe one day but for now I think my apple scraps are better spent as pig feed. She loves apple scraps, just remember to remove the seeds before feeding to livestock since they contain arsenic. You can also use the apple cider vinegar to help lower parasites in your livestock. There are many reasons to keep vinegar on hand even if its just one of those things you store under the sink. Which is where we keep ours all three gallons of it. Hopefully you never have to use your for a rotten egg but you never know. One thing is for sure we are all a little happier that the smell is gone on our little HOMEstead!