Training the dogs

In a house with so many pets, it's vital that they all know their place, and that the ones that can be trained are. Especially as I have 3 young boys that live here too their respective ages being 5, 8 and 11.

I would say for a puppy that no one should buy a dog under the age of 5 and that would be the earliest. Or have the child at an age where they cannot easily get the the dog.

I brought my oldest dog a Golden Retriever when Jordan my 11 year old was 18 months old and he was really being my first child out in the yard alone until he was around 4 years old. Then not with the dog alone as GR's are very boisterous for many, many years and mine is quiet large.

Now we have 17 chickens, 5 rabbits and counting, 3 dogs with one of the bunnies being a house rabbit which means she never goes outside unless supervised - I usually let her and my other adult desexed rabbit Pepa have a run in the veggie garden while I am doing the weeding. Amazingly they don't eat all the veggies!

My house rabbit and all the babies are house litter box trained, this is really to do with rabbits, just confine them to a fairly small area and leave the litter box in the pen and then they will continue to use this once they are free.

My dogs come in pretty regularly and my first challenge in training them was to get them to accept that Sian lives indoors and has free run of the house and is not allowed to be eaten!

Brahma is a Rhodesian Ridgeback and was my first challenge, he is kept in a pen indoors and once settled allowed near the fire place and has run of the lounge area. It really did help that Sian thinks she is a Rottweiler and had absolutely no fear of this puppy or in fact any dog. Basically she didn't run from him and would actually go towards him and charge him at times and completely had him stumped! He never really chased her and their relationship developed into one of a grudgingly mutual respect. If Sian wanted to play they would and if she wanted to be left alone he would do that also.

Phoenix was a little harder to train, he is a sheep dog and while wanting to serve us he also wants to chase and round up ANYTHING including the long grass on our daily walks! He is very smart though and responds very well to weekly dog obedience as does Brahma although being a Ridgeback he is way more laid back and if he feels like doing what is asked he will if not he doesn't! Phoenix the Border Collie wanted to please so when introduced to Sian did follow my instructions to drop and stay and tolerated her getting closer with my close supervision and eventually let me lie him down while she was close to him - although he was very stiff at the time.

I wouldn't leave the dogs alone with the rabbits at all but they are getting better and for 7 month old puppies they are really well behaved, I would ideally like to get Brahma into something way down the track like endurance which is a race where the dog runs along side your bike for I think around 10-20 kms and Phoenix into agility or flyball as he really wants to be worked hard.

Some Winter ramblings

Goodness we are already halfway through the year!! Well the garden is coming along nicely and Ivé not had much time to blog as we have all been very busy with the new baby rabbits and the puppies and we have been building a new patio for some extra cover for all of us for this Spring.

On the chook front most of the girls stopped laying eggs in March, I think at one stage I was getting 1 every 3 days! We held out on having to buy any though and were supplied 2 dozen from a friend with younger layers than us.

Just this month pretty much to the day of the Winter solstice my new (breed by me) barnevelder x Cochin laid her very first egg! My god she let the world know about it too we had a very concerned Henry the rooster pacing the hen house for this egg which I think took about 5 hours to be laid! There are 2 other eggs also being laid surely by my silver laced and blue Wyandottes as they are a good 8 months old now and I would have thought should be laying!

The others are still having a good Winters rest though.

I have been given a ton of used straw shavings from a breeder friend with lots of rabbits, in the mix which they just throw away there is straw, rabbit droppings, wood shavings (all untreated so safe for garden) and there is some uneaten rabbit food in there too. By chance after using a lot of this on the garden as mulch where it will improve the soils greatly I decided to put some in the chook pen, we have a particular area that just gets walked on and turned by the chooks so much the soil is sour and smells really awful! This only seems to happen in Winter. I threw the rabbit mix on and not only did the smell go and the sawdust soaked up the moisture but the chooks had a ball sifting through the mix to get to the uneaten rabbit food! A bonus all around! I also added some to the composts I have going which are all breaking down well, hopefully I shall have a huge amount to use on the garden for Spring plantings.

The veggie garden is going well we ate all the pak choy, the rocket gets used pretty much every second day and is getting quiet large the same with the lettuces and the silver beet and radishes, the Japenese Turnips are a little slow but that's ok they were a bit of an experiment.

I have now removed all the celery which had gone hard but was still good food for the rabbits and chooks and replanted more pak choy in that area.

At a recent rabbit show I brought a few bags on wood shavings, most I will use as rabbit bedding but I saved a bag to spread around the edges on the veggie garden to see if this would be a good organic way to keep the snails at bay, will let you all know how that works out.

I would really love to grow some potato's but don't really have a spot in the sun for them, might have to try and source a old wine barrel from freecycle. Have had some great times in the veggie garden lately, somehow the feeling of pulling weeds for the chooks and clearing the beds for the veggies to flourish makes me really feel at one with the earth. I also have the 2 oldest rabbits out for a play, Sian and Pepa and I really love watching them tease each other and hop round happily.

Speaking of the rabbits, Sian has been shown twice in the past couple of months and the first time she came both 1st and second in her class and last time she came 1st this is all in the pet section though so I cannot wait to see how the new babies fare in the proper classes.

