Worm Farms

About 6 months ago we decided to buy a worm farm, we already had a compost but it was full and we also had a massive black compost for the dog poo and wood fire ash and still we seemed to have way to many fruit peelings and waste that the chickens were not eating such as citrus, avocado, potato peelings. Now of course we have the rabbits and when indoors they have a litter tray too which is simply mulched paper that also needs to be composted so we decided to get the worms.

Your local Bunnings usually has all you need to start a successful worm farm and it's really easy and great fun for the kids to get involved with, mine loved the whole thing from the coir mulchy messy briquette you pop in a bucket for the worms to live in in the lower layer of their pen to the depositing of food each week and the noise the farm makes now their are literally 1,000's of worms chewing away at the food! Added bonus of course the rich liquid worm poo tea that can be slightly diluted and put on seedling for that added boost in nutrients!

There are a few different ways to start a worm farm but basically you need 3 levels, I was rather tempted to try with 3 polystyrafoam boxes that I would have been able to get free from the green grocer and build that farm that way, but I wasn't really too sure exactly what was required to keep the worms happy so went the more commercial route. We brought 1,000 worms + many castings included in the packet from Bunnings the cost being about $25 and then a large black 3-4 tier farm for the worms and the medium that the worms live in is included. You place that in a bucket with about 9 litres of water and this makes it moist for the worms then tip in and away they go!

I noticed over Summer the population really dropped and I have no idea if they went to the very bottom of the pen, it ends up quiet heavy after putting all that food in but it's April now and my gosh the population had exploded, they are so many I have taken some pictured but when you lift the initial lid and turn the food slightly there are hundreds all looped around each other, very exciting! I put rabbit poo, paper, newspaper, fruit peelings, apparently you can also add dog poo, although we had a separate composting bin for that.

Apparently it is not a good idea to add meat as this can very quickly attract flies and maggots, we did get small vinegar flies but no maggots thank goodness!! I added pretty much most of the plums that I had picked to early this year and they seemed to love those too.

The finished product

Of course when talking about the veggie garden there is never a finished product! However for this season I have planted all 6 beds out and added some seedlings to pots with other plants in them just to fill the space and now it's all feeding them, weeding the beds, will add some pea straw when the seeds grow and the seedling get bigger, keeping the snails off them and bugs and then of course harvesting them. Then the wonderful cycle begins again!

Before Easter I pulled out the yellow zucchini and the golden nugget pumpkin plants and split the 2 tier bed to create another bed for the onions, I added mushroom compost and cow manure to one bed for the leeks, white, red and brown onions and spring onions and then just added some lime and turned the soil for the parsnips, carrots, turnips and radish. I used seed for all those plants and have noticed the soil seems to be very water repellent and it was from the bottom of the 2 tier bed so it will be interesting to see if they come up ok.

Carrots do not like recent manure or mollycoddling but they do like fairly friable soil and mine seems a little too clayish but we shall see.

All plants discarded from last season are given to the chickens and while turning the soil and moving it to the new beds I found many cockchaffer larvae (no it isn't any sort of reference to male underwear) rather a turns into a beetle that chomps through plant roots and grass roots so I threw the lot to the chooks who were wrapped with a tasty morsel for afternoon tea! I still have some pots with coriander and endive coming up, but as the days are getting shorter the growth is really slowing, along with some garlic chives, might have to move them inside and see if some indoor heat keeps them alive for longer.

Hope you all had a great Easter, such great weather here in Victoria anyway for gardening!

While away camping the other week, Rocky the rougue escaping Hamburg managed to escape into the veggie garden and I am so pleased to say she did minimal damage due to the bamboo sticks! She really couldn't turn the soil at all, and I have found the black birds have stayed of the garden too!

Planting of the Winter Crop

Today I planted the Winter Veggies, it's been a couple of weeks project as Ivé needed to move all the tops of the planter boxes to reduce the height of them and then haul 300 kgs (ok I got the boys to do it) and a trailer load of mushroom compost too add to the soil to improve it for the next crop.

I still have the white onions, leeks and spring onions to plant along with carrots parsnips and turnips but it's not the right time on the moons cycle to do that until next week so that will be done then.

I also had loads of Silver beet and discovered that you cannot transplant this fully grown it just withered up and died and although I gave the lot to the chooks to eat so it wasn't wasted I am sure they would have preferred to eat it fresh! I have included a picture of this I tool and you can see Ivé added lime to the other beds too which I do at the end of each year for ph balance and to break up the clay soil a bit.

I planted some silver beet seed, pack choy, bok choy, silver beet plants, 3 types of broccoli, 3 types of lettuce, rocket seed & english spinach.

