Beans have gone mad. Tendrils in all directions, nasty when you get one caught on your neck. They're covered in tough little hairs which are angled back down the stem, so it slips easily forward but is highly abrasive going backwards. But there's trouble brewing here... one of the six plants, one on the end, is dying. Either it's diseased or something destroyed its roots - every leaf on it is wilting and the stalk is turning yellow. Rather like what happened to some of our capsicum plants last year.
Passionfruit are good. At least the birds seem to think so. Damn birds have eaten the best of them. I've taken to picking at the first hint of a purple blush and then letting them ripen in the kitchen. Dozens of fruit on the vine and still more flowering and setting.
Basil is huge, but insisting on going to seed. Also afflicted with the wrinkly leaf syndrome that the hibiscus display, but it doesn't seem to kill the plant and the leaves still taste great. Oh but the small green grasshoppers all over it might be a problem.
Parsley has gone into recession. It was enormous, don't know what happened but it's died back to about a third its earlier size. Most of the stalks and leaves look healthy... so hopefully it'll stick around.
Chillies... ah, the chillies. With the kids in the house we don't get to use chilli a lot. Had the opportunity the other night to try one of ours fresh for the first time. Oh my dog. Honestly the hottest little pepper I've ever eaten. Great flavour. Looking forward to using those more. The bush hasn't grown much but it's still fruiting well.
Rosemary and chives doing great. Marjoram gone mad and stringy, needs a prune. Sage looks like lace, thanks again to the little grasshoppers. Chickory exploded into seed (not that we care much). Spring onions have not grown noticeably in months... they just sit there looking healthy but too few to harvest.
Pumpkin (we think). Something that volunteered from scraps in the chook pen. It started life at an opportune time, when the chooks were not able to be confined to their coop. Grew enough to poke a runner out the opposite side of the pen into the yard. Then I renovated the hutch and shut the chooks in for a couple of days. Every leaf inside the coop and even a flower or two was eaten back to the stem. No worries, the bits outside the pen are thriving and have just flowered.
Mystery marrow. More volunteers, this time from the compost which we used in pots to try and grow tomatoes and petunias. They have similar leaves and flowers to pumpkin but don't seem to want to take over the world like pumpkins do. Whatever, they're looking great. As are a couple of tomato bushes which managed to peek up around the marrow.
And finally, we have planted some citrus trees. Lemon, mandarin and orange, up the back between the shed and the chooks. Little fellas still, will have to wait a number of years for anything from them.
Saturday 31 January 2009
What chicks want
While I'm on the subject of chickens... In the past six months I've learned some things about chook psychology.
During the day time, chooks seem to like resting on the ground, especially in the dirt, but they want a good long view at ground level - presumably so they can see any potential dangers coming. Ideal spots include hedges and low shrubs. Cool, loose dirt or leaf litter provide comfort, interest and sometimes a hidden snack.
At night it's a different story. Chooks want to climb as high as they can get and will go to extraordinary lengths to find a good perch. I guess the logic is that when it's dark they can't see things coming to eat them, so they might as well just try and get out of the way. Chickens aren't smart at the best of times but once the sun goes down their brain really switches off. They'll flap and squark like crazy if you pick 'em up while sleeping, but they'll go right back to sleep wherever you put 'em down. If they haven't been eaten everything must be OK. Funniest thing is when their head slips out from under their wing and hangs down limp below the level of their feet.
All of that is useful when you're thinking about building a home for chickens. This day/night dichotomy is why I'm trusting a four-foot-high wire fence to keep out chickens which even with clipped wings made it up onto a six-foot fence to sleep. Fingers crossed.
During the day time, chooks seem to like resting on the ground, especially in the dirt, but they want a good long view at ground level - presumably so they can see any potential dangers coming. Ideal spots include hedges and low shrubs. Cool, loose dirt or leaf litter provide comfort, interest and sometimes a hidden snack.
At night it's a different story. Chooks want to climb as high as they can get and will go to extraordinary lengths to find a good perch. I guess the logic is that when it's dark they can't see things coming to eat them, so they might as well just try and get out of the way. Chickens aren't smart at the best of times but once the sun goes down their brain really switches off. They'll flap and squark like crazy if you pick 'em up while sleeping, but they'll go right back to sleep wherever you put 'em down. If they haven't been eaten everything must be OK. Funniest thing is when their head slips out from under their wing and hangs down limp below the level of their feet.
