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Kay's Garden Report - 2 July

Posted by Kay Baxter 11 months ago

It’s mid-Winter here right now and the garden has slowed right down, taking a big breath. There is a load of food in the garden, and not much work in the garden for a few weeks yet. Winter here is a lot colder and far more frosts than Northland!

We are eating a huge range of winter salad greens, endive, Winter lettuce, Joe’s lettuce, Miner’s lettuce, parsley, coriander, fennel, corn salad, spinach. We’re also eating a range of carrots, beetroot, Aomaru Koshun daikon turnips both Ohno Red and Henry’s White, plus loads of ferments made in the Autumn. And of course all the stored potatoes, kumara, pumpkins and Jerusalem artichokes. Although it was a terrible summer we are certainly not going hungry!

This is the first year in ages that we have our chickens hard out laying by early July. It has been hard looking after them well whilst shifting around so much but we got it sorted this year! We have been feeding them a little seaweed meal and chicken minerals everyday and they only took 3-6 weeks to moult. Their bright colours are back again and they are back onto the lay. We have Golden Wyandottes, and they are such beautiful birds. Their eggs aren’t as large as the Leghorns but they go clucky and hatch our replacements and fatten up well for a roast!

Over the next few weeks we will be planting our orchard. The fruit trees will go in at quite wide spacings (6m) so that we have plenty of room for all the legumes in early Spring. Our intention is that in addition to our orchard providing fruit for us, it will also provide as many seeds and sources of protein as possible for the chickens. We want to get off the ‘buying grains’ treadmill as fast as we can. We have worm farms, where we grow worms for the chickens which are fed our own cow manure, and that has proved very successful so we are going to increase the size of that operation to provide the bulk of the chickens winter protein while the comfrey is dormant.

Comments (2)

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Ute Bohnsack : Hello Kay, can you post some more details about your worm farm please? Also, I gather from the last sentence that comfrey is an important food source for your chooks. I know of the value of comfrey but I find my gang is not terribly keen on it. Thanks, Ute

Posted 11 months ago

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Kay Baxter : We have been seriously growing worms as a high quality live protein source for our chickens especially over winter when the comfrey is dormant.In my experience by far the fastest ad best way to grow worms is with straight cow manure, with seaweed, and a mineral feroseradded so that we kow we ae not just recycling the soil deficiencies but upping the brix all round. the minerals hae been mixed based ona reams soil test for oursoil. we ad as mucjj manureas the worms can eat every week. we have 8 worm farms ad we take turns at harvesting the worms, and the vermicast from each farm on a daily basis over winter especially. If you go to our website you will see the design of our worm farm, they are modular for easy shifting and harvesting etc. chicken aecreatures of habit like most animals and humans to an extent, if the don't kow comfrey the might not ear it. you just hae to get them used to it. mine didn't eat worms either in the beginning. with comfrey I chop it up and mix it with their food until they get it, same for young chickens. Comfrey can provide 60% of a chickens protein over summer it is high protein low fibre perfect for poultry! Thanks kay

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