Sunday 30 December 2012

Least favourite job of all

red mite

Cleaning out the chicken coop and getting rid of the bird mite (red mite or Dermanyssus gallinae). The chickens have been spending as much time as possible out of their coop … the weather has been getting warmer and warmer … all of this means mites!

When fishing the eggs out of the coop, occasionally, some of these little blighters are crawling over the shell.

Honestly, I hate them. I have to get into the coop and shovel all of the straw and nesting material out, then give it a thorough brushing over. Then it’s spray over with malathon (an insecticide that kills the mites). When the malathon has dried, I put in new straw and nesting material and then powder the lot with a lice and mite powder.

I also cleaned out the chicks run and gave them a new load of straw and some nesting material. The chicks aren’t nesting yet, but they are pretty close to it, so they might as well have some clean nesting material.

After the clean out … it was into the shower for a thorough cleaning … twice! Also, off with the cleaning clothes and into a tub of hot water for them!

Friday 21 December 2012

Aulonocara Fry Development

I will post a new video of the fry as they develop. At the moment I am taking a video every day … dunno if that’s going to last. Come back to this page to see them grow.

19th of December 2012

 

20th of December 2o12

 

21st of December 2012

 

22nd of December 2012

 

23rd of December 2012

 

24th of December 2012

 

25th of December

 

26th of December

 

27th of December

 

28th of December

The mother Flame Peacock cichlid has now been moved to a recovery tank so that she can recover before moving back into the community tank again.

29th of December

 

30th of December

 

31st of December

 

1st of January 2013

 

2nd of January 2013

 

3rd of January 2013

 

4th of January 2013

 

5th of January 2013

 

6th of January 2013

 

7th of January 2013

Some of the fry are getting a lot larger than the others.

8th of January 2013

 

9th of January 2013

 

10th of January 2013

Well, that’s probably enough of that!

Thursday 20 December 2012

Chicken Nightclub?

One of our chickens (the lowest in the pecking order) has taken to sleeping out overnight.

Tuesday, when I went to feed the chooks, she was outside the coop and wanting to get back in for breakfast. I figured that she had missed the lockup time and had spent the night in the trees near our property.

Last night, she was not in bed for role call either. I walked around our property trying to find her and thought that, perhaps, she had suffered the same mysterious fate as our rooster, Raj. I left the coop open until well after dark and then closed the hatch so that no nasty visitors invaded the rest of the chickens while they slept.

This morning, however, she was outside the coop waiting to be let back in again.

Maybe she has found herself a chicken night-club and is staying out all hours partying it up with her chooky mates. When she returns in the morning, she looks rather dishevelled.

She has obviously found somewhere else to sleep for the night and, apparently, is beginning to form a habit. I need to stop this habit before it becomes ingrained as the coop is the safest place for her to sleep. Today, and for the next few days, the chickens will be in lock-down. No chickens in or out! There is plenty of room in the coop for all of the chickens, so it isn’t likely to be a problem of crowding.

Tuesday 18 December 2012

Peacock Cichlid Fry

One of our peacock cichlids (Aulonocara sp.) was looking a bit odd a few days ago. It was not opening it’s mouth and it’s mouth was quite full. After observing the fish for a while, we decided that the most probable reason was that the fish was a “she” and that she was mouth-brooding.

We moved her into our rehabilitation tank so that she could brood without being hassled by the other fish.

Now, about 7 days later, there are little cichlid fry swimming around in the tank. Some of them are not doing so well (one is curled and wriggles around the tank without much control) and the rest hang around the filter. In all, I have counted eight fry and she looks like her mouth is still full.

The filter in the rehab tank is probably not the best for the tank. I’d like to get a trickle filter for this tank so that the fry are at lower risk.

Aulonocara sp. fry with mother

We now have another peacock in the tank that is looking a bit full mouthed too. It looks like we’ll have to move another fish into the rehab tank too … or set up another one.

