13 chicks in the spare room right through the wall from our room got old fast! At the tender young age of 2 weeks old, our little chicks were moved outside into their new home.
They now have more room to run around and they have learnt how to fly up onto the perch and balance. We've had a few nice days and they love snuggling up together in the sun....
One week in and our chicks are growing fast! At 7 days old they are now weighing in at around 80-100 grams each and are sprouting (is that even the right word?) more feathers every day.
Over the week we have increased their feed from 6 grams each per day to 11 grams, to 18 grams. It seems like a big increase over only a week but it is still only half the recommended amount! We split the food into 2 feeds, 1 morning, 1 night to stop them from gorging themselves. ...
When Josh & I first got our laying hens it marked a bit of a turning point for us. We've both grown up having home-kill meat in the freezer and have not thought twice about it...we knew where it came from! In New Zealand most farm animals are free range. Cows, sheep and deer are certainly not cooped up in confined spaces...it just wouldn't work, however chickens and pigs are a different story.
It became clear very quickly that when our chickens were allowed to free range, eating as many bugs and as much greenery as they liked they were so much happier and healthier looking. As soon as we could see that this was clearly how chickens were supposed to be, we changed our way of thinking and our chicken buying habits. Up until this point when buying chicken from the supermarket, we bought what was on special. From now on it was free range or nothing at all....
Breakfast was a pretty exciting affair in our house this morning!
We had our first pig "graduate" a few weeks ago which meant we had homegrown bacon ready to go. Pair that up with eggs fresh from the chickens and a loaf of bread made in our shiny new bread-maker and we had a totally homegrown breakfast!
It was delicious and was an amazing feeling knowing that everything on the plate was either a product of our little farm or was homemade.
I wonder what's next...maybe growing wheat to make the flour? I'm working on a house cow too...not winning that battle though 🙂
The day had finally come for our first little pig to "graduate". I kept myself reasonably detached from the process and we arranged for the home-kill guy to come while I was at work. I'm sure eventually I'll be ok to be there but for our first pig I decided to turn a bit of a blind eye! I gave him a good pat before I left for work and when I got home he was gone. Josh reassured me that the whole process was very quick and professionally done so that made me feel better. We had also watched a documentary recently on the state of some pig farms which was hideous, so knowing that our pig had lived a good life in a big paddock with a nice shelter and clean hay to sleep on erased any guilt I was feeling.
It was still a strange feeling though and the paddock looked a little empty with only 1 pig but the prospect of home grown bacon, pork chops and roasts was pretty exciting!
A week later Josh went to collect our meat - wow! When we spread it all out it looked pretty impressive. We ended up with 36 kilograms of meat in the form of roasts, chops, strips and bacon and it looked amazing. So much better than the pork you buy in the supermarket...this was real meat!
It is a great feeling knowing that we are making progress in our attempt to become self-sufficient. The meat looks amazing and tastes even better! I love knowing exactly where it has come from and what went into it and it is hugely satisfying knowing that we raised it ourselves.
A huge part of being self-sufficient is growing our own veges. We are really lucky in New Zealand to have an extremely mild climate, however we do still get a few frosty mornings during winter. I'm still doing a lot of learning about vege gardening but we had a pretty successful summer garden and I caught the gardening bug...bad!
Last summer we planted punnets of veges which was great, but of course the next step was always going to be planting from seed. I bought some propagators, a bag of seedling mix and a few packets of seeds and gave it a go - and it worked! I ended up with all sorts of seedlings that I ambitiously planted in the garden in May. It would have gone ok albeit rather slowly if the pigs hadn't decided that they were lunch.
Josh and I had decided a couple of months earlier that we really wanted to be able to grow veges all year round, so after a bit of research we purchased a polytunnel. I didn't even know these existed but once I had seen one, I knew that was what we needed. A polytunnel is similar to a greenhouse, but as the name suggests it is a tunnel shape and covered in polythene, giving you a large space to garden that maintains a much warmer temperature than outdoors. Ours is 6m long, 3m wide and 2m tall - even Josh can stand up in it!
The assembly was reasonably straightforward...
...and while I thought we would opt for just digging up the ground Josh had other ideas and I came home from work to find this beautiful construction!
