We are the very happy owners of six new chickens. Kate from Beautiful Chickens brought them to us yesterday afternoon. We had the new wing of the chicken palace open for the first time with the red carpet down. The band played Waltzing Matilda. Ahem, I think I got a bit carried away there. They are such a beautiful bunch of girls. So healthy looking and not too flighty, I think that's always a good sign. If they're calm, it tells me that they were relaxed and comfy where they came from.  Kate has a beautiful setup of coops and runs on her property. The chickens have a lot of room to wander around, they have free access to fresh water and food. Everything is clean and the chooks are vaccinated. If you're thinking of buying some chickens, I recommend Beautiful Chickens to you. You can contact Kate on 0414550302. If you're looking for beautiful looking chickens that are excellent layers, ask Kate about her Isa X Faverolles. 

Don't you love all the chook furniture Hanno made. It's all from recycled materials. I hope it makes our girls very comfortable while they settle in.

I decorated the coop with bunting and hung a half curtain over the front of the nesting boxes. Chooks like privacy when they lay eggs. I've also hung a print of chooks and a rooster in the coop next to this one, I'll take photos of that today. I was going to put up some fairy lights too but the person who took down the lights after Christmas (and that person shall not be named here) lost the lights. He doesn't remember where he put them after Christmas and all attempts at finding them failed. We will get some lights in there soon. I wanted to have a set of battery operated lights so that if we have to go to the coop when it's dark, we'll have more than a torch.

In the new flock, we have two red frizzles - one with a blonde chest, one with a red chest. Two Australorps - one blue, one blackish blue. A barred Plymouth Rock and a magnificent silver-laced Wyandotte. All of them are young, the two Frizzles have just started laying. The Frizzles will be called Tricia (red chest) and Kathleen (blonde chest). The Australorps will be included in my bell series of names - the blue will be Jezebel and the black will be Annabelle. We already have two bell girls - Bluebell and Lulubell. The Wyandotte will be called Tammy but probably only the older folk or those who love country and western music will know why. :- )  The Plymouth Rock is Martha.

We'll keep them safe and sound in their new home with the door closed until later today. That will teach them that this is where they live from now on. Usually we'd leave them locked in a bit longer to familiarise themselves with the smells and sounds of our backyard, but it's hot and we want them to get out into the fresh air. So about lunchtime, we'll let them out to meet their sisters, although they can see each other through a wire door in the coop. At the moment, they're drinking water and eating seeds and seem to be happily scratching through the straw. We checked them when Kate left and looked in on them again when it started getting dark and the older girls had gone to bed. They seem to be quite settled.

Kate had afternoon tea with us before her trip home and we talked about her doing a post or two about chickens here on Down to Earth. I am hoping the first one will be up fairly soon. It will be on how to prepare for your first flock of chickens and what you need to have in place when you bring your first chooks home.

It's a good feeling having a new flock of good quality chickens in the backyard. They've come at just the right time. We'll start planting seeds and seedlings in the next few days and it won't be long until we have a fully productive backyard again. It makes me feel very secure knowing we'll soon be able to pick fresh vegetables and collect many more golden yolked eggs every day. That, my friends, gives a feeling a satisfaction like no other.

It's been a long, dry summer here. The temperatures haven't been nearly as high as those down south, we've had only two very hot spells, but the rains didn't come this year and that was worse than the hot weather. Summer is our wet season and when it passes with very little rain in January or February, then it doesn't look good for the rest of the year. Our average rainfall in February is 405mm, so far we've had 99mm. We have town water and tank water here. We installed two water tanks to use on the garden. They hold 15,000 litres/quarts. We have a smaller tank on the front verandah that holds 500 litres, that water usually keeps my ferns and plants alive. Our annual rainfall here is just under 2000mm, and about half of that falls in summer.