We have set up another tank for the second mouth brooding peacock cichlid. The tank has almost no tank furniture in it. Just a filter, a heater, some gravel and a pot. We got the tank water up to the same temperature as the main tank (added hot water and then cooled it down with some ice-packs). Then we set about catching the broody mother. She wasn’t that hard to catch once we removed the furniture from the main tank.

When we released the mother cichlid into the new tank, she was very stressed and so she spat out most of her eggs and hid. She was still carrying several eggs in her mouth at this stage, so we put a cover on the tank and let things settle down.

This morning, the mother cichlid has collected all but about 7 of her eggs and is hiding behind the pot in her tank. The 7 or so eggs that are still in the tank are looking a bit cloudy, so I’d say that they have perished.

In the other brooder tank, there are now about 15 peacock cichlid fry. About half of them are solid yellow in colour, whereas the remainder are banded. I suppose that, because this species is a hybrid, that they are going to reflect the genetics of the parent as well as the grandparent species, so it will be hard to predict the mature colour and patterning.

I will transfer the fry into the first brooder tank and the mothers into the second brooder tank in about a week. This will give the fry somewhere to mature while giving the mother cichlids somewhere to recover. If I put the females back into the main tank straight away, they will mate again.

Because the broody mother does not eat for the duration of the hatching, and for some time after the fry emerge, I need to give them some recovery time so that they don’t starve themselves to death. Also, for mating and brooding, the females need some energy reserves and they won’t do that while looking after their young.

So far, so good. Only two of our mouth brooders have mated, so we only need two brooder tanks. Hopefully, the cycle of brooder tank to rehabilitation tank for the mother will work out well. Although, I’d like to get a bigger tank for the fry and set that tank up with a better filter. I would also start out with no substrate (no gravel) in the tank and slowly add rocks for hiding places for the fry as they mature. Well, we live and learn.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

A pleasant walk on the beach

We have been meaning to do more walking after work to improve our health. For the last couple of days, we have been going to Howrah beach and walking it’s length. First day, we three walked the beach … day two, it was the three of us and my darling wife’s cardigan corgi, Fiona. Today, we took my Staffordshire bull terrier, Salome (Sally). Sally was very excited to be on the beach with all of the waves and other dogs and stuff.

As soon as Sally gets onto the beach, she starts to yip and yodel, telling everyone how excited she is. When we let her off lead she takes off like a bullet.

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Fiona isn’t terribly happy about going into the water, Sally is an entirely different story. Sally likes to bite the waves and run up the beach.

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Here are the three of them … this is the only kind of photograph of my daughter that I will post online, a silhouette. Unfortunately, the web is a dangerous place and images can haunt you for a long time.

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The dogs really enjoyed their outing and Sally was very well behaved.

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Tuesday 11 December 2012

Vet Visit

Today the vet, Scott, from Montrose Veterinary Clinic visited the farm. Our old wether sheep, Gary, has been scratching his neck furiously and he has caused himself some nasty cuts.

Last year, Gary had the same thing. It was caused by lice then … and it looks like he has lice again.

When Gary was sheared, he was given a spray on lice treatment and a drench for parasites. I don’t think that the spray is up to the job on our Gary. Scott gave Gary a shot of Ivermectin to make him less palatable to the lice. The wiltipols’ are pretty impervious to lice as they shed their hair at the time that lice affect the sheep. Because lice have to live further up the follicle than the length of the wiltis’  hair, it isn’t an attractive habitat for the nasty little creatures.

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I had made some improvements to the sheep pen so that the wiltis’ wouldn’t escape. However, one of  the sheep got itself stuck in the gate. After giving the sheep it’s OJD injection, the vet and I had to try to push the stuck sheep back into the pen. The next sheep was very spooked by it’s adventure and tried to leg it over the top of the pen. I was able to catch her in the air and bring her safely back to earth for her OJD injection.

They don’t like the vet’s waiting room.

