September 2008:
Spring has arrived

Our fruit trees are in flower! Cherries, pears, nectarines, plums and even the very first apple trees are in bloom.

The new shed behind the orchard will be a chook house. The new chooks will have access to the orchard and keep it free of pests. We'll experiment to find out how much time they can have in the orchard before damaging the roots of the fruit trees. We plan to let them free range over the whole property as well. 

Chooks and more chooks: 

chooks are great. They help digging in the garden, they produce fertilizer, they lay eggs for us, and they are cute companions. We decided to have more! But not the crossbreds which are so common today. We want to have chicken which are purebreds of types that are not common today any more, but which were the typical chicken people had on their farms a hundred years ago. We like Barnevelders, Faverolles and Welsumers best. These breeds are in danger of dying out and keeping a few of them is helping the breed to survive. They are almost impossible to buy in Tasmania. We got fertile eggs from the mainland and used an incubator to hatch them.

Silke planted many, many trays of seedlings in August and in September, but disaster did strike! Mice or rats invaded the greenhouse and destroyed many plants. Silke planted everything out again and we covered the trays with bird mesh. That did not work either, because the rodents simply ate their way through. And we didn't catch them in traps. The seeds just tasted better. 

Finally we gave up, sort of. Silke planted everything once more, but this time we placed the trays on the window sills in our house. It worked well!

the Pink Eyes on the left were planted two weeks apart. The ones behind the stick on July 27th, those in the front on August 10th. The difference in development is not big. It really doesn't make much sense to plant too early and risk frost damage!

Asparagus (right):

strong and thick asparagus shoots appear! All the effort that went into building the asparagus bed has paid off. It stays dry enough over winter so that the plants can survive. We still can't harvest much this year though. But in twelve months time the asparagus bed will be in full production.