Ducks are another addition that we have wanted to make to the farm for ages, but I have been unable to find any reasonably local until now. I was extremely fortuante to get these five young adults, a pekin drake, three pekin hens and one khaki campbell duck. They are …
The lovely Josie has gone home today, but by the time she left she was rapidly drowning us in her yummy milk. Because I am greedy and don’t want to share it with the dogs or chickens, I’m planning on making some clabber and using it as a cheese starter …
Thanks to all the glorious cream that Josie is giving us on her milk, I thought it would be a great idea to have a go at making butter. As I don’t have any cheese cultures at the moment, making cultured butter to get cultured buttermilk seemed like a good …
I am babysitting my friends Jersey house cow for a week while she is interstate. She is a lovely old girl (Josie the cow, not my friend;) with a dropped rumen, a broken tail, a blind quarter, an uneven udder, a dicky hip that makes her shuffle when she walks …
Even though I knew that is what they were bred to do, the meat chicks grew at an amazing rate that was only eclipsed by the amount of food they consumed and the amount of very stinky poop they created! I definitely would not get more than 12 in the …
For the time being at least. I have persevered for over four months training Charlotte the dexter to be a house cow, but it’s finally time to give it in and concede that she is just not cut out to be a house cow. I have learnt so much from …
We processed our first lot of chickens today, including the meat chickens and the large Australorp rooster. I spent a lot of time watching youtube videos to figure out how to pluck and clean them, luckily I was able to hand the dispatching duties off to G, not sure I …
Success in the garden! It has been a strange season so far, but none the less I have been able to harvest a bit from the garden – kale, beetroot, potatoes, lettuce snow peas, sugar snap peas and a few strawberries!
All my hard work in the garden over the last few months is certainly paying off now – everything is growing well and I am starting to harvest some lettuce, snow peas, sugar snap peas, kale, silverbeet, potatoes and beetroot. The first lot of tomatoes are in and growing well …
We have raised several batches of chicks now, but so far have not got one to the table, mostly because by the time they got to table age they have either been hens (therefore kept for eggs) or bantam roosters (not worth plucking!). Although we do currently have a grow out pen …