I am not sure what to do because our sunflowers have hit the roof of the garden.  Any suggestions?  It wasn’t a problem I was expecting to have.  I didn’t even plant the sunflowers, they just came up from seed the chooks must have missed.  They are stretching the roof up higher every day, I hope they stop growing and flower soon!  Someone suggested I should cut a hole in the roof for them so they can keep going higher, but I haven’t managed to bring myself to do that yet.  I like the feeling that everything is safe inside the cage, and I know for sure that possums and sparrows would be in there if I took the netting off the roof.  We may just have to see how they cope with being compressed.

However we have started the new year with a good crop of peas from the same caged garden.  They are delicious!  I just love fresh peas as they are SO sweet!  Even Josiah likes peas if they are home grown.  :)  There are still plenty more to come too.  Yum.

Another thing Josiah likes is newly hatched poults (baby turkeys).  They are lovely and friendly and kind of sleepy when they are in their first few days which makes it easy to cuddle them.  Chocolate the mum doesn’t seem to mind us handling them, she is the only remaining one of the hens that we raised ourselves a few years back.  She is also the only hen sensible enough to allow us to move her to somewhere safe to sit on her eggs this year, and as a result she is the only one to hatch any out.

She hatched out 7 little ones over yesterday and today. They are very sweet.

We had a lovely time at church on Sunday with 3 separate sets of visitors.  It made for a good crowd in the hall later for afternoon tea, and plenty of people to chat to.  One of the families was on holidays from the mainland and had been to our church before, 4 years ago, and were having a return visit.  We really loved spending time with them last time they were here, and it was great to renew the friendship some more, and meet more of their children.  Of course we had to drag them home to show them what we have achieved over the last 4 years too.  :)

The first stage of our soap making process was to render some lard.  To do that we had to cut the fat into small pieces, about 1 inch or 2cm square.  With so much fat to do it was all hands on deck, but using butchers knives meant that we had to be very careful of young fingers.

There are two methods of rendering lard, the wet method and the normal method so we tried both.  The wet method was to put the fat into water and boil it up.  Eventually the water all boils off and the hot lard starts to ooze out of the fat.

The other method is to put the fat straight into a pan and warm it slowly.  Again the lard oozes out of the fat.  Both methods worked fine.  I now tend to put just a little water in with the fat as it helps to keep the fat from burning as it initially warms.  Once the lard starts oozing out things move quicker.  It is quite amazing how much lard comes out.  The original pieces of fat shrink and start to crisp up as they are basically deep fried.

When as much lard has been removed from the fat pieces as possible the lard is poured into a mould.  I found it best to pour it through a fine sieve or even a course cloth.  It seems that if the fat pieces get cooked too much then the lard becomes tinted a deeper yellow.  This is not really a problem for soap but it is considered best to keep it as light as possible.

The lard was a beautiful white when it cooled.

When the lard had been poured out I was left with the fried fat pieces which are called cracklings. These are mentioned in the Little House on the Prairie books as a treat, but even salted we found them pretty unappealing.  However the dog and the chooks were not so reticent.

So, now that the lard was prepared I could get to the task of soap making.  I wanted a really basic lard soap so the only ingredients that I needed were lard, water and caustic soda.  The ingredients needed to be weighed accurately and mixed in a stainless steel or enamel pot.

The lard was melted in one pot and the caustic soda was added to cold water in another pot.  I had to be very careful doing the caustic soda mixing, as it is extremely alkaline and will burn and the mixing of it causes a very hot reaction.  Once both mixtures were cooled to the right temperature then the caustic mixture was added to the lard and the whole lot was stirred well together.  I continued to stir until the mixture thickened enough that marks remained when it was stirred as shown below.

I poured the mixture into some ice cream containers lined with an old tea towel and let it set overnight.  The next day I cut it into bars, using gloves so as to avoid any stinging sensations.  Apparently it pays to be careful with the soap for a couple of weeks until it has hardened.  It can be used after 6 weeks.  It looks a bit rough but is great to use.  It is scent free, lathers nicely but is hard enough to not disappear into a sloppy mess if it gets wet.  We love it.

I started with the small intestines from a home butchered pig.  The intestines are held coiled together by some connective tissue that I simply sliced so that the intestines could drop into a few straight runs a metre or so long.  Then the intestines were rinsed with fresh water inside and out.

It turned out that my sink tap was a perfect fit to push the intestines onto and rinse them through.  At this stage the intestines were quite thick and a browny pink colour with a strip of fat along the outside.

Next I peeled off the connective tissue that had held the intestines coiled together.  It was a thin clear plasticy tissue that was fairly strong and pulled off without too much hassle.  Then I cut or pulled off as much of the remaining fat as I could.

