Pets and Trees

Our 2 new chickens arrived in a cardboard box from Chicks'R'Us hatchery on 31 August. They were 20 weeks old, at which time they're known as 'point-of-lay', although they're not laying yet. We named them Arabella and Beyonce. Beyonce might actually be slightly younger, and she is shy, scared and tends to follow Arabella around everywhere. When separated they cheep cheep cheep for each other or panic and bok bok bok. Arabella is missing a lot of tail feathers and has darker legs than Beyonce so they're easy enough to tell apart.


Coco (standing in the middle with the bright red combe) was the first chicken we got - she is much older (about 3 1/2 years, although we've only had her since 9 July) and this year she started laying on 31 July. She lays 2 out of every 3 days approximately and her eggs have bright orange yolks.

Arabella has become pretty friendly with Coco and while Coco has established herself as first in the pecking order, Arabella is definitely second while poor Beyonce is at the bottom. Arabella is always seen scaring other 'visiting' birds such as crows, magpies, cockatoos, pigeons and indian miners away, and we joke that she must have been assigned that duty by Coco.









Stretchhhh.









Here is their home, the chicken-coop.


Our four pets!












Ezekiel is our cat. He and Coco are best mates. They even slept a night in the same room, Ezekiel's house. It was Coco's doing - I went down to make sure she was in bed, couldn't see her anywhere, I heard a bgok, looked up and there she was, 2nd shelf up in Ezekiel's room (our old downstairs toilet). I tried to put him in the chicken coop for the night because I couldn't move Coco, but he broke out, of course, and turned up later at our front door. So for lack of places for him to spend the night he went in with her, and after observing them carefully for an hour or two and after having seen them in the yard for the last 2 weeks with Ezekiel more scared of Coco than anything, they spent 7 hours together in close quarters.

That was a bizarre night on the 21 July. I checked on them during the night, then the next morning after letting them out was the morning our old Eucalyptus tree came crashing down. We initially just thought the crashing noise was from a truck or something down the street, then an hour or so later looked out the window and saw this:

The insurance company sent out their contractors the same day around 2pm and they had it cleaned up by 5.30pm. They took all of our old junk from the shed away too, as well as coming back later to deliver 2 cubic metres of mulch and grinding the stump of the tree into sawdust - useful for my compost, and they gave us a new shed. We now have soo much more sun in the yard, and since it was all fixed up so quickly and only damaged the neighbour's washing line and our old shed, I almost didn't mind! The leaves of the tree took up our neighbour's entire backyard!

Here they are chopping it down, fearlessly!

My Backyard

Here are some images of my backyard...

2/15 Done

2 Days left of holidays. 2 Uni terms completed. Monday marks the start of Term 3, Year 1 of my course. I haven't got my exam results yet other than for Anatomy & Physiology 1B, where I did pretty well.

This coming term I'm taking: Remedial Massage 2, Chemistry 1C, Reflexology 2, Anatomy & Physiology 1C, Reflexology & Ageing, Nutrition 1B (distance), Acupressure & Meridians Workshop. All my classes are on Saturday, Sunday or Monday, so I have 4 days a week Tuesday-Friday where I can do nutrition, garden, do housework, do uni homework and assignments and whatever else comes up (eg. worms, bees, butterflies, chickens, cats, compost, gardening, reading, cooking).

Wheee...

DIY Worm babies

I was going to go out and buy a worm farm when I realised I could make one myself and save $70. So today I found whatever I had around the place and created this, my worm farm.

Alfalfa House kindly donated a generous handful of worms from one of their own 6 worm farms to start me off.

Digital Seed was a helpful resource for working out how to create my DIY worm farm, and I'm sure it could have been better if I'd followed their directions and bought a couple of cheap $6 containers but I figured this set-up would do, at least for now, until my worms have multiplied quite a bit and need more room.

This is how worm farming works: You feed the worms weekly, by burying kitchen scraps (about 2-4 x as much as there are worms) in their bedding. Digital Seed said to bury it in a different spot in their bedding each week over six weeks, and that the worms follow the scraps, so when you get to the sixth week, if they've consumed all the scraps and bedding, you swap them into the container above and collect the remaining castings for the garden.

My McDodgy worm farm components: Mine's comprised of a series of stuff - the lid from my old beehive as a cover, a "spacer" from my beehive as a worm box (Box #1), a few "queen excluders" as ventilators/floors to the boxes, a polystyrene box previously cut down and used for growing wheatgrass to use as another worm box (Box #2), 2 old kitty litter trays to catch worm juice, and a stand consisting of that large broken container at the bottom (would have let it catch the juice had it not been broken and leaky).

Distracting side note: The excluders are like a strong steel mesh, and in beekeeping they're used to prevent the queen bee from leaving the "brood chamber" and getting lost in the hive (worker bees can fit through the many holes, and she can't as she is larger), meaning there is less chance you will kill her accidently when you open up your hives to check them out or remove or replace frames of honey. If you kill the queen, the bees get very upset as she is the essence of the hive - laying all the baby bees - without her unless they have some babies already that they can convert into a queen with a special diet, or unless they've already got some queens being raised (due to booming population/crowded conditions and the need to divide up) they're doomed.

Constructing the farm:
My basic construct from top to bottom is: Cover, (spare and empty) Box #1, Excluder#1, Shade Cloth cover, Worm bedding + buried scraps inside Box #2, Excluder #2 as a floor, 2 litter trays as worm juice catchers, held up and raised from the ground by the broken container

Worms need bedding. The bedding I've used for the worms is sawdust-soil, a handful of mature compost and damp shredded newspaper. Once you've added the bedding you can sprinkle on the worms, and in response to light they will burrow down into the bedding.

The worms in my farm are only in the polystyrene section (Box #2). The bedding containing the worms and buried scraps is covered by a cut out piece of shade cloth pressed against the bedding and held down by the excluder above it to prevent fruit fly and vermin entering and having access to the scraps.

In the worm farm I'm now using the excluders to provide ventilation, as well as to allow the worms to move into their new bedding when the time comes to swap them out into the other box (the one made of the "spacer", which I'm now going to call Box #1) and collect the nutrient rich worm castings for use on the garden. You swap them out by placing fresh bedding into Box #1 above the other box and by removing the shade cloth cover overnight from Box #2 so the worms can move upwards.

Underneath the polystyrene box (Box #2) I have 2 litter trays resting on top of the broken container "stand" to catch the worm juice that will ooze out as the worms eat through the kitchen scraps. The worm juice can be diluted 1:20 to spray onto plant leaves - with the advantage that it won't burn plants unlike most foliar sprays. You can also use it direct without worry, but this is more a waste than anything else. You only need to use weekly at 1:20 to obtain amazing results. You can also water your plants with it.

In addition, once the worms have eaten through all their bedding and scraps, mainly worm castings (poo!) is left behind in Box #2 (which after you've moved the worms into Box #1) can be added to soil to plant seedlings, to pot plants or even in garden beds to enrich soil. Some sources say you can grow seedlings directly in it, others believe it to be too strong. I haven't experimented with this yet but when I have you can be sure I'll post on it.

The cool thing is worms add more NPK to the stuff they eat in the process of digestion some how - about 11 times as much as would have been produced through composting the scraps.

Alfalfa House were also kind enough to give me some of their worm juice at the same time I got my worms, so I diluted it 1:20 and sprayed the back lemon tree a few days ago. It's yellowing leaves are now turning lovely and green which is incredible because everything else I've tried has not helped that tree.

It's great to use it as a foliar spray as it also acts as a biological control for pests - because the worm juice is full of bacteria and microorganisms assist in the control of pests.