January 2009: The middle of summer

Right: two Welsummer cockerels and a pullet

Below left: the ducklings enjoy a swim in the bathtub

Below: and they are very hungry afterwards!

Below right: a second lot of ducklings hatch

We didn't really want to hatch poultry in an incubator. We would have preferred to buy pullets or even day old hatchlings and ducklings. We found that it was practically impossible to source the breeds we wanted here in Tasmania. The only way to get them was to have eggs air-freighted to us from breeders on the mainland. Fertile eggs can be easily damaged during transport. They can get too cold (especially while being air-freighted), they can get too hot, or they can break. It is always a gamble and we knew that we had to expect very mixed results. Duck eggs are supposed to be even more difficult to hatch. Here are our results. We use two small incubators: one is a 12 egg incubator, the other one has room for 24 eggs. Our hatch rates have averaged around 40%, which gives us four to five hatchlings per dozen eggs. The best results were the eight Salmon Faverolles we hatched from a dozen eggs, but the worst result was a zero hatch rate from twelve eggs from a different source in the same incubator at the same time. We hatched 18 ducklings from a total of 34 duck eggs, giving us a better than average success rate with our ducklings. 

We were very lucky that we didn't get any power failures over the months when our incubators were running. Now we are looking forward to the next breeding season when we can hopefully pass over much of the job of raising little ones to our broody hens!  

Harvest time

Left: Blueberries, raspberries, currants, brambleberries and peas

Right: our first plums!

Below left: White Transparent apples

Below: Irish Peach apples

Below right: the pigs love fallen fruit!

Below left: Cocozelle Zucchinis, a pickling cucumber that should have been harvested earlier, squash Pattison Panache

Below right: Red Pak Choi F1

The Vegie Garden

Below: potatoes on the left, corn and a row of Red Kidney beans planted in late November.

Right: Seven year beans. 

The Large Orchard

Left: our first plums (plum Victoria). Every once in a while a small birds finds its way into the netted orchard. And they like the plums! Without a bird net we wouldn't get any plums for ourselves. 

Right: the plum President are a variety that ripens much later.

Right: Nashi pears

The Kitchen Garden

Right: climbing peas Alderman and snow peas. 

Below left: the beautiful flower of the passion fruit Nelly Kelly. Both passion fruits in the kitchen garden had died back almost completely last year but have now come back with great vigour.

Below right: the potatoes are ready to die back. The Russian Kale is doing well, but the mixed climbing beans have almost completely died.

We'll remember this summer as the one with the "bad beans." The beans just didn't want to grow. First we had to deal with the snails who ate the little plants as soon as they emerged, and we decimated the snails by torch light over many nights and replanted. But then another problem came. The plants grew vividly to a certain height but many started to turn yellow and looked burnt. At first we thought that our own fertilizer mixture had been too strong and had burnt them, but that was not true. Beans turned yellow and died off in many different areas of the garden, but always in patches. On the right photo the beans in front are badly affected while the ones behind them look much better. The beans in the front of the left photo have died but the ones behind have not. The climbing beans on the photo above right are also brown. 

All we know is that we watered them all equally well and that they seem to die off in patches. Is it a virus infection that the mild and moist spring brought? Many people in our area experienced the same problem with their beans, too. Let's hope the next planting season will bring better results!