Chicken at work

The neighbour's chickens have moved in and they settled in well. In past three weeks they flattened all greens in the chook pen, ate most of the slaters, inspected the raised garden beds and have done a wonderful job at tidying things up.

The big nesting box has been accepted too. The hens produce an average of 1.5 eggs per day. Enough to feed us per week. Have not bought eggs yet since the chooks moved in. But bought some laying pellets, Australian made and produced by Weston Milling, hopefully from GM free products. I bought the pellets at City Farmers, and asked them about GM content in the animal feed. They referred me to Weston Milling. Will follow this up with them. Although there is only GM canola produced in WA, they could easily import GM animal feed from overseas, especially from China and use it in their locally produced poultry pellets. One of the reasons to have my own chicks was to control the poultry feed, and wanting to exclude GM feed.

The poultry feed should include 15-18% protein in order to produce lots of eggs. Where should the protein come from? I do not want the laying pellets to come from GM fed animals from feedlots. I will report back on my journey exploring the origin of the Weston Milling Protein. My hens are old, they have had a production cycle in a battery and probably already had a year or two in my neighbour's chook pen.

During the last two days I let my five hens out of their 6x9m enclosure and allowed them to wander through the rest of our big backyard. They loved it, especially the scratching under the layer of mulch that has been rotting away for 1.5 years. Plenty of slaters and insects around. The chooks had a feast. The only victim was a basil plant in a pot that I had not moved out of the chicken's way in time.  Fortunately they don't seem to like the rocket, the parsley and the kohlrabi. they also have not touched the sweet potatoe leaves next to the old watertank.

The productive part of the garden near the second patch has been fenced off with a plastic mesh which we used before to protect the roots of the plum trees during transport before transplanting. The new fence is working well, only needs one dropper to stay in place and keeps the chickens out.  Lettice is growing well, parsley shooting up everywhere and lot of sunflowers emerge. And there is room for the productive space to even grow bigger, following the motto of Charlie: "The Edge is Where it's At".

Getting closer to having chickens - borrowing the neighbour ones!

My raised garden beds have been in place a while, but production has not been as good as I expected. The zucchini plants were eaten and the are tomato seedlings the same and not produced even one tomato. The soil has dropped a bit and while one of the beds is full of nasturtions at the moment the second one hosts a slater megatropolis. I tried several ways to get rid of the beast, including hand picking them. The only way to get rid of these beasts in any sensible way was to finally get hens.

Our council allows to have poultry. There are local laws under the Health Act that makes the following specifications, in Division 4:

1. Poultry and pigeons shall be kept overnight in a properly constructed and securely fastened enclosure. The enclosure (chicken coop) is to have a smooth concrete floor at least 50mm thick so that it can be adequately cleaned.
2. The associated run area should be fenced to prevent poultry coming within 15 metres of any dwelling or 18 metres of any street. A free range area of 30 square metres is recommended.
3. All enclosures within which poultry are kept shall be maintained at all times in a clean condition. At the direction of an Environmental Health Officer you must adequately clean or re-position an enclosure that does not meet adequate hygiene or structural requirements. 
4. A combined total of not more than 12 poultry and pigeons may be kept outside the prohibited area.
5. No roosters are permitted to be kept on any premises, but no roosters.

We are lucky as the property is neither on commercial land nor in the part of town where poultry is not allowed at all, which is closer to the centre of Perth. Our chicken coop is next to the neighbours garage, which not a dwelling, as this only applies to buildings for human habitation. Not sure why they mandate a distance to the next dwelling, probably for hygienic purposes, public health issues. We don't quite make it with that mandated distance, but there is a significant distance. The total free range area is only about 15 square metre, but if 30m3 is right for 12 chooks, that will do for the number I plan to have which is 5 at most! The guidelines need updating. To encourage people to grow food in an urban setting, the restrictions should be limited on how people can do this, as long as public health concerns are met.

