Saturday 21 December 2013

Happy Litha to all


Yesterday was Summer Solstice in the southern hemisphere (which includes us). The Earth's annual journey around the sun has bought us back to the peak of solar strength and the promise that 'this too shall pass' and winter will come again.




Every year we head to water for our Litha celebration; it pays to have water close when playing with fire.
Litha is a celebration of the sun reaching the height of his strength and a realization that everything is cyclic and even the awesome power of the sun waxes and wanes. We decorate the altar and surrounds with sun symbols and imagery. We perform a ritual to say thank you for the light and heat that let us live on this planet, then we party.

Decorating the tree behind the altar (facing North)



The altar is coming together nicely too

I love the twisted branches of this tree.

The Sun Lord's mask.



My partner wearing his Litha crown.

The Sun Lord in a light hearted moment.

The mask after the ritual, hanging in the tree, watching over our revels.

The Sun Lord casting the flaming spear into the water to symbolize his current strength and the shortening of the days from this point onward as the suns strength wanes towards winter.


Feasting from the altar.

The spear is floating in there somewhere




Happy Litha to all. I hope your day was as pleasant as ours.



A holed rock hanging in the tree.

A rock with a hole in it (naturally formed) is called a hagstone. It protects the area it is hung in from negative energy and if you look through it maybe you will see the faerie world.




Tuesday 17 December 2013

Using Guinea fowl for tick control.




We have been keeping guinea fowl for years. When we were managing (and working) a bio-dynamic avocado orchard we used them to keep down insect pests in the trees and paralysis ticks on our house cow. Now we keep them to reduce tick numbers for our sheep and dogs, and because it seems too quiet without them after all these years. They are exceptional insect hunters and will eat adult ticks by the thousand, they are also efficient watch dogs and escort snakes and goannas from the yard very swiftly (except that one time when they chased a black snake into the house instead). They do however have some unique characteristics................

The flock collectively have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder); they tour the perimeter of the yard at a specific time each morning and afternoon and if anything is out of place they will stand and cackle at it for about fifteen minutes, examples of 'out of place' are leaving a pot upside down when it was previously the right way up, parking the car two meters closer to the house, leaving a shovel leaning against the fence or a visitor's car is parked in the driveway.

Individual guinea fowl will behave in a bossy way towards chooks, dogs, sheep, ducks and sometimes humans when food is at stake. You can see the warning in the body language of the guinea fowl in this clip, he is warning the rooster off 'his' grain.



They don't like to sleep in a pen at night but will go as high up the tallest tree they can find. Ours come gliding down to the ground at dawn with much squawking and cackling.

 One of our dogs; Jess, has been obsessed with one particular guinea fowl for some time and she sometimes gets a bit overwhelming for the poor boy. He sometimes flies onto the top of the chook pen to get a break from her. This clip shows her patiently waiting for him to come down so she can protect him.





In my experience, guinea fowl are terrible parents; they hatch too many babies then try to walk them too far and don't protect them from predators (kookaburras, goannas, foxes, currawongs, butcher birds, hawks and snakes here). We get around this by finding the eggs and giving them to a clucky chook to raise, this has the added advantage of making them less flighty in nature as some of their behaviors are learned from their parents.

The latest batch of guinea fowl keets with their (no doubt bemused) mum.

There is some debate about whether guinea fowl actually help control ticks; here are a few articles on the subject to help you make up your mind. For my part, I definitely think they make a difference.


a comparison study of biological and chemical tick control

a home-grown view

an effectiveness study

An 'against' article.

Another 'against' article

What do you think? Would you keep them?

Saturday 14 December 2013

Afternoon storms bring fertility.

This week there have been storms every afternoon. While I was house sitting I managed to get some amazing photos of a storm moving over the house.











I am so glad the milking and feeding were done by the time the storm hit.

Friday 13 December 2013

Learning to milk goats


I am house sitting (well dairy sitting) for a friend who has a goat dairy. Consequently I have had to learn to milk goats. Having grown up on a dairy, I was fairly confident I could manage goats; however they proved a bit harder to milk than I imagined. Goats are very different to cows when it comes to milking.

The dairy has mostly Saanen and Anglo Nubian  milkers. They are a pretty lot. There were billies, dry does and babies to be fed daily too.

The first milk I did was guided by my hosts and involved advice  about how to hold the teats and not to pull downward when milking (different from cows there). The procedure they follow is outlined here. It took me an hour to milk one goat and my hands were very sore. I was to milk between two and five goats twice a day (panic stations). As I had to catch the bus to work at 7.30 am and milking and feeding had to be done before that, I decided to call in backup for my first morning; my daughter (fortuitously home from uni) came over and stayed the night to help out with the morning milking.

By the end of the week I had my timing down to fifteen minutes per goat and was able to get it all done in time for the bus. Afternoons were more leisurely affairs when I got to watch the babies play and the maremma herd dog in action.