The pups are now 6 months and eager to walk each day, I need to use a harness devise to walk Brahma though and a Halti for Phoenix as they both pull terribly and they are strong! Brahma and Sian play well together although this past week I am really having to watch Brahma closely for signs he might want to nip her we did have one close call. Sian is definitely a house rabbit now, we converted an old TV cabinet for her to sleep in and she just runs lose all day otherwise until we go to bed. She comes and has breckie with us and if I am folding washing you can be sure she is helping! Although some might call grabbing the socks and throwing them off the couch more of a hindrance! When Rylan goes to bed, every night she goes up there with him and sleeps next to his head until about 10 or until we watch TV when she comes back up to us.

Autumn update

Well it's almost Winter but it didn't feel right calling it the Winter update with 1 more day of Autumn!

I have finally finished the rabbitry and we have 2 new additions to the family with Aurora a fawn blue mini lop and Rhea a blue mini lop to be out show and breeding does. Next week I purchase Ariel our Siamese sable buck, they are tiny 8 weeks old and it will be awhile before any babies are to bred, but we do have a show in June so it will be interesting to see how they go, although an important factor before showing a mini lop is that their ears are fully lopped!

In the garden I have not done a huge amount although I need to do a ton of weeding and pruning out the front, I will save it until the third quarter on the moon cycle which doesn't begin until the 4th June.

We have been eating loads of rainbow chard and lettuce and all off the pak and bok choy is gone used in stir fry's of which we eat many.

This weekend I planted some Chinese lettuces 4 varieties and won bok, bok choy and pak choy and some chicory and kale, the last 2 being veggies I have not grown or used before.

The stakes I used in the garden are keeping all the birds out as we have the odd escapee chicken and they don't seem to able to do much damage.

It's interesting to see the difference in the growth on the bed I did absolutely nothing to and the others were I loaded up the cow manure chicken manure and muchroom compost as the left alone is doing pretty poorly compared to the others but I was following advice that root veggies don't like freshly manures gaden beds as it makes the roots splay.

The Ballarat Harvest Festival

Last week the Ballarat community Gardens had their annual harvest festival, I took this as a fantastic opportunity to go and visit some exciting garden plots that people had veggies and plants in to pick up some tips and to taste some yummy home cooked food.

We went there around lunchtime and I ordered 3 delicious vegetarian wood fired Pizza baked in the gardens clay built oven. Tasty! I then tried some roasted chestnuts, they were an interesting taste as Ivé never tried them before, you received them got off the fire and they are kind of black but basically the skin is simply peeled back and the nut is easily eaten, it kind of tasted a little like potato to me.

I brought some lovely (sweet!!) quince jelly and the plan was to make some homemade scones that afternoon, but I became too busy weeding the veggie garden and ended up not making them but I have noticed the boys have been using the jam for toast so it must be ok!

The older boys had some fruit salad from a stall while Kyan my 4 year old was transfixed the whole time listening to a group of older ladies doing some story telling, sitting on cushions and looking like he was having fun!

For me though the fun part was checking out all the plants and garden plots that people had, I got some great idea's one of which being to lay sawdust down between the beds to hinder probably weeds but I suspect this is done to prevent snails from slithering up onto the beds! What a great idea! Certainly one that I will be using in my own garden.

It's not all about gardening!

Self sustainability is not all about gardening, there are different levels of self sustainability from not letting a thing leave your property and not buying from outside to simply recycling and growing your own veggies,I think on some level we all try to be as self sustainable as we possibly can in this day and age knowing what damage we have already done to the planet.

I started by using cloth nappies 11 years ago, of course we were already re-cycling and a year later we brought some chickens to stop buying into the whole egg production scene. Then the Veggie garden came and the questions on using water for the nappies to wash which led to us buying a water tank and storing all our grey water to be pumped out back onto the garden.

Now we have quite a big veggie garden, we now have 4 water tanks and they grey water tank. We haven't brought eggs for 10 years and we sell too quiet a few neighbours we compost as much as we possibly can and use all our own manure from the chickens and rabbits, and all our cleaning products are the simple bi carb/vinegar and eucalyptus oil. I hand weed everything so no poisons are used which while the down side to that is it's hugely time consuming, ALL the weeds and grasses get re-fed back to the chickens so are completely recycled.

So that is self sustainability for us, trying to be responsible for the waste we are causing in the world, trying to take the cargo bike for groceries and walk and ride the bike when possible, meeting the kids halfway from school so that car isn't taken out all time time and trying to get those extra groceries while already out on another trip while down in town.

Something we do have is a wood heater and as I loathe using chemicals for anything we have come up with a way to use all those dozens of toilet rolls we go through each week and used up lint in the dryer. We also run 2 businesses from home and have many documents that need to be shredded to privacy reasons, what to do with all that shredded paper? We stuff the toilet rolls and use them as firelighters! This saves us buying fire starters which are smelly toxic smelling. They work really well, we also add pine cones which are gathered up from the local park only 4 door from us, that fall down every year.

Ivé posted some pictures of what we use for the wood fire and the lint pile that only takes me about 2 weeks to gather and the amount of fire starters I get per lint empty.

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!