After we build the fence we got the neighbour's hens over for a day. They loved it and got stuck into the slaters right away. However at night time they were reluctant to slip back through the very small gap in the fence and the neighbour was not happy for the chooks to stay over night. The part of the fance we had taken out was simply not big enough for the chicken to get through comfortably and the birds were scared to push their way back, due to the lack of motivation at the end of the day, no green grass being in sight. We chucked them back over the fence by hand the next day and the trial was abandonned

Soon the chicken are coming over for good, the hen house should be finished by tomorrow morning, the laying box is done. We already dig over the neighbours backyard to get ready for planting radishes and lettuces. Two rats jumped out of her compost scampering for shelter, a sign that the compost was much too dry anyway. We enhanced the soil with two bags of sheep and cow manure and the rain today has watered it in beautifully. Looking good, ready for seedlings!

Lemon and avocado tree in the new garden bed, but not too much shade.

Getting ready for chooks

We finally built the chook pen in October 2012, after contemplating about it for several years; but summer passed without the friendly animals taking home on our property. The pen measures about 15x10m and is built in a rectangle with the garden shed in one corner.

The area has a bit of shade during summer, from an olive tree near the she and a ficus in the middle of the garden which is our oxygen lung and guarantor for a cool backyards even in a hot summer. the area also it holds two raised garden beds that were unproductive last winter due to a slater invasion. The chooks will sort that out. I am certain about this.

Home made fence spreader for the top of the pole

It was easy to erect the fence, just dug a whole and inserted the fence poles into the sand as is. Spreaders hold the poles apart, the mesh is tied to the top and bottom of the fence poles with wire. It took us two afternoons with two people and turned out a decent exercise and accomplishment.

The decision still had to be made where to house the chooks and where to put their nesting boxes. We decided against putting them into the shed and have started to built an annex on the back of the shed just for the chooks, between the shed and the neighbour's garage.

We hope to finish it this Sunday and the hens are already waiting.

My neighbour is on long service leave in Europe at the moment and she has agreed for me to mind her five chicken in our backyard, giving them a holiday from home. Chook minding at its best. This gives me an opportunity to check out whether having hens is the right thing for me, does not tie me down past September 2013, hopefully results in a friendly slater eradication outcome and might even give me some eggs. Lots of benefits in this temporary arrangement.

Hopefully on Sunday this saga continues and the chicken can settle in. They are rescued battery hens and are still laying. However, I have not found any eggs yet, despite the neighbour being away for 6 days already, as the neighbours chook pen is a gourmet place for some nifty crows that take care of the eggs. Another neighbour just told me that he saw them fly up to the gutter with an egg in their beak, then drinking the egg in the gutter, leaving no trace of their crime. I swear to make life very uncomfortable for the crows if they venture into my chook yard. We will give the hens proper nesting boxes that keep out the crows, hopefully.
More learning and the promise not to neglect this blog for as long as I did since the last post 6 months ago.

November garden

The lobbing of the old olive trees and the lilac tree has made room for new garden beds in the back of the garden, in an area which has a bit of shade at the moment but is going into full sun soon. It's the ideal spot for tomatoes and I planted several plants from self sown seeds out of the compost.  The first bed was created about four or five weeks ago and I used some Pura Veda seeds to get a bit of ground cover and much needed shade from the direct sun impact.

I used old jarrah planks to shape the beds and put some mulch around them after I had lifted the useful earth into the beds from the outside ot the area. On the side of the bed I am raising more tomatoes, zucchini and kohlrabi seedlings in pots.

 

The bed to the back left followed about two weeks ago and I sowed some yellow beans, kohlrabi and rocket. The garden bed in the forefront is just a week old and holds more tomatoes, spring onions and more radishes will hopefully come up. I also just stuck into the ground two onions which have started growing in my kitchen draw and were no longer useful in food. Hope to get some seeds out of them and they might also work as  repellent against pests.

My experiment with lettuces in pots worked well again this year. The seedlings just came up in the area where we had lettuce last year. the plants are going to seeds now a bit early because of the hot weather last week. To the right of the picture are some tomatoes just about to set fruit, and starting to climb up the home made frame. In the front are some sweet potatoes, the leaves are good for stir fry too. 

 

 This is the 2011 lettuce patch, plants are shooting up here too, desperate for some water. The soil is depleted, as no additional manure was added since last years crop, but we got about 8 weeks of lettuce out of it  and are still picking leaves as we go. I am looking forward to the sunflowers reproducing last years splendid work in attracting bees to the garden and providing shade to the crops below.

