random catch up photos

because I've been such a slacker and haven't really been sure what to write

One of the new roses in the Rainbow Bridge garden

Tim Tam, "Where are you going mum?"

Hopie and Luka at the dam

Lily at Ballarat comp

Luka on his birthday! :)

Lilypillie, my smiley girl

The interesting attempts to draw with small children around! LOL

Hopie with the ribbons our club gave her at the end of the year. She was more impressed with the biscuits but I thought they were nice. LOL

La demonstrating his weird abilities to sleep in the most bizzare places...

Hope at a recent comp

Hope, Sierra, Luka and Rin at the dam

Nilla playing sneaky stealth ninja bunny

and demanding a pat from La

Haha, - such shy timid little wallflowers hey!

random bits and pieces of my world

This pear tree on our property always blooms JUST on La's birthday, to the day, every year. It does fruit but the cockatoos and cows get more of it than we ever do.

How lucky am I? As much work as this place can be, I get to watch sunsets like this from my back porch!

Both girls, looking far more stationary than they are! And it wasn't posed or anything... they were busy goofing around with Lily pretending to brush Rin (that's actually what she's looking at, a comb that's fallen) and Rin manically staring at Hope who had the ball. LOL

A more typical scene... Sierra follows Lily around, ploinks down near her for a nap and is inevitably pounced on, cuddled, kissed, brushed, used as a pillow and otherwise loved on. Aussies and kids are the best combo ever!

The post I didn't want to make...

Foxes have been a huge problem in our area. It's a combination of factors I suppose - our area is 'fox friendly' in that there are a number of small properties, mostly lifestylers who don't go out of their way to make an area unappealing to a fox. There is plentiful wild game, water sources, pockets of bush for dens, virtually no one trying to do them in as is more common on big farming properties and a number of people who still leave dog and cat food out or toss food into open compost piles. The only real danger they face here is cars and they learn to avoid those easily enough. In short, if you're a fox, this is eden.

If you're a chicken, a duck or a goose or a person who loves them however this is not such a good area. We've battled the foxes since we moved in, putting up pens and aviaries, more fox proofing, better fox proofing, different fox proofing etc. We've buried rubble and wire everywhere around perimeters. We're reinforced pens, we've used sturdy material, put aviaries in pens to lock the birds in at night, never let the birds out unless it's bright daylight and put them away well before dusk even hints at arriving. We've limited the areas the birds can free range in to right around the house and garden. We've banned the waterfowl from going anywhere near the dam or even into the paddocks or small-yard. We've even got a Maremma for their protection although that turned out to be a remarkable failure.

We've had them break through wire fencing, dig under buried bricks, climb over two meter tall fencing, chew 2x4 wood pallets set underneath an aviary to grab the birds out. We've had them bait the birds to pecking at them and grab any bit protruding from the fence before trying to tug the birds through the wire. It didn't work - a rooster won't fit through a 3" square but it did kill him. We've had foxes break into an aviary on the porch by pulling the door until screws on the bolt-latch snapped at the nut. We've had them pull and pry away colourbond from the steel frames of the shed. We've had them take them during the day while the dogs were wandering loose around the place. I lost my first goose 10 minutes after it arrived and got onto the dam when I went to the sheep shed. We've had them take a mature Embden gander while we were a few hundred meters away working on the chook pens. We've lost several adult geese who were spooked by a neighbors 4 Wheeler. I've opened the door to find foxes on my doormat several times, utterly unafraid of my presence. Sometimes I have seen them working singly, sometimes in pairs or trios. Regardless the results are devastating.

