Category: Keeping Animals
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Electric Fence Keeps Pigs In!
I finally got to install my electric fence yesterday morning, and we haven’t had any more trouble from the pigs. For the electric fence energiser, I bought a Thunderbird BD-20. This is a neat little 2 km “strip grazer”, powered by 4x D-cell batteries. I don’t have mains power near the pig pen because it’s…
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The Pigs Escaped!
The pigs have escaped three times this week! Luckily, they’ve only got out into our yard. Each time, they just hang around in the garden, dig up the grass a bit, and lay in the sun. Putting them back in their pen was pretty easy – they’re just like flighty chickens. They’ll flee if you…
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The Big Pig Project 2010
In our quest to eat more sustainably, we’ve been experiencing what it’s like to raise our own animals for meat. So far it’s only been chickens, but we just raised the bar another notch with the addition of three pigs to the back yard! Aren’t they adorable? These little guys are super-cute, and you could…
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Processing Chickens
That’s the euphemism for those that don’t like to say “slaughtering and butchering chickens”! I processed the last two roosters from our first batch of chicks today. We’re keeping the one female from the group to join our layer flock. This photo is from the start of June – I just realised I hadn’t taken…
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Chicks Taken By Predator!
Some sad news, I’m afraid – two of the three chicks that Girlie hatched have disappeared. We’d left Girlie and the chicks in the main chicken run, since they had a safe indoor area that the rooster can’t get into (the entrance is just small enough that he can’t/won’t go in). Things had been going…
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Organic Fruit Fly Control and Hatching Chicks
We had a fantastic presentation today at the Jamberoo Community Growers meeting, by the people from Organic Crop Protectants. A big part of the talk was on organic fruit fly control, using their “eco-naturalure” male fruit fly trap and attractant/insecticide products. It looks like a great system to keep these frustrating pests down. You simply…
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Chicken Tractor Lifting Handles
The chicken tractor I built with my father a couple of years ago is still going strong. Since moving to Jamberoo we’ve been using it to build garden beds – we place it where we want the bed, leave it there for a few weeks until the grass has been cleared, then move it along…
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Joel Salatin in Australia
I’m a big fan of US farmer Joel Salatin. He’s the man behind Polyface Farm, “a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm and informational outreach in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley”. You might recognise him from the recent films Food, Inc and Fresh, and from Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. One of my favourite articles…
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Playing With Their Food
I was telling some friends at work about our new chicks, and when I mentioned that we were growing them out for meat they asked if our girls – aged 4, 6 and 8 – knew. To be honest, we’ve been upfront with them since before the chicks hatched. We’ve been clear all along that…
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Backyard Chickens Soar In Popularity
I’ve long had the feeling that more and more people are getting into things like growing their own food, keeping chickens, and living sustainably. But then my own interest in these areas has been growing over the past few years too, so I wasn’t sure if it was just that I was paying more attention…