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No magazines, no piped music … just sunshine and dirt. Still, job done and I gave them an extra feed of sheep pellets so that their bad experience in the pen isn’t their only experience in the pen. We feed the sheep in the pen every morning, so they know that the pen means food … it is just unfortunate that it also occasionally means being manhandled and injected. Still, it’s a sheep’s life.

After their latest adventure in the pen, I have more repairs and improvements to make … joy.

Saturday 8 December 2012

Campbelltown–Branch Show

Today was the annual branch show for the Tasmanian Dairy Goat Society. My youngest and I got up early and headed off at 7am to arrive in Campbelltown at about 8:50am.

The studs that were represented at the show had some awesome goats at the show. There were two Anglo-Nubian studs, two British Alpine, a Toggenberg and a Saanen stud. The two British Alpine breeders also had Saanen, Australian Melaan and Australian Brown goats, so there was a very good representation of Australian goat breeds. This was also the first show that I attended that had bucks. There was one buck > 24 months and several bucklings.

My daughter and I were both enlisted in the showing of the goats as there were many more goats being shown than there were handlers. I was a little daunted when I was showing the buck, he is a big animal and I didn’t have a lead … just a collar to grip. Still, he was very pleasant and quite gentle. I felt very pleased with myself that the bucks owner trusted me with him.

My daughter did a lot of showing, she was the “little helper” of one of the studs, and she got to play with about six kids (one, just 3 weeks old).

I felt very proud of my daughter, she got in and helped and hardly lost her energy for it at all. At the end of the day, she was awarded a ribbon for “Best Junior Handler” she was well pleased with her ribbon. All of the breeders were very supportive of her and were very impressed with her care and attention.

I didn’t take any photos of the event, but there were many photos taken by the society, I will post some pictures when I get them.

Wednesday 5 December 2012

New filter in the fish tank

Over the past couple of weeks we have seen our large fish tank get more and more murky. The filter was getting gummed up with fish waste and algae. I also had to do some cleaning out of the motor of the filter on the tank and this was getting to be a more and more regular occurrence. The tank came with an internal filter, basically the filter sucked water up from the tank and trickled it over four cartridges that had bio-balls and filter wool. This arrangement would be fine for just a few fish, but we were having to do more and more frequent cleaning and water exchange in the tank.

I started looking around for a better solution to the aquarium filtration problem and the more I read, the more I thought that an external canister system would be a better option.

Here are some of the things that I learned while reading about aquarium filters.

Why filter at all?

An aquarium is a closed system that you keep introducing new food to the occupants. The fish eat the food and then excrete the waste. The waste is broken down by bacteria that extract what they can from it and then in turn excrete ammonia, which is toxic to the fish. Natural bacteria in the water (anaerobic bacteria) converts the ammonia into nitrites, these are still toxic to fish in high quantities. The goal is to remove as much of the excreta and decomposing matter in the fish tank as possible and reduce the ammonia and nitrites so that the closed system remains non-toxic to the fish.

There are three different forms of filtration.

Mechanical

Mechanical filtration is simply passing the water through a medium (such as sponge) to remove the debris. Usually this is done by pumping the water out of the tank and into a reservoir that contains the filtration media. When the water trickles down to the bottom of the media, the bulk of the debris has been trapped in the cavities in the media. It is necessary to clean or replace the media on a regular basis.

Biological

Biological filtration uses another kind of bacteria (aerobic) to convert the nitrites into more benign compounds (nitrates). Usually, the biological agent is cultured in a filter by providing an ideal environment for the bacteria to form and grow. There are a number of very clever ways that this is done, but most often bio-balls are used. These are simply plastic objects with a large surface (often by creating lots of internal structures).

Chemical

Chemical filtration is the use of filter media such as activated charcoal to chemically scrub the water. Activated charcoal attracts chemicals and removes them from the system. When charcoal is overloaded, it must be replaced.

There are other kinds of filtration, but these are the most common types.

What do I need to know before I choose a filter?

The main things that you need to know are:

  • What filters work best for the types of fish that I am keeping;
  • What filters work best for the size of tank that I have; and
  • What can I afford.

