The sunroom makes a good greenhouse!

So a few weeks ago, I planted some "Purple tiger" (a.k.a. Trifetti) chilli seeds I got from a friend - some in the sunroom, some in the courtyard. Turns out the sunroom worked well as a greenhouse. 5/7 came up there, as opposed to the courtyard where 0/8 came up.

They look like this now:

You can see the purple tinge in the leaves. They won't be very hot as chillis but they should make a decorative plant as well as a milder chilli option.

Gardening and chickens

So working on the back yard again at the moment. The removing of some grass gave the chickens the best day of their lives. Am a bit worried about the brown chicken (Godzilla). She's got a lot of patches where the feathers seem to be snapped off. Not sure what is going on there. She seems happy enough, and there doesn't seem to be anything visibly wrong apart from the broken feathers.

On the flora side of things, we've been planting things in the back yard too. Mostly natives, like this correa reflexa (Australian native fuchsia):

The wire cage at the back is protecting the fig tree from the chickens. Turns out that they find the leaves irresistibly delicious. It needs two layers of protection to keep the chickens out, otherwise they reach through and pull the leaves out.

No more treekey

So I thought I'd update what the front yard looks like now that the dead tree, bougainvilleas, palms and other stuff has been removed:


While we could and did do a lot ourselves, we resorted to paying some nice people to remove the palms. They certainly earned their money that day and I'm glad we paid people to do it. The replacement plants are mainly banksias, with a hakea planted in the front corner (behind the succulent in this photo). At least when these grow up they should provide a good habitat for native animals that wander around.

How treekey of them!

So in the process of cleaning up the front garden to replace the dead plants, bougainvilleas and other things with some more native and easier to manage plants, we got to this stage:

Which looks like this from the other side, but with one intriguing detail. If you look closely:

You'll see this:
I'm rather glad that changing house keys was one of the first things we did. Yes, it does match the original key we were given with the house. Given how long it would have been out there, it seems to be a better idea than hiding a key under the door mat.

More soap making fun!

Okay, so the first batch looked good. The second batch looked good too. Time to make it more challenging. How do you do that? Well, you try to make clear soap.

Turns out that one method for making clear soap involves adding some amount of ethanol and dissolved sugar to the mixture. And some glycerin as well, although why should I do that just because some recipes do and some don't?

Well, attempt number 3 of soapmaking (the first attempt at transparent) went horribly wrong. The soap didn't even saponify properly. That was before I acquired some nice measuring stuff. I now can measure with impunity! Anyway, 3 was a disaster. 4 worked really well for part 1, the saponifying. Part 2, the clarifying, was interesting. With the use of a blender and some Britta filtered methylated spirits (I figured it was the best source of ethanol I was going to get), I went about estimating from some vague online recipes the amounts of ethanol I needed given the amount of Lye. It certainly did turn out translucent, and with my new set of dyes, I went to make bars of translucent soap! Now it turns out that either my calculations were broken, or that glycerin(e)/glycerol actually does something I should know about. Anyway, I now have a bunch of liquid soap that looks like this in close-up:


I have also acquired some pH test strips which clearly indicate 1-14 using 4 different indicators. Very cool. Also, quite sure my successful soaps are good now and not going to burn anyone's face off.

Saponification is complete!

DestructoMeg gave me the bits and pieces for Christmas, so I took the contents of these:

And made this:

(okay, yes, some food colouring and essential oil was added). After carving, they look like this:


Made them using the hot process, so they should be usable straight away although a little drying out would be good for them. I would like to be able to test the pH to make sure I've made sap for humans and not for cleaning ovens, but sadly the pool testing kit can't tell if it's in the right range.

Afternoon tea

Afternoon tea


is served....

First ever corn cob!

Far more exciting than those beans :)


Although the tomatoes are a little feeble.

We also had a second one that had a lot of red kernels rather than the blue above. Taste test: boiled them for 12ish minutes and they were rather chestnut textured. A little floury I guess? Tasted very corn like but not sure if they were boiled enough, too much, or that's the reason why other coloured corn isn't sold mainstream. Have to say it would be a lot more substantial than the usual corn but the texture was a bit strange at first.

Beans!

First crop of the season! Yay!

Which one goes with which?

So of the two of these chickens (ignore the non-laying one at the back):


One big chicken, one giant chicken. Both on the lay. Two eggs.

Can you guess which chicken laid which of the eggs? What I want to know now is how big an egg the smallest of our chickens is going to lay!

And for those of you wondering how our vegie patch now looks:

The tomatoes are starting to flower, but are still quite small compared to everything else. The exiting thing is the real cobs of corn! Curious to see how they turn out!

Random stuff around the house

So here's a delightful chap we found in the back yard. Apparently the chickens didn't think this was food, which is a little surprising. Been ages since I've seen a c.cada!

Next photo is in our courtyard where I planted some succulents provided by our neighbours. The flowers have grown to be even more plentiful now.
And here's a bunch of kangaroo paws from my folks. Yay!