After peeling the casings looked like the picture below.  I turned them inside out and rinsed them both sides.  They could be turned inside out by turning a cuff in one end and running water into the cuff.  The weight of the water pulls the casing inside out.  It was kind of fun to do.

At this stage the inside lining of the casing, all those little tiny villi that absorb the food, still need to be removed.  I had a go at doing it straight away but it was hard work and was not being successful so I put the casings into a plastic bag in the fridge for later.  A week later I finally found the time to do more research into how to do the scraping.  Some sites recommended soaking the casings in salt water for a while and I thought perhaps I should try that, however given that they had already waited a week I just gave them a try.  It turned out that no further time was needed.  After turning them inside out I used a bread and butter knife and the scraping went very easily.  In fact some of the fat that I had not managed to remove earlier also came off as I did the scraping.

The final casings are thin and a transparent pale pinky white in colour.  Once again I used my tap to rinse them and you can see what they look like at the end.

Finally I put them into a brine solution (salt and water) and stored them in the fridge.

Of course I had to have a go at making sausages after all that effort.  I am very glad that I have a little electric mincer as it makes the job much easier and we use it every time we butcher one of our pigs.

And the finished product – all our own pork!

Now I have to confess that while the sausages were quite edible we did find the casings to be a bit on the chewy side.  I wonder if it was because the pig they came from was 2 years old, older than most pigs butchered commercially, or whether sheep intestines would be better for fresh sausages? Anyway I hope to use the rest of these casings to make some cured sausages instead and the thicker casings should be fine for that.

Our first pig shelters were A frame shape, made with a wooden framed and covered with tin.  We considered a strawbale structure instead but at $3 a bale it was going to cost us more than the A-frame, and with the volume of rain over here the bales do not last long during Winter, or even in Summer sometimes.  We did however have cheap timber and lots of secondhand corrugated iron available, so that was what we used.

Our very first shelter was for 3 piglets and it lasted for quite a while, being passed on to the next batch of piglets as well.  It even had a raised floor to keep the little ones out of the mud, but they were destined to outgrow it fairly quickly.  Eventually it was destroyed by pigs getting a bit too big and a bit too rough and it got too far gone to be worth repairing.

We have also used the old half a tank as a shelter.  The pigs actually quite like them, but the old tanks we have are not very big and so get outgrown.  The pigs also like to knock the backs out sometimes, although they can be riveted back on, so we still have one that can be used by younger pigs.  You need to watch them in a high wind though, we tend to put them close to trees as a wind break.

When we were given our big pig we built another A frame for her.  We bought 9 pieces of 1.8m hardwood from the local timber mill, and used some secondhand aluminium sheets and roof capping that we already had.  We also needed nails and roofing screws.  Our total cost was under $20.  Tools used were a mitre saw, air compressor and associated nail gun, angle grinder with cutting disk and electric drill.  With all of the power tools it took us a bit over an hour to make.

The pig approved, she had heaps of room and could make her own bed out of the straw provided, but it took her only 2 months to wreck it.

She managed to knock the front of the frame apart, so for our next attempt we made a welded metal pig house instead.  We made it wider and lower, as she had trouble turning around in the previous one.  She still attempted to knock the back wall out regularly but we were able to reattach it with rivets easily enough.

It lasted about 9 months before she broke the frame of that too.  :(  Also now our piglets were way too big for their little house too.  They had, in fact, taken up residence in a greenhouse plastic covered geodesic dome that had blown from the chook and garden system into their paddock and had wedged itself over a stump.

This dome lasted them a surprisingly long time, until the big pig joined them in the paddock in fact, at which time she commandeered it and it began to deteriorate from then on, especially when the big girl would chase the others out.  We did running repairs for a while but eventually it got just too far gone.

We gave some young pigs each a mini dome for a while.  They had been made for broody chooks, but the pigs liked them too as they provided rain protection and shade.  They were basically framed from rural poly pipe with a circular base, two arches crossed over as uprights and another smaller circle attached up high to keep the shape.  They were covered with chicken wire for the hens but we pulled that back to allow access for the pigs.  A small tarp covered it all. I didn’t seem to get a decent picture of them but one can just be seen in the background of the photo below.  One pig kept theirs in quite good condition but the other pig decided he preferred to sit on top of his and so would continually squash it flat. Another issue was that they were very light and would fly away in a strong wind.  Pegging them down was no good as the pigs dug the ground up and the pegs along with it, so we ended up tying them to trees.  All in all it was just not worth redoing them when they broke.