 

To the left of the 2011 lettuce patch is a new area where I grow green beans, peas and coriander next to parsley in the shade of an orange tree. The beans just started climbing on the hand made frame and a bamboo pole. The patch is visible from the kitchen and I enjoy watching the beans grow every day. This picture also shows one of my fruit-fly traps. First results are out and need to be written up in another post.



Fruit fly traps

The mediterranean fruit fly is in my view the biggest threat to obtaining a yield on tomatoes and stone fruit in Perth. The plum trees we planted last year have set lots of fruit and some of them are already showing bite marks of fruit flys. It's time to do something about it, and might even alread be too late. I have prepared  a few small and big plastic bottles to use as fly traps and want to give it shot again, after my last attempts were not overly successful.

A good recipe for the bait is from a program of ABC Gouldburn Murray on 1 April 2011.
 
Jacky's Fruit Fly mixture:
Add one heaped teaspoon of vegemite to one litre mixing jug.
Add half a cup of hot water to dissolve the vegemite.
Add 1/4 cup of brown sugar.
Add finely chopped banana peel.
Fill remainder of jug with cold water.
Cut two small holes at top of empty 1.25 litre plastic bottles.
Pour a third of mixture into plastic bottle and hang (one litre mixture can be spread across three 1.25 litre bottles.)

Some other useful suggestions come from Garden Note 547 published by  the WA Department of Agriculture and Forest.

Mediterranean fruit fly - ceratitis capitata

Table 2 contains several fruitfly bait recipes, all exploring the need of the female medfly for protein:

Recipes to lure Medfly in home gardens
Solution 1
80 g white sugar
1.5 g dry brewer’s yeast
920 mL water
Solution 2
5 mL imitation vanilla essence
20 mL household ammonia
1 L water
Solution 3
Peel from 6 mandarins (or 2 oranges)
50 mL household ammonia
1 L water
Solution 4
2 tsp honey
2 tbsp ammonia
2 tbsp imitation vanilla essence
1 L water
Solution 5
1 tsp borax
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp bran
1 L water

The internet has plenty of advice on how to control the medfruit fly:

• Green Harvest
• Royal Horticultural Society (where I sourced the pretty picture above of the small fly)
• Wattle Tree Horticulture
• Bugs for bugs

The WA Department of Agriculture also publishes another useful resource: Common Seasonal Pests. Time to cut the bottles and to prepare the mixtures.

Wicking bed in Perth?

The weather has been very wet in the last two days and I have noticed how well the mulch we applied last year has changed to soil, or at least rich and dark coverage of the sandy sub-soil.

It's time to make new plans, especially for the garden. Designing new garden beds is on top of the list. I have been interested in wicking beds after Permaculture WA has been promoting it for a few years now and a friend in Mount Lawley had good yield with hers.

Today I got an interesting article with inspiring photo from  Sustainable Gardening Australia.
I tried to link the pic, but could not do so, so here it is again: neat beds and the box in the background looks just the size of my old fridge! Am also intrigued to see the mashed frame protect the plants from pest, such as fruit flies, can imagine a number of tomatoes growing in there and other delicat goodies.

Want to explore the making of wicking beds, the principle is good, conserving water, limiting fertiliser and concentrating the good soil where it is really needed.

The second immediate task is to find out more about nitrogen fixers. Have been looking at a good youtube video that explained how the plants need assistance when picking up the nitrogen from the soil.

 

 

One thing is clear to me and not frightening but exciting: I need to learn more!

Urban farming

Becoming more and more interested in urban farming, ready to learn and grow myself, I have found a few inspiring videos such as this one:

The tree lobbers have been and there is plenty of space to plant, space for new fruit trees, veggie gardens and my blueprint looks more and more like this picture which is taken from a community garden surbey in Sydney. What a great place to work in and recharge your batteries: http://communitygarden.org.au/2009/10/05/basic-infrastructure/

Still, our hearts need to heal as the cutting of old olive trees and the lobbing of our shade giving ficus was a big blow to our souls. It will get better and time will heal the sorrow and some new growth will give hope. Looking forward to a fresh start.