Some ideas for food, medicinal and other useful plants you can place in and around your chicken run for healthy, happy chickens.

What I’ve been reading about this week – worming pigs naturally, butchering pigs, sustainable display homes, KiamaSphere, Book Depository, modern homesteading, how to freeze eggs, and the solar nest.

Here’s an awesome YouTube video about Novella Carpenter’s urban farm in West Oakland (California, USA). It’s got a lot of great info applicable to growing food and raising animals (for eggs, meat and dairy) in suburban and urban areas.

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 sit [...]

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 any [...]

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 [...]

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 these [...]

This story has been a bit of a saga.

Remember back when I got Molly the leghorn to go broody and slipped some eggs under her? Well, none hatched. I think it was a combination of inexperienced first-time mother and low fertility rate of eggs. She was sitting on 6 eggs: three exploded in the nest [...]

I previously posted asking if anyone had any suggestions on how to make a hen go broody. I got some helpful answers, and did some research, and found a few suggestions:

leave eggs in the nest put golf balls in the nest, so she thinks they’re eggs set up a nice quiet nest in a darkened, sheltered corner [...]