So, after trying to stop a chicken from going broody several times throughout last year, now I want her to go broody and she won’t!

Late last year we got some new chickens – 4 brahma pullets and a rooster to match. We also acquired 3 unwanted ISA brown layers from a friend. So with the [...]

Earlier this year, Megan and I worked with some other local families to start a gardening club called the Jamberoo Family Growers. Unlike traditional garden clubs, this group will have a focus on helping people to grow fruit and vegetables at home, using healthy natural methods and tapping into local knowledge and experience. It will [...]

This is a post I wrote a while ago on my personal blog, but I think it’s really appropriate here. Plus I still don’t have much time to post anything new yet.

Don’t you hate it when you know you’ve seen something in a video (say, Bill Mollison talking about planting in guilds), but you can’t [...]

We had been planning to get a couple more chickens once we got our chook run finished. Molly is a bit of a sporadic layer, and the silkies are even less reliable. We figured a couple of good layers would shore up our egg supply so we’d never need to buy any more.

Sarah had seen [...]

After going broody since Christmas, Molly the leghorn then decided that it was time to molt.

When they molt, chickens lose lots of feathers, and new ones grow to replace them. The process requires lots of protein, so they normally stop laying during molting. They look pretty scruffy for a while too.

Finally last week, Molly started [...]

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’ve long watched other chicken-bloggers report their first eggs, and now it’s finally my turn!

When I came home from work today, I went out into the backyard to have a look at the garden and the chickens, as I normally do. On a whim, I opened up the door to the roost to check it [...]

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 [...]

It can be hard to find chickens for sale locally, especially if you’re after a particular breed. Here is a big list of all the places I found when I was looking:

Illawarra Mercury Classifieds (look under pets, horses and livestock, and for sale categories) Other local newspaper classifieds (Kiama Independent, Lake Times, etc) The Trading Post The Land Check [...]

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 [...]