Broody!!
My favourite chicken has taken to sitting on the eggs the other chooks are laying. She isn’t obsessive about it, she is more than happy to be kicked off the eggs when I collect them, but if the eggs are there she wants to sit on them.
country life
Zeolite & Rice Hulls
Today I cleaned out the chook pen and took some pics.. Here is the empty pen –
Zeolite is a nitrogen absorber. Once it has absorbed all the nitrogen in the chicken coop I can use it on the garden as a fertiliser.
Here is the Zeolite in the bags we buy it in – it is $10 per bag. It lasts somewhere between 2-4 months just depending on how often one is able to scoop out the poop. If I don’t touch it at all, it’ll need changing in about 2 months – if I scoop regularly it’ll be 4 months.
Here is the outgoing zeolite and rice hulls. It is probably about 3/4 of the amount initially put in – the chooks scratch quite a lot of the material out across the months but thankfully a large portion of that material ends up on the pavers we have out near the door so that can be scooped up with a shovel and put into the garden. And of course there is quite an addition of chook poo to the material!
This material goes onto the garden as mulch and fertiliser and the garden loves it. There are some seeds in there so it does need a little more weeding than your average garden but it is so worth it with the results one gets.
And here is the pen when the new material has been added. The chooks come out and cluck and scratch up a storm, they love the new stuff.
I try to keep the zeolite in the middle of the pen and put the rice hulls (the cheaper material) out towards the edges in the hope more zeolite will stay in the pen.
So there you have it – a clean chicken pen, happy chooks scratching about, a happy garden thanks to the awesome fertiliser, and a happy me because I feel better when it is all clean and purty.
Mizuna
I have never been a fan of regular lettuce. I prefer baby spinach or rocket. One day at the garden centre I found Mizuna which is apparently another kind of lettuce but I’d never heard of it, so I thought I would give it a try..
On the 11th of November this is little kitty sniffing them to see whether they are worth chomping on. She has a thing for grass and things that look like grass but she chose not to chew at these. They’d been in the ground for maybe a week.
I fed some to the chickens over the following days, picking from the centre of the plant as I hoped they would bush outwards a bit. This apparently encouraged them to flower. Here they are on the 22nd November –
And here they are just 3 days later on the 25th –
I had no idea they would flower. They taste great, and have the advantage of growing quickly and also tall away from the ground so they are easy to keep dirt free and rinse off when it is time to eat them.
According to Wikipedia they are resistant to cold and grown in winter in Japan, and you can eat them hot or cold. I’ll keep an eye out for them at the garden place and if I see more I’ll be buying them to plant in some of the large pots I have which are plantless. I think Mizuna would do great in a pot as well as in the garden and if it is close to the back door I can just pop out and cut some for salad.
The chooks absolutely love it – probably it is their second favourite green thing to eat after Kale.
Garden Notes 1
I discovered a mutant cauliflower. Well all of my cauliflowers have pretty much been weird but this one certainly takes the cake so far. I’m not growing them for me – they are for the chooks and the chooks don’t seem to mind the oddness, or the caterpillars which have (irritatingly) overtaken these plants.
We had a couple of super hot days and then quite a bit of rain. The plants seem to be loving it, I can see real differences between photos I took on Friday and photos I took today.
Tomatoes & Watermelons
Newly planted, can’t wait to see how they do.. ;)
A Fish Miracle
Even though it is a rainy day here today nothing keeps us from the awesomeness of the backyard for too long, so in a break from the downpour when it was just spitting and rain was falling like flakes of snow instead of water, I opened the door and the kitties rushed out, then I followed with a tomato and apple treat for the chooky girls.
The Other Half was doing some weeding around the water feature when he thought he saw the body of the fish which died a few months ago. Turns out it was not a body it was a live fish! It has been existing in there, feeding on algae for several months without us feeding it fish flakes. I gave up when I kept not seeing it and figured it had expired.
It does not like people so it just hides under the fountain part of the water feature and that is why we never saw it..
Updatey
We did some re-shaping of the garden
I put in some beans, celery, pumpkin and mizuna as well as cat grass, cat nip and tansy.
These plants have not enjoyed great weather, they have been rained on extensively and have suffered a bit as a result. Here is hoping for some better weather so they can go forth and prosper like the rest of the garden.
Which as you can see, is doing quite well.
Except we are having a little caterpillar issue.
The chickens enjoy eating them!
Chicken Free Ranging Update
The ground finally dried out enough to raise the chicken free ranging tent again. I went off to the gym and the other half got creative while I was gone..
It took ages to tempt the girls out. Greens which usually incite a chicken riot were gazed at from the doorway where they felt safe. Finally the other half helped them out with the scary rake from behind trick. Once they were out, they started digging and scratching.
