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 bait [...]

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 [...]

Help! Does anyone know how to ‘cure’ a broody chicken?

Molly (our cuckoo leghorn) has gone broody, and given her way would spend all day up in the roost area of our chicken tractor. The photo shows the roost with the access door open – she gets cranky and pecks me if I try to move [...]

I previously posted a list of online resources I found useful (for both plans and inspiration) when designing our chicken tractor.

I’ve had a few emails from people who lack either the time or the inclination to build their own, and would like to purchase a ready-made chicken tractor. So here are some of the Australian [...]

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to writing up these entries – last weekend I attended my first Illawarra Seedsavers meeting, and it was great.

There were about 10 people at the meeting. Being my first, I didn’t know what to expect, but the other people were all very friendly and welcoming. They’d [...]

The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Good Living” supplement today has an article about HerdShare and Rentachook, titled City folk find a milky way.

HerdShare runs out of Byron Bay, and facilitates a scheme designed to get around Australian regulations that prohibit the sale of raw (unpasteurised) milk. Instead of buying your milk at retail, you instead buy [...]

Since Molly the rooster moved out to the farm, we’ve been wanting to get another chook or two for the chicken tractor.

Our three black silkies are just about to come into lay (I’ve been saying that for 3 weeks now!), but we thought it would be nice to get a ‘proper’ layer as well. We [...]

When thinking about a coop for our chickens to live in, we wanted something practical, non-permanent, and space-efficient. We were only planning to have 3 or 4 chickens so we didn’t want to build anything too big or expensive, but we needed to protect them from neighbours’ cats and keep them comfortable.

Looking around the net, [...]

We have three silkies at the moment, just about to come into lay. They’re named Seraphina, Luciana and Ro (yep, we’re big Barbie movie fans around here!).

We had a rooster named Molly as well (I know, my defense is that you can’t tell their gender as day-old chicks!), but we had to get rid of [...]