Each time up till now we've simply tried to build better, safer, stronger, bigger, more reinforced homes for our birds. We've spent thousands doing so. The results always the same, eventually the foxes work out how to defeat it. We've tried dealing with the foxes 'the nasty way'. We've got a Maremma, Shadow, a breed of dogs who adopt the birds as their 'pack' and protect them. We'd been careful to quiz the owner that he was old enough to start working and had been bonded to animals before. We didn't want a puppy but adopted an older rescue because we wanted one who would be old enough to protect them straight away. He's a lovely boy but I think the guy telling us he was raised with ducks and lambs was nuts because there's no way they were around for long if so. We were persisting with him though, I'd decided to reduce how many birds I had until he was trustworthy with being loose with them full time, adapt how we penned them near him etc. It was not ideal but if it meant investing a bit of time until he matured we were willing to do so.

Then on the 23 I decided to let them out in the garden with us while we were moving mulch. Bright daylight, Nic, myself, La running around like a loonie, Lily babbling, Hope and Si with us. The only ones left were one Silkie, one Wyandotte hen, two Aylesbury girls and my black Muz girl. The rest just disappeared with nothing but a few tufts of the roosters feathers left. Most of my chookies are pets with names, many were born here and will (would...) hop up for cuddles and eat from your hands, sit on your lap, get kisses from La, ride in the pram calmly along with the kids etc. La adores them. Lily adores them. One of my favorite stories is how our geese stood outside the window where I was birthing Lily and honked encouragement to me. The next day we were out in the sunshine and she got to meet them and help feed them. It's just too much to keep loosing our lovelies. I've kept at it this long because I couldn't imagine not having our lovelies greet me and beg at the door for treats and helping me garden. I still can't and keep thinking, maybe I could just keep Lilah, the silkie... and maybe just the rmaining dottie girl... how can I let go of my lovely 'dotties? But at this point I'm not willing to risk anyone anymore. It's not fair to them.

berk-begurk!

When we first moved in, it didn't take very long at all before we'd added a 'few chooks, just for eggs' to our family. It didn't take long to discover what amazing and social creatures they are, each with their unique personality and my 'few chooks' quickly discovered the importance of heritage breeds in poultry, many of which are now endangered and many genetically valuable lines have died out as most people get their eggs from the grocery or else keep commercial hybrid layers like the IsaBrowns. It was love at first sight when I saw standard partridge coloured Wyandottes. It took me some months and several hours drive to track them down but they're strikingly beautiful, friendly, docile and good layers and mothers. It wasn't long after that we ventured into ducks with the beautiful Aylesbury and Brown Chinese and Embden geese.

Many people don't consider the benefits of keeping a few chickens in their backyard - something that is legal even in many suburban areas. Chickens actually make excellent pets as well as being useful - they produce lots of fresh, tasty and healthy free range eggs. They also clean up virtually any kitchen scraps minimizing waste, scratch in the backyard and provide 'fertilizer' and compost (used bedding) as well. The eggshells can be dried and crushed and put back into the garden or given to the birds for calcium. Having your own layers will help reduce your carbon footprint as all that money isn't spent in producing and managing a large scale chicken farm or transporting the eggs from farm to factory to stores.

In addition, most eggs are produced in a manner that most people would find highly objectionable. Heidi of Operation Gloria, covers some of the conditions of battery cage hens with her rescued girls. Commercial hens are burnt out after a season of laying and disposed of rather than the expense of reconditioning them being paid when they will not be able to lay the same maximum number of eggs for minimum amount of cost input as they do their first year.

However even the supposed 'free range' eggs are not terribly humane in most cases as the requirements for being able to be labeled free range are nothing like the idyllic farm most people imagine when they picture it. In Australia, other than the Qld's basic protection laws there is no legal definition of what free range is. Some companies adhere to the Free Range Egg and Poultry Association of Australia or RSPCA's standards, where the requirements are no more than 7 birds per square meter and no more than 1000 birds per shed or per FREPAA 10 birds per sq metre up to 1000. The 'pasture' these birds have access to is to be shared by the whole lot of birds in the shed. While it is required to have shade, shelter and palatable vegetation, the maximum range density is 750 birds per hectare at 25 DSE [300/acre at 10 DSE].

