August marked the first month that I started our little homesteading adventure. Each month I plan to write a reflective blog post on what's been happening in our backyard. This first blog post will cover everything from orphaned lambs to chickens, ducks, our backyard orchard, vegetable gardens and berry garden. Happy reading x
Chickens
We recently bought a few new chickens. We purchased four Orpington hens (a mix of blue, black and one splash girl). The two black hens have been named Marmite and Vegemite; the other girls still need names. With the Orpington hens we also bought an Araucana x, purely because I love their beautiful olive coloured eggs. Our first two pullets laid blue/olive eggs, which is when I first fell in love with them. We still have those two frizzles - they're now four years old. I also wanted to move our free range chickens from down in the front paddock and into the backyard too. This meant not only moving the chickens, but also the chicken house. We were lucky to have a couple of work mates and family come over one Friday evening to help us to relocate it.
Ducks
This month I also acquired two Magpie drakes. I've wanted Magpie ducks for a long time so was a bit excited when I saw that a couple needed to be rehomed locally on the NZ Duck Facebook group. Those two boys were able to avoid being culled and will now happily live out their days roaming our backyard and splashing in their pool. Hopefully they'll mate with our Pekins one day too. Although our Pekin girl has proven that she has very little interest in being a mum at this point so her eggs have been put under one of our Indian Runner x ducks instead. Both our Indian Runner ducks are now sitting on nests and it's highly likely that their eggs are fertile. We will have to wait and see what happens though.
Orphaned Lambs
Peppermint arrived one freezing cold winter night in a cardboard box, not yet taking a bottle and slightly shaky on his fresh, newborn legs. He soon started taking the bottle and came to work with me each day for the first week, as his need for milk was so frequent. Two weeks later I was contacted by the same farm saying that they had an orphaned girl available so we took her in as well. As soon as Peppermint met Snowflake he cuddled into her. Snowflake was already taking a bottle when she arrived so our only minor (and very cute) problem was that she was adamant that our Samoyed dog was her mother. She would follow her everywhere, up and down the fence line. Both lambs are a few weeks old now and are doing really well. Peppermint was born at the start of August and Snowflake mid August.
Backyard Orchard
We consume a lot of fruit in our house so it only made sense to plant our own orchard. We've started off small with a simple backyard orchard and hope to expand out into one of the front paddocks at a later date. I was gifted a garden voucher from my work when my partner and I got engaged. This was spent on purchasing the following fruit trees - a grafted plum (Black Doris and Omega), a Royal Gala Apple, Meyer Lemon and Satsuma Mandarin. Since then I've also bought a loquart tree (a childhood favourite from a family friend's batch) and a red cherry guava. We also had a Bearss Lime tree to plant. I plan to still buy another apple tree to pollinate our other apple tree; hopefully an old fashioned apple variety.
Edible Gardens and a Strawberry Patch
We have designed two large raised vegetable gardens for the backyard this month and they're slowly being built over the weekends. This process would have been completed by now if it wasn't for all the wet weather that we've had. The silver lining is that it fills up the water tank for the start of Spring. Each of the raised gardens are 4 m x 1.2 m. We've used old bricks for a path down the middle and will fence the entire garden to prevent our cheeky chickens getting in. The start of the path will have a swinging gate added to it. After hours of time spent reading garden books and interacting with other gardeners on Facebook pages I've decided to have a go at both square metre planting and companion planting this year. Rainy afternoons have been spent browsing the Kings Seeds catalogue and making a wish list online. I've finally put an order in and am looking forward to that arriving in the mailbox.
We've also made a strawberry patch in an old raised garden bed. I was lucky enough to be given some strawberry plants and picked up some extras at Palmers Garden Centre too. I made the mistake of not fencing it off from the chickens properly, as I didn't think they'd be able to get up there once their wings as been clipped. Let's just say that was a rookie mistake so I have a little bit of fixing up to do before I add anymore plants to the garden.
Overall a successful month. We're definitely looking forward to Spring and some more sunshine though. Next month my plan is to complete our backyard orchard, finish off making the vegetable gardens and start planting, sow some seeds and work on further developing our berry garden.
More to come soon x