All of that is useful when you're thinking about building a home for chickens. This day/night dichotomy is why I'm trusting a four-foot-high wire fence to keep out chickens which even with clipped wings made it up onto a six-foot fence to sleep. Fingers crossed.
All things chicken
1. About a week ago, our oldest chicken started laying. Lovely Henny Penny has been producing an egg each day. They're not magical or anything. They don't even taste any different to the free-range eggs we've been buying from the shops for ages now. But they're as fresh as they come and there's something special about food which comes from your own back yard.
2. Not sure if I've mentioned this (and too lazy to check) but we are back up to five chickens now. We bought two new hatchlings a few weeks back. Just to be clear, these are chooks six and seven, having "lost" one young chick and given away a rooster. We're trying to be more hands-on with this pair than we were with our second lot, hoping to foster the kind of pet-like relationship we have with Henny Penny as opposed to the touch-me-and-I'll-scream-bloody-murder attitude that Steggles and Nighttime have sadly adopted.
3. I haven't finished renovating the laundry yet. But I have raised the roof and added a second level to the chickens' hutch. Much to my frustration, the chooks wanted nothing to do with the hutch that I'd poured so much time and effort into - other than to use it as a stepping stone every evening to aid them getting up on to the top of the fence where they'd sleep for the night. (And in the morning they wouldn't jump back into the coop, no they'd be down into the yard and shut safely out of the coop where their water is.)
Now the roof of the hutch is at the same height as the fence, the second level is completely open on two sides (one long and one short) with the other long side closed off with a piece of shadecloth; they cannot jump up onto the fence any more and they have a nice big perch running the length of the hutch about 1.5m off the ground. Not only do they sleep on the perch and stay confined in the coop, but with the lower half of the hutch now open at the top they come in through the side door and jump up. And Henny Penny obligingly chose the nesting boxes as a good place to lay her eggs.
4. Much as we enjoy having our pets sharing our space, especially when the three older chooks do cute things like sit on the doorstep in the morning waiting for somebody to bring them something to eat, having chicken shit all over the outdoor bbq area is something we're not willing to live with. So this arvo I purchased more wire and some garden stakes and erected a no-frills 4-foot fence to exclude the chooks from our entertaining space. I used the large square-mesh wire because it's cheaper, uses less material, does the job and is ideal for climbing plants. Thinking of growing some peas. Bet the damn chooks eat 'em. Have yet to construct the gate.
5. Free-range chooks are spoilt for choice. With all those nice bugs and seeds and leaves to eat, they can turn their beaks up at lousy kitchen scraps. Sigh. There are some things they do enjoy: bread crusts and watermelon skins are the favourites so far. Most everything else gets left to rot. I've got fussy kids, fussy worms and now fussy chooks. At least the compost bin can't spit anything back out at me.
2. Not sure if I've mentioned this (and too lazy to check) but we are back up to five chickens now. We bought two new hatchlings a few weeks back. Just to be clear, these are chooks six and seven, having "lost" one young chick and given away a rooster. We're trying to be more hands-on with this pair than we were with our second lot, hoping to foster the kind of pet-like relationship we have with Henny Penny as opposed to the touch-me-and-I'll-scream-bloody-murder attitude that Steggles and Nighttime have sadly adopted.
3. I haven't finished renovating the laundry yet. But I have raised the roof and added a second level to the chickens' hutch. Much to my frustration, the chooks wanted nothing to do with the hutch that I'd poured so much time and effort into - other than to use it as a stepping stone every evening to aid them getting up on to the top of the fence where they'd sleep for the night. (And in the morning they wouldn't jump back into the coop, no they'd be down into the yard and shut safely out of the coop where their water is.)
Now the roof of the hutch is at the same height as the fence, the second level is completely open on two sides (one long and one short) with the other long side closed off with a piece of shadecloth; they cannot jump up onto the fence any more and they have a nice big perch running the length of the hutch about 1.5m off the ground. Not only do they sleep on the perch and stay confined in the coop, but with the lower half of the hutch now open at the top they come in through the side door and jump up. And Henny Penny obligingly chose the nesting boxes as a good place to lay her eggs.
