Category: Country life

The first year: dangerous Australian wildlife

Stephen Carlin

Australia seems to be regarded in awe by other places for our multitude of deadly creatures, and I can confess now that I was worried about what creatures might lurk here at Hill House. As I grew up on the other side of the country and had lived in towns and cities on this side, I was unfamiliar with the level of wildlife here, and expected that it would be frankly seething with animals, some of which would be keen to bite. But I can report back that we have been…

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Our gardens; the first year

Stephen Carlin

A blank slate was what we wanted with our new garden, and when we moved here, that’s what we got. There was a small, roughly fenced and terraced vegetable plot on the hill below the house, which had been mostly abandoned to layers of cardboard and plastic. The rest was grass, with lantana and other tall weeds on the fringes. In our first year we have tried and moved a couple of gardens, and begun to plant the ornamental gardens round the house.

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Our first year: moving towards a more sustainable future

Stephen Carlin

We have just celebrated our first year here at ‘Hill House’. It’s been a great time, highlighted by meeting new friends and settling into the community, as well as having lots of visitors. We also got our beautiful smooth fox terrier, Willow, who has kept us busy. The daunting unknown of looking after 20 hectares has now become more a familiar reality, as we find out what is achievable here, but there will be many years to come of trial and error to try achieve a more sustainable future here.

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For everything a season.

Stephen Carlin

The famous line from Ecclesiastes has many metaphorical applications, but it has very literal value in the garden. Sometimes when a plant is hard to grow it can just be down to daylength or temperature, not soil quality or the other things we try to get right. Things are perhaps a little more straightforward in cooler climates where you just need to ‘plant after last frost’, or catch the last warm days of Autumn to get winter crops established.  In the subtropics the seasons are long and the planting times ambiguous.…

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Growing chia

Stephen Carlin

Here’s a plant that I’m growing for the first time but I think I will be growing chia continually, as it’s not only attractive and useful, but hardy. Chia (Salvia hispanica) burst onto the stage not many years ago in Australia as a new wonder food, and it’s still expensive in the shops compared to other seeds like sesame or linseed. I wanted to give it a go as a potential chicken feed, in the line of trying a wide range and seeing what grows easily. Growing chia I grew mine from chia seed from the…

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Grass seed as chicken food

Stephen Carlin

This morning I had an idea for bonus chicken feed. We have many types of grass here, but there is one that grows in shady spots on the forest edge, and lately it has been shedding a lot of seed as you pass it, so much that you can hear it scatter. I know that the chickens forage keenly for grass seeds, so thought I’d  see how well collecting it for them works. Ideally they would forage themselves, but the grass is outside the chickens’ range. I took down a…

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Mung bean final harvest

Stephen Carlin

The mung bean bed at the Mid-levels got too overgrown. It was lush but crowded, and the plants were spindly and falling over each other in a tangle. What’s more, there didn’t seem an end to the flowering, with old pods spilling while new ones formed. So I figured it was time to treat it like the cover crop it was, pull it up, pick the pods, and dig the plants in. I ended up with a decent haul of beans, which the chickens loved in two feedings.

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