country life

No Bake Cheesecake

12 Comments Posted on February 16, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

My earliest no bake cheesecake attempt in 2015

Just secretly, behind the scenes, I set myself a few goals for 2015 which I did not share with you, because hello what if I fail? This recipe represents the first of these goals which I have achieved and am now ready to share with you. What was the goal?

Perfect a no-bake cheesecake recipe.

I started with a recipe from The Annoyed Thyroid – Kit Kat No-Bake Cheesecake – you’ll note there is no gelatin which is perfect for me because I am terrible at using it and once I found out what it actually was, I was not a big fan of using it in recipes anyway..

I tried that recipe with the following changes –

– no kit kat, because my other half is a bit allergic to chocolate

– I used scotch finger biscuits for the base

– I put in brown sugar rather than caster sugar

– I also added some cinnamon because I always do.

I took it to my parents for dinner and it was hugely popular. We ate it with tinned black cherries and said we thought tinned raspberries would work well with this too.. The one thing we all felt was that the cheesecake part was a little heavy.

Then I thought.. could I add more cream to lighten it and would it still set? And maybe I might like a little touch of gingernut biscuit in the base. So cheesecake #2 was created – this time I used 300mls of cream instead of 50mls, and a mix of gingernut and scotch finger in the base.

I made it just for us here at home, and it was delightful. It did set, though not quite as well as the first one. I thought maybe I was done tweaking, but never say you’re done, because you won’t be.

The next time I made it specifically because family was coming in from interstate, and I used 250g of regular cream cheese, 250g of light cream cheese, and still 300mls of cream. I also used a base purely of Anna’s Swedish Thins – which you should definitely try as a biscuit if you have not, and Ikea make a version almost identical which they call Pepparkakor – these biscuits are fantastic with cheese especially bitey vintage or blue cheese but they are even more fantastic as the base of a cheesecake.

This was totally the best version of this cheesecake yet. The ginger from the base seemed to transmute itself into the cheesecake itself, adding an amazing flavour. Done, perfected. I achieved my goal and ate several cheesecakes in the trying, which was awesome. Each shopping trip, I’ve added the ingredients for this cheesecake to our shopping list, and it makes enough that we have a small piece for dessert nearly every night.

But then, a happy accident happened when I went to recreate my perfected version. I’d seen this recipe over at Domesblissity – Mini Choc Hazelnut Cheesecake Cups – and I’d bought some spreadable cheesecake, intending to give this recipe a try and perfect it.

I was in the middle of making the no bake cheesecake while listening to The Celebrity Apprentice on my cordless headset – the base was complete and in the fridge – when I discovered all my cream was no good. Seriously, this happened on the 26th of January and *two* 600ml thickened cream tubs had use by dates into February. I suspect foul play of some kind and I definitely smelt sour cream. But I had this spreadable cream cheese (250g) in the fridge, and I thought.. ok, give that a try in place of the 300mls of cream.

Here now, I present to you, my final no-bake cheesecake recipe.

The base –

150g Anna’s Ginger Thin biscuits – 50g Butternut Snaps – ground into a fine crumb.
80g unsalted butter

Combine the biscuit crumbs with the butter in a bowl and then press into a baking paper lined baking pan – put this into the fridge to cool while making the base.

The Filling

250g regular cream cheese
250g light cream cheese
250g spreadable cream cheese
(I use Manhattan from Aldi)

90g brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Recipe Notes –

You can also add 50-300g thickened cream if you like to make it lighter, and the cheesecake will still set.
Leave the cream cheese out at room temperature for an hour before you begin mixing for the best results.

Make The Filling –

Mix the brown sugar and regular cream cheese first, until smooth.. Add in the vanilla and cinnamon during this stage.

While the mixer is going on a light speed, add in the spreadable cream cheese. Then cut the light cream cheese into small strips and add that in. Mix on high speed for a few minutes until perfectly smooth. If adding cream as well, add that in last.