I believe that if you're growing a garden full of vegetables, then you need to be collecting water to enable you to do that. Water is a hidden cost in vegetable and fruit gardening but if you're serious about supplying some, or all, of your vegetables, then you should think carefully about how much it will cost you to grow them. If you don't harvest your own rain water, watering will be your biggest cost. In Australia the average water use for two people is 360 litres per day. Hanno and I use much less than that at around 200 litres between us and that costs us around $200 every three months. If we used town water on our garden, I suspect we'd use the average of 360 litres and that would cost us just under $400 per three months. We save that amount of money because we harvest our own water. We want to be as self-reliant as we can be so buying tanks and being thrifty with the water we do have is just part of gardening for us. If we can grow a lot of the food we eat, taking no water from the communal dam to do it, then we see that as sustainable gardening. Saving vegetable seeds, recycling household and garden waste into compost, home-made fertilisers and harvesting water is part of the closed system we try to maintain here.

And then the question of managing the harvested water comes into play. I used to be a bit obsessed with the rainwater. I'd check the water level by tapping on the side of the tanks and I'd water with miserly amounts of water on the vegetables. I was fearful of running out of water. A few years ago I decided to stop watering the front gardens all together. I'd planted up gardenias, wisteria, roses, camellias, magnolias and a few drought-hardy species like callistemons and sage. To my surprise, most of the larger plants survived and it was only the smaller roses and daisies that died. We never water the lawn. I don't care if that dies or not. Grass is so resilient, it always comes back after a bit of rain.

Over the years I changed my ideas about conserving our tank water. I realised that even though the tanks got low, they've never been completely empty and even in drought years, rain would often come when we needed it most. Instead of being miserly with it,  now I water almost every day and the garden has survived summer and the drought quite well. I no longer have that feeling that we'll run out of water. I changed from a glass half empty to a glass half full and I'm happier for it. I never waste water, but I am giving all my plants and particularly the vegetables, the water they need to thrive, not just survive. I don't know if there will be a time in the future when we run out of tank water but I'm not worrying about that till it happens. I have plants here that need the water we have, I have to live this day, not worry about next month or next year.

We're still practising all the water-wise techniques such as planting vegetables with similar water requirements next to each other, making sure the drips from hanging baskets flow into the garden, using thick mulch to conserve water already in the soil and water storage crystals in the ornamental plant pots.

Those tanks have been one of our wisest investments. I'm pleased we can share the water we harvest with our chooks and all the visiting birds that fly though here as well as the wildlife that live here. I'm grateful I have a husband who could rig up the system of pipes, drains and tanks that makes our water harvesting a success because without those tanks I doubt I'd be as enthusiastic about backyard food production as I am.  What is your watering setup at home?

Bread and butter cucumbers.

Another week put to bed and now the weekend looms. I hope you take enough time over the next few days to rest and allow your stresses to float away. We all need to be ready and able for our work next week. Invest in yourself and your future work by resting enough to do it well.

Hanno at the produce store. He's pointing out a little chicken tractor.

The plan was to go out for lunch at the surf club and to pick up a couple of odds and ends at Bunnings and the chemist. We also needed a new chicken feeder. I was going to take photos along the way to show our local area and to give my northern hemisphere friends a glimpse of sunshine and the south Pacific Ocean. The plan worked well at the Little Mountain produce store. I snapped Hanno walking into the store, put the camera in my bag and there it stayed until just now when I downloaded that one photo to the computer.  Oh well. My intentions were good.

The chickens will be here next Tuesday. I can hardly wait. They will be a group of Wyandottes, blue Australorpes, Isa x Faverolles, Frizzles, and splash Pekins. Kate, from Beautiful Chickens will bring them up and help settle them into the new chook B&B. The little house is ready out there. Hanno finished painting the exterior and soon, before it gets too hot, I'll go out and add the finishing touches, lay down some straw, fluff up the nests and install their feeder and water container. Just between you and me, I also have fairy lights and bunting. :- )  Shhhhh.

I'm so proud of Hanno. He did the renovations with as many recycled materials as he could find.  The floor is made up of cement pavers, bought new, but almost all of the rest, the corrugated iron sheeting, timbers and wire, were recycled. Oh, there is a new latch. Now we'll be able to separate the chickens properly and keep smaller or sick chickens in a quiet area. It also provides double the space for them when it's raining. Hanno still has to make a small run off the side of the coop but that can go up in the next week or so. It needs to have a roof and be completely enclosed - I've seen goannas (large lizards) climb up over the old wire fence in the past.

