Using Guinea fowl for tick control.

We have been keeping guinea fowl for years. When we were managing (and working) a bio-dynamic avocado orchard we used them to keep down insect pests in the trees and paralysis ticks on our house cow. Now we keep them to reduce tick numbers for our sheep and dogs, and because it seems too quiet without them after all these years. They are exceptional insect hunters and will eat adult ticks by the thousand, they are also efficient watch dogs and escort snakes and goannas from the yard very swiftly (except that one time when they chased a black snake into the house instead). They do however have some unique characteristics................

The flock collectively have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder); they tour the perimeter of the yard at a specific time each morning and afternoon and if anything is out of place they will stand and cackle at it for about fifteen minutes, examples of 'out of place' are leaving a pot upside down when it was previously the right way up, parking the car two meters closer to the house, leaving a shovel leaning against the fence or a visitor's car is parked in the driveway.

Individual guinea fowl will behave in a bossy way towards chooks, dogs, sheep, ducks and sometimes humans when food is at stake. You can see the warning in the body language of the guinea fowl in this clip, he is warning the rooster off 'his' grain.

They don't like to sleep in a pen at night but will go as high up the tallest tree they can find. Ours come gliding down to the ground at dawn with much squawking and cackling.

 One of our dogs; Jess, has been obsessed with one particular guinea fowl for some time and she sometimes gets a bit overwhelming for the poor boy. He sometimes flies onto the top of the chook pen to get a break from her. This clip shows her patiently waiting for him to come down so she can protect him.

In my experience, guinea fowl are terrible parents; they hatch too many babies then try to walk them too far and don't protect them from predators (kookaburras, goannas, foxes, currawongs, butcher birds, hawks and snakes here). We get around this by finding the eggs and giving them to a clucky chook to raise, this has the added advantage of making them less flighty in nature as some of their behaviors are learned from their parents.

The latest batch of guinea fowl keets with their (no doubt bemused) mum.

There is some debate about whether guinea fowl actually help control ticks; here are a few articles on the subject to help you make up your mind. For my part, I definitely think they make a difference.


a comparison study of biological and chemical tick control

a home-grown view

an effectiveness study

An 'against' article.

Another 'against' article

What do you think? Would you keep them?

Afternoon storms bring fertility.

This week there have been storms every afternoon. While I was house sitting I managed to get some amazing photos of a storm moving over the house.

I am so glad the milking and feeding were done by the time the storm hit.

Learning to milk goats

I am house sitting (well dairy sitting) for a friend who has a goat dairy. Consequently I have had to learn to milk goats. Having grown up on a dairy, I was fairly confident I could manage goats; however they proved a bit harder to milk than I imagined. Goats are very different to cows when it comes to milking.

The dairy has mostly Saanen and Anglo Nubian  milkers. They are a pretty lot. There were billies, dry does and babies to be fed daily too.

The first milk I did was guided by my hosts and involved advice  about how to hold the teats and not to pull downward when milking (different from cows there). The procedure they follow is outlined here. It took me an hour to milk one goat and my hands were very sore. I was to milk between two and five goats twice a day (panic stations). As I had to catch the bus to work at 7.30 am and milking and feeding had to be done before that, I decided to call in backup for my first morning; my daughter (fortuitously home from uni) came over and stayed the night to help out with the morning milking.

By the end of the week I had my timing down to fifteen minutes per goat and was able to get it all done in time for the bus. Afternoons were more leisurely affairs when I got to watch the babies play and the maremma herd dog in action.

My daughter milking her first goat. She has done AI, embryo harvesting and ultrasound on them but never milked.

The milk is taken to the gorgeous milk room where it is strained and bottled. The amount of milk given by each girl is carefully recorded for future reference (some were giving 3 litres per milk)The milk room is then cleaned and the floors swept (the dairy is swept too).

The milk room. I have dairy envy (even though I am not milking at the moment).

The bales where the milking happens. How neat and tidy is that!!

The waiting room, An undercover area with hay and water where the girls to be milked wait for me to get to them.

Some of the girls I was milking.

They are curious and intelligent ladies.

There is a maremma dog to guard the little ones

The babies are a joy to watch.

A little saanen doe, looking like a fairy animal.

One of the many shelters; one for each paddock.

I have really enjoyed learning a new skill and spending time with these pampered goats. Having lots of goat milk to drink is a bonus too. My fiend also makes cheese and soap from her milk (both are beautiful products).

 Have you ever thought about having a dairy? cows or goats? People tend to be either a 'goat person' or a 'cow person' which are you?

Hugelkultur beds update

Stage four of the Hugelkultur beds has not yet been completed, but stages one, two and three are producing lots of food. The beds look like a jungle with plants fruiting, seeding and new plants emerging, there is a good mix of vegetables and flowers too. At the moment everything growing in these beds are annuals as I have plans to top up the soil at some point and I don't want to move perennial plants to do it.