The Density Of My Cheesecake Destiny

It is a density thing, why I say to mix the things in this order – the time I accidentally mixed the straight out of the fridge regular cream cheese with the cream, it was almost impossible to get that smooth. So learn from my mistake and mix things of a similar density with each other. :)

The Final Step!

Pour mixture into the lined baking pan with your base. Smoosh with spatula, until presentable. Cover with alfoil or glad wrap and then put this back in the fridge for a few hours, or overnight if you have the time and can resist the urge to eat it.

Can You Guess?

What my next cooking goal might possibly be? And do you like a cheesecake, will you give this recipe a try?

cooking, country life, food, Happy Snoskred, recipes

The Berry Cow

4 Comments Posted on February 9, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

If you visit the small town of Berry on the New South Wales South Coast, you will meet this fake cow which stands outside of the Berry IGA..

I don’t know how artists make these things so lifelike but up close with the exception of the chipped paint, you would swear this cow is real and speaking to you loudly with her eyes..

I don’t speak enough cow to interpret this look, though.. perhaps you do? :)

I mentioned in my paperweight post that I would be heading to Berry – and I did head over, but on that occasion the cow was GONE. Everyone I was with was in complete shock. We suspect it went for a repaint and will hopefully return soonest.

Australia, Berry, country life, cows, New South Wales

Those Girls

9 Comments Posted on January 17, 2015June 2, 2015 by Snoskred

Just a couple of weeks ago I was at Aldi. This poor guy was trying to load the skinny but long boxes Aldi uses to hold the coffee pods into those large box containers they use to hold all their empty boxes. The boxes fell on the floor and I said to the guy – don’t pick them up, I’ll get them – I could see a perfect use for them at my place. You’ll remember the Chicken Merge – I used baked bean trays from Aldi to hold the treats. These long boxes are better suited to the task.

Todays treat – baby spinach and rocket, apple, tomato, tuna.

Chickens like to scratch with their feet when they are eating. With the wider baked bean boxes I used, two things would tend to happen – they would tip the whole box onto its side, or they would get in it and scratch around in there.

These long skinny boxes are perfect for chicken treats. I now bring a minimum of 3x those home each time we visit, Because they are long, there is room for all the girls to check out the treats without anyone having to get pecked. Because they are not very wide, the chicken scratch the ground and then eat the treats, and there isn’t much room for the chickens to get inside them or tip them up onto their side.

You can see how perfectly the girls arrange themselves around these thin, long boxes.

It always amazes me how much chicken behaviour is learned from other chickens.

These new girls did not have the foggiest idea where to lay an egg. When they first merged with the older girls, you would find their eggs on the ground, just randomly. Now, they lay in the laying boxes.

They did not make the Egg Song, ever. They were not very vocal at all. Now, they’re joining in with the egg song, and they are trumpeting and bagerking and making all the chicken noises.

They had tried to dustbathe but were not especially great at it, mostly because they did not grasp what the kitty litter tray full of sand was actually for. They also struggled to make dirt holes in the grass. Now, they are in a yard where everything is dirt, which by the way is exactly how chickens like it, and they spend a good couple of hours a day dust bathing with their new chicken friends.

Lizzy, Mary and Kitty get to share a treat box.

Speaking of chicken friends, how are they going together? Because they have so much space, this merging process is a lot longer than it would usually be. The three newbies still sleep out on the roost in the run at night.

During the day, White Sussex is Queen of the Castle, with the three new girls slotting in just under her, then the game hens, then Redcomb and Rosie are at the bottom of the pack.

Rosie Rosecomb

Redcomb and the two other game hens got a bit confused with all the rain in December – their bodies thought it was winter again, and they went off the lay and moulted as a surprise to themselves, especially as they had only moulted a few months before. They are looking a bit ratty at the moment as the feathers slowly grow back in.

Chickens, country life, shopping, yay

Chicken Merge & Vale Twiggy

6 Comments Posted on January 5, 2015June 2, 2015 by Snoskred

The Great Chicken Merge has occurred.. Sort of. You can put chickens together in an enclosure, but you cannot make them a flock or tell them what the pecking order is – they have to do that themselves, and it takes time. When your girls have so much space that they could pass days without running into each other if they so desire, integrating themselves into one flock will be slow going, and mostly takes place around food, and where chickens roost at bedtime.

