Drop skinks!

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Peasants

It has been pretty busy here at McCarthy Park lately. We have had one bush fire already and have spent a fair bit of time doing more fire proofing, including getting some tree loppers in to help clear.

An entertaining aspect of the wildlife at present is the King skinks. We have always had a whole community of them in the rockery, and encourage them by giving some food now and then and keeping the dogs out of that area. We often have them in the roof space, and occasionally get quite energetic and run around.

this year, they have added a few kamikaze dives from either the eaves or the grape vines! Quite regularly we here a THUD and look out to see a skink on the ground!

King Skinks in the rockery

Finding its way in!

Mead

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Peasants

We have so much honey, and a lot of it crystallised, so we decided to try Sandor Katz T’ej (Ethiopian style honey wine) as described in his book ‘Wild Fermentation’. It is delicious, and so very easy to make! It has helped put the crystallised honey to good use- we just warmed it enough to liquify before mixing with the water.

Naturally fermented mead (T’ej)

Silver perch…

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Peasants

Now the weather is warming up and the Silver Perch in the swimming pool are more actively eating (they slow down a fair bit over the colder months), they are easy to catch on a fishing line. They like prawns, but their favourite is worms! The tricky part is catching more than one- it seems that once the first good sized one is caught, the others know and avoid the bait. We have our great net system now though, which means we can hop in and catch a few-selecting the ones to harvest and releasing the others. These two beauties were caught for a lunch with guests- the biggest was 1.2kg!

Silver Perch

Topbar hive

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Peasants

We have read quite a lot about the different styles of hives and which may be best for the bees. We decided we would experiment! The box of bees was getting really full so we decided to have a Topbar hive made for this area.

The full bee ‘box’

We cut the comb from the box, getting as much as we could-especially comb with brood.

Cutting out the comb

This was cable tied to the top bars.

Comb cut from the box and cable tied to the top bars.

When we had as much as we could, we replaced the Topbar hive in the same position and direction as the box, closed it up and left it for a week. A week later, a few of the bits of comb had fallen off and were removed, but the bees had strengthened several others and even started creating their own fresh comb!

The bee numbers looked really healthy, especially given the numbers that were lost in the process of transferring from the box to the Topbar.

Great number of bees after only one week

The bees are coming and going very happily!

Honey, honey, honey…….

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Peasants

Well, the hives are going well. We decided to re-queen both hives- we had read a lot of advice on re-queening annually, plus with the billabong hive still behaving aggressively we decided that replacing the queen was the only option. Never having done it before, we did some research and found it surprisingly easy. The hardest part was finding the old queens and removing them!

After re-queening, we left the hive for 10 days and then checked, and sure enough the billabong hive was calmer already, so we knew we had done the right thing. With the weather getting cooler, it was also time to reduce the number of supers again. We had already removed one super from each of the kitchen and billabong hives, and harvested heaps of honey, and we now reduced them further. For winter, each hive has the brood box and one super, which is more than half full of honey. We will keep an eye on them but hopefully this will keep them going over winter. Mind you, it has been amazingly mild so far and the bees are continuing to bring in pollen at a great rate!

Produce room full of honey

Bees ……

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Peasants

We had such a great harvest in March, from both hives, but then left it too long before checking them again. One month later the ‘billabong hive’ had turned quite aggressive, with both of us getting stung through our suits. On checking the brood box, we found queen cells, no sign of a queen, and no sign of brood either. We did only check the 6 centre frames but by then really needed to close up the hive as we were getting seriously attacked! The frames looked pretty empty, apart from some that had plenty of pollen and money in them.

Pollen and honey but no brood

So, stings treated and up to the kitchen hive to check. This hive was looking better, so we removed a frame of brood (getting stung for our trouble again!) and went back to the billabong hive to replace an empty frame.

The following weekend we checked it out, and found at least one other frames (as well as the one we added) with brood, o there must have been a queen already from one of the queen cells, and she had just started laying! Hopefully disaster averted. Time to check again this week…………

Trout season begins!

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Peasants

As the water temperatures have gone down below 20C now, we took out the perch from the aquaponics fish tank and added them to the swimming pool with the other perch. It is great to be able to have a variety of sizes of fish living together and not eating each other! We added trout fingerlings to the fish tank for winter, and already they are leaping out of the water to feed! They are so much more exciting than perch, but the perch are certainly tasty and easy to manage. Part of the change over involved a good tidy up of the grow beds, which were looking very sad. Pulling out plants that had finished providing (or were too massacred by caterpillars to keep!), adding some fresh expanded clay and seedlings, and they look so much better.

tidied up and ready to grow!

It was also time to harvest some yabbies, and it reminded us of how much it hurt our backs to bend over the ibc tanks to clean them out…so, we purchased a grow bed to match the aquaponics system and replaced the ibc tanks with that. Now we have a great yabbie tank that doesn’t involve bending over to clean, and it looks good too as it matches the AP system! Of course, we had to harvest a dozen or so yabbies at the same time!

new yabbie tank

Autumn and getting green once more!

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Peasants

Well, it certainly has been a hot Perth summer, but autumn has finally arrived and with the cooler weather the plants are recovering. We have loads of pears, guava, citrus and apples growing at the moment. This is the first year we have been able to pick guava, and they are delicious!

Strawberry guava- delicious!

We also have had a huge amount of honey from our busy bees- the shelves were full of jars of honey and we did another harvest a couple of weeks ago. This is a 20 litre bucket!

20 litre bucket of honey- second harvest this year!

Our olive trees have also fruited this year, much better than the dozen or so olives we harvested last year!! Enough to fill a couple of 2 litre jars. These are soaking in water, changed daily for 2 weeks. Next comes the brine solution which they will sit in for a year- such a long wait!

Olives in water

The hottest Perth day for 24 years!!

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Peasants

Well, most of Perth stayed indoors as much as possible today, with the temperature reaching 44.4C…….that is 112F for those overseas! We knew some heat was coming (plus it is summer after all and we do what we can to prepare for the heat…and bushfire season. We had put up shade cloth over the aquaponics grow beds, and the duck pen, and thank goodness we did that before today.

Shade cloth covering the veggies in the aquaponics

Late yesterday we gave everything a good deep watering in anticipation of the 41C forecast for today. As the temperature soared we turned on some sprinklers to give the birds some relief, and freshened up the water baths (check out the handy hints page) we have around the place.

Splish splash I was takin’ a bath…..on a 44 degree day!

We also put on the ‘overhead’ sprinklers. We have these on the house in case of a bushfire, but it also helps to cool down the house (we have a tin roof); and we also have them on the rabbit house, again for both reasons. The rabbits had their two litre bottles of ice (also mentioned in handy hints) this morning, and then a new one at 3.00 to help them out some more.

The poor turkeys are hot, as they recently had young and they are too small to let out along with the ducks, geese and poultry. We turned on the sprinkler for them too, and this helped cool them down.

Welcome visitors….

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Peasants

We have had such an abundance of birds lately- particularly the Splendid wrens. They are so comfortable with us being quite close- the only trouble with photographing them is they flit so quickly!!

They have become very regular visitors to the vegetable garden and aquaponics garden, and are very welcome indeed as they are eating the caterpillars!

Checking out the caterpillars in the veggie garden!