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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 1, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Bandicoots, Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Rats, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

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Bandicoot in the Sacred Garden

The sacred garden – but does it feature a coy bandicoot?

Is it just me, or does this sound like the title of an atrocious 1970s Australian erotic film? Admittedly I’ve never heard a bloke describe their wedding tackle as any kind of marsupial. Is this a failure of the national imagination? Possibly.

Anyway, the “sacred garden” is not as lewd as it sounds – it’s the name our eight year old has given the veggie patch that shelters beneath the frame of our ancient trampoline.

I’m not quite sure why she views it as a holy site. It could be the shape. In the organic gardening world, it seems, circles, mandalas and spirals have some mystical life-giving power that doesn’t flow through your old fashioned rectangular plot. I’m skeptical, but at this stage in our death-match with the brush turkeys I’ll take any advantage I can get. From chook dome to remodelled tramp to recycled children’s bicycle wheels, there are no corners here.

Chicken dome and sacred garden

The late great Andy Ninja checking out the sacred garden

Upcycled bicycle wheels protecting radishes

Broccoli and sorrel under a fan in the sacred garden

And the Mandala of Aviary Wire does seem to have worked its magic on my brassicas, despite extreme flimsiness. Having been abandoned by the side of the road after a rich and full life getting between bouncing children and broken ankles, the trampoline net is more a spiritual than a physical barrier to aerial raiders, held in place by optimism and zip ties. But to date, my newly planted garlic – positioned, of course, in a protective ring around the broccoli – has remained in the ground and my crop of red mustard and baby bok choi, while small, is perfectly formed.

It’s not looking so good on the broad bean front, despite a lavender and rose geranium mulch that makes the chook dome smell like a seniors’ underpants’ drawer. I’d like to think a benevolent long-nosed bandicoot is squeezing in under the wire to snaffle the curl grubs amongst the asparagus crowns. But I suspect that in reality I’m hosting rodents with keen insights into the politics of eco-nationalism. “When you go in and take the beans, Rupert, make sure you leave a cone-shaped hole. That way the marsupial-loving hippie will never dare leave rat poison out again.” If only I owned an infra-red video camera with a motion sensor I might find out for sure – or at least collect some footage of hirsute visitors for that retro Ocker erotica.

Bandcoot digging with boot for scale

Curl grub making a break for it.

Bandicoot or devious rat?

Rose geranium ready to be sacrificed to the rodent repelling cause

Aromatherapy mulch

The miraculous tears of the broccoli in the sacred garden

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

March 31, 2015

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Permaculture, raising chickens

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Andy Ninja’s great escape

Andy Ninja was always a chicken with a mission. She arrived at our place, in the company of her rather macho sister Harley, already in possession of a name that perfectly captured her special qualities, thanks to the penetrating insights of my chicken-wrangling nieces.

Chicken wrangler and baby Andy

“What was I doing on the drive?… just getting a snack… really…”

Andy off for a morning stroll

Within a year she’d made her first break for freedom. A quarter acre block just couldn’t contain her ambitions.

Most mornings we’d wake up to find her scratching up the trad in the front garden, her daily constitutional in no way hindered by clipped flight feathers or the locked garden gate. Then one morning she toodled up the drive and didn’t come back.

There was no tell tale trail of torn feathers, but after a couple of days I tried to gently break it to the kids that Andy probably wasn’t coming back. All the fox-baiting national park rangers in the world weren’t going to save a chook on the loose overnight on the mean streets of Berowra.

My eldest was in denial. She hand-crafted a “missing” poster, complete with full-colour portrait and I nailed it over our mailbox. Some kind of closure at least, I figured.

A week later, I get a phone call from some folks down the street. Andy Ninja, it seems, was that proverbial chicken who crossed the road. She had introduced herself to a new family, laid them some eggs and made herself at home in their kitchen. They were in love with her. There were childrens’ tears as the unrepentant adventurer was returned.

Andy back with sister Harley after her adventure

She’s back

Andy “enjoying” a cuddle

Don’t get me wrong. Andy liked to roam, but she knew her own stomping ground. A couple of years back we spent a few months overseas. While we were gone, some young Swedes rented our place. They weren’t keen to be small-holders, so our generous and well organised neighbours, chicken aficionados from way back, offered to take in our birds for the duration.

We gave the chooks a week or so to settle into their new high security quarters – a proper coop, enclosed on all sides with wire, with a sturdy dog-proof outdoor run. After our haphazard fencing and half-baked sleeping arrangements, surely the chooks would be safe and sound in the custody of some proper chicken keepers.