THIS is a free range system that is being introduced into the EU. This has been rejected in NSW as being 'too liberal' in space. Compare that to the average backyard chicken who is free to engage in the full range of behaviours natural to a healthy chicken and in many cases is only locked up in a shed at night to protect them from foxes. (Who are a real danger even in inner suburban backyards.)

Here are some of my eggs from today... the rear ones are duck eggs, the middle pale brown ones are 1-2 year old Wyandotte eggs and the dark one on the right is from Tiger, a 3 year old little silkieX who is one of my best mums. These eggs are fertile (well, we hope!) and going to be set in the incubator to produce chicks and ducklings.

I began breeding and planned to set up a larger shedding and pens (you can see one a few posts back) for my birds and got an incubator to hatch out more chicks than the mother birds can do by themselves. My incubator is a fairly small, fairly basic one which will take 60 hen eggs at a time. The eggs are set in a batch every week, after which they must be turned several times a day to prevent the embryos from being able to turn. Just like a human baby must turn in the mothers womb to get out, chickens must turn around in the shell in order to pip, tie off their 'umbilical' cord and hatch.

Here are some of the current eggs in the incubator. Below the grate is a little well filled with water to provide the correct humidity for the eggs. The shells are porous and breathe, allowing the exchange of oxygen and water in the form of humidity. The embryos must loose a particular percentage of their weight from day 1 by the end of hatch, which is determined by the humidity and porosity of the eggs. The wrong amount will hinder the embryos from being able to pip and hatch correctly. EG The air cell size is affected, too small an air cell can prevent the chick from being able to inflate it's lungs once it's punctured into the air cell.

The lines you'll notice on them are pencil marks to tell me which side to turn them to. They go from line up to line down and around again. When I collect the eggs from the nests I write the date of collection on the rear (fertility declines in eggs older than 7 days) and on the side where the lines are I write the date they were set. About 8 days into the setting, the eggs are candled - which means they're held up against a bright torch (flashlight) to see if there is any development or if it's clear. At 8 days you can see a little embryo developing and a bit older than that you can see the embryo move around. Clear eggs are removed as they can go bad and explode in the incubator... NOT very nice!

Here is the whole incubator with the lid set back on. The temperature is a bit low here as it's just been set back on after turning the eggs which temporarily lowers the temperature. The eggs require a temperature of 37.7C and 21 days, longer with ducks.

And speaking of ducks, this is our most recent addition - Honey aka Dini (as in Houdini), a little bronze and white muscovy duck who found her way to rescue and then to me. She is a cheeky little thing and an escape artist!

I live...

As usual time has gotten a bit away from me. I'm still very wrapped up in my own head at the moment. This has led to much badness in terms of keeping up with correspondence, in that I sit down to start replying to someone and walk off a dozen times and then feel awful for being about a week late and probably making people wonder if I'm mad at them or don't like them or something. Meh. I need to get my act together.

In the midst of this here's what we've been up to:

• The kitchen is back to normal after the tree crashing through it and is now a nice sunny yellow instead of the dark green it was previously
  
  
• We've spent some time restructuring two raised veggie beds out back, making them six slightly lower beds and spent time planting out some of my little seedlings.
  
• After getting up the large (10 bay, each bay being 1.2m wide x 2 m deep) aviary for the chooks, we're now working on the fencing for it a bit each weekend as funds permit.
  
  
• We also went to the Melbourne Royal the other day to watch the Australian Shepherds. It was lovely to catch up with people but I'm afraid I rather put a damper on the day for Nic and La as I wasn't much in a festive mood. I did learn that a breed that had been on my wish list some years back, the Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen, IS actually in Australia and spent awhile patting one though.
• La's lobby for a hermit crab won and we brought home "Crawlit" the crab the other week

• We've also welcomed ChaCha the chook, also named by La. She appears to be an brown layer cross of some variety and came from a neighbor as she was getting bullied by the hens there. She's rooming with Tiger, one of my friendly little SilkieXs.
  
  
• With the house repaired I've finally been able to test my incubator! I have a dozen std Australorp eggs in it as well as a few Partridge Wyandotte eggs to give it a trial run! 20 days to go!
  
