Scary times

I never intended to blog about anything other than the garden but find that occasionally I need to vent, ponder, whinge, get advice, sympathy ....

Next week Teen One has her driving test, OMG how old am I!  I can't decide whether I want her to pass, and therefore take over the taxi driver role, or fail so that I can keep control.  I have been known to have to sneak up to the station after a glass or two because she has needed a lift home unexpectedly - such a dilemma, do I drive after a couple of glasses of wine or do I allow my daughter to walk home in the dark by herself.  Don't worry though, any more than a couple and I have just walked (staggered) to the station and accompanied her home - I'm not that irresponsible! That could soon be all a thing of the past.

In NSW they have to do 120 hours before they can even sit the test and you would think that that was more than enough.  I doubt I did more than 10 hours, at the age of 15 (NZ, long long ago), before sitting my test. BUT I don't really think that she is anywhere near ready to drive around on her own - changing the radio station, fiddling with her mobile and castigating all other drivers on the road is far more pressing than concentrating on the job at hand.

This was brought home to me quite graphically at the weekend when we passed three teenage girls standing in the middle of a local street because one of them had lost control on the corner and their little girlie mobile had collided with the kerb on the wrong side of the road.  Very soon that could be MY daughter.

How do other people feel about this - do they live in mortal terror or just be thankful that they no longer have to spend their entire life in the car being a chauffeur?

Chook and Garden Update

Too busy to blog much these days but I have had a stroll round the "farm" this afternoon and taken a few piccies.  

If you look really closely here you can see a few baby oranges and hiding in amongst the leaves are some enormous passionfruit.  We are going to have an amazing crop of them this year, both vines are doing really well.  I can sense lots of passionfruit cheesecakes coming on.

Not a great photo but this is my Three Sisters Garden, see here for an explanation of what that means.  I have chosen cucumbers, Lazy Housewife Beans and Blackjack Zucchini to accompany my sweetcorn.  The corn is beginning to flower already so I am hopeful of an early crop.

Here is the BlackJack Zucchini at the end of the Three Sisters bed, it is only a few weeks old and already producing more than enough for a family of four.  I can see us getting pretty sick of it by the end of the season.  Luckily it is one of the veges that the Teens will actually eat in vast quantities without whingeing.  Goes really well with all the lovely home grown eggs too.

And speaking of eggs, in the background of this photo is my new chook house which used to be a cubby house.  I got it locally from Freecycle for $0!  How brilliant is that.  I haven't finished modifying it for chook habitation yet but I'm sure they'll love it.

And finally here is my new pumpkin patch, for years I have tried to grow them near Hubby's lawn only to have them mown down but have finally given up and put them on the path by the clothesline.  I have  Red Kuri and Butternut Squash in there, as well as another zucchini that I feed to the bunnies and chooks.

As for the Incubation update - what a lot of ups and downs, especially temperature wise.  The incubator is quite hard work, I have to open it twice a day and turn the eggs and fill the water tray to keep the humidity up.  Then the temperature seems to go mad and I pop in and out of the study trying to stabilise it.

One morning it was 38.1 when I got up when it should only be around 37.5-7 and then the next day one of the Teens turned it off by mistake so the temperature plummeted. I had put some eggs under my broody Wyandotte Sylvia as well, but my one remaining Isa Brown got into the coop and destroyed 2 of the 3 and replaced them with her own.  I've given her a couple more but who knows what the outcome will be.  

I candled the indoor ones tonight and I think ( but only think) that 12 of the 14 are developing.  The other two look to be dead but as I said I don't know for sure.  I have marked those two with sad faces to see if I am right.

Eggs - of the fertilised variety!

I am beside myself with excitement. I finally found a friend who wanted to give chooks a try and was happy to take all 4 of my Isa Browns so that I would be able to have some chicks. Not sure how someone with my total lack of patience is going to survive the 21 days it takes for hen eggs to hatch though.

The first to go in the incubator are these Buff Brahma bantam eggs, only 6 of these were available but that's ok, I only have a suburban backyard after all.  I have ordered a dozen Sussex eggs in 4 different colours as well and those should arrive any day now and be in the incubator by the weekend.

Fingers crossed that we get a good hatch rate and that ALL of them are girls - I know this is highly unlikely so I am steeling myself to get rid of any roosters as we are not allowed to keep them.

One of the Glamour Girls (silver laced wyandotte) has gone broody as well so I am going to sneak a couple of Sussex eggs under her for fun - the silly bugger is sitting on an empty nest at the moment and no doubt waiting for peeps.

Wish me luck :-)

"Bandicooting" Potatoes

In my usual impatient way I have picked some new potatoes out of the patch while they are still growing.  I was quite impressed, last year I got about 3-4kg of spuds in total, and I think that might be a generous estimate.  Today I took half a kilo just from two of the plants on the ends.