Here is my seed station (and morning tea). I work out what I'm about to plant here, then write up the labels and start planting in the bush house. Those three seed packets near the cup were brought over from Korea when Sunny's mum came over last September. I have Korean seeds for hollyhocks, salvia, dahlias and pansies. 

The seeds sown two weeks ago have germinated - with the exception of kale and daikon - and have now been moved out into the sunshine. A second planting happened two days ago and this afternoon, I'll sow more seeds. We want to eat the freshest food and the only way we can do that is to grow it ourselves. There is optimistic anticipation at this time of the year when we prepare for our annual vegetable planting. From 1 March, it will be full steam ahead and this year, I'm more motivated than ever before to make the most of the climate and the rich soil we've built up over the years. What we don't eat fresh will be shared, frozen or preserved in some way. Nothing will be wasted. Whether you have a garden like we do or a collection of pots, I hope you garden along with me so we can share photos of our fresh food. I'll have a Pinterest page up soon so we can do that.

I'm enjoying doing more in my home again. Many people would think I'm crazy saying that but it fills me with a feeling of satisfaction knowing I'm making the most of what we have. We have a wonderful life and it doesn't just happen by chance. We identify what we want and what we need to do, plans are made and then the day-to-day work carried out to make our plans happen.  And it is in the deliberate action of daily chores and what comes from them, that gives me that feeling of continuous contentment.

I've received the first typeset file of my new book and have to read it tomorrow to send back for printing on Friday.  Later this morning I'll settle in on the front verandah with a cup of tea to do that. When I send the manuscript back to Penguin, I'll do some writing for the new ebooks, then craft work - either sew on the embroidered pocket on my new apron or finish off a dishcloth, and finish of the decorating in the new chook house.

Apple and walnut cake

Before I go I want to thank everyone who took the time to tell me their thoughts about the ebooks I'm writing. That information is invaluable and I thank you sincerely for helping. I've made up my mind about the subject now and as soon as I made the decision, it was clear to me immediately that it was the right choice. More on that later. I'll go through all the other subjects and make a list of the suggestions. Over the next month or so, I'll write posts about as many of those subjects as I can. Hopefully that will sharpen me up a bit and help you move forward in your simple life.  Have a beautiful day, my friends.

It's been quiet here lately. Sunny and Jamie are over in Korea visiting Sunny's family. It's a wonderful opportunity for Jamie to spend time with his cousins, aunties, uncles, and Sunja, his beautiful Korean grandma. I want so many things for my grandsons, Jamie and Alex, and being at the heart of their families is just one of them. Hanno and I miss having Jamie here but we've been talking on the phone and have seen photos and videos. Hello Sunny, Jamie, Sunja and the rest of the family! We send our love to all of you.

Hanno finished most of the chicken house renovations and although there is still some work to do on the exterior - painting the recycled corrugated iron and adding an enclosed run, the coop, roosts and new nesting boxes are all ready. I'm decorating the coop. I haven't yet decided if I'll put curtains on the nests but I probably will. There will also be fairy lights and bunting. :- ) One of the things I know Jamie would be excited about if he were here is that we're just about to get some new chickens. He would be right in the middle of that so when they arrive, I'll make sure I take plenty of photos of the girls, their new home, where they're sleeping and eating and drinking to send to him.  He has loved those chooks since he was tiny and from when he could walk, the first thing he did when he came to visit was feed the chooks bread and fruit.

In the meantime though, my days flow by in a gentle trickle. I have such a rich life, there is always something to do here. I haven't yet sewn the embroidered pocket on my new apron, I have the last bit of Johnathan's cardigan to finish, I want to knit a set of loose weave dish cloths and of course, in addition to my housework and writing, I have the on-going important work of raising seeds to be planted in our vegetable garden next month. This is all the gentle work of a simple home, the tasks change with the seasons but the work flows on, never ending.  I love that.  Working for the life I want at home is a creative and rewarding way to spend my time. You probably do something similar and feel the same about your home.