The jungle on the right are the Hugelkultur beds, the potato towers can be seen on the left, against the fence and the whole floor is layered with cardboard. The chooks stare longingly through the fence at this little oasis of green.

The corn is doing well in stage three, but there will only be enough for one meal from this tiny planting. I need to put more in, looks like another bed building day is required.

The zucchini are producing lots of fruit and providing shelter for eggplant seedlings.

Green and purple sprouting broccoli are still producing enough heads to feed us. 

Roma tomatoes are giving us enough vine ripened fruit to qualify as a glut.

Good old silverbeet just keeps on giving, although only one plant remains of the original three; the other two have gone to seed. The climbing beans are picking and the second lot of bush beans are almost to flowering now.

The amaranth towers above it all and provides some colour to the scene as it seeds. After collecting seed from it for more plantings, I will give the seed heads to the chooks.

I am really pleased with the Hugelkultur method of building garden beds; it retains moisture, it is an attractive looking bed, it makes piles of rotting wood useful and it encourages me to build new bed space. I will be continuing to build more beds in the future (as time permits).

This is me, mowing the lawn. We put up an electric fence around all the stuff we don't want them to eat first. Sheep are nature's mowers and whipper snippers.

Square foot garden update

The seedlings are up in the trailer bed in which I am trialing square foot gardening. The beans are towering above everything else but most of the seeds have sprouted.

I have taken the advice of Mel Bartholomew and thinned the seedlings to the appropriate number and spacing per square foot, it caused me great pain to pull out good seedlings and volunteer plants from the last crop so I hope it pays off.

The bush beans are growing so fast they will be taller than the strawberries by tomorrow.

You can just see the carrots coming up.

The lettuce is looking healthy inside it's square.

The Tokyo Bekana is up, and it needed thinning.

 I am watering the entire bed at a rate of 10 litres per day, I scoop out the water from our showers and use it to water the whole garden. When the seedlings have all grown a set of true leaves I will mulch between them with a fine mulch like dried grass clippings or chaff to help retain moisture in the soil.

I am now wondering if I could combine square foot gardening with my Hugelkultur beds to make use of the best qualities of both methods, or would it be better to  use the Hugelkultur beds for large vegetables like zucchini, brassicas, corn and tomatoes and use the square foot gardening bed for small vegetables that can be grown intensively. What do you think?

Salmon Faverolles update

I let the Salmon Faverolles out for a run in the yard for the first time this morning; they were so excited and happy to be treated like 'big chooks'. There are only seven of the original ten left; all three died from the same mystery Marek's like disease we seem to have acquired. Treatment with St John's Wort tincture prolonged the life of one chick but he ultimately died and the other two were fine one night and dead the next morning with the characteristic neck drawn back, splayed leg posture.

The seven remaining chicks are growing fast and have reached that awkward adolescent stage between chick and chook when they are scruffy and disproportionate to look at, but these chicks somehow manage to make that stage look cute (I really am in love).

In their pen, waiting to be big chooks.

Three days later, they are big chooks and the pen is open.

Foraging for bugs with mum.

I will let them out for a few hours every day for a few weeks to let them learn to forage and enjoy being chooks. We will need to build them a pen of their own soon as I am a bit worried that my cross breed flock will be too aggressive for them; they really are gentle and docile chooks.

Square foot gardening

The trailer bed has been planted with broad beans, snow peas, lettuce, beetroot, strawberries and calendula as my late winter/early spring crops. Now all those crops are finished so it's time to replant. 

The broad beans produced very well.

The calendula provided flower petals for oinitment, seeds for planting and looked pretty too.

The lettuce and strawberries grew really well together but now the lettuce has gone to seed.

Square Foot Gardening
I have been reading about square foot gardening lately and I thought I would give it a go in the trailer bed because the size of the trailer can be divided into 24 neat square foot beds.

I used wool to mark the beds out; not a long term solution, but it will do for the first planting.
I later removed the calendula, but decided to leave the strawberries.

The idea is to plant a given number of plants in a square foot of garden space. The beds need to be easily accessible and it's an advantage to have some trellis space. It's amazing how many varieties of plants can be squeezed into that little trailer bed using this method.
This method of gardening was pioneered by Mel Bartholomew, who must have a good mathematical mind.

This chart gives a planting guide for lots of common vegetables.

I planned the planting of my trailer bed using an online planning tool which made the planting much easier. Then I got to work planting the bed.

My November planting plan for the trailer bed (for some reason it shows the planting date as the date I downloaded the plan; the real planting date is 17th November 2013).

I dug up each square, added compost and a sprinkle of blood and bone and planted the required number of seeds in the square in the advised pattern.

The whole bed looks neat and tidy again. I put the shad sheet back on until all those seeds sprout then I will mulch the bed and take off the shade.