So, we decided a more permanent structure was needed.  We thought that using some nice solid uprights might be a good idea, so we enlisted the aid of 4 nice strong trees already in position. We had a lot of small saplings that had fallen in a wind storm too, so we made use of them and cut them into bush poles.  We stacked the bush poles along the back and one side of our new structure, securing them by hammering a dropper parallel to the tree trunks leaving about a 15-20 cm gap. When the poles were stacked to a good height, we tightened the dropper to the tree trunk with fencing wire and a gripple, just like tightening a fence. We attached two pieces of milled timber across each edge as a sloping roof support, and covered them with greenhouse plastic.  It was secured with stripping that was nailed on to the roof supports.  We also attached some plastic down the sides to keep the drafts out. It took us about a day to make, coming up with ideas as we went, and it has now outlasted all our previous efforts.  We have had to reattach the plastic a number of times as time has passed and wind has torn at it and it needs replacing now, but the basic structure has remained quite sound for the last year and a half.

We made a second and then a third shelter using the same basic two sided, high roofed model but modifying them according to the materials available at the time, and we were reasonably happy with the results.  It was important to have a good slope on the roof plastic, and not to have any areas that would cause the water to pool in one spot, or instead of running off the rain would collect and weigh the roof down.  Of course we haven’t always had trees growing nicely in the right place and so have had to dig in uprights instead.  One shelter made with plastic covered panels lasted well until they busted through the plastic one day.  We replaced the panel with tin at the back and the tin has had to be reattached a few times as they will tear it off occasionally when the mood takes them.  Log walls are definitely better.

The pigs seem to really like these shelters, they give them shelter from wind and rain, are spacious and airy and allow them to escape quickly in case of a dispute.  All our farrowing has been done in the two main ones.

To improve on the roofs we made some panels out of 2 x 1 inch rough cut wood.  They were assembled using a nail gun with the wood strips 500mm apart.  (How is that for mixing imperial and metric for you).  Then they were covered with tarps which were held on with thins strips of wood that we cut on our table saw and mounted with 4 bolts to the original frame.  We can then attach extra tarps from the roof panel to the base to give extra shelter in Winter if we want to.

We have found these roof panels to be very good at having the rain water drain off and they have stood up to the winds very well.  All of our shelters have needed occasional running repairs which we are happy to do so long as the basic structure remains sound.

It would be lovely to have unlimited funds to purchase something portable and pretty, but in the meantime our pigs seem happy to make do with their bush shelters.  Sometimes of course they just sleep under trees or in their wallows. We are still experimenting and hopefully will come up with more ideas in the future.

Because we didn’t shorten the uprights, the dome was pretty tall and we had to give the chooks a chair so they could get up to the roost.

Also because the circumference was smaller the pipe was under more pressure but it was quite workable none the less.  We had the pipe break a couple of times but easily fixed it by putting some large dowel inside the pipe where it was broken and screwing it in place.

We had 6 hens in there and they had a good life eating all the garden leftovers.  That was in Albany, Western Australia.  Beautiful climate, no frosts and plenty of rain.  We used our dome there for 2 years before we moved.  I believe the dome lasted for about another year after before the pipe became so brittle that they gave up on it.

When we moved to Tasmania we were keen to have full size domes and gardens again.  However money is always in short supply and with a view to having longer lasting domes we decided to make them using the black rural poly pipe.  It lasts longer out in the sun, but is less rigid than the white pipe, so we made geodesic domes rather than the original type.  (We followed some instructions on a website which has now gone, but I have pasted the instructions at the end of this post in case anyone wants to see them.)  We hoped that the geodesic form would give more structural support to counter the more flexible pipe.

We used 1 inch rural poly and covered it with very heavy chicken wire which can withstand quolls and foxes.  The roost was mounted to the pipes.  Before long we added further tarps around the back of the dome to give more wind shelter to the hens.  We originally attached the pipes together with cable ties but over the years it was necessary to replace that with wire ties instead.

Over the years we made another 3 domes, just using ordinary chicken wire for them.  They have been pretty constantly used, but were difficult to move.  It was easiest to take the whole family down and do it together.

This is how the  domes look after 3-4 years.

This poor one is quite flat.  I have stakes in most of them to hold to pipe up, but they have fallen over in this one.

This is our original dome.

We no longer try to move them but just keep them propped up as best we can.  It is very difficult for us to get inside them, although the chooks still roost in the two better ones.