I started a new ebook recently. It's part of a series of six. I'm not sure of the title of the newest book yet but it's all about housekeeping, routines and green cleaning. Penguin expects the first book, The Simple Life - the pleasures and rewards of getting back to basics, to be published as a print book and ebook in late March. The ebooks will be on sale on Amazon and iTunes and all the usual places.

I wonder if I can pick your collective brains. In addition to that book, I've already written one on milk and making dairy products (various cheeses, yoghurt, ice cream etc) in the home kitchen using what is generally available, I've also written a kitchen garden ebook, and now the housekeeping one. My contract calls for six books in total so I wondered what other topics you'd like to see me write about. I was thinking one could be a book of my various food recipes, some published here, some new ones. Would that interest you? And one other topic - maybe baking - a step-by-step guide to various breads, fruit loaf, cakes, scones, crackers, biscuits. Something that will help you provide tasty and nutritious snacks for your family without going into those aisles at the supermarket. Give me some ideas of what you want. I thank you in advance for your help.


Although it's still summer, this February has been quite mild here, but not so for our friends down south and in the west. More homes have been lost in the bush fires and thousands of hectares of bushland burnt. That means lost habitat for our birds and wildlife. I hope the days of high temperatures will come to and end soon and we can all enjoy the start of autumn. I'm sure those of you in the snow are looking forward to sunshine, green grass and warm days. We've seen quite a few news reports this year of the heavy snow falls and floods in north America and Europe. It's been a tough season in many parts of the world. But soon the seasons will change again and we'll all get used to the changed conditions. In the meantime, stay safe everyone.

I want to let all my readers know that apart from occasionally linking to my sponsors, I never link to commercial sites. Never. I got an email from a woman yesterday who told me she's not reading my blog again because she got a virus from one of my links. I don't know how she got her virus but I know it wasn't from one of my links. I think she must have downloaded a virus, simply by going to a rogue site, and it showed up when she visited here.  All the links below are to medical and nutritional information. And please be assured, I appreciate your visits and always endeavour to provide a safe platform here.

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I got lured in by red food the other day. I wanted to make salmon patties and when I looked in the stockpile cupboard, there was no pink salmon. I had a few cans of red salmon so I decided to use that instead. When I started preparing the patties, I realised I only had organic potatoes and I didn't want to use those in the patties, so I boiled a couple of red/orange sweet potatoes instead, then peeled a red onion. As food as I had the patties made and in the fridge, I took time out to look up red food on the web.

I knew there had been research done in recent years about the health benefits of phytochemicals - the part of food that gives it colour. If you're eating fruit and vegetables for the health benefits, the deeper the colour, the more of these phytochemicals you'll be getting.  And by the way, phytochemicals are never in vitamin supplements, they're only in food.  

This list of phytochemicals is from the Stanford University cancer research site.

When I went back to the kitchen, I decided to make up a red meal. Red fruits and vegetables "Contain nutrients such as lycopene, ellagic acid, Quercetin, and Hesperidin, to name a few. These nutrients reduce the risk of prostate cancer, lower blood pressure, reduce tumor growth and LDL cholesterol levels, scavenge harmful free-radicals, and support join tissue in arthritis cases." Source. All brightly coloured fruit and vegetables are good for you and the medical advice is to eat a colourful variety every day, but my preference that day was for red food. 

As well as the red salmon, red onion and red sweet potato fish cakes, I made a salad of red vegetables - red capsicums/peppers, tomatoes, radishes and finished it off the chilli jam.  We also had coleslaw which was not red but had to be used. Dessert was watermelon. 

To make eight salmon patties, boil potatoes and mash them. You'll need about 2 cups. To the mashed potato, add the broken up salmon, finely chopped onion, two eggs, salt and pepper. Mix well together. Form into patties and cover with bread crumbs. Fry in a shallow frying pan until golden on both sides - about 15 minutes. Serve with a red, green or rainbow salad of your choice.

Does colour play a part in your food choices?