It only took 5 of us to move it into the tunnel (no big deal!) and once it was in, about 50 wheelbarrow loads of topsoil to fill the beds. All in a days work! We put weedmat down under the soil - I'm ever hopeful that I won't have to weed the garden but I think I'm dreaming - and Josh also put a layer of grass clippings and leaves down for a bit of a reverse composting. On top of the soil we put a few bags of compost (store bought...terrible I know, but our compost pile is still a work in progress!)
A few of the seedlings that I had planted a couple of weeks earlier were ready to be transplanted so I put them in and the polytunnel was starting to look pretty good. A few paving stones, some gravel and 9 strawberry plants taken from last years crop in and we were ready to go. I'm hoping that we will have a bumper crop and that we may even be able to get a head start on tomatoes and capsicums given that on a sunny day in July it felt like summer in there!
There is still plenty more room in the garden beds (although I don't think I'll struggle to fill it) and with the arrival of the new Kings Seeds catalogue I've got a busy few weeks ahead of me!
When you are on a farm - even one as small as ours, it is important to learn to take the good days with the inevitable not so good days. We have been extremely lucky that the worst we have had to deal with was the pig vs. chicken saga.
Until today.
We'd had a night away and knew that as soon as we got home we would have to find the pigs. Josh had just extended their paddock so they could explore down in an area with pine trees and have a bit more space to dig around but the last couple of mornings they had been getting out. Josh put a hot wire over the fence we thought they were using as their escape route but it would seem that everything we had heard (and up until this point not believed) about pigs being great escape artists was in fact true.
We arrived home and I went searching only to be called by Josh to tell me that the pigs were cruising around in the yard where the trucks are. I went and got the big white bucket that they know means food and coaxed them back up into their paddock for some dinner. All was well again until I realised that the pigs had taken a detour through the vege garden on the way down to the yard.
Total destruction.
The broccoli, cauliflower, radicchio and cabbages that I had grown FROM SEEDS in March had been chewed, dug up and moved all around. And we're not talking a couple of plants here. We're talking about 20. Thankfully it would seem pigs aren't partial to leek, baby beets or lettuces...
So the vege garden was a mess. Not the end of the world (although I was highly unimpressed with my pigs). But then we noticed that one of the chickens that had been bitten by the pig way back and had not really come right was looking very forlorn. She had been distancing herself from the other chickens for a week or so and hadn't got her colour or comb back after the attack, was generally seen sort of tucked into herself in the middle of the paddock and on a closer look she had lost a lot of weight. So it was decided that for her own good it was time for her to go to chook heaven. Having "dealt with" 3 of our meat birds just yesterday I thought I would be fine with this but she was a pet...she had a name! Add that on top of the vege garden destruction and the day had suddenly become quite traumatic.
As far as days go this one definitely fell into the "not so good" category but after fixing the fence, salvaging and replanting a few of the seedlings, baking some cookies and preparing our home grown chicken for dinner (more on this later) things are looking up!
As it is nearing the time for our Pig to graduate we decided that we needed to get another piglet to keep him company and to keep the pork supply rolling! Josh's aunty & uncle happened to have a weaner ready to be sold so we picked her up a couple of weeks ago and took her home. As this was around the same time that our pig vs chicken saga was happening we decided to keep her in a stock crate in the paddock until we had separated the animals - I didn't think that 2 pigs vs chickens was going to end any better!
Once we had sorted the fence we let her out and after a bit of rough and tumble Girl Pig and Boy Pig were the best of friends! It's really good having 2 of them - they are great company for each other.
We have also added to the collection 3 "pretty chickens" They are 3 month old black & white Plymouth Rock/maybe Wyandottes...the lady we got them from wasn't 100% of the breed but they were close to home and looked pretty cute to me! We originally had 4 however we made the mistake of putting them straight in with our brown shavers - they are a lot bigger than these guys and took the establishment of the pecking order very seriously resulting in the complete shock and shut down of one of them. The other 3 are doing really well now and after a week of living through the netting from the big chickens they are now all roaming around together. The big chickens certainly like showing them who's boss though!
We thought that because the pig and chickens had been perfectly happy living in the same paddock together for 5 months they would be fine.
We thought wrong.
We started noticing that the pig was playfully snapping at the chooks every now and then. That was fine until I was up in the paddock and saw that a couple of the chooks had slightly damaged wings. It looked as though our pig was helping himself to an all you can eat chicken buffet.
As much as I loved having the animals in the same paddock we decided that our little egg laying machines needed to be taken care of so we built a fence, but unfortunately not before pig took a chunk out of one of our poor chooks as we were laying out the fence. It was a wee bit stressful to say the least - I'm not sure who was more traumatised, me or the chicken!
