I spent an afternoon hanging out at the local library today looking through books on gardening and a generally more sustainable lifestyle. Despite the way I have been raised, we realised that if we want to do this ourselves we're seriously going to need to do some research. It also requires a lot more work obviously and a whole lot of planning ahead! To be honest I'm super excited for the challenge though.
We have a chicken coop... now we just need chickens! Well to be fair this is my mothers coop but our chickens are going to be bunking up with hers. It has an inside and outside covered area as well as an entire paddock for scratching and finding juicy bugs in. I really couldn't imagine a happier place for a feathered friend. Chickens are proving to be quite difficult to come across though. We initially wanted to save some ex-battery hens but after some research have decided that they're probably not ideal. Sadly many have had their claws removed which means they can't/ don't know how to scratch around. They are also almost always over a year old, which means they are past their prime laying age. As much as we would love to save them anyway, the main purpose for getting chickens is for the eggs and we can't really justify the cost of keeping them just like that. Sooo we have to find a chicken farm that will sell us chicks. Most of them are way out of town so it looks like we have a small road trip ahead of us!
And we've been given a pretty decent patch to start our vege garden on! Boy is it going to require a lot of work though. The grass that's growing here is called Kikuyu and it's a right pain in the butt! I think it originally comes from Africa but the settlers introduced it here because it makes such a beautiful lawn. The down side is that it went crazy in New Zealand. It makes these long runners and ends up tangling and strangling everything in its path. If our little garden has any hope at all we're going to have to dig up every last inch of this green monster and make sure it doesn't come back. Then the soil needs lime, compost etc before we can finally get the Autumn crop in. Of course I'm fairly heavily pregnant now too and not capable of much manual labour, so it's poor Nic who is going to have to do the grunt of the work.
Yup so there you have it, lets see how this all works out!
x
Oh sweet I got ex-battery hens when I lived on a farm in a past life and they were amazing. Lots of scratching and tons of eggs for many years. They even perched when I was told they would not. Biggest problem I had was a ferret who killed a few, really yucky.
ReplyDeleteAnyway I am so excited for this next adventure for you, I hope we will be on the same journey soon too.
Best of luck chookie buying.
Love V