Red food recipes

I want to share a link to an interesting program that networks local growers and local food eaters together based on proximity. It's called RipeNearMe and it's free to join. You can find out what is ripe and ready to eat near you and also, if you have excess produce in your own yard, you can register to swap your homegrown food for other local produce. Seems like a great way to eat local/sustainable, share/receive surplus AND build community all at the same time. 

The concept is simple: you’re able to list any food that you grow yourself, or post produce growing in a public space. As a ‘grower’ you can add as much as you grow (there’s no limit, and it’s free) and determine whether you want to swap, sell or giveaway your spoils. Others do the same and everyone’s food gets pinned on the global map for some very interesting online foraging!

By default, when you list your food on RipeNearMe it has the status of "growing". That means you can add your mango tree (or whatever) when they’re not in season, leaving it set as "growing". If you live close to that mango and you know you want some when they ripen, you subscribe to it. When they are ripe and ready to harvest, you'll receive an email reminding you to get in touch with the grower. Or you can add your tomatoes as "growing" when you know you've got a good crop and change it to "ripe" when they're ready to pick. By then, hopefully, you'd have people close by subscribing to your tomatoes who would receive an email when they're ripe reminding them to contact you to buy (or barter). You can do the same thing when you're growing lemons, apples, macadamias, asparagus, peaches or lettuce. Honey, bees wax and eggs of all types may also be added.

Looking at it from the buyers' perspective, imagine having 50+ subscriptions within a few miles/kilometres of your home. What if you had an email every other week letting you know there’s some food (silverbeet, eggs, tomatoes, oranges, potatoes, honey, durians, etc) for you to collect from a neighbour?

This program is just starting off now and it needs help to get up and running. It needs people like you and me to support it by listing what we're growing. Without that, it won't work. So please think about supporting it. We are all self-reliant people and this is a hands-on program that will help us bypass the supermarkets and get the freshness that we all crave. Cutting out the transport of huge amounts of food will help us all and this can be the start of that. There is no doubt about it, this is not just about food, this is about building community and taking food out of the hands of big business.

Please note I have no commercial interest in this program.

We have friends visiting at the moment and have the joy of little feet in the house again. I hope you have joy in your life today as well. Thanks for visiting this week and thanks for your comments. The contact with folk near and far keeps the blog a changing feast for me. Stay safe.  xxx

Here is some Airedale cuteness for you - these are Jens and Cathy's dogs - Matilda when she was a puppy and Koda.

I want to move our dependence further away from the shops and closer to food we grow ourselves or find locally. I am hoping to grow enough pumpkins to store for at least six months so we don't have to buy them. Pumpkin is one of those vegetables like garlic and onions that, if stored correctly, will last quite well for a long time without you having to do anything to it.  If I can grow enough for 12 months, I'll be a very happy gardner.

The seeds I had were taken from a very good pumpkin we bought on the back roads of Queensland somewhere. It was a Japanese pumpkin with dark orange firm flesh, dark green skin and a delicious flavour. One taste and I wanted to reproduce that pumpkin. After that meal, I took the pumpkin out of the fridge, removed all the seeds and washed them. I didn't dry them because I didn't want to store them - I wanted to see if I could grow its babies and store them year after year after year.

Hanno loves eating pumpkin but he hates their growing habits. Most pumpkins will take over a small garden if you let it but I thought that if I planted my pumpkin on the edge of the garden, during our down time, that would solve the problem. In December, I planted about five seeds in three pockets in our compost heap. It was late in the pumpkin growing season, I wished I'd planted earlier but that was when I did it. Theoretically, we can plant pumpkins all year but we go very close to one and two degrees at night here during winter so I didn't want to risk it. My hope was that this one planting, if I did it organically and with care, would supply us with a crop of top quality pumpkins that could be stored. Instead of having those vines meandering all over the garden, as much as I love the look of that, I could see "someone" snapping. No, this way was better.