The traditional trench method seems to be better than cages if you have the room for it.  I also have a cage so it will be interesting to see what comes out of there.  It's not exactly a controlled experiment as the cage has pantry spuds and the traditional patch has seed potatoes from Diggers.

Since it is Meat Free Monday here I am going to try really hard to make a meal purely from home grown food.  I am thinking broad bean, snow pea and zucchini frittata with minted new potatoes.  Not sure whether to give myself a break on the cheese (which I did not make) as frittata isn't quite the same without it.  I don't have any onions either but I figure garlic and spring onions will suffice.

Garlic Harvest

This was my little garlic patch a month or so ago, one row of Italian red and one of Early Purple.

And this is all that remains of it.  I tried to do one of those groovy French plaits, it turned out ok, but more practise is definitely in order.  It is now hanging under the deck roof keeping the vampires away according to Teen 2 (too much Twilight obviously)

This is how the patch looks now, the Silkies are digging it over and fertilising it for me.  They don't seem to want to lay eggs but they can still earn their keep. Once the spuds behind are finished we can turn the coop round and they can dig over the whole patch.  Don't you just love chooks!

Chooky Update

I finally got around to taking some photos of my new Wyandottes, this is Bella a Blue Columbian.  Unfortunately she has suffered a bit of feather pecking in the rear end and has no tail but I'm hopeful that once it grows back she will live up to her name.  Unlike the silver laced Glamour Girls she is a large Wyandotte so will be huge eventually.

This is Dotte, another Blue Columbian who is at that hideous teenager stage with some feathers and a bit of remaining fluff.  Hopefully she will get more attractive as time goes on, poor thing.

And this is TingTing and PomPom who are my family's favourites, they are nowhere near as destructive as the bigger chooks so they spend most of their lives free ranging around the garden.  They have managed to eat all the spinach and Mesclun mix on one side of the garden but they don't uproot everything in sight like the others.  PomPom is so tame that you can turn her upside down and carry her in the crook of your arm like a baby.

A friend of mine in the Blue Mountains has a Silkie rooster so we have arranged a holiday up there for the girls once they start laying.  I've never seen a Silkie chick but I imagine there's nothing cuter.

Can You Tell I'm on Holiday?

I seem to have been blogging like a madwoman this week.  I have lots of time to spend in the garden so I have been noticing things more.  I found this rotten little 28 Spot Ladybird on my potatoes, along with a couple of his friends so I promptly fed them to the chooks.  I think I've read on someone else's blog - was it Julie's - that they can decimate a potato crop.

I spotted these little comfrey flowers hiding under the leaves too, comfrey is brilliant for chooks, I think it helps in shell production and is absolutely fantastic in the compost.  You can make comfrey tea for your plants or just add it to your compost.

Below is some info I copied from Wikipedia.

There are various ways in which comfrey can be utilised as a fertiliser, these include:

• Comfrey as a compost activator - include comfrey in the compost heap to add nitrogen and help to heat the heap. Comfrey should not be added in quantity as it will quickly break down into a dark sludgey liquid that needs to be balanced with more fibrous, carbon rich material.
• Comfrey liquid fertilizer - can be produced by either rotting leaves down in rainwater for 4–5 weeks to produce a ready to use 'comfrey tea', or by stacking dry leaves under a weight in a container with a hole in the base. When the leaves decompose a thick black comfrey concentrate is collected. This must be diluted at 15:1 before use.
• Comfrey as a mulch or side dressing - a 2 inch layer of comfrey leaves placed around a crop will slowly break down and release plant nutrients; it is especially useful for crops that need extra potassium, such as fruit bearers but also reported to do well for potatoes. Comfrey can be slightly wilted before application optionally but either way, avoid using flowering stems as these can root.
• Comfrey potting mixture - originally devised to utilize peat, now environmental awareness has led to a leaf mold-based alternative being adopted instead; two year old, well decayed leaf mold should be used, this will absorb the nutrient-rich liquid released by the decaying comfrey. In a black plastic sack alternate 3-4 inch layers of leaf mould and chopped comfrey leaves. Add a little dolomitic limestoneto slightly raise pH. Leave for between 2–5 months depending on the season, checking that it does not dry out or become too wet. The mixture is ready when the comfrey leaves have rotted and are no longer visible. Use as a general potting compost, although it is too strong for seedlings.

And look what I found on the older passionfruit that I had more or less given up on due to possum damage.  there are already half a dozen fruit on there and it's only mid-October.  If all the flowers on both plants turn to fruit I will have to set up a road side stall to get rid of them.

And here are some new feijoa flowers, they're so beautiful it wouldn't even matter if we did get any fruit.  Last year I hand pollinated them but I am going to leave them this year to see if the bees can do it for me.