Our property is in Kumbia in the South Burnett region of Queensland Australia. The climate is sub-tropical, we get hot summers, which can be very dry or very wet. We have cold winters and can have frost at times. As we are relatively close to the equator, day length does not change much - in Summer it gets light around 5am and dark at 630pm, in Winter its more like 6am and 530pm respectively.
I'm still learning what grows well here and a lot of things have been a bit backwards, for example, Winter is the season for strawberries! Here's a bit of info about about climate:
Spring - warm days and cool nights, minimal pests, so a good time to get plants established
Harvest silverbeet, mustard greens, spring onions and broccoli, herbs start regrowing
Start planting seeds and seedlings for summer!
Summer - hot and humid, slugs and powdery mildew are a problem, but if plants get established in Spring and are nice and strong they can survive and produce well
Autumn - still warm, but nights cooling off again, time to prepare for winter frosts and bring in the last of the summer harvest, time to plant winter crops including:
peas, brasicas and root crops
Winter - expect heavy frosts, nothing tender will survive to be eaten, put effort into silverbeet, brasicas and root crops, watch out for bandicoots!
I do try to follow organic principles where possible and my two best allies for adding fertility are mulch and compost/weed teas. More on compost here. And I have a worm farm.
Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here. You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!
Sign up for my weekly email updates here, you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon....
Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens.
If you want to read more about chicken tractors, head over the Tanya's blog and read my post, then come back here to leave a comment. Tanya lives…
I have had the worm farm for over a year now, and I have to say it’s the easiest and most convenient way I have found to make compost and to dispose of vege scraps and other organic waste. I have not had much success with putting everything in a compost bin, I find that the food scraps go all sloppy and don’t really compost properly. I have found that my current system works much better, all food scraps go to the worms and the compost bin is for weeds and manure. The worms are able to eat all our food scraps and convert it to compost and worm tea, and there is still plenty for the compost bin, but now its not full of sloppy food scraps. People often ask if its necessary or possible to have both a worm farm and a compost bin, and I think it actually works better for us.
The worm farm really requires very little maintenance. All I have to do is tip in more food scraps every few days, drain the tea once a week or so, check that the top tray is damp (if not, tip in half a bucket of …