Pumpkins, like all cucurbits, are prone to powdery mildew - a fungal disease that causes the fruit to fall off and the vine to eventually die. Planting them in a mound - either of soil or compost, or in the compost heap itself, is ideal. About five days after I planted them, up came the shoots, green and healthy. I removed several of the smaller ones. There is a knack to watering pumpkins successfully. Watering at night or late afternoon will encourage powdery mildew so I always water in the morning. When the vines have established and sent out long shoots, roots will form under some of the nodes. Water (and fertilise) at those points too. Pumpkins are hungry feeders so the nutrients these vines extracted from the compost allowed me to skip the fertilising but I did give them a couple of watering cans full of seaweed concentrate. If you plant them in garden soil, add some nitrogen fertiliser and sulphate of potash. The nitrogen will help the green growth and the potash will encourage flowers to form.

Many people get concerned when the first flowers form without it being followed by a small pumpkin coming soon after.  Pumpkins always set male flowers first. These are the flowers on long stalks and can sometimes grow 10 or 12 inches and reach up above the leaves. The male flowers are there to encourage the bees to start visiting before the female flowers grow. Another difference is that the male flowers are closer to the where the vine started growing and the female flowers are always on the vines ends as they spread out in search of sunlight. When you look at the flowers together, and strip off the petals, you'll see distinct differences. The male flowers are tall and slim and have a long stamen in the centre which holds pollen.  The females have a shorter stem and the flowers are wider. Just under the female flower sits a tiny pumpkin. At their bulbous centre is a stigma that traps the pollen to fertilise that small pumpkin.


Pumpkins are naturally pollinated by bees and ants.  The flowers are only open for a short period so if they open before or after the bees arrive, and there are no ants, they might not be pollinated. You can pollinate by hand. Do this early in the morning. Find a healthy looking male flower and peel off the petals, leaving the stamen (like in the photo above). You'll often see some of the yellow pollen has dropped to the bottom of the flower.  Find a female flower, gently open the flower and rub the stamen over the centre of the female flower. Close the flower if you can, and go on to repeat this process on every female flower you want to pollinate, using the male flower for one or two flowers only.  I tend to pollinate two pumpkins on each vine, then I get a new male flower. If you pollinate all of them, you'll get smaller pumpkins.

In a week or so, if pollination is successful, the female flower will have fallen off and the pumpkins should be getting bigger. If they are, cut off the ends of each vine. That way you can keep the plants fairly well contained. If you have a small garden you might care to try the small bush variety Golden Nugget. It produces a large apple sized pumpkin on a bush. It can be grown in a container.

Depending on the variety, pumpkins generally need about 120 frost-free days to grow to maturity. They're ready to harvest when the stem goes corky and the vines start dying off. Cut the pumpkin from the vine leaving about six inches of stem attached. Dry in full sun for about two weeks, then store in a cool, dry, rodent-free place, not the fridge, for as long as they last. Most will last at least six months in ideal conditions.  The drying process is vital because it allows the pumpkin to fully ripen, it improves the flavour and it hardens the skin enough for long term storage.  Keep the stem attached during storage but if it falls off, seal the hole with bees wax and use that pumpkin next.

Are you a pumpkin or squash gardener? What are your secrets to a good crop of pumpkins?

I have been slowly getting back into my rhythm and routines and doing a lot more in the house. It's more like the first six or seven years of this simple life, before things got busy again. Most of us feel fulfilled by good choices and have to live with the consequences of the bad ones. I can't say that my writing and what came from it was a bad choice, but it took me to places unexpected and away from some newly discovered values.  One thing I have learnt by living as we do is that there are not too many things that can't be stopped or modified to remain on our chosen path. I think I did a lot of modifying in the past few years so that I could do everything I had to do, but I stopped doing some of the things I wanted to do. It's easier now. I've stepped back, made new choices and I'm feeling happy about where we're heading.

My plan now is to get back to that easy, benign routine I had back then. One thing lead into another, we got bread baked, beds made, laundry done, floors cleaned, gardening organised and still had time to sew, knit, preserve, visit, read or just sit watching the chickens in the garden. I have just started my ritual of opening and closing the bedroom window again. It used to be part of my routine to make the bed and open the window every morning. We have three windows in the bedroom and this is the one on the shady side of the house. The window can be open most of the year but I loved to open it in the morning to let in the fresh air and close it in the late afternoons of winter when the temperature dropped. That one simple act of opening and closing the window made me feel I was taking care of my home and us - especially in winter when closing it kept the warm afternoon air in and shut out the cold air of night. It was a silent confirmation of sorts that we could make things better and more comfortable here by carrying out these small daily acts of home life.

