We get seasons up here in the Hinterland! This means that we get lots of leaves on  the ground as well. This is a resource I haven't had before as living in Brisbane, there are very few deciduous trees around to collect leaves from. It turns out that some people up here sweep the leaves into big piles and burn them or collect them up into bags and take them to the dump!? I have a friend who has an avenue of deciduous trees and he wants all the leaves off the grass. He was keen to blower vac them into a gully, I was keen to collect them all in the trailer and bring them home. It took about ten trailer loads to get the bulk of them home (and he thinks I'm mad into the bargain) but how could I pass up all those lovely leaves? Here's what I did with them... The first few trailer loads went into the chook pen on the floor. I piled all the leaves onto a tarp and then dragged them into the pen and upended the tarp. It made a messy big pile that covered the stump and bra...

We have been keeping back yard chickens for about twelve years now and sooner or later you get a sick chook that needs to be separated from the others for its own safety (Chickens will attack and kill a weak, sick or injured chicken sometimes) and in case what it has caught is contagious and so the other don't all catch it. I spend a lot of time watching my chooks (we don't have a TV remember!) and as a result I pick up on things that don't seem quite right quite quickly. If I see a chook limping, sitting a lot, staying away from the others, not joining in when you throw treats on the back yard or just not seeming right AND I can catch her pretty easily, then there is definitely something wrong. This post is not so much about why the chook is sick but how I "hospitalise" them when they are. Here's what I do... I spend a bit of time watching the chook in question so I can see what she can and cant do before I catch her. Can she walk? Is she eating? Why ...

Sometimes, eggs just disappear... You know you saw some in the nest when you fed the chooks first thing and then, when you go to collect the eggs and lock the chookies up for the night, some or all of your eggs have simply vanished! Its so incredibly frustrating... The more often you collect the eggs, the more chance you have of getting them no matter why they are disappearing though. Collecting the eggs as often as you can may also help you figure out who the culprit is - one of the chooks or un unwelcome guest. I have got the fright of my life as a big black crow flew out of the nesting box when I opened it one time and chased a scrub turkey out of the sleeping part of the coop - she was on her way into the nesting box to eat the eggs when I finally spotted the right culprit. So there is a chance that snakes, rats, crows, turkeys, your dog or some other yet to be identified animal is eating the eggs - not one of your chooks.  It can take a while to figure...

Last year in early summer, I thought one of my baby chooks had escaped and was hiding in the bushes in the backyard. I chased after her for a while before I realised that it wasn't one of my chooks but a bush turkey chick! It was the same size as one of my Aracana babies just a lot darker. It was kinda cute and we felt a bit special that the chick was in our backyard. By December it had grown a lot and we decided that it was probably a boy and christened him Christmas Turkey - or Chris for short! Once we became convinced it was a boy we started looking on the internet to see if it was indeed still cool and fun to have a giant male bush turkey in your backyard along with chickens... All the articles that I found said that they were trouble. Big gangs of bush turkey boys visit backyards with procreation on their minds and look to the domestic hen to satisfy those needs. For most people the mating part isn't an issue as the eggs even if they are fertile aren't being ...

We hatched some chick from eggs put under a broody hen - which was soooooo much fun a while back and I have a friend who is about to do the same thing. We were discussing how to make sure thee chicks have access to water that lasts all day while she is at work but isn't deep enough for them to drown in. The biggest problem is that chicks need water, but for some reason they think they are ducks and leap right on in. Their feathers aren't waterproof and they get waterlogged and cant get out. If its deep enough, bad things can happen. Shallow dishes are fine unless the water evaporates too quickly or the chicks stand on the edge and tip them up... (who would have thought that giving water to chicks was so hard!?) We found a couple of solutions that worked well for us. Once you have seen a couple of these ideas, you'll have a light bulb moment and be able to rush out and make you own at no cost! Here's what we did... The first idea that we came up with was to put...

We have never raised chicks before and after setting twelve fertile eggs under one of our broody hens seven weeks ago, we had no idea what to expect. Its been a learning curve... If you are considering hatching fertile eggs under a broody hen as a backyarder, have a look at this post and see what you will be in for. Lots of really cute ""Awwww" moments, worry, frustration, fun and heartache - and that's just our first four weeks! Here's what it was like... We got our eggs from Dancing Bee Poultry - The more local the eggs, the more chances of hatching them. If they have to travel from interstate, they will have a rougher trip and you might not be able to see the internal damage and they have less chance of hatching. Our first attempt had eggs from interstate and we didn't hatch a single one. So my advice is to get local ones if you can source them. The eggs need to be rested for 24 hours point down in the egg box before they go under the chick...