We have a real problem here with wild birds eating our seedlings. They love broccoli, lettuce, beans, beetroot, silverbeet, corn – they even pulled out some of our onions and garlic!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the birds – satin bowerbirds and purple swamphens are the main offenders – I just wish they’d leave our gardens [...]

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 well, [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks ago I attended another Sustainable Illawarra workshop – “Starting a Backyard Veggie Patch” at Jamberoo Primary School. Megan then attended the repeat of the workshop a week later. It was great that we were both able to do effectively the same workshop without need to organise child care!

The workshop was delivered by [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]