Last year we went to Sovereign Hill and they have the olden days veggie gardens set up with all they have for pest control then and I was so inspired by it I have decided to use this method for my veggie garden to keep the birds of the beds and if any chooks should escape which does frequently happen there will be a method in place to ensure they don't cause too much damage.

RecentlyI found at an a bargain at a antique shop on a recent camping trip and brought 500 bamboo sticks for about $5, they are very thin and pushed into the ground between seedling make the ideal bird protector as the blackbirds don't like to dig around them they stay away. Bliss!

I cannot plant the onions until Ivé removed the pumpkin which I think is at the end of it's life and the yellow zucchinis, and wevé had great success with that, I will then remove the top layer of the bed and reposition it and add more manure for the onions and leave the bottom layer for the root veggies such as the carrots and parsnips with no manure added as they don't like this and it can cause them to split.

Mandala Meditation Retreat

This is just a bit about the philosophy I follow the Brahma Kumaris, they are a group that are based all over the world first originating in India and are Primarily run by woman, the sole goal is to provide course on anger management, meditation, stress relief.

Here's a little extract from one of their sites;

We are individuals of all ages and backgrounds who regularly attend classes at more than 8,500 centres of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University located in 110 countries.

We study spiritual knowledge that nurtures respect for all faith traditions, coherently explains the nature of soul, God, time, and karma, and delineates an enlightened lifestyle.

We practise and teach a form of meditation that relaxes the mind and nurtures a healthy balance between our inner and outer worlds. Through numerous social service activities and partnerships, we promote spiritual understanding, leadership with integrity and elevated actions towards a better world.

I have been on quiet a few retreats at the bk centres, here's the link for the Australian ones if any ones interested at all
http://www.bkwsu.org/au/retreats

This is a picture of the one I stay at;
http://www.bkwsu.org/au/retreats/retreat-locations/Frankston%20South/

The rooms are very basic and the food all vegetarian, the centre is based on 20 hectares of bush land and there are tracks winding all throughout the place, the walks are divine!

The word Mandala is from the ancient Sanskrit language meaning circle. Mandalas are sacred geometry of circular patterns that repeat throughout our universe,nature and our psyches.

On this course we made a few mandala's some we drew ourselves other we cut and pasted from magazines and another we made a group one with cards and candles and the final one with nature and used nuts, twigs and sticks. I loved it, met a lovely lady there called Connie who was a natural healer, we had a really good talk, I felt a special bond to her. Have included some pictures of the retreat.

The Indoor Rabbit

Your probably wondering how this factors in with self sustainability but in fact rabbit droppings are excellent for use on the garden and the litter from the litter tray if you use a specific type ideal to add to the compost and for the left over carrot tops and end and lettuce/greens scraps perfect for your rabbit pet to eat!

We use this brand http://www.fibrecycle.com/breeders-choice-cat-litter.html easily available from Pet Stock. It is simply newspaper heat and water.

We had some sad news last week, we noticed Cinnamon our agouti coloured rabbit had swollen eyes, both and rapidly increasing, I suspected Myxomatosis having read up on it and upon calling the vet it was highly suspected after he told me to check if her vulva was also enlarged which it was.

We took her to the Vet and he checked her temp and glands and thought it best to have her put to sleep, there is no cure for Myxo and the cause of death is generally pneumonia after they have first gone blind and grown massive tumors all the body and all this is done over 14 days.

So our other 2 rabbits Sian and Pepa are now in quarantine and Pepa remains outside with no free ranging access and Sian was brought inside as she was sharing a pen with Cinnamon and I will need to clean it out thoroughly before she can be returned there.

So now she has become a house rabbit and a very spoilt one at that! She enjoys sultana bran with us in the morning, watches TV with us at night, is barely in her cage, only when I go out and at night time when we turn the lights off and open the upstairs door, she races upstairs faster than lightening to sleep by our bed rather than get left downstairs or worse actually put back into her hutch!

I have posted some pictures of Sian our spoilt girl her pen, relaxing in the lounge and eating the edge of the carpet! It's ok though it's the dogs mat.

RIP Cinnamon only 13 weeks old.

The Early Autumn Update

Well It's been an interesting Summer, the heat is still hear turned into humidity down in Ballarat but we are starting to get the cold mornings and evenings so Autumn weather is certainly here to stay.

This year I got a absolutely massive crop of plums but due to the fact I lost the crop each year to the birds, and it's literally overnight I picked the lot early hoping that they would ripen. I had about 20 kilos of plums and they didn't ripen so Ivé certainly learnt a valuable lesson there. The other plum tree I was able to pick early and all went well although there were only about 10 plums of that bush, anyway a lesson learned.

