The Chicken Palace
July 30th, 2007 - Posted in chickens - by Sarah|
30th July 2007
Our Light Sussex chooks (Australasian for chickens) have really settled in here in their fantabulous chicken palace.
The chicken palace.
We costed up the chicken house that we wanted to build and discovered that we could buy one for about the same price. It came in about 6 very large and heavy pieces that we manhandled down to the area we’d designated for the initial chicken run and assembled. It has been much admired by both lots of neighbours who have the more common chicken wire, old tin and pallet style of chicken house.
It certainly seems to be appreciated by the chickens as they’re already laying lots of eggs again. The eggs had tailed off as the days grew shorter. Chickens rely on daylight hours to know when they should be laying or not. Only one hen carried on laying until about a week before the shortest day. She’s affectionately known as Fatty as she went through a phase in the autumn when she looked much bigger than the others. This was probably why she was able to keep laying longer.
For this reason we would try to make sure that we breed from her but in addition to being the best layer she is also the most stupid of the lot of them. As a recent example of this we have added a short gate to their run. This is so that the chickens can get in and out when they want to but the Wekas can’t get in to steal their eggs. This gate is just above head height on a chicken and about a third of the height of the roosting poles they leap onto every night to sleep. All of the chickens happily hop over it except Fatty who paces back and forth along the fence trying to find an entrance. She has even been found at dusk, when the others have already tucked themselves up for the night, standing on top of the nesting boxes (also about 3 times as high as the gate) trying to get into the run. So maybe we won’t go out of our way to incubate any of her eggs…
All of her eggs should now be fertile due to the arrival of Ahab.
Have you seen the whale?.
A couple of months ago we went along to the West Coast Poultry Club annual show. Through the deafening crowing and clucking noises we managed to ask someone if any of the birds were for sale. We were directed to a notebook at the front desk where we wrote down our names and phone number and our request for a Light Sussex Cockerel. A few days later we got a call from a woman who had won all the prizes for Sussex at the show (we think that she was the only entrant). She didn’t have a Cockerel available but did have a Rooster she would be willing to part with once the 2007 show season was over.
?That sounds great? I said and hurried away to look at my chicken books to find out the difference. In case you’re interested a rooster is over 2 years old. Ahab settled in fast although the chickens looked a bit shell-shocked for a few days. He looks after them in a manner astonishingly similar to a mother hen looking after chicks. He’s always on the look-out for tasty morsels and when he finds some he makes a high pitched staccato noise that has them all running up to him. He always lets them eat first and only tucks in when he’s sure that there’s enough. The noise he makes is so appealing that the neighbours on our West have started shutting their chickens away as they all come running through and under the fence and leave a short while later fully fertilised!
We’re hoping that one of our hens decides to go broody soon so that we can start increasing our flock and eating chicken a bit more often. More on that soon…
The flock ? July 2007.
We have the power!
July 27th, 2007 - Posted in Building - by Sarah|
27th July 2007
Well, we have decided that there’s no excuse to not update the blog regularly again now that we’ve got a reliable (touch wood) internet connection. Our phone line was connected today just two months after we first requested it. Whenever we’ve mentioned to our neighbours that there weren’t enough phone lines and that we’d been told a new one had to be installed from the main road (about 1.5km and across the railway tracks!) we always got the story about the new subdivision just up the coast at Punakaiki. Apparently a new hotel had opened up at the bottom of the road with phones in every room and used up all available lines – the new residents had to wait 6-9 months for a phone connection. So by West Coast standards ours is fast service and pretty impressive when you consider that we’ve even got it 4 days before we were told it would be connected.
Because we have bought a block of land that no-one has lived on before the process of installing the phone began about 2 weeks after we moved onto the Croft. The caravan was first moved on to a temporary site at the furthest end of the track from the road. Before moving we’d identified an area the right size for caravan, awning, loo and shower tent. It was between the house site and the road and was just filled with Ponga (Tree Ferns) which would be relatively easy to clear. We set about clearing it in our first week here. The Ponga were easy but the Supplejack (a vine which grows on trees) took a bit more effort. After a couple of days it was clear of plants but we still needed to remove the topsoil and get some river gravel delivered to provide a free draining surface for us to live on.
Caravan pad being created.
We’d noticed that a new garage was being built just down the road and a digger was on site there. So we went and asked if it was available to come up the road and clear a few square metres of ground for us. It turned out that it was and sure enough, the next day its owner ‘walked’ it up the road (strictly not allowed as the tracks chew up the road surface). It took the digger about half an hour to do what would have taken us a couple of days of shovelling. A few loads of river gravel were delivered and tipped into the hole and hey presto ? we had a pad for our caravan which will be a parking/turning space when the house is built. The digger was left here overnight and we got to thinking that while it was here maybe we should try to get everything lined up for phone and power cables to be laid so it could dig and fill in the trench before it was moved and we wouldn’t have to pay for it to come back again.
Caravan pad complete.
The next day and a few frantic phone calls later everything was lined up. 1. Telecom would come and mark where their underground cables were on the road so the digger wouldn’t dig through them. 2. The digger would dig the trench in the afternoon. 3. Brendhan would shovel layer of sand into the trench. 4. In the morning the power guys would come and lay their cable. 5. We would cover the power cable with some more sand. 6. The Telecom people would come and lay their cable in the afternoon. 7. The digger would refill the trench the next day.
It seemed impossible that all these elements would fall into place but on the day everyone turned up when they said they would and did what was expected of them. The problem came from a completely unexpected direction.
We woke on the morning of the cable laying to find that an overnight rainstorm had filled the trench with about 50cm of water. There was no way that anyone would lay cable into that so Brendhan zoomed off down to the digger man’s house and he came up and, with the digger, gouged a drainage channel from the trench to the edge of the terrace. The last of the water was just trickling out as the power van arrived and the cable team helped us to replace the sand that had washed away before laying their cable.
With cable in place we could now set up access to both power and phone and this was when we learnt that it would be the end of July before we got the phone. The power was faster ? just over 2 weeks ? and came on just in time as winter hit with a cold snap that same night.
So now we have got all mod cons ? a fridge, a microwave and an oil-filled heater (and Sarah is talkin g about a dishwasher! – Brendhan). More importantly we can charge the laptop battery and the mp3 player and as of today we can even connect to the internet without relying on intermittent mobile coverage.
Our new home all set up!