• The lambs are growing well, except for poor Luna who came up with a bum leg last week. She either pestered one of the other ewes or it's polyarthritis but either way she gets an injection every day for 5 days to help. A few of the lambs and ewes may be looking for new homes in the future, though I'm not 100% final on my decisions yet.
  
• La has been veerrryyy excited about his birthday coming up in October. He's singing himself (a very off key) happy birthday song every day, has decided on his theme (it's going to be a brachiosaurus party... not just any old dino, a brachiosaurus specifically), planned his cake (it's got to be 'berries, mango, strawberry and mandarin dino cake that's green') and would like 'a lot of kids, his Hopie and a lot of people and Ana' there. Ana is a local Aussie breeder for anyone not in the breed and La has a wee crush going on. LOL
  
• In keeping with his party, Lily has an actual dress. You may now all die of shock - the child owns something overtly GIRLY and I even think it's cute. LOL We also got her lovely amber teething necklace in the post the other day.

I've also done a few projects which I've forgotten to post pictures of so here they are...

this scarf was actually completed ages ago but I never posted it as I was trying to find yarn for a fringe and haven't found any so.. eh... it's being called completed.

this one is a ribbed neckwarmer in handspun overdyed coloured corriedale thick-n-thin paired with a vintage French button... for when you need a scarf but don't want to be dealing with the wind blowing it up in your face or a baby grabbing it.

And for my KAL group, the September "ABC" dishcloth. I use them for burp rags for Lily and they are the most fantastic burp rags as they absorb heaps without looking gross like face washers do!

The windstorm (update with pics)

We've always gotten a lot of wind here. It's ripped a 3 x 3 m colourbond/steel frame door straight off it's hinges on the shed and into the neighbors paddock, flipped over aviaries, sent all manner of toys flying and felled "branches" in the paddocks big enough to qualify as proper trees. Last Sunday morning we woke up to find a tree had come down and taken off the front of the house, some gutters, some fencing and along with it the electric lines, water and phone lines.

Normally the insurance would put us up at a hotel but with bottle lambs, dogs, the cat, the birds etc it just wasn't going to be practical so we asked them for a generator and Telstra has rigged a temporary phone line a few days ago but the insurance has done very little else, so we've still got tarps over the hole, the wall propped, no electricity and no running water.

The view from inside the kitchen

The SES helping to secure things - nothing but the best to say about them, they were great! After the electricity was off and it was safe for everyone, they were able to put a prop up, as once they removed the tree and branches the front would have fallen. From there it had to be tarped up as we're continuing to have windstorms and rain almost every day.

The good news is that it only took out the house, rather than taking out any of us, so we're all safe. The bad news is the insurance company has to go through twenty billion bits of red tape before they do much and the front of the house will have to be rebuilt and an electrician come out to fix the damaged wiring before they can re-hook up electrics, phone etc so we've got no real time frame for how long that will be... it's been a week already and all they've done is send out about 15 different assessors, which have all done the same thing as far as I can tell and we're supposed to have another one coming in the next few days. In the fine tradition of bureaucracy, I got a phone call the other day to let me know I'd be getting a phone call in the next few days. What about? Dunno. Why I needed a phone call to inform me I'd be getting it? Equally mysterious. As far as I can tell essentially the hold up is that they've got 9 tons of red tape to go through, the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and in my more cynical and over it moments I suspect that both hands are busy wanking.

I hate foxes....

The majority of our poultry are in their own colourbond sheds at night, with two smaller cages being used for a single pair and Leopold the Old English Game bantam who is kept for his good looks despite sensibility dictating I don't need a spare rooster and certainly not an OEG when I breed Wyandottes. His cage is on our verandah, only about 5m away from our bed. After having pretty well fox proofed everything as well as possible, yesterday at 5:30am we were woken by the sound of screaming and crashing coming from our front verandah.

