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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
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.
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.
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.
This beetroot apparently has a complaint about the kitty climber planks we put over the top of it. But it has found a way to get to the sun in any case..
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.
Newly planted, can’t wait to see how they do.. ;)
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..
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!
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.