So, how does one merge chickens together? With great difficulty, a lot of interesting chicken food, and plenty of time and attention.

Large trays of chicken interesting food – namely greens chopped up nice, tomatoes, strawberries, and tuna – were put together. I made 3 large trays, so that there would be plenty of places for the girls to eat and get to know each other.

There was much eyeballing. New chooks and old chooks alike, eyeballing and sizing up their chicken foes. There were one or two kerfuffles – the beginnings of a fight, which mostly ended with girls going their separate ways without the fight really starting.

Battle lines were being drawn – the five old girls VS the 3 new girls. And yet none of the girls really seemed like they wanted to push things to an actual battle. Lizzy, the black and gold Pekin, is the only one who tends to push the boundaries.

In the photo above, there she is, pushing. And here she is, at it again –

I’m writing this a couple of days later, and no actual battle has yet taken place – things are still in a wait and see mode, with the older girls clumping together and sticking together –

– and the new girls exploring the enclosure and not fighting much for position.

There have been a couple of interesting moments – mainly at bedtime. On the first night, Lizzy, who is perfectly named for her behaviour – she is *exactly* like her Pride and Prejudice name sake – decided she wanted to roost with the older girls.

This is Lizzy – she is the black and gold Pekin.

Well, what a to-do there was! Never did you hear so much squawking and tut tutting and general chicken noise at bedtime., but Lizzy carried her point and got a spot on the indoor roost, on one end, next to Rosie who is the lowest chicken on the pecking order and not one to cause trouble, not even with a new girl.

The two grey and gold Pekins – Kitty and Mary – decided Lizzy was welcome to all that kerfuffle, and they chose to sleep happily out in the enclosure area, where there are two roosts to choose from and zero old girls to fight with in order to get on them.

The next night, Lizzy was either too tired, or had been convinced by Mary and Kitty to avoid all the drama, and all 3 girls slept on the roost out in the run area. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is just as safe as the roost inside the coop. I don’t have a decent shot of Mary at this time, she is a bit camera shy but here is a shot of Kitty –

Below is an old photo of the run and you can see the two roosts there, from when the coop and run were first mated together.

The day the merge took place I was out in the enclosure with the girls for an extended amount of time. I had some work to do out in the chook pen, namely, taking out some of the large amount of leaf litter which appeared during December. I also intended to sit and watch them a little, so I took out a stool and a glass of water with a cover, because raking can be dusty even after all the rain we’ve had.

I cannot speak for all chickens in the world but I can speak for our chickens. Our girls LOVE leaf litter. For the most part and I have blogged about this before, we rake it all into one corner and leave it be, and the girls scratch and peck and time and weather generally composts it into soil.

There you can see piles starting to form. The plastic green thing on one side is the end of the hose which runs into the pen allowing us to water the garden bed if we need to.

In early December, it rained for 14 days in a row, and we had the highest rainfall for a December since 1888. Seriously, no joke. I looked it up. 249mm was the December total. We usually get 77mm average in any December and in some cases as little as 10mm for the whole month. They had 216mm in 1888, so we beat that in 2014, making this the highest rainfall in a December since they started keeping totals.

You make that pile, we’ll destroy this pile you made, kthx human!

We had a thunderstorm every afternoon for the first 7 days. The stormy weather blew a lot of extra leaf litter into the enclosure. This is no bad thing and normally I’d just rake it up all neat like and then let the chickens pick it apart again. You can see in this picture below that the chicken wire roof has plenty of leaf and branch litter on top of it, as well.

However, on closer inspection, I noticed that some non leaf rubbish – chip packets, lolly wrappers, plastic bags, that kind of thing – had blown in as well. And I’m not happy to leave that in there. A decluttering was required, the litter needed to be raked up and any rubbish removed, and then much of the litter could remain, to be picked apart and enjoyed. During my raking of this litter, I discovered many of the reasons why the chooks spend good portions of their day picking through it – I found many crickets, spiders, slugs, and other insect goodies which the girls love to eat.