I keep, mostly, Lake Malawi Cichlids so I need a filter that works well for fresh water tanks. I don’t need to worry about salt water.

The tank that I keep cichlids in is about 350 litres. The rule of thumb for adequate tank filtration is that you want to be able to filter the entire contents of the tank three times an hour. So that means that the filter that I choose needs to be able to filter about 1050 litres per hour (350 x 3).

I don’t have a huge budget, so I am not going to choose a filter that has all of the bells and whistles. If I can get something cheap and reliable … then I will go for that.

I did a lot of reading of stuff on the Internet in aquarium fora, blogs, reviews and vendors sites. I found that there are a couple of common themes out there. Mostly to do with some of the major brands of canister filter. I also had a pretty good idea of the price range for the features that I wanted and so I could then go off to a reputable and reliable shop and get what I wanted (within the limitations of what a shop can and will stock). I explained my requirements to the chap at the shop and he happened to have pretty much what I was asking for, and on special. The original price was over $300 but he was able to sell it to me for $165. The filter included all of the media and was pretty easy to set up (according to the manual).

I ended up buying an INTERPET External Power Filter (EPF) 350. The filter is made in the UK and has a 1 year warranty. Honestly, I don’t care where it was made so long as it is made well.

The clips on the side that hold the power head down on the canister are well designed and don’t look like they will break. The taps and pipes are also well made and don’t look like they will break easily. Many people who reviewed canister filters complained that the clips on their canisters looked flimsy and like they would break. There were also complaints that it is difficult to get spare parts for some of these when/if they break. Well, I think that the manufacture and design of the EPF350 is pretty good.

I got my new filter home and had it set up in about 30 minutes. My main problem in connecting it was that the old basket system didn’t leave much room for other pipes, so I had some juggling to do. Also, the baskets are fixed and cannot be removed without breaking them or taking the hood to pieces (I don’t want to do either).

The gotchas with this filter are:

  • The filter comes with a large o-ring and no mention of where it goes in the manual or in the installation guide. Fortunately, I worked out that it goes around the power head; and
  • The box says that if is self priming “Priming made easy with leak-free lock-fill system – just fill and go”. That doesn’t sound like self priming … unless they mean “do it your-self”. Anyway, fill the canister through the little port as indicated until the water is almost to the top of the spout and then turn it on.

I also had some trouble with the hoses … but that was really a problem with the design of the tank stand, not the filter.

Now that it is on and running, it is much more quiet than the old filter and the fish are enjoying the exciting new currents in the tank. Also, the pipes for the external filter are much less obtrusive than the quintet of down pipes and highly visible pump of the internal filter.

I will see how the EPF350 performs, I am looking forward to a cleaner fish tank!

Sunday 2 December 2012

Cichlid Photo-shoot

I couldn’t resist taking some photographs of our cichlids and put them here on my blog. There is still a bit of algae in the tank, but then the algae eaters haven’t had much impact yet. We gave the tank a good clean out yesterday.

Cichlid Pack

Here are a bunch of our cichlids Pseudotropheus (tropheops?) x 3, Aulonocara nyssae (in the middle).

community

A general community shot.

Dragons Blood Peacock

This is a Dragons Blood Peacock cichlid (Aulonocara sturtgarti). The scales on the face are an iridescent blue when it hits the light.

Flood

This one of the Pseudotropheus sp. that was in the first photograph.

MBuna

“Speedy” is a Melanachromis auratus, there are two of them in the tank … they enjoy a frank exchange of views (both males).

Patch

Here is “Patch” is a Cyrtocara moorii and is a lovely friendly fish.

Red Jewels

These are our red jewel cichlids (Hemichromis bimaculatus), they were the first cichlids that we had in our 450l tank.

Storm and Tempest

Here are “Tempest” and “Storm” they are Aulonocara nyassae. We haven’t seen anything like Tempest on the Interweb. The body colour changes from orange to brown and olive green. Tempest’s face is the most amazing metallic blue.