I have been getting a good crop of gold nugget pumpkins although they are so little deseeding them and peeling them is tedious!

The yellow zucchinis are ripening nicely they don't seem as prolific as the traditional green ones. Strawberries are coming along nicely, carrots good, although with both these things it is so hard to determine how much they produce as I have 3 children constantly raiding the vegie beds! Still it's better than eating processed food.

I don't think the cucumbers will ever produce fruit unsure why I think though the soil in that new bed is not quiet good enough yet, needs more manure added. I have recently been sent 10 large 30 kg bags of cow manure at $3.50 per bag, I am going to save so much as normally I buy about 10 kg's at $7.00 from Bunnings, although moving 300 kgs of manure was not that much fun!

Silverbeet is going rampant and it's a big shame no one likes it here!! It was more grown for the chooks and they love it so get fed it regularly.

Had some really bad luck with some plants as one of the chickens escaped into the vegie garden and was pretty much in there for hours. She ate most of the lettuces although some of the purple coloured ones seem a bit more hardy. They also got to the radishes, all the spring onions, Japanese turnips and the rocket and the rhubarb. Also the celery is going well, I tend to break that off and feed to the rabbits, they love it.

The next plans for the garden are to break up the taller beds and half the height size and by doing that I will be able to add 2 new beds so I will have 5 large beds in the vegie garden, the horse water trough bed and a smaller long pot bed.

Also managed to find a male Kiwi fruit plant and I brought some trellis and planted that with the female, it's in the area the chook range free though so Ivé had to fence it a bit.

Have started to move the vegie beds since first started this posted, very heavy work and one spot I wanted to put a bed gets virtually no sun so rethought that placing and have placed it in a more suitable position.

I love Autumn, there's so much potential for the garden now the heat is lessening and we can actually miss a day here and there of watering, all that water Victoria recently received has topped up the tank to a fantastic level.

The New Puppies

Although this is completely not a self sustainable topic, I cannot skip by talking about my 2 new puppies Brahma and Phoenix, I believe they will both add, enrich and possibly change my life so I feel they are important to include.

Earlier this year in fact of New Years day I was unfortunate enough to lose my 7th baby. I have 3 young boys for which I am eternally grateful for and made the decision that this would be it, no more children. My youngest started Kinder this year and whilst I could certainly put my energies into the garden and my work (Remedial Massage Therapist) I felt I needed something more. My oldest dog Benson is no longer able to walk great distances anymore so I decided to buy another dog and a pound one at that. Unfortunately everyone I enquired about I was not able to even look at due to having young children, rabbits and chickens and I repeatedly told to look at getting a puppy, preferably an 8 week old one.

In pretty much the same week I found Phoenix, a chocolate Border Collie and then Brahma a liver nosed Rhodesian Ridgeback, the story behind Brahma is pretty amazing, I went onto an Internet dog site to look up breeders for a Ridgeback as I have always been interested in getting one and upon searching found the only 2 breeders that had just had pups in Victoria, one was a familiar name.

It was Sally my childhood and very best friend when I was 14! I was amazed and immediately contacted her, and through many conversations and e-mails I eventually went up there and brought Brahma. He is a Liver nosed Ridgeback and was apparently pick of the litter so as an agreement as Sally gave me a huge discount on him we have decided to keep him entire until Sally decides whether she would like to breed and show with him, int he meantime I will teach him obedience basic and possibly go on to do agility or endurance work with him. His Pedigree name is actually "It was fate"!

The story behind Phoenix is an interesting one also as I actually used to work with the breeder that bred him she worked for the Shire I once worked with for 10 years, she was there on a temporary position for 6 months. This is 200 kms away from where I live now by the way! So all very bizarre!

When thinking of a name for Phoenix I really wanted an angel name, or something spiritually significant. I meditated on it and choose a card from my angel card pack and this name Phoenix came up and here is the meaning;

According to the most popular variant of the phoenix, the bird lives in Arabia for 500 years at the end of which, it burns itself and its nest. In the version of the phoenix described by Clement, an ante-Nicene (basically, before Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire) Christian theologian, the phoenix' nest is made of frankincense, myrrh and spices. A new phoenix always rises from the ashes.

I thought this was fitting as this dog would symbolise a totally new path in my life and moving on from my whole raising babies one.

So far the pups are fitting in nicely although at times they fight they seem to be settling into a nice friendly pattern with each other, they both highly intelligent a complete change for me after owning a Golden Retriever!

The plan is for my eldest son to take the collie and for myself to train the Ridgeback at obedience club for 1 year before moving onto to our specialised fields. I am really looking forward to having something in common with Jordan and to sharing this special time together.