Our courtyard has a water feature

Now that most of the foliage has been disposed of, and the water has been appropriately and mostly channeled out of the garage and down the pipe that doesn't quite go anywhere useful, this is the result during a downpour:

Gardening news with pictures!

Okay so what does our back yard view look like now without palms? Rather colourful! Yes there is still most of the debris there, but at least the flowers are nice:

And the "we're not quite sure of the name of it but apparently it's from New Zealand" tree attracts a lot of these noisy chaps which is rather nice:

And as for the vegie patch, looks like the pumpkins may yet take over the world. It hasn't been that long since they were seeds. All of these seeds were planted at the same time.

I hope the pumpkins are tasty, and I hope the chickens like the taste of the plant to keep it a bit under control!

More chicken news!

So now we've tried integrating the chickens. Yesterday we clipped the wings on the youngsters and chucked them in with Godzilla. Much squabbling. Much fighting. Decided to let them all roam around the yard and it worked a little better although they still were being menaced.

By late at night it seemed slightly better. Godzilla went to bed earlier and the other two looked forlornly at the site of their temporary house. We locked them all up overnight and it seemed not too bad. This morning there is still squabbling but they are hanging out near each other. Slowly but surely it seems to be getting better.

Chickenflash! Monday night:
So tonight, it looks like the younger pullets went to "roost" with Godzilla! They might be squabbling during the day but it looks like they are getting clever enough to sleep in the right place. Yay! (Last night Nessy did but we had to round up the last one....) The younguns are even allowed to eat food once Godzilla has finished :-) Only when she's finished....

Chicken update and general farming

Just a few words on what's happening down at the farm....

So we're still keeping Godzilla separate from the pullets. Point of lay is in fact 18 weeks, and they are now 15 weeks old so 3 more weeks at the most before we shut them in the coup together to see what happens. The different food and living space is a bit of a hassle, but there's still a little too much menacing. From 18 weeks they certainly won't grow anymore, but until then we'll still need to keep up the pullet food. Fingers crossed we can cohabit them at 16 weeks and do the wing clipping.

So another weird thing... a few days ago someone stole our tulip bulbs from the front yard. Bizarre.

And our vegie patch is getting there. Beans, tomatoes, corn and pumpkins looking good. Lettuces doing mildly okay. No sign of any carrots, strawberries or the new lot of chillies.

Notes on mixing hens and pullets

So far not so good.... Godzilla ended up with both black and white feathers flying and can terrorize the new pullets easily. Pecking order is to be established, and it isn't a fair fight.

We've separated them in to a new protected temporary cage, but they are still stalked by Godzilla. Not idea, but we'll see how they go. In 4 weeks time they should be equal size but hopefully we don't need to wait quite that long.

Edit: So it looks like Godzilla spends much of the day menacing the other two despite the cage separating them. They also know their place and hide despite the protection.

Chickenflash: 1st October - Godzilla still menacing them through the cage although they are getting a little more brave and exploring sooner.

Chickenflash: 12 October - Gradual improvements in braveness from the pullets but looks like another fortnight before we'll mix them again. They are around 14 weeks old now.

I feel sorry for the neighbours....

So last weekend while we were down in Ballarat for a lovely wedding, we asked our goodly neighbours to look after our pets. No worries we thought. Easy. Free eggs as payment.

When we came back, we discovered that we were down to one chicken. There was a Godzilla but no Elvis. What had happened? The neighbour returned our keys the next morning and explained everything. Apparently on the first day they were looking after the chickens, there was already one less. Elvis was just lying there... so the nice easy job with eggs as payment didn't work out so well.

This weekend we drove down to Tahmoor to get some friends for Godzilla (and more eggs for us). We got a white one (Leghorn x New Hampshire) and a black one (Australorp x New Hampshire). They are 12 week old pullets and we've now just introduced them to each other and Godzilla. There's a bit of squabbling with sorting out the pecking order so it'll be interesting to see how well this goes......

Gardening update!

So now that the weather is getting better (a little too good today - what's with cracking 30 degrees already??) it's getting time to be a little more inspired to do the gardening. The tree fern has moved:

There's a clear view of how much work needs to be done to the retaining wall:

For that, I'm thinking the wall needs to go and so do the palms causing it to collapse. Then they can be replaced with something more sensible and hedge shaped.

We also have a little white tulip saying hello:

And a pink tulip up and coming:

Today there was also the creation of a chicken-free zone. This is the last time the chickens will be allowed to scratch up this patch of dirt.
Last but certainly not least, my parents gave us some orchids from the garden. They are still going strong 2 weeks later!

Daffodil time!

Okay... maybe too many exclamation marks in these last two posts, but it's been a while. Anyway, this is our first daffodil of the new house :-) Some fundraising bulbs were purchased. I don't have any faith in the tulips happening, but the fresias are showing promise.

I had a birthday!

So my lovely wife took me out to celebrate in style!

Champagne High Tea!
Followed by the Tea part of the High Tea!


Yay for High Tea in the QVB!