Tempest

Storm and Tempest are usually found together … they spend a lot of time together, reading, walks in the park, scrap-booking together … the usual things that couples do.

Tigger

Above is “Tigger” he is a Metriaclima lombardoi (Kenyi) … when we bought him he was the most amazing blue colour, then he turned yellow, so we know he is a boy.

Tigger II

You can see in the picture above, Tigger also has some blue iridescence in his face.

Venustus

These are Jack (above) and Duke (below) they are Nimbochromis venustus. There was another venustus in the tank (Rex), but it had a disease and the other fish attacked it. We put Rex in a casualty tank to try to help him recover … but he died.

We also have some clown loaches, a khuli loach, a pair of algae eaters and a pair of hypostamus plecostomus … I will get around to posting pictures of them at some other time.

Saturday 1 December 2012

Busy, busy, busy

Today has been a very active day. We have been out shopping for a new fish for our aquarium. We wanted to get a plecostomus because they are algae eaters and will help to keep the algae levels down in our cichlid tank. We ended up buying two pretty bog standard plecostomus at about 6cm length and they grow up to about 15cm.

After that, we needed to give the fish tank a good clean out. We took the hood off, all of the gubbins out and cleaned all of the algae out. The filter wool is a bit nasty and it needs to be replaced eventually. After that, we did a 1/4 water exchange.

I decided to make a nice beef and vegetable pie for dinner tonight. It’s a simple pie: diced carrot, celery potato and onion fried off and then put in the pie dish. Beef with a beef stock cube, 1 cup of water and a teaspoon of cornflour. When the beef is cooked and the liquid is a little bit reduced and thickened, poured over the vegetables and a lid of puff pastry over the top.

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Into the oven at 150o for about 30 minutes did the trick. The pie is also very tasty … not just pretty. My gorgeous little daughter made the leaves on the top of the pie for decoration and to use up the excess pastry.

For dessert, I made a couple of miniature pavlovas. My darling wife mentioned that she had seen some pav’s that had been dipped in chocolate, so I thought that I’d make up some chocolate sauce and drizzle it over the top. The fruit on the pavlova is banana, strawberry, passionfruit pulp, whipped cream and, of course, the chocolate sauce. I’ll see how the family enjoys their dinner tonight.

pavlova_01

It looks nice.

Friday 30 November 2012

Fence Finished! Yay!

Today, after getting home from another day in the office, I spent some time on the fence. Yesterday, I took all of the clips off the mesh so that I could tension the 3rd wire. That left me with a clear run at the job today. There were loads and loads of clips on the 3rd line and they were very badly rusted. I got blisters on my hand from the pliers and the repetitive twisting of the clips left my wrists a bit sore.

Today, I pulled the 3rd line through and tensioned it. The 3rd line is the line that holds the top of the dog mesh, so it didn’t need to be as tight as the top two lines.

The line was tensioned and then I went along the fence and put new clips on the mesh to hold it up. There were a couple of holes in the mesh that I had to knit back together.

The mesh didn’t reach all the way along the fence. The mesh stopped about 8m from the gate end of the fence and it is a Frankenstein combination of dog mesh, welded 4x4” mesh and chicken wire. The 4x4” mesh is OK, but the chicken wire is draped over a 3 rail timber fence (the timber fence was also falling down) and only covers the bottom half of the fence.

I put up some new chicken wire that covers the timber fence from top to bottom and did some repair work on the timber work as well. Finally, I had to knit the end of the chicken wire to the 4x4” mesh.

The fence is now sheep repellent … the sheep should be able to roam around the front paddock without fear of them escaping. We enlisted our lovely little daughter to get some sheep peanuts and try to entice the sheep into their newly opened paddock. Initially, the sheep were very … sheepish. After they did a circuit of the paddock the sheep seemed to get very excited (or at least excited in sheep terms). The sheep wandered around the paddock and ate lots of seed heads. After the sheep had their fill of excitement, they headed back to their normal daytime paddock.