We opted for a simple fence made from waratahs, a couple of hot wires and chicken netting - hot wire to keep the pigs in and netting to keep the chickens out - as much as I love them they're not particularly smart and are still not afraid of the pig!
Since then the animals have all been living very happily on opposite sides of the fence. Luckily the chickens are pretty tough and the 2 that had been injured survived - they're not laying at the moment - no surprises there - but they're looking much happier a couple of weeks on!
Somebody told me that chickens were gateway animals...this was certainly not a lie!
Once we realized how amazing it was having our own free range eggs right outside our door the obvious next step was bacon to go with them! Our neighbours had a weaner piglet ready to be sold and we said yes! Our little piggy arrived and although initially quite unfriendly he soon realized that we were his food source and became much more tame.
We originally had him in a stock crate down in the yard but built him a small enclosure in the chook paddock. This was supposed to be temporary until he got settled and then he too would have free reign in the paddock but things don't always go to plan...
The afternoon we were ready to move him to the paddock we had it all set up nicely, Josh carried him in a wool sack and we set him down in the pen. He ran around in a few little speedy circles and then stopped. We placed a tray of pellets in the pen with him and thought we would give him some space to calm down but Josh's dad thought he would give him a little push in the right direction. Well, for want of a better phrase all hell broke loose! Piggy took off and with squeals that still make me cringe thinking about it, squeezed through the fence, hot wire and all and made his escape. He spent the next half hour cruising around our front lawn while we tried coaxing him with food. When the gentle approach didn't work we attempted to sneak up on him and catch him but instead he took off in the opposite direction towards the neighbours farm. This was now getting serious. We knew he wasn't tame enough to come back and if he went through that fence he was gone for good. By this point I was on the verge of tears...we hadn't had him long but he was still our little piggy!
Eventually Josh and his dad managed to herd him through the gate into the paddock and giving up on the idea of trying to get him back into the small pen, we just decided to let him go for it in the paddock. Since then he's been co-existing very happily with the chickens. The first couple of weeks he spent tearing around after the chickens much to their disgust but once he started getting fat the running around slowed down considerably!
We're very lucky as I'm able to take a pig bucket into the cafe next door to my work and twice a week I bring home a bucket full of scraps often consisting of scones and cakes for him! It's clearly working as he is growing very fast. He's 7 months old now so is not too far away from "graduation" as we like to call it. One of the best things about having a pig is that absolutely nothing goes to waste in our house now. It amazes me what he will eat - he's certainly not fussy!
Although he has his flaws - the rings in his nose aren't doing the best job at stopping him from rooting up the ground - he's very friendly and loves nothing more than a good back scratch. It's great looking out the window and seeing him cruising around with the chookies - it's our little farmyard, or as one of my workmates likes to call it, our breakfast paddock!
I think our chicken adventure began about a month after we had got settled back in Te Akau. Josh had started clearing the paddock next to our house that was completely over grown with blackberries and privet and I suggested that we could put some chickens in there. Somehow I don't think that was quite what Josh had in mind for the paddock but he happily went along with it (he does this a lot...he's pretty awesome!) What entailed was 4 months of after work planning, researching and building to create a coop that would not only sufficiently house 6 chickens but would be more of a chook mansion!
Once we had the coop built and painted a beautiful barn red, the next step was moving it up to the paddock - easier said than done! Josh and I managed to move the framing for the run on our own...
...but it took 4 strong men to move the coop itself! I was conveniently at work that day and arrived home to this amazing sight!
Finally by July we were ready for our 6 little ladies to move into their new home. We got 6 brown shaver chickens but now it was time to learn how to take care of them!
They were 16 weeks old when we got them and at the point of lay but they must have been raised in quite small quarters as they had no idea how to roost, jump or where to lay. We had to add more ramps and teach them how to use these to get into the chicken coop and another to get into the nesting box and onto the roost. We also had to teach them how to perch. The first night they couldn't get into the coop and we found them sleeping in a pile in the corner of the run. The second night they made it into the coop but slept in the same pile in the corner of the coop. It took a few weeks for them to get the hang of it all - we were finding eggs all over the place for the first month but they have it sorted now and aside from the odd lazy layer - eggs on the floor underneath the roost - we get 5-6 eggs a day in the nesting boxes...even after 9 months it's still just as exciting opening the door of the nesting box to see what's inside!
