End of summer….

It has been a warm end of summer, with most days over 30 and some getting up to 40 degrees! The warm weather has meant the growing season has continued though, and we have continued to harvest an abundance of tomatoes, beans and zucchini!

Surprising to us, the dragon fruit are starting a second flush of flowers, with at least another 7 buds appearing. This is so much better than any other dragon fruit season, and they are delicious!


With the two lots of young quail doing so well, it was time to cull the older ones who were not laying much at all, but still eating! We now have a couple of quail dinners to look forward to, and while we were at it we also culled a rabbit and prepared it into cubes ready to make a delicious dinner!

One aspect not doing well, is our chooks- they are just not laying well at all! Usually they would have come on the lay last year, and may be trailing off now as we draw into Easter, but they just haven’t come back on the lay since last year, other than one to three eggs a day. today we have done a sort out, and separated the old hens from the new, and placed them with the three spare roosters we have (from a recent hatching). The plan is to see who is actually laying and when, to decide who to keep!

Fox Attack!

Yet more death and destruction at McCarthy Park this week……went out to feed the animals one evening, and came face to face with a mangy looking fox actually curled up IN the chook run. It had obviously got in earlier and killed three chooks, but couldn’t get out again.

It is so, so distressing….and annoying, to lose our animals in this way. Foxes tend to just kill for the sake of it rather than for food. This fox was very skinny, and must have been hungry, yet had killed three chooks and just left them.

After much searching, we found a possible entry point – a very small gap under a gate, not at all something we would have thought a fox could fit through. Fortunately all the other animals free ranging at the time were unharmed.