I did like the dome system and can see things we could have done that would have made our domes much longer lasting.  Firstly if using the rural poly pipe then I would recommend using 1.5 inch pipe which is much more rigid and strong.  This would help to keep the domes in shape.  Also I think that our domes collapsed largely due to having the weight of 12 hens on the roost weighing  them down.  I would make a stand alone roost for them instead.  It might make moving the dome a little more fiddly, but would be worth it in the long run.  (We have made some good stable roosts from old broken wooden bed frames.)  I would also wire the pipes together from the start.

So that is our experience.  Feel free to learn from our mistakes.  :)

It is time for new chicken housing for us.  We are going to a different rotating model that we are making up ourselves due to some problems that we have that are specific to us.  Namely the fact that we have possums, wallabies and turkeys who persistently manage to invade my gardens despite the electric fencing around them.  Also the sparrows do some damage so I am going to have gardens that remain fenced to keep things out as well as the chooks in when they are going through them.  I also like to free range the chickens so this will keep the gardens safe from them too.

We have made the first run of our chicken housing now.

It is tall so we can walk into it to weed or whatever.  Each section can comfortably hold 6 or 7 chickens, and there are 6 sections in the run.

The front and rear walls will stay there constantly but the roof and end walls are on frames or panels that can be moved as required with the chooks.  The plan is that the birds can be rotated through the sections so they can eat what remains of the veggie gardens after harvest, and giving us new chook worked over areas to plant veggies anew each season.  Ultimately we plan to have multiple rows with probably one bunch of birds for each row.  At the moment we have multiple end panels so we can divide up the sections for the chooks we currently have.

It seems that the instructions that we followed to make the geodesic dome have disappeared from the web, so I have pasted them here instead.  They used to be on Hell Creek Farming Co-operative ‘s web page.

Since I last wrote we have had another batch of piglets, 9 this time, and they are all weaned and ready to sell as of now.  They are cute little critters.

We have also turned our last big pig (other than the breeders) into pork.  Her name was Skinny Minnie but she was neither skinny nor minnie in the end.  I got more adventurous this time when we did the butchering and kept the small intestines as well, which I have made into sausage casings.  There is a post on this blog describing how I did it with lots of pictures that may not be to everyone’s taste.  :)  It is always interesting to learn how to do these sorts of things though, and the internet is a marvellous source of information.  Lydia is currently working on tanning a piece of pig skin.  She fleshed it and soaked it in lime to remove the hair.  The next part in the process is the soaking in tannin.  Apparently we have the best bark on our wattle trees for tanning, and so she is using that.  All of the byproducts from the process can be thrown on the gardens and will be good for them.  Chemical tanning is another matter!  It is sad that the world so often seems to end up using methods to do things that are detrimental to the environment, when other more sustainable ways are available.

When Kim is well enough he has been using his new (well, new to us) Triton workbench to start work on some kitchen drawers.  It has been a learning experience for him but he is doing a good job.  So far I have a new bench, a new rubbish system and 3 drawers, all of which is making our little shack more efficient already.  One of the drawers has been allocated to be an egg drawer, so that we can easily keep on top of what eggs we have and which are the freshest ones.  The pigs are getting lots of eggs for their dinner lately, which is a great source of protein for them.

Our poultry has been given our attention recently.  We now have a portable energiser attached to the electric netting fence for the tent dwelling chooks who we like to call the Bush Rangers.  That means that we can move them anywhere on the block.  One job that has taken up lots of our time lately has been the extension of the wooden chook houses.  We now have 6 sections 3m long and 2m wide.  Our original idea was to make all the walls as moveable panels, but after more consideration we decided to just make the roof and end walls moveable, and to keep the front and back walls fixed.  This will make rotating the chooks through the cages easier, and will mean that when there are no chooks in the sections and I have vegetables planted in them instead, that the veggies can’t get raided by any free ranging chooks or turkeys or any of the local possums, pademelons, bettongs and even sparrows if we cover the open top with netting.  At last I may be able to grow veggies again!  All it takes is to completely fence the garden in and the rest of the world out.  :)  I have 2 of the sections set apart for veggies at the moment and my peas are coming up now.

Having more chook housing has also meant we could rearrange our chooks so that we have our pure breeds isolated and can collect our own fertilized eggs now too, for brooding or selling.  And speaking of brooding, we loaned a clucky hen to our neighbours last month and she is now the proud mother of 6 Cochin chicks.  Cochins are a large friendly chook with feathered legs that the young lass next door is planning to breed. Our own hens are not doing so well at brooding this year, we have had a couple of them desert their eggs before they hatched and one who made the eggs filthy which is not good for them.  It is pretty frustrating, especially since we bought some special fertile eggs of particular breeds that Lydia wanted.  One clutch of Silver Laced Wyandotte eggs is due to hatch today but we are not hopeful that there will be many chicks as the poor eggs got well and truly messed around.  The next clutch is due on Thursday, they are French Marans.  Fingers crossed that the hen will last the distance.

