July 2014 Blog Posts (11)

This weekend, I:

• Switched on the solar system that I made for the aquaponics.  It's been 48 hours and it's still running even with very little sun.  I took the heater off to save on power - tank is still at 18.5 degrees at 5.00 pm.  I think she is now off-grid.  Made a video on it and posted it around the place. 
• Fixed the worm farm after the chooks destroyed the "worm wee" tray.  …

The days of throwing everything organic in the compost are over, here at the Manor.  It's way too slow to work that way.  I seem to have evolved a system after spending a crazy amount of time reading up.

Kitchen scraps get blended up and go into the worm farm.  Junk mail and papers are wetted and placed on top of the worms to keep a moisture barrier (and the worms eat it as well). 

Worm castings will go straight onto the garden.  Worm juice goes into the compost…

Observation:  damn those chooks are destructive!  They ate my turnip/cauli patch.  I've now fenced it.  They ate both my Kratky hydroponic boxes.  Threw them out in disgust.  Tonight, I found they've eaten the bottom foam box on my worm farm!  Mind you, that's better than the top box which has the worms!  I'll have to fun another fence to keep them the heck out of that whole area.  On the bright side, they are at point of lay now. Should produce eggs in a month or…

Major renovations...

Hi Guys,  well I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone next weekend.  I am a little bit garden mad and my husband just roles his eyes at me and lets me do whatever I want in the garden; it will be nice to have fellow nutters to talk to about the garden.

  I have been really busy in the garden over the holidays and trying to get all the pertinent things completed before going back to school and neglecting everything again.  A big thing on my "to do" list was to build…

If you are quiet and turn your speaker volume up, you will hear our local magpie perform his horse whinny at the beginning of this clip. He's been doing this for over 5 years. Usually it's part of a little medley of five or six local sounds. I can't pick them all, but one is a wood duck and one is the horse whinny. The neighbour reckons he does a dog bark too.

Magpie whinny

The first time I…

A little video on how to make sausages:   How to make Thai Chicken Snags

The second instructional video is: How to make Baeurwurst sausage

For those who are thinking about having a go at jerky or biltong:  How to make…

'Tis the time of year in the sub tropics when the Sweet Leaf/Katuk bushes [Sauropus androgynus-- mani cai (马尼菜), in Malay it is called cekur manis or sayur manis] loose their leaves and bare out.I make sure I strip every…