September 2017

A little monthly update on what's been happening in our backyard and gardens over September.


Chickens and Ducks 

We recently purchased another two Araucana chickens. These two lavender hens are coming onto their first lay now and lay beautiful blue eggs. Both are reasonably tame and are interesting to watch scratching around in the backyard. We've had no luck with getting our Pekin duck to go clucky, but now have five chickens that are clucky so I've popped a few eggs under them. Some of these eggs will definitely be fertile, but I'm unsure as to whether the chickens will commit to hatching them or not. So far it's looking promising. The two Indian Runner x ducks are still both sitting on a nest of eggs each. Over the past week one of them has started smashing the odd egg. These eggs obviously weren't fertile. You can easily tell by how rotten they now are.

Pet Orphaned Lambs 

Peppermint and Snowflake are doing really well. They're now outside day and night. They have two old dog kennels in the paddock for shelter. They sleep cuddled up together in one at night. When I first started putting the lambs outside I let them play in our backyard, instead of putting them in the paddock. When they started to learn how to strip the citrus trees it was time to move them out into the paddock. Both lambs will be two months old in early October. They're old enough to be completely weaned off bottles of milk now, but we've continued to give them a bottle each night to keep them tame. They are also due to be drenched and have their tails, as well as Peppermint's boy bits removed soon. They're incredibly friendly and have learnt to come when they called, especially if they know there's a bottle of milk it in for them. 

Backyard Orchard 

The two latest fruit trees that I've recently purchased are a Greenmeadow Cox Orange apple tree and a tropical guava. We needed a second apple tree to pollinate our Royal Gala apple. We also ensured that we selected a tree that will do well in clay soil. This is something that I failed to think about the first time when selecting fruit trees so I'm hoping that the other trees will do okay. The tropical guava I couldn't walk past at our local grower's market when I saw it was only $10. Both my little boy and I love guavas at much as the wood pigeons so we may even end up purchasing a couple more of these.

Raised Vegetable Garden Building Project 

We've had a lot of rain over the past few weeks so our raised vegetable garden project has taken a bit longer than we had expected. The frames are now all up, but we still have to attach all of the chicken netting to it to stop out cheeky chickens from being able to get into our garden. I've spent hours planning my garden and taking into consideration gardening methods such as, companion planting and crop rotation. You can read more about our garden design and plan here.

Berry Patch 

Our berry patch has now been relocated away from outside the lounge window. Now that the chickens can no longer jump up onto the window sill and it's the garden, we should hopefully have a bit more success. We've planted two blueberry bushes so far and will add a third too. It's beneficial to grow more than one variety together. This ensures that they pollinate each other and that you get a better crop. Some blueberries will however pollinate self-pollinate. We also plant different varieties of strawberries.

Mr 2 helped to put sheep pellets on our berry garden around the strawberries. We don't put them around the blueberry plants as they don't like it like the strawberries do. I then added pine needles as a form of mulch around all of the plants. As the pine needles break down they'll help to keep the soil acidic, which is how blueberries and strawberries prefer it. Our garden was then finished off with some new compost and strawberry straw. This helps to feed the plants and also keeps the fruit clean.

Growing From Seed

This year is my first year growing my own fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs from seed. I've developed a love for buying different varieties and learning how to grow them. My three favourite brands so far are Kings Seeds, Koanga and Yates seeds. When deciding what to grow I took into consideration what we eat a lot of, some different varieties I wanted to try that you can't purchase in the supermarket e.g. Zephyr Zucchini; as well as things that are fun to grow with children e.g. giant pumpkins, sunflowers and popping corn. We've learnt so much already and can't wait to continue sharing this adventure with you all.

Happy gardening everyone x