This was the first free range outing for Nugget (AKA Rosecomb) and she had no clue what to do. She doesn’t know how to scratch like a regular chicken or how to create a hole in the ground to dustbathe in. After watching the other girls for a bit, she tried dustbathing without any dust, just on the grass.
Light Sussex (still nameless) is the best at creating a hole to dustbathe in. She made several and eventually Nugget found her way into one of them. As well as one of the game hens. Lucky Light Sussex makes a big hole in the ground, big enough for everyone to enjoy. :)
They got to stay out there for several hours while I weeded the garden. Getting them back into the coop was just as difficult as getting them out of it in the first place. They wanted to stay out but a thunderstorm was on the way, so the other half herded them back into the coop.
Spring Garden Update
I have a few updates – lets start with the garden..
It once looked like this.
It now looks like this.
A lot of weeds had sprung up, so I have been slowly weeding and mulching. This is the half of the garden I have completed. I’ve put down sawdust formerly from the chook laying boxes, and also Zeolite and rice husks formerly from the run and coop.
A slightly closer view – you can see how much the seedlings have grown. What you can’t see is that my zucchini plant has flowers and a baby zucchini on it! I spotted that while out there today but couldn’t get good photos.
Strawberry flowers!
The chooks have been enjoying greens from the garden for a few months now. When they see me get in there, they go nuts bagerk-ing and took took-ing, hoping that greens will come to them as a surprise.
As you can see, there is still some work to do.
Unfortunately the weather has now turned to shyte, so it may not be done as soon as I would like.
Yes, that is a storage box full of weeds which I removed from the garden. :)
There is also a chook free ranging tent. That will be the next update.
General Update
This past week has been extremely busy because it has rained cats and dogs here. In 4 days we had over 120mm!
The trouble with this is that we live next door to a large football oval which is elevated higher than our place. So, all the run off from the football oval ends up in our backyard. :( This turned the yard into a swimming pool. It looked like this.
Yes, next to the beige fence is all waterlogged too. Bear in mind the grass is pretty long, it didn’t get mowed and the chooks haven’t been out chopping it down with their beaks.
The rain started on Tuesday. On Wednesday around lunchtime when the above photo was taken I went out to check on the chookys, the water went through my shoes thoroughly saturating my feet. After I did not have any shoes which would be suitable for going out to the chook coop! Uhoh, what now?
Once I changed shoes and socks, I spent a good couple of hours in pouring rain driving around to local stores trying to find gumboots. You would think this would be an easy task – and it would be if you were a kid. However being an adult, not a single store had any adult gumboots. Just after 5:30pm I found my way to the local fishing store which was closed but lucky for me took pity on me and let me in when they had what I needed. YAYS O YAYS teh gumboots.
I was then able to return home and shut the chooks up for the night but the fun was not quite over yet. We discovered a minor flood at the front of the house where the garbage bins reside. This required a trip to Bunnings to get a hoe so we could build a drain down the side of the driveway. If any human can go to Bunnings and return home with just the thing they went there for, they must be a better human than we are, because we spent $133 and only $20 of that was on the hoe.
The other half then STOLE my gumboots to go outside and make a drain. We have the same size feet, isn’t that funny? Well the next day we had to go back and get a second pair of gumboots so we both have a set.
We spent time over the next couple of days digging various drains in different places to allow the water to run off better. We now have a sludgy, muddy, icky mess. But at least all the water sitting on top of the ground (eg in the below photo) has drained away. There is now a drain right through the middle of this shot, which I do not have a photo of.
We dug a drain along the front of my veg garden which was running like a stream for the past few days. The garden has loved the rain, my plants are very happy. I was inspired to get a few more seedlings today while at Bunnings, again, to get flyscreen for my mealworm farm. Because as I say you can’t just get the thing you went for. :)
I have killed 2 Redbacks this week who showed themselves once the water rose higher than where they live.
The chookys have been somewhat locked in this week – even on the days I let them out into their run they preferred to stay inside the coop. But this has inspired a new chooky besides Floppy to lay! It was a perfect first egg, though a little on the small side. With that said it was still big enough to eat. I made up scrambled eggs today with that egg and four of Floppy’s eggs.
We don’t know who it was. I suspect one of the English Game bantams as one of them – purple comb – has changed comb color significantly this week. It is now more like burgundy comb. Same chooky has been approaching me for feather massage and back scratching whenever I have been near the coop so I think she thinks I am a rooster.
I was out in the yard this afternoon having planted my new beetroot seedlings and my rainbow chard plant, in my gumboots having just put down the hoe, leaning on the fence around the garden, watching my chookys scratch around and make happy noises and trumpet about their lactose free yogurt I gave them and the brussel sprouts they demolished while I was at work today.. and they really did demolish them, there was only one leaf left..
.. it occurred to me that as muddy as it was and with new rain starting to spit down around me.. this is the life. :)
Intense contentment.