You may have noticed that our white leghorn bantam “Twiggy” is missing – she had to be euthanased, unfortunately, not long after we got her. She was suffering very badly, to the point her comb and wattles were turning purple, a sure sign of respiratory and circulatory issues. Due to these worrying symptoms we sent her to be necropsied and make certain we were not dealing with any truly serious nasties.

The news eventually came back and while no evil respiratory illnesses were present she did have laryngitis, bronchitis, a chest infection along the lines of pneumonia, plus a kidney issue which would have become very unpleasant for her down the track. The vet said it is unlikely she would have survived the stress of having to be treated with antibiotics as she did not much enjoy being handled by humans, and unfortunately the kidney issue would have killed her within 6 months in any case.

They also found that she had serious nutritional deficiencies and seeing as all 4 of our new girls turned out to come from the same breeder, the vet suspects that the other 3 girls may have the same nutritional deficiencies. We will have to keep a close eye on them. Sometimes these things can be fixed by a balanced diet, but sometimes much damage is already done, especially if these crucial vitamins and minerals are missing when the girls are growing up and need them the most.

It is always difficult to make that decision to euthanase, and I know we’ll have to experience this again before too long, with 5 girls who are getting on in chicken years. If we make it to the end of 2015 with the 5 older girls, I’ll be very happy if that happens, but I’d also be quite surprised.

Chickens are here for a good time, but not always a long time.

Chickens, country life, Vale Pets

Chicken Update 580235

4 Comments Posted on August 10, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

So excited I am about blogging again, I am scheduled out a couple of weeks in advance. You are reading this in August but it was written on the 28th of July. :) YAY me.

We have just had a huge weekend of chores and jobs, and the first one on the list was clean out the chook pen and enclosure.

The raked up leaves, branches, and assorted biodegradable chook leftovers.

So the people who have the block behind us have a lot of trees and while it is lovely to look at it means a lot of leaves, branches, gumnuts, and associated tree junk end up in the chooks yard. The chooks do not mind this because these leaves will often hide little yummy insect friends, so the leaves are really a constant entertainment to them. They spend their days turning the leaves over hoping for a treat. I mind, because it looks messy. But in keeping chooks you soon learn you have to give up on what you want, it is all about what the chickens need and want.

Over winter there is not much point trying to do anything about it. If I rake it all up guaranteed the next week there will be strong winds and it ends up just as messy as it was before. So yesterday I did rake and made a lovely pile in the back corner which will be left to biodegrade – that is if the chooks can leave it alone long enough – and there is now a strong wind warning for our area. Of course.

And clearly, there is little chance of the chickens leaving it alone for very long. If you move something to a new place, it suddenly becomes fascinating and exciting and must be explored, pecked, scratched, and not left alone until every possible treat has been exposed and eaten.

Little Kitty looking in – why can’t I be in there?

Well, little kitty is not used to chickens yet. She thinks they are great fun to chase. The chooks respectfully decline this, and gave her several decent peckings to convince her they are a formidable force. She does not seem to mind and continues to chase. I will slowly teach her this is a bad thing, over time. At this point she’d got annoying and the chooks were clucking and tut-tutting her, and there was even a few wing flaps and bagerking in her direction, so she was sent back to the regular yard for my sanity and for her own safety.

Usually we will clean out the coop in the last week or two of autumn, and then leave them be other than occasionally scooping the poop out of their coop, throwing them their many treats and collecting any eggs. You can’t be so lax in summer because in the heat the poop gets quite smelly but in winter you can leave it a few days – some people actually leave it the whole winter which is perfectly ok – they use a system called deep litter. Long story so google it if you want to know more.

The chooks laying area cleaned out.

The chooks laying area with fresh new wood shavings. They will make some very fascinating circle shaped nests in here. I will have to remember to take a photo.