4. Much as we enjoy having our pets sharing our space, especially when the three older chooks do cute things like sit on the doorstep in the morning waiting for somebody to bring them something to eat, having chicken shit all over the outdoor bbq area is something we're not willing to live with. So this arvo I purchased more wire and some garden stakes and erected a no-frills 4-foot fence to exclude the chooks from our entertaining space. I used the large square-mesh wire because it's cheaper, uses less material, does the job and is ideal for climbing plants. Thinking of growing some peas. Bet the damn chooks eat 'em. Have yet to construct the gate.
5. Free-range chooks are spoilt for choice. With all those nice bugs and seeds and leaves to eat, they can turn their beaks up at lousy kitchen scraps. Sigh. There are some things they do enjoy: bread crusts and watermelon skins are the favourites so far. Most everything else gets left to rot. I've got fussy kids, fussy worms and now fussy chooks. At least the compost bin can't spit anything back out at me.
Sunday 4 January 2009
Too much to say
Ironically, it's been quiet here because there's too much to talk about. Or maybe it's because there's been too much talk about.
Since I started doing this the world's attention has been brought quite sharply to bear on most of the issues that concern me. There's so much high profile discussion and activity going on that my little blog seems rather superfluous. Which is great!
I just want to highlight a couple of local bits of good news.
1. Brisbane folk are now habitually conservative with their water. We managed to meet the 140L/person/day target under extreme restrictions and even now that the dams are heading towards 50% capacity we're still sitting well under the 170L revised target. I just read my water meter for the first time in 201 days, and our total household usage over that period averaged only 194L per day - actually less than the previous six months when we were watching like a hawk.
2. Politics is (generally) swinging in the right direction for sustainable civilisation. The election of Obama is of course globally significant, but even here at home we've seen the Traveston Dam project put on hold, willingness to regulate agriculture in order to protect the Great Barrier Reef, plans for floating desalination plants shelved, proactive measures from government to promote energy efficiency and GHG reductions, community gardens... heaps of stuff.
3. The combination of environmental/sustainability concerns and the economic crisis is driving a swing away from "consumerism". I so hate being thought of as a "consumer". I want to be a "contributor". But anyway, it seems that I'm far from alone in my back yard garden tinkering, chook raising, material recycling and "waste not, want not" attitude. Newspaper articles are even using words like "frugality" in a positive lifestyle sense!
So here's hoping that 2009 continues in this trend. There will certainly be bad news this year (I predict a sudden resurgence in the price of oil at some stage, going even higher than the peaks of last year) but there is also an atmosphere of hope. As I heard it said on a BBC radio interview yesterday, a crisis is an opportunity for change.
Since I started doing this the world's attention has been brought quite sharply to bear on most of the issues that concern me. There's so much high profile discussion and activity going on that my little blog seems rather superfluous. Which is great!
I just want to highlight a couple of local bits of good news.
1. Brisbane folk are now habitually conservative with their water. We managed to meet the 140L/person/day target under extreme restrictions and even now that the dams are heading towards 50% capacity we're still sitting well under the 170L revised target. I just read my water meter for the first time in 201 days, and our total household usage over that period averaged only 194L per day - actually less than the previous six months when we were watching like a hawk.
2. Politics is (generally) swinging in the right direction for sustainable civilisation. The election of Obama is of course globally significant, but even here at home we've seen the Traveston Dam project put on hold, willingness to regulate agriculture in order to protect the Great Barrier Reef, plans for floating desalination plants shelved, proactive measures from government to promote energy efficiency and GHG reductions, community gardens... heaps of stuff.
3. The combination of environmental/sustainability concerns and the economic crisis is driving a swing away from "consumerism". I so hate being thought of as a "consumer". I want to be a "contributor". But anyway, it seems that I'm far from alone in my back yard garden tinkering, chook raising, material recycling and "waste not, want not" attitude. Newspaper articles are even using words like "frugality" in a positive lifestyle sense!
So here's hoping that 2009 continues in this trend. There will certainly be bad news this year (I predict a sudden resurgence in the price of oil at some stage, going even higher than the peaks of last year) but there is also an atmosphere of hope. As I heard it said on a BBC radio interview yesterday, a crisis is an opportunity for change.
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