Skip to main content

Farm update - October 2012

Wow, what a month!  As predicted, the bounty of spring has arrived!  We are getting 8-10 eggs a day and now with Bella milking again, at least 4L of milk a day, but there's not much getting to the kitchen, with too many calves to look after at the moment.

Benny the Braford was a very unhealthy looking calf that we brought home from Cheslyn Rise. We bought home another one (a heifer) a couple of weeks later, and as she looked even worse, we called the vet.  It turned out that they were both suffering from paralysis tick poisoning, which gradually paralyses the animal, from the legs upwards until they can't swallow and then can't breath.  It looks like we got to Benny in time, he is still very weak and seems to be unable to get to his feet without a boost from one of us, but once he's up, he's ok and very keen on lucerne.  After two weeks we finally got him to take some milk, I wonder now if the problem was the milk powder just tasted wrong, and then when he got some of Bella's milk, now he loves it and finishes his two litres twice a day.  The heifer calf only survived a few days after the vet came, she was drinking ok one day and dead the next, it seems to be very unpredictable.  I'll write a post in more detail when I know more about how Benny goes, and I hope I can offer some advice on managing sick calves.
Benny the Braford
Romeo the freisian-cross calf is a younger tame calf that we managed to foster onto Bella after she lost her own calf shortly after or during birth (see more here).  They took a week to get used to each other, and we had to be patient and let Bella decide to foster him.  He is very tame and enthusiastic drinker, we were so very pleased when Bella let him drink from her, so that we don't have to milk twice a day!  She is now very protective and won't let us near him, I guess she doesn't want to lose another calf.



All the other cattle are good!  We had our neighbour's massive red bull in our yard a few weeks ago after tine Donald the Dexter challenged him to a fight and he broke through the fence, and it was an interesting afternoon trying to encourage him to go back home!

the first cheese of the season - a Romano
We don't have as many chickens, even after I did that stocktake last week, we decided to process some of the roosters as they were big enough and starting to fight each other and generally cause trouble.  We did 6 in one day and enjoyed a very tasty roast chicken for dinner as a reward!  The other day we got 12 eggs from the 19 hens, 4 from the 6 pullets, so they are doing very well this year.

In the garden, I've been trying to follow moon planting, so I only just got some seeds into seed raising pots, but the winter garden is still proving plenty of kale, broad beans, peas and carrots, so I don't want my spring seedlings to be ready too early, or I'll have some tough decisions about what to pull out (I need a bigger garden!!).  I've also harvested a couple of super-sweet tiny strawberries, a nice treat from the garden :)


peas are doing well, I have plenty this year, might help that
I moved them away from the onions....

lavender is looking good and covered in bees

the remains of lettuce, beets, swedes and turnips,
 soon to be the tomato garden

waiting for bok choi and broccoli seeds to set and eat all the cabbages,
and then will move in the summer root veges

Mizuna and tat soi seeds, will soon be lettuce

the herbs growing back after winter - mints, thyme, oregano and taragon

broad beans and shallots to be replaced by corn and squash

the crazy bean plant lives on.... potato bag in the background

the pullets and young rooster helping me with the scraps :)
Has anyone else noticed a theme in our animal colour scheme?  You can tell we're Queenslanders with all these maroon and white animals!  And we don't even have time to follow sport!





Comments

  1. Romeo if gorgeous. That white spot on his head resembles a heart on the photo

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seeing calves come down with ticks is so sad. We recently had to have a one year old put to sleep as we had missed the ticks on him (grey/white mixed colouring) and the vet's injections did not help. We were hand feeding him the previous day and full of hope for him. Its supposed to be a bad spring for ticks this year. Joy

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

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!

Chicken tractor guest post

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. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to