This is the damage... the fox had taken ahold of the mesh with it's teeth and pulled until the screws that hold the slide bolt broke, letting it swing upward and the door open. We bolted awake and dashed out knowing exactly what the sound was but too late, the fox was already gone into the night and so was poor Leo. I'd snapped these only a few days before, Laurent was cuddling him and giving him a frontrow view while we had a handyman out.



I am rather seriously considering getting a Maremma to protect the birds and sheep as well. Not just because of this incident... I am sick to death of the number of foxes we have around here and the fact that being on smaller parcels of land (nothing much larger than 50 acres, many being 5-15 acre blocks) means we can't do boo about the foxes really. I've opened the door to find them sitting on the porch, even the doormat and see them all the time trotting across the fields in broad daylight completely unconcerned about human presence. I've got research to do, I'm not jumping in uninformed but other options I've looked at either aren't good matches for our situation or are impractical, so I think a livestock guardian dog may be in our future. With breeding season approaching and an incubator (finally!) on the way, we should have lots of babies this year and I don't intend to loose any to foxy loxy.

Today was not a day I looked forward to - the car needed servicing.

Yeah, I hear you - big honking deal. Except that servicing the car here entails waking up the 3.5 year old and 2 month old at 5:30AM, hauling them out into the cold to drop Nic off to the train and then deal with settling two cranky, overtired children once we get home before later waking them up early enough to drop off to the mechanics, whereupon I'm stranded for the day with two small children, one cranky with a cold and the nearest bus stop a 2.5 kg walk, for a 45 minute ride to the nearest train station. Sound like anyones idea of fun yet??? What? No takers? I'm shocked!

At any rate, today was not as terrible as it could be although it wasn't fun. It started upon arrival where we found they had penciled us in for Wednesday instead of Thursday as asked for and were cross with us having been 'no shows' from incorrectly penciling us in. So we walked into town, we stopped at the pizza joint, we had excellent nosh and headed toward the playground to wait for the bus. When we got there some local youths had smeared excrement all over everything, up and down the slides, on the rocking critters etc - try explaining that to a 3 year old! So we walked back into town - or rather I walked carrying Lily while La whinged and tantrumed in true unreasonable and ill 3.5 year old style. We watched the birds for awhile

and poked around the shops... one of which sells some local handspun/dyed yarn and when I saw this I just had to pick it up! It's $9 for aprox 90g but the neat part is the fiber content: it's dyed sheep and white samoyd - yes, SAMOYD... as in the big white fluffy DOG.

After this we caught the bus, with La claiming to have an owwie back and was sick on the bus, progressing into screaming, wailing and hysterics. He is still feeling miserable as anything and sacked out with a fever.

At any rate, we made it home and I went to let the dogs out when I noticed a goose in the yard...

This is not MY goose. Well... it is now I suppose but I digress. The day before we'd had a woman pull up claiming she'd found a goose walking down the road (as you do...), it had laid an egg, her dog was going to eat it and was it mine. It goes without saying this happened just as I was trying to get the fire going and succeeding after 20 minutes of babying it along, the dishes were stacked everywhere for washing, pile of unsorted laundry was waiting for folding on the couch, La was whinging about breakfast and Lily was just feeling disgruntled over being set down so I could start a fire and warm the place to something above subzero, let alone had a chance to put a brush through my hair or make-up on. Mine were secure in their yard so I suggested maybe it belonged to a neighbor who has geese but if it wasn't, she was welcome to leave the bird with me. I didn't hear from her so I assumed it must've been the neighbors but I'm guessing that having found it in my yard today, it must not have been! So now I've got another goose.

And this is just one for me. I completed the scarf bit awhile ago and decided to start felting a little black tri Aussie on it for La who wants a "dog like Hopie". I've roughed in most of the body shape but still have to do the head and bear in mind it's still very rough and will be more refined by the time I'm done. :) This is done with tufts of wool rovings (picture a cotton ball if you tore it apart) placed on the scarf into the desired shape and needled down. The felting needle on the left tangles the fibers together until they mat into felt and attach to the scarf. Good fun!