If you live in certain climates then cockroaches and other creepies are going to be part of your life. We had terrible problems with cockroaches a few years back and after a chat with a chemist friend I changed from using Borax to Boric Acid as they way to get rid of our cockroach problem. The active ingredient seems to be the Boron that is in both Borax (Left) and Boric Acid. (Right) The main difference seems to be that Borax is a crystal and easier for the cockroaches to ignore as its large and easy to see. The Boric Acid is a powder and dissolves into the sugar/milk mixture that I use and is ingested along with the attractive sugary part of the dish and Voila - no more cockroaches! Here's what I did... I buy my boric acid online via eBay or on Amazon. As you only need a teaspoon at a time, a few hundred grams lasts a long time! <iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" framebor...

We live in Queensland. We have cockroaches. Lots of cockroaches! Why the NSW rugby team is called the Cockroaches is a mystery to me - surely ours are not only bigger but more plentiful??? At any rate, I don't like living with them (and I'm quite sure they  are not so fond of me at the moment!!) and I have been going through the usual gauntlet of sprays, solutions and bombs to get rid of them... But I'm not so keen on the chemical aspect of all this spraying and bombing. I hate the smell and can almost feel disease and cancer growing in me every time I spray. I'm OK with the resident cockies getting a lungful of chemicals and then keeling over but I feel its impolite (and probably illegal) if my guests and family members do the same thing!!! We went through a faze of killing them by hand (and flyswatter and rolled up newspaper and underfoot) but its hard and frustrating work and it probably was only culling the dumb and slow ones - leaving the smart fast ones to ...

If you have chickens, sooner or later they are likely to get scaly mites on their legs. I didn't pay much attention when my chickens first got it and by the time it had registered that there was something wrong, its quite painful for the chookies and quite hard for the owners to get rid of them. I know that one of the main causes of the mite for me is sugar cane mulch. Either the mites are on the cane when it arrives (which I suspect) or there is something in the sugar cane that brings the mites out from their hiding places. Once I switched from sugar cane as litter on the ground for them to scratch in and also in the coop and bedding boxes, I got rid of my mite problems almost over night. Two of my chookies have got a slight case and I thought I should get onto it before it gets to the stage where its got to be very painful, like in the picture below. Picture from Backyard chickens.com This is a reasonably advanced case and as you can see the scales have lifted from ...

When I only had three or four chickens, I had no problems. They seemed to live long and lay eggs. What more could you want? As I added to my flock, I found that I was introducing diseases and parasites that my original chickens simply didn't suffer from. First up was scaly mite. Easily treated by painting the legs with tea tree oil. Then came the red mites. The poor chookies were itching and scratching their little beaks shorter and shorter I swear. Again not so hard to treat. I wait till they've gone to bed for the night and pluck them off the perch one at a time and dust them with lice powder. In the morning, I clean out the coop, give it a good scrub and dust in there and the laying boxes as well. The worms gave me a fright! Scary looking things and I think that's what shuffled one of my babies of her mortal perch. These i ended up dealing with by soaking bread in the worming mixture and throwing it out to the chookies who gobbled up both the bread a a daily dose of w...

If you have chickens, sooner rather than later you will have to worm them. Especially if you come across this sight while walking barefoot through your chook pen... I had no idea what this was when I first caught sight of the gently swaying bundle of tentacles warm and cuddly in a recently dropped, dropping! A quick Internet scan and it seemed they were very likely to be round worm - but no matter what they were called they needed to go. Worming chickens seems quite easy when you are at the local produce shop with a selection of wormers in hand. Basically, you remove the chookies water a few hours before bedtime (to ensure they are thirsty in the morning) and then the next day give them water that is laced with the wormer - and watch them spend the day dehydrating in the hot Queensland sun rather than take the one sip required to kill off the worm population that have taken up residence in their guts. After a week, I was convinced that some of them may have taken the requ...

One year for Christmas we bought a couple of citrus trees to first use as a Christmas  tree and then to plant in the garden. A wonderful plan that would give us a living Christmas tree one year and lemons and lime leaves for ever more! Well, for the first few years the lemon and lime tree were just doing the growing thing. For the kaffir lime tree - that was fine cause we were after the leave off that tree, but for the lemon, I was getting a bit worried as I was keen on being able to pick fresh lemons and use them when ever I wanted - and it simply wasn't happening. A few years ago I spotted a beetle on the lemon tree. A year or so later, there were quite a number more. By the time I realised that these bugs may have something to do with my lack of lemons, I had an infestation. I consulted Dr Google and discovered that these kinda pretty bugs were in fact Harlequin beetles - or Stink Bugs to the kids - and they were sapping all the life out of my new lemon tree growth. ...

The possums round our place are very friendly creatures and as much as we adore nature and all her creatures, it turns out we aren't so fond of some of the furry ones coming inside and raiding the fruit bowl at 4am! One of the places they are getting up onto the balcony from is the gate at the side of the house. I had a bit of leftover bamboo from another project and was mucking around with it when I got an idea. I mentioned it to the husband who leapt into full DIY mode and very soon, we had a possum gate deterer made with our very own hands and 45 power tools. *sigh* Here's what it turned out like! Each spike is screwed to it own bamboo circle spacer. They were then all slotted into place by the two cross braced bits. The ends have a hole in them and they have a cable tie holding them together at the bottom. Then the whole thing was cable tied to the gate. The idea is that as they use the fences for highways, the gate is the easiest place for them to enter our...

Last year sometime the neighbour came over and asked if one of our chookies had disappeared. I had a quick head count and said, "No, why?". She explained that she thought she had seen one of them in the undergrowth in her garden. We went hunting and eventually discovered a Scrub Turkey chick scurrying around. We were quite pleased to be able to add scrub turkey to our collective awesomely biodiverse backyards and over the next few months excitedly reported sightings in the Poinciana tree, on the fences and general scurrying around. And then it disappeared and we forgot about it. Last week at about 6am my chookies went berserk. I leapt out of bed and rushed to their pen (dressed glamorously in my purple bed sox and untied dressing gown) to see what was the matter. From their sqwarking, I had assumed a cat or dog had got into the pen - but when I got there, there was nothing to be seen. No intruder of a feline or canine variety - not even a chicken. I called to them ...

I have lived in this house for over ten years and for over ten years we have hosted a great many ants as they use the front of the house as a massive any highway. I don't know where they go and I don't know where they come from despite efforts over the years to trace their nest. They march across the back of the neighbours house, along her gate, across the fence, along our gate, along the side of of our house, across the front and down the side to the fence where they disappear into the 'good' neighbours place (Good fences make good neighbours. When we put up a huge non-see through fence they became much better neighbours!)  The highway is usually about 10cm to a foot wide and, as a general rule of thumb, that where they stay. I'm guessing that all the rain has upset them and in the last month or two they have been coming across our verandah, not the front of the house When you have visitors to the front door, its quite a sight. Over the year...