Gardening

Every day, I go outside around dusk and call out “chookie chookie chookie” and my three lovely chickens come running towards me, clucking all around my feet. They get another cup full of grain for their bowl, I fill their water bowl, toss in some treats into their coop and lock them up for the night.

In return, they are giving us three beautiful eggs a day. That’s enough for us to give away a carton of eggs each week or so which is far better than I expected to receive.

I’m a couple of months into my attempt to make fertile soil from unwanted waste material now, so here’s the update no-one asked for or wanted.

Still being dirt poor (ironic, since I have no actual useful soil / dirt) I scoured the internet for ways to turn unwanted materials into a soil I can grow my plants in. My chief concerns are it should be really cheap, but also as organic and natural as possible.

Day 1 of excavations. A local bobcat and excavator operator, Neil, has come to move all the heavy things for us.

We wrecked the stairs outside my door and removed the concrete and bricks there. The piles of pavers, wood and assorted bricks from other projects were pushed over the bank and will begin their new life helping to retain the embankment. A decent section of the path was ripped out and two channels were dug for drainage.

Finally, I’ve become that guy…the one who always wants to enthuse about compost :grin:

I’m lucky to live in a place that is semi-rural i.e. the city is 15 mins that way, but my neighbours keep horses, camels, ponies, goats and other animals. It’s not rural, there’s no real farming here, just some home gardening and a few hydroponic operations.

The benefit to this is that horses are dirty bastards, constantly pissing and shitting in their stables, and some people rake out the stables and bag the shit and sell it at their front gate for a couple of bucks. I get 15-20kg (roughly) bags of horse manure and sawdust from a nearby horse lover.

We finished the earthworks today. The back yard has been reshaped a little (no photos) but the main work was filling in the trenches we dug and then mounding the contents of the two bush turkey nests on top of that.

I still need to run over it with a rake and shape it the way I want, but it’s basically all in place now.

You can’t see the fence post holes we had drilled into the ground with a massive auger, but they are done now as well. A couple of days rest and I’ll be filling those holes in with dirt and pounding it down with a sledgehammer.

I decided to solve two of my problems at once. First, what to do with all the empty Coke bottles I have. Second, how to make sure I have garlic at all times without having to constantly buy it.

I took 32 garlic cloves and stuffed them into a seed sprouting tray with some horse manure. About 20 of them sprouted, and I’ve re-potted those into re-purposed Coke bottles filled with more horse manure.