My daughter milking her first goat. She has done AI, embryo harvesting and ultrasound on them but never milked.




The milk is taken to the gorgeous milk room where it is strained and bottled. The amount of milk given by each girl is carefully recorded for future reference (some were giving 3 litres per milk)The milk room is then cleaned and the floors swept (the dairy is swept too).



The milk room. I have dairy envy (even though I am not milking at the moment).

The bales where the milking happens. How neat and tidy is that!!

The waiting room, An undercover area with hay and water where the girls to be milked wait for me to get to them.




Some of the girls I was milking.


They are curious and intelligent ladies.

There is a maremma dog to guard the little ones

The babies are a joy to watch.

A little saanen doe, looking like a fairy animal.

One of the many shelters; one for each paddock.

I have really enjoyed learning a new skill and spending time with these pampered goats. Having lots of goat milk to drink is a bonus too. My fiend also makes cheese and soap from her milk (both are beautiful products).

 Have you ever thought about having a dairy? cows or goats? People tend to be either a 'goat person' or a 'cow person' which are you?

Saturday 7 December 2013

Hugelkultur beds update


Stage four of the Hugelkultur beds has not yet been completed, but stages one, two and three are producing lots of food. The beds look like a jungle with plants fruiting, seeding and new plants emerging, there is a good mix of vegetables and flowers too. At the moment everything growing in these beds are annuals as I have plans to top up the soil at some point and I don't want to move perennial plants to do it.


The jungle on the right are the Hugelkultur beds, the potato towers can be seen on the left, against the fence and the whole floor is layered with cardboard. The chooks stare longingly through the fence at this little oasis of green.

The corn is doing well in stage three, but there will only be enough for one meal from this tiny planting. I need to put more in, looks like another bed building day is required.

The zucchini are producing lots of fruit and providing shelter for eggplant seedlings.

Green and purple sprouting broccoli are still producing enough heads to feed us. 

Roma tomatoes are giving us enough vine ripened fruit to qualify as a glut.

Good old silverbeet just keeps on giving, although only one plant remains of the original three; the other two have gone to seed. The climbing beans are picking and the second lot of bush beans are almost to flowering now.

The amaranth towers above it all and provides some colour to the scene as it seeds. After collecting seed from it for more plantings, I will give the seed heads to the chooks.

I am really pleased with the Hugelkultur method of building garden beds; it retains moisture, it is an attractive looking bed, it makes piles of rotting wood useful and it encourages me to build new bed space. I will be continuing to build more beds in the future (as time permits).




This is me, mowing the lawn. We put up an electric fence around all the stuff we don't want them to eat first. Sheep are nature's mowers and whipper snippers.

Friday 6 December 2013

Square foot garden update


The seedlings are up in the trailer bed in which I am trialing square foot gardening. The beans are towering above everything else but most of the seeds have sprouted.

I have taken the advice of Mel Bartholomew and thinned the seedlings to the appropriate number and spacing per square foot, it caused me great pain to pull out good seedlings and volunteer plants from the last crop so I hope it pays off.

The bush beans are growing so fast they will be taller than the strawberries by tomorrow.

You can just see the carrots coming up.

The lettuce is looking healthy inside it's square.



The Tokyo Bekana is up, and it needed thinning.


 I am watering the entire bed at a rate of 10 litres per day, I scoop out the water from our showers and use it to water the whole garden. When the seedlings have all grown a set of true leaves I will mulch between them with a fine mulch like dried grass clippings or chaff to help retain moisture in the soil.

I am now wondering if I could combine square foot gardening with my Hugelkultur beds to make use of the best qualities of both methods, or would it be better to  use the Hugelkultur beds for large vegetables like zucchini, brassicas, corn and tomatoes and use the square foot gardening bed for small vegetables that can be grown intensively. What do you think?

Salmon Faverolles update


I let the Salmon Faverolles out for a run in the yard for the first time this morning; they were so excited and happy to be treated like 'big chooks'. There are only seven of the original ten left; all three died from the same mystery Marek's like disease we seem to have acquired. Treatment with St John's Wort tincture prolonged the life of one chick but he ultimately died and the other two were fine one night and dead the next morning with the characteristic neck drawn back, splayed leg posture.

The seven remaining chicks are growing fast and have reached that awkward adolescent stage between chick and chook when they are scruffy and disproportionate to look at, but these chicks somehow manage to make that stage look cute (I really am in love).

In their pen, waiting to be big chooks.



Three days later, they are big chooks and the pen is open.

Foraging for bugs with mum.


I will let them out for a few hours every day for a few weeks to let them learn to forage and enjoy being chooks. We will need to build them a pen of their own soon as I am a bit worried that my cross breed flock will be too aggressive for them; they really are gentle and docile chooks.