By Day Two, Andy Ninja had made her way home. I returned from work to find her mooching around in our yard. We had stern words and passed her over the fence.

On Day Three, she was back again. Our chicken-wise neighbour assured us confidently that with close wing clipping, there would be no repeat offenses.

We woke up on the morning of our flight out to see this view from the window.

“High security chicken run? What high security chicken run?”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when we arrived in London, to receive a slightly aggravated email from our Swedish tenants asking what to do about the chicken that, despite previous arrangements, had turned up on the premises.

Or to receive another one, a week later, saying that actually, it turns out that they quite liked having the chicken around and what should they buy it for treats.

Andy Ninja goes for a walk

While we were gone, Andy Ninja was quite the chicken around town, it seems. Our poultry-hosting neighbours would get phone calls at all hours reporting sightings of a neat brown chicken strolling down the main street. Was it one of theirs? Our friends up the drive also got regular visits. Andy would pop into their shed to learn a bit more about welding, or perambulate through their herb garden to monitor the watering.

She survived abandonment by jetsetters. She survived a week on her own on the street. She survived, we suspect, a midnight attack by an ambitious tawny frogmouth, perched, as she was, all alone on the top of the chook dome. At one point, Andy transitioned to become a she-rooster who crowed in the morning and made eyes at her flock mates. And then started laying eggs again. After months under surveillance as a suspect in The Case of the Cannibal Chicken, she emerged, eventually, entirely vindicated.

I have to admit, Andy wasn’t wildly keen when the hefty newcomers arrived and stole her place at the top of the pecking order, but she rolled with the punches. She was bit miffed when her perch, the chook tractor, was repurposed into a brush-turkey-proof brassica zone, but she sighed and settled down next to the pushy new girls on the edge of the potted figs. She outlived her bikie sister and a large percentage of the world’s twenty billion chickens, with their abbreviated and unfree lives.

But she didn’t survive this week.

Something – maybe Marek’s disease, maybe “wet” fowl pox, maybe both – has rolled through our little flock, despite our middle class pretention of expensive, vaccinated hens. Luna quietly expired a week or so ago, and despite an attempt to segregate the sick bird, Andy went a few days after. On her last day, looking horribly under the weather, she simply disappeared, her mysterious ninja powers undiminished by age and illness.

She’s made her final break for it and it looks like she’s got away for good this time. We will surely miss her.

The reflection in a wise chicken’s eye

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 12, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Eco renovations, Insect pests, roosting

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Tonight on Chicken TV: Roost Swap

The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house. Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it. I feel the overwhelming sadness of an artist doomed to be underappreciated during their own lifetime.

Of course, the veterans never saw the appeal of the coop: Andy Ninja unswervingly committed to her lonely position on top of the chicken dome; Snowball, after enduring wearying attentions during Andy’s “cock of the roost” phase, shifted to an exposed position on the rim of a half-barrel.

Andy on the chook tractor

Snowball in position

At first I blamed Treasure the uppity Light Sussex, throwing her weight around. During our recent holiday, she took up a new role as “Her Indoors”. Friends and neighbours, promised eggs as a quid pro quo for keeping the flock fed and watered, went away empty handed. Treasure kept prying eyes away from her crowd-sourced egg stash with fluffed up feathers and force of personality.

Queen Treasure was enjoying plenty of wing room in the nesting box the first night Luna, Shyla and Abbey decided to perch next to a Snowball by the brown turkey fig. However, by the following evening, she’d followed the crowd, and Palm Beach, with its rakish verandah, striking use of organic forms for perching purposes and innovative aquarium-lid clerestory window, stood empty and unloved.

Treasure hogging the beach shack

The outdoor room

I’d like to console myself that this move is not so much a rejection of my design ideas as an embrace of one of the garden’s many “outdoor rooms”. But before concluding that the chooks’ change of roost simply expresses a seasonally appropriate relish of al-fresco napping, I thought I should eliminate alternative explanations. Like an infestation of red mites: the bed bugs of the chicken world.

I can now report that the henhouse is now cleaner than my kitchen, with the deployment of a bottle of bleach and a rarely sighted scrubbing brush. The organic credentials of my garden may have taken a dent but hopefully the chookhouse has had a detox. The mantra of “form follows function” does come in handy when you need to hose chickenshit out your modernist masterwork – though this is not a feature frequently noted in Australian Architecture magazine. In the process I believe I may have made a breakthrough in the quest for an eco-friendly alternative to concrete: a mixture of sugar cane straw, wood ash and a small quantity of egg yolk, carefully cured under a sequence of chicken bottoms, makes a substance that could not be moved by a jack-hammer.

