Bean planting, incubating chicken eggs and kookaburra rescue
After brekky and feeding the dogs I try to get into the nursery. It needs to be watered every morning, and it is great to follow the watering with some seed planting or moving seedlings into the garden.
Bean seedlings planted in our garden beds
A few weeks ago I sprouted and then planted some big beans (borlotti and fava) in seedling punnets. They had grown so much in those few short weeks, they were due to be moved into the garden. I took my bucket with compost, small garden shovel and a water mix into the garden with my punnets, and planted them around the place. They are nicely spread out in the garden, I hope they will survive the heat (although it has cooled down now, hopefully the scorching heat won’t return for a bit…).
Our incubator with 24 of our chicken eggs
After planting them and putting everything else back in their place, I went about setting up the egg incubator. Unfortunately we do not get a lot of broody hens here, I think most of our chickens still have egg layer lineage instead of broody lineage, but we are getting better every year. As it is nearing the end of summer the broody hens are less and less frequent. So we got the incubator out, I had been saving eggs over the past few weeks, especially from our Barnevelder chooks, as we like that breed and want to continue with them. We have 2 incubators, both a gift. We put the smaller one into the larger one (as the smaller one does not have insulation) and fired it up. It is running on our solar power system, so won’t cost us. I put the eggs in after it was warm enough. Now I just need to make sure the eggs are turned regularly and they have enough humidity, and we will have chicks in 3 weeks if all goes well!
The soaked kookaburra drying out on the verandah.
Tom found a half drowned kookaburra in the water tank today, luckily a branch had fallen into the tank a while ago that he could perch on, otherwise he would have drowned… The wet and shivering bird was fished out of the tank and brought home to dry on the verandah in the sun. He must have recovered enough to fly out, by morning tea time he was gone!
©2016 Zaia; permeco.org, incorporating Permaculture Research Institute Sunshine Coast, simplicity, permaculture, self reliance, food, health and homesteading, planting bean seedlings and starting egg incubation, rescuing a kookaburra
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!
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