I'm not sure why I stopped opening and closing the bedroom window. It was probably busyness or being focused on writing but I'm glad I found my way back to it, particularly at this time of year when the temperatures are about to get colder. My life is made up of a lot of small activities that give me pleasure - taking hot bread form the oven, letting the chickens out at first light, sitting and thinking on the front verandah, sleeping in a bed with just-washed sheets that have dried in the sunlight. I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm pleased I remembered this, this small and unimportant bedroom window, and that opening and closing it still feels as good as it used to.

What are your small pleasures? Are they part of your routine?

We have seven chickens left. The last of our old girls died late last year and now, even though we miss those old characters, we've started building up our flock again so we'll have plenty of eggs. Kate at Beautiful Chickens has some girls ready for us and as soon as the chicken house renovations are complete, we'll pick them up. I can hardly wait.

At the moment we have Lucy, an Old English game hen, she is our oldest chicken. She came to us when Shane and Sarndra moved from the country to the city and couldn't take their chooks with them. Lucy arrived with a flock of older chicks she'd hatched, many of them roosters, and now she's the only one left. Lucy is blind now so we've been hand-feeding her and moving her around the yard so she stays in the shade. Hanno puts her in a nest at night and gets her out every morning. He feeds her bread and milk with chicken pellets and greens thrown in for good measure. When Jamie is here, he hits the side of Lucy's metal bowl with a spoon so she knows where her food is.






This is the view looking from the front of the chicken coop over towards the back of our yard. The trees provide shade during the summer, then the pecan loses its leaves in winter giving the chooks much needed sunlight during the colder weather.

In the next couple of weeks we'll have to start looking for signs of mites and fleas. These often present in autumn. We use Diatomaceous Earth (DE) here. If we see the chooks pecking at their feathers or preening a lot, it generally means they have mites. We cover them in DE, especially under wings, around their comb and wattles and under the tail. This generally fixes things in a few days.  When the girls moult, which they usually do in autumn, it's a good idea to have a good clean out of the chicken house and nests - sweep up everything that's been laying around and put it on the compost heap. If you have one, use a pressure hose to clean the coop, if not, a hose will do. Don't forget the nests and roosts. When it's all completely dry, add straw or hay to the nests and floor, then throw a few cups of DE around the coop and in the straw and nests. That should keep things in check and the chickens comfortable for a few months.

Just one more tip. A few people have asked about worming chickens. It's not recommended to worm chooks any more - it's another chemical they can do without. A crushed garlic clove once a month in all the water containers - leave it there for three days then give plain fresh water again.  If you notice foamy diarrhoea and your chickens look thin and sick, they might have worms and you should treat them. You'll also have to clean out the coop again and replace all the straw.

This young chap is a native bush turkey. They roam freely in and out of the rainforest and often irritate gardeners by scratching through gardens. This fellow visits a couple of times a day, has a feed of pellets, wanders around with the girls for a while, then leaves again.

We couldn't do without our hens. In the past couple of weeks during the summer heat, and with two of our girls broody, we've only been getting about three or four eggs a week. When we have times like that it shows me how much we rely on our little ladies and their eggs.  Hanno went to the organic farmers market on Saturday and even though we could have bought eggs there, they're never as good as ours. I bet you find the same with your girls too. Nothing is as good as fresh eggs from your own back yard.  How many chickens do you have now?

The kids have gone back to school, the weather is cooling a little and time is marching on. 

I finished the final reading of my book yesterday so that's been sent back to Penguin; hopefully it will be published in late March.

I took the opportunity last week to make more lemon cordial and gave these two bottles to Cathy and Sunny. Hope you have a  wonderful weekend. Thank you for visiting over the past few days.

Table manners for children