We decided last month that we needed to be rational about our cattle.  We just do not have the pasture to support much here yet and so we made up our minds, reluctantly, to sell our Dexter cow and the calf.  Of course no sooner did we decide to do that than the cow got sick and went off her hay.  I hurriedly built a little crush using three trees, one post and my old head bale so that I would have somewhere to restrain her if we needed a vet to see her.

However in the end Izzy picked up again just with some TLC and lucerne chaff, although too much lucerne can give her a belly ache so we have to be careful.  After talking about them at our homeschool group, we found a family there who wanted to buy some Dexters and the long and the short of it all is that they decided to buy our girls. That is really a blessing as we know they are going to a good home and we can even go and see them if we want to.  The plan we worked out was that they would be collected by the stud that Izzy went to before so that she can visit the bull, Maria the calf can be halter trained and the people buying them can get some cattle handling training before taking them to their own place.

And they were collected just yesterday.  The lady phoned in the morning to say she was on her way and we talked about our facilities (or lack of them – tiny crush, little homemade ramp, no yards).  She mentioned that she was mainly concerned about loading up Maria, so when Lydia and I went down to shift all the animals around (horse here, Dexters there, sooky calf wherever) we decided to try to put a halter on Maria first.  We coaxed her into my little crush and locked her in there.  She was not impressed, but it meant we were able to put the halter on.  Then we tied the rope to the corner post and let her out and she had her first halter training lesson.  She was not impressed!  There was plenty of vigorous pulling, rearing, leaping and the occasional collapse on her side.  I am so glad that we had been to the Dexter field day and seen other calves being halter trained so that I knew what to expect.  In the end she was tied up for an hour before Andrea arrived from the stud, which gave her plenty of time to learn that the rope would not let her go.

I was worried for a while that I had done the wrong thing as poor Maria was not happy with the situation and I wondered if all I had done was to upset her.  But Andrea thought it was great and it meant she was able to lead her to the trailer using the halter, while Lydia did the same with Izzy.  Not that it was an easy exercise, lots of pulling with the occasional leap and bound from Izzy and even more energetic antics from Maria (definitely more halter training lessons required), but it didn’t actually take too long. Then they went up my ramp and onto the trailer with no hassles, just more patient pulling and pushing, and it was all done. Andrea even took the ear tag to put on Maria for me.  Andrea is of the opinion that Izzy’s recent health problems stem from her putting all of her energy into milk for Maria, and losing condition herself in the process.  So getting Maria weaned and letting Isabelle have access to lots of good pasture should be the best thing for her.  I feel much easier in my mind having had her advice, and I was very pleased that my efforts in making the crush and ramp were worth while as they made the job go much smoother.  I will miss my cranky old cow though.

We still have our three sooky calves, although it is hard to call them that now that they are 11 months old.  The two steers we recently moved to a property that our neighbour is leasing and we are agisting them there.  Because the boys still remember their halter training they were really good to move, Lydia and I just led them down the road and onto the neighbours horse float.  However we have kept the heifer at home, as a companion for the horse and so that we can continue to handle her regularly so she stays quiet.  Another advantage to us of keeping this heifer over the Dexters is that we can get her mated much more easily with the bulls down the road, and there should be no need to take her off to any studs.  So we are down to 1 horse, 1 cow and 3 pigs on the property (not counting occasional piglets) so we should be able to organise them between paddocks somewhat better now.  We need to be able to rest some of the areas to give the grass a chance to grow, and we also want to put in potatoes again this year.

In other news I turned 50 last month.  I am constantly reminded that I am getting older because I have to have my glasses on so much now or I just can’t focus to read – or type emails.  Lydia made me the most delicious Black Forest Cake for my birthday.  She did it properly with kirsch and everything, it was such a treat!

The poor boys continue to struggle with their health, as does Kim, and the whole family has been hit with a particularly nasty cold this last week, but we have so much to be thankful for.  Caleb’s school is having a reunion and his friends offered to pay for him to go over for that.  He refused at first, because he is so sick, but in the end they convinced him that they will look after him and so he will be back in Albany briefly next month.  I really think he is going to struggle, but he does have good friends.  Sam is planning to be back in Albany in February next year despite his bad health too.  One of his best mates, Mitchell, is getting married.  We still have no idea where he will be staying or anything yet, but we are committed to getting him there and back.  I would love to go back to visit again sometime too, maybe it can be my turn next.

if you want to know were I got the idea, go to brawlinthefamily website. (if you put that in the address then you,ll find it)