One thing I do not clean out is the spider webs. There is only one place (in my mind) where a spider is welcome and it is within the chicken coop. If they can survive the pecking beaks of the chooks, they can eat a multitude of flies. If I spot a poisonous one I do usually squish that because I’m none too sure on whether they are poisonous to chooks or not.

The girls hanging out, here are a couple more shots. :) Happy moments for my girls.

Chickens, country life

Officially Un-favourited.

7 Comments Posted on August 1, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

I wrote this comment on Dancing with Frogs just over a month ago now. I have an update, and some photos. :)

My favourite (Red Comb) was attacked by a hawk this morning. She is sort of ok. We have not been able to find any injuries. She did have some blood on her beak but my thought now is that blood belongs to the hawk and that is why she is still with us now. She is no shrinking violet and I am sure she gave that hawk one heck of a pecking.. and was thus unceremoniously dumped as too much trouble.

I don’t think this can have happened too far from the ground because she was still in the chook pen..

She was unsteady on her feet, but I think maybe that is shock, and also that she was probably dropped though none of us saw the attack, we did see the hawk sitting in a tree nearby right after. Nothing is broken, though I suspect she might have bruising we can’t see. She is still alert and still her regular loopy self personality wise.

She stayed in the nesting boxes all day with all the other girls comforting her, except for one girl on the lookout in the run, anytime a bird flew by there was much bagerk-ing and posturing from the lookout. They took it in turns – one keeps the watch, the others comfort – until it was roost time. As soon as it got dark and the other girls put themselves to bed, we took her inside because it was going to be a cold one tonight.

Right now she is safe in a box, all toasty warm (but not too warm) by the gas heater. I am resisting with all my might the constant urge to check on her. She needs her sleep. I must not touch that box until 5:30am at the earliest.

If she survives the night, before the other chooks wake up in the morning, I will install her back in the nesting boxes in a warm box she can get in and out of with food and water nearby so that she will not lose her place in the flock. My hope is that she’ll have had enough time and rest to be back to normal – if not, we will keep up the night time warm inside sleepovers until she is.

It does not matter what it is, if anything happens to the chooks it is always her it happens to and I think this is because she is my favourite. I have now officially un-favourited her, and I am going to have no favourites now. I must like them all equally. It isn’t fair to the favourite!

We will now be installing bird netting over their area, to keep them safer from flying predators. Though it is entirely possible that hawk will not return – too much trouble for no reward. If the hawk had picked one of the other girls the hawk might have had better success.

It might be time to re-visit the design of the chook pen, too.. I really want to just suck it up and bite the bullet and make them a huge totally enclosed area like the one on henblog..

So.. what happened next?

Red comb did survive the night. At 6:05am I opened the box, which had been in front of the new gas heater overnight. I tell you, this was the warmest chicken I have ever held. And she was so happy to see me, and I was so happy to see her. It was raining outside so I wrapped her up in a towel so she wouldn’t get wet, and took her back out, putting her in a safe box in the nesting area.

I knew she was not out of the woods yet, that there might be internal injuries we could not see. The other half – who grew up in the country – had checked her over very carefully and could not see anything wrong. I crossed my fingers and went to bed about 6:30am (night shift) and when I got up that night she was still fine. Each day that went by and she was still here, I got more hopeful.

She did have a limp for a while and it took her a while to get back up on the roost but otherwise seemed fine.

She has made herself a new chicken friend by the name of Rosie and all appearances suggest she has been lowered on the pecking order. She used to be second chook, right after White Sussex. Now, it is White Sussex, the other two game hens, Ancona, Red Comb, and then Rose Comb (Rosie).

Now Red Comb and Rosie are inseparable. Where one goes, the other must follow. Rosie is the black chicken below next to Red Comb, eating a corn treat.

I think the reason for the demotion was that Red Comb had a limp for a while, was not on the roost at night, and was not her usual speedy self.

The chooks were locked in their run/coop for a good couple of weeks. They were not a great fan of this, being it is winter and they like to be out scratching up a storm of bugs and worms in the softer ground. On Sundays they would get let out early when the other half got home at 4 and he would be out there with them for a couple of hours so they could free range a little under his watchful eyes. Many healthy treats were given in the coop/run to keep them from being bored.