I hope the chooks were keeping a close eye on my efforts to pest-proof their home, since the tomorrow’s weather forecast, predicted with 95% confidence, is for rain. If there’s anything more humiliating than spending your Sunday on your hands and knees scrubbing a nestbox, it’s standing in a puddle during a downpour trying to persuade a group of saturated chickens of the merits of functionalist architecture.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

April 27, 2014

Posted under

Animal pests, Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Chickens as cultivators, Companion planting, Edible flowers, Exclusion pest control, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Vegetables

Diggers

Naughty as it is to dig – vandalising the earthworms’ underground cities and all that – I decided to take to the spade today. The youngsters did a pretty good job in their weeks under the chook dome of clearing that patch of its weeds but excavating the couch grass was beyond them. And I wanted to work in the chicken manure they left behind: black-and-white gold it might hypothetically be called by some chicken-obsessive. And, let’s face it, I just felt like digging.

And now I have more garden buddies to help out. The young chickens returned with some enthusiasm to their old stomping ground. Tragically perhaps, there are few moments when I’m more content than gardening with an inquisitive chook scratching away beside me, perilously close to being whacked by a spade in its eagerness to dart in for grubs. Today I almost decided that the psychodrama of raising day-old chicks was worth it. Shyla, raised in the brooder, hung out with me, approaching periodically to inquire, with a dinkum Aussie rising inflection, when I was going to find her something delicious to eat. Absolutely charming.

Allegedly Einstein said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This aphorism seems appropriate to ANZAC Day somehow. It also quite accurately describes my approach to planting broad beans. I’ve had two goes at getting my broadies going with minimal success, but now the human and chicken digging is done, I’m trying again. The humane traps are in the post, and in the mean time I’m hoping a well secured vege net will keep critters at bay. With luck aromatherapy will be my ace in the hole. The beans planted right by the lavender hedge seemed to germinate unmolested – benefiting, I suspect, from distracting smell of the companion plants. This particular net was draped right over my “Frenchette” lavandula dentata for the last three months. It’s as delightfully scented as your granny’s hankie: hopefully rats don’t favour potpourri.

If that doesn’t work, perhaps I should leave out some of the unexpected harvest that appeared underfoot today. One scraggy looking stem of jerusalem artichoke, sprouted from peelings I chucked to the chooks, produced two double handfuls of dangerously more-ish tubers. Blow on winds of winter, the artichokes have arrived! This bounty was greeted with groans in the kitchen. I love the taste and try to sneak them into to soups and bakes and stirfries, just one or two, cut up small so no-one will notice. But the post-prandial flatulence that inevitably ensues is a dead give-away. If they have a similar effect on rats, this could be our secret weapon in organic pest control. Maybe if we leave them scattered around the garden-robbers will gorge themselves on that toothsome but indigestible inulin and simply explode. If the decorous aroma of lavender doesn’t work, perhaps the more prosaic accumulation of gas in the alimentary canal is the way to go.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

March 1, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Gardening, Native animals, Predators, raising chickens, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

A grand day out

Time to get the fully feathered chicks – all of 6 weeks old – out of the brooder in the kids’ bedroom. To my amazement the new coop, which weighs the same as a gas giant, does actually fit under the chook dome. After Donna’s departure, I’m a bit worried about plunging the peepers straight into the fowl-and-brush-turkey-ordure-rich environment of the run, so we’ll give them a few weeks in the chicken tractor, getting a garden bed ready for brassicas. They had a first scratch around this afternoon, ready for the big move tomorrow.

Andy is looking very miffed by these developments. I caught her lurking in the new coop – I think she envisages it as her own personal quarters. She was transfixed by the sudden appearance of the new girls, so I was able to grab her and turf her out before any argy-bargy. However, Snowball and Andy have been using the top of the dome as a perch, so they were wandering around the run at something of a loss at sundown tonight. They have a whole series of dry places to sleep – under the granny flat, in the wood-shed – but since they seemed to favour a spot underneath the neighbour’s horrible coral tree, we leaned a ladder (a previous craft project) against the outside of the woodshed, exactly where the chicken dome used to be. I tried to give Andy the idea but she wasn’t having it. Hope they are somewhere out of the rain tonight….