Jan and I made fettuccini on the weekend using the new pasta maker Vickie and Bruce bought for us, eggs from our own chooks went in.

My Aunt bonny gave me a rooster sculpture for our vege patch.  Handsome isn't he?

Jan put a weather station up on the roof.  It measure pretty high temperatures up there 38 degrees odd, when inside we're seeing more like 22.  It's got a rain guage, wind etc.  Jan is intending to hook it up to this website so we can keep track.

Jan and I just went out to see how the new chooks liked their roost.  We used a range of woods from around the yard, and I rubbed olive oil into them to hopefully deter pests like lice.   Anyway we arrived just in time to watch each hen fly straight up one at a time.   The last few couldn't find room so stayed on the lower branch but persisted until they all fit on the top.  So cute!!

Today we picked up six new hens.  Pekin Bantams.  Bantams are smaller than regular chooks.  Eat 1/3 as much and lay eggs 1/3 the size.  Very cute.

The girls in their tractor, Jan adding in their water container

The paddock is all set up and they'll be let into it tomorrow.  Their house and the paddock will move around the yard, moving spot every couple of weeks.

Zucchinis are flowering

There's chillis already

The corn is much healthier since we gave it some water with chook poo in it.

Here's some photos of fruit from around the yard, they're getting ready.  The peaches are juicy and some are edible.  We can tell because of the big holes in some the birds have been into.

Apples

Grapes, I'd say we have a few hundred bunches like this.  eep.

Persimmons

Figs

Tamarillos

Only 3 weeks of the year left.   Jan and I set up our christmas tree and a few decorations around the house.  We've been using the same tree for 10 years, same decorations and all, though we have a few little ones we've bought around the world or been given as gifts too.

I've enjoyed watching bees drink out of our troughs over the last few days.  I'm glad we're providing a water source for the bees as well as having them pollinate our plants.

I created a harvest applet for this website during our this month of living here.  We didn't measure everything and didn't count everything so it's not completely accurate.  Some things were completely forgotten and some things we ate while standing in the garden so they didn't even make it inside (e.g. mulberries).

From this total I can see we should have picked loquats more often.  Probably preserved some more citrus.  I needed to net the mulberries and cherries because we basically got none from those trees even tho they were completely covered in fruit ripening at one stage or another.  Hopefully we can improve on all these numbers, but I reckon more than 30KGs of produce (357 items) over 19 types of food is a pretty good for the first month of living here.  I love that it's exactly 3 dozen eggs for the month! How fabulous is that?