Then a couple of weeks ago, we re-did the outdoor pen. It now looks like this –

You can see the height of the pen has now been doubled to walk in height. It used to look like this – this photo was taken just after we put in a fresh sand floor back in the summer –

Chicken wire now covers the top of the enclosure. It took a good couple of days for the other half to sew it all together with binding wire.

We put in a beam at the back to support the wire some.

After this photo below was taken, I got out the pitchfork and made some holes in the dirt, for the girls digging pleasure. They had a blast.

I don’t know. I think if a predator is determined to get my girls, no amount of chicken wire or protective measures is going to be enough to save them. I think this is a reasonable compromise for the time being. In the summer, it might be rethink time. I want to build me a chicken batcave safe enough no fox or quoll or other unfriendly predator can get through. For now, I think this will prevent further hawk attacks during the day while they free range, at least.

The other great thing about this is pigeons can no longer get in and steal the food. I like the pigeons, don’t get me wrong, and I mean to set up a proper bird feeder for them. I just am not a huge fan of the lice and mites they can sometimes carry with them. Our girls have been lice and mite free for a fair while now, though.

I’ve been on the overnight shift for a month or two now, as in starting work at 10pm or midnight – I have been meaning to post this for ages but events conspired against me.

I am not sure yet if Red Comb knows she has been un-favourited. She doesn’t get treated any differently, it is just in my mind I am not allowed to call her my favourite anymore.

As I type this, White Sussex has begun her ba-gerking. There are a tonne of cockatoos and galahs flying about overhead. She will ba-gerk for that or anytime one of the other girls lays an egg.

Speaking of eggs, these crafty girls were hiding theirs somewhere. Now that they are in this enclosure, hiding is no longer an option. I also suspect our resident blue tongue lizard was eating some of the hidden eggs! But maybe one day when spring rolls around and I get back to the garden, I’ll pull out something which has gone rogue over the winter in the garden only to find a huge clump of eggs hidden there.

Chickens, country life, fears

And It Begins

1 Comment Posted on January 9, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

There are some jobs that I have been wanting to do for over a year. One of them was to sort out the shoes. Why would I do this in preparation for kitchen jobs you ask? Well the kitchen is like one huge open plan area and in one corner of that we had shoe racks – it was right near the entry way and it seemed like a logical place for them to go but it never worked in practice. All shoes have now been moved to this new home.

Plus some shoes have been put aside for donation and some for throwing out. Decluttering is always a happy feeling for me..

The scarf storage has been on the door of the new “shoe room” for a while. I’ve put the jewellery cabinet and storer into the same room as well. Kinda like a mini dressing room. Now I just have to get all the jewellery in the one place – I can think of 7 different locations where you can find jewellery of mine right now – on top of the soda stream being the most bizarre one. :)

The plastic containers have been a nightmare I never seemed to wake up from, and I was over it. OVER IT. But now, it is sorted – using a bookshelf which was no longer needed for storage of the tupperware type containers, and all the plastic storage containers I bought today for use with the new plan of things.

Here is our new pressure & slow cooker! Shiny, no? Well kinda no, it was the floor model so it is a little dusty. Now I just need to learn everything there is to know about slow cooking. As in how it works, etc. I have never done this before.

We bought a meat slicer. Yays! I am sick of spending excessive amounts of money on sliced chicken, turkey and ham. We have a foodsaver already.

I also got this rocket blender. I have wanted one of these things for a while now and I think a strawberry/banana coconut milk smoothie might work for the mornings as a breakfast.

Of course with the new deep freeze, I can freeze fruit like there is no tomorrow. Bananas tended to sit and get ignored until they went bad and got thrown out in the past. When I find good strawberries I like to buy a lot of them, wash them off and store them. Now I can just put them in the freezer.

I bought a whole watermelon today half of which I have frozen for the chooks in case we get any more of those super hot days. I’ve cut up a bunch of apples to freeze for them. I had frozen zucchini prepared for them on Tuesday which went into their water as ice cubes, they loved it enormously.

Speaking of Tuesday, which was a catastrophic fire risk day here.. this SMS came to me as a surprise, twice. Plus we got an electronic recorded message to the home phone.

I was still up when the sun rose on Tuesday so I went out and washed out the chickens water bowls and ran the sprinkler in their enclosure for a while – the water helps keep the sand cool and helps with their dust bathing themselves down to a cooler level of earth. It was already 31 degrees on my weather station before the sun even came up, but it was overcast so I went to bed thinking everything would be less hot than predicted.

Around 10am just as I was drifting off to sleep the safety switch tripped. I had to get up, get dressed, go out and turn it back on. Around 2, some telemarketer called me on my mobile which I had turned to ring from silent in case there was some kind of emergency. I was not making a great deal of sense on the phone seeing as I was asleep, lucky for the telemarketer else I would have gone off for being woken up. After I hung up, I woke up and went out to check on the chooks – the weather station said 44 degrees C. Hot time!

The girls were doing ok, chilling out in the shade under their coop, dustbathing happily. I put some more frozen veg in their water and went back to bed. Absolutely terrible sleep and then I had to go to work earlier than I had been used to – 5pm instead of 6. I nearly did not make it.

Tonight I am hoping to head back to bed at a more regular time having got up about 2 today and then doing a hard day of chores. I tried to do this last night – went to bed at 2, tossed and turned till 6, said stuff it, I’ll go watch another Dexter ep until I am tired, which turned into 2 eps.

Tomorrow it is off to Sydney for an Ikea & Costco trip. We’re heading up a little later than usual in the hope of missing all the peak hour traffic we usually hit on the way home – it is daylight until late now and Costco is open till 8:30pm. Will update you urgently! :)

cooking, country life, get organised, health, Home, prep for going paleo

Garden Updatery

Leave a comment Posted on November 15, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Zucchini plants have gone nuts!

There are some lettuces – the ones the chickens did not get to when they escaped to the “outside world” while I was giving them a treat before leaving for work – and I could not get them back in. Out of 5 only 2 lettuce survived.

A couple of secret tomato plants have sprung up. I did not plant any – these plants grow from the seeds the chickens have eaten.

The yellow Zucchini are not quite as successful as the green ones. This could be because instead of growing just one zucchini at a time, they are trying to grow many!

Chickens, country life, garden

Looks like it does work.

1 Comment Posted on October 23, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

So that is a yay!!

It has been a long time since I have blogged here but I am still reading the majority of the blogs I always did in my google reader – I don’t have the time I would like to comment but believe me I am still there keeping up with your goings on.

My goings on – not a great deal. I hibernated for the winter. The chooks got their large “free range” area (how can it be free range if they are locked in a pen lol) but it is a huge space and they really enjoy it out there. Well they did until we put the sand down – now they think we have done something bad to their space and are kinda freaking out about it. They’ll get used to it, like humans, chickens are not a fan of change.

Once a month or so we make a trip up to Sydney to visit Costco and Ikea and all the amazing food places I am always reading about on the food blogs. Wow there has been an explosion in that, hasn’t there!

I’ve planted some Zucchinis and lettuce and still have work to do on the rest of the garden – much weeding and removing of old plants.

That is when I planted them – here is how they look now – with added solar lights from Kmart –

They have baby zucchinis already! These are a yellow zucchini so look for the yellow thing with the zucchini flower attached. ;)

I’ll put up some pics now. :) So yeah, now it is as easy as typing the text in here and saving as a draft, and then using the iphone to upload my pics, probly you will hear from me more often. :)

country life, garden

Does this worky?

Leave a comment Posted on October 23, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Testing out the iPhone app thingy for WordPress – if this works you might hear from me more often..

Can’t see how to insert a pic yet I was going to show you the chook pen with freshly added and raked sand they now have a large area to wander in during the day. It once had lawn but apparently they are not fans of that and they dug it up and ate it all.

Chickens are a little crazy!!

Ok I found the pic thing will give it a try

Chickens, country life