All in all, the fence seems to be doing the job and I am very happy to have finally finished the thing. HA HA FENCE, I WIN!

Sunday 25 November 2012

Fishing Adventure

We went down the east coast to Opossum Bay to do a spot of fishing. This is a really lovely spot, just over from the jetty.

Opossum Bay

The tide was out when we got there, so we had a poke around the rock pools … well my darling wife and little daughter did, I risked the low tide with my fishing rod anyway.

After about an hour, the water had come up a little and we decamped to the jetty and sat there for another couple of hours just pleasantly soaking and losing bait. I caught a flathead, but it was too small to keep.

After that, we came home and it was time to feed the goats.

We let the chickens out very early today … so they had decided to hide their eggs rather than lay in the coop (evil chickens!).

Fence … when will you end?

This morning I got up and got on to fixing the fence. I needed to replace the temporary barrier by re-joining the two ends of the fence that runs east-west. The wire was in a pretty horrible state and it was too fragile to twist very much.

I reattached the tensioning wires and then attached the mesh using netting clips.

cross bar

The mesh overlapped a bit, so there is at least some support for the mesh, the staples will be holding the fence to the hurdle.

I stuffed up a little bit … the gate no longer opens past the hurdle. Never mind … the slope always made this a difficult way to open the gate anyway.

Tensioned Topline

The top line was then tensioned using the ratchet and then I walked down the fence to check the tension and to make sure there were no kinks preventing the line being tensioned. Halfway down the fence I noticed that a previous repair job on the fence had twisted the top and midline wires around each other, on the other side of the twist, the top-line was very loose … hrumph. I will need to cut the mid-wire and untwist it from the top, then I will put a tensioner on the other end of the fence as well.

Now that I have done what I can today … it’s time to go fishing!

Saturday 24 November 2012

More Fence work

The long awaited replacement of the fencepost that is the corner post for three paddocks is upon us.

next fence post

This post joins three paddocks, and I need to re-tension all of them. The fence that needs the most work is the fence that runs off in the upper left of the above picture. This fence separates our lower paddock from our neighbour’s property and it is the one that has taken the biggest beating from fallen trees and branches. Also, I want to let the sheep graze in this paddock.

Taking the wire off the post wasn’t too hard, the staples came out fairly easily. The main problem with unwiring this post was that the ends of each of the fences wrapped around the post and each other … making it a bit of a puzzle to unwrap it.

When the staples were out and the wire unwrapped, I folded the wire back so that it held itself out of the way. Then, out came the post.

Post Out

This post wasn’t rotted too badly, but it did have a terrible lean … so, out it comes and onto the bonfire for later.

I attached the fence from the sheep paddock to the end of the gate using a bit of twisted wire, so that I can leave the fence as it is until the fence posts have set in the ground without having to worry about the sheep getting out. It isn’t a long term solution … so I’ll need to rewire the fence as soon as I can.

Next, I dug out the holes for the posts (I had to move one hole because the cross piece on the new hurdle is shorter than the original one was), set the posts into the ground, backfilled and packed the soil down as hard as I could. I wanted the posts to be able to stand upright without support so that they didn’t need extra posts while the concrete set. After digging the holes out, I had a bit of a sit down in the shade.

new posts in ground

When I had rested enough, I got the concrete mixed and poured into the holes. My darling wife had to go off to the hardware store to get some more concrete (I didn’t check how much I had before I started).

Concrete In

The concrete was then smoothed out and cleaned up. Next, it’s back to the house to clean the buckets and tools and I get to sit and relax for a while.

Thursday 22 November 2012

Gratuitous Goat Shots

Here are some pictures of our goats.

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Minnie, Daphne and Darius …

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and Holly

Here’s a shot of Minnie standing on top of the cable wheel. They like playing on their cable wheel, they play “King of the Hill” on their toy.

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Standing on the cable wheel … having a yodel!

I have covered the holes in the cable wheel with some ply-wood so that feet don’t accidentally get stuck and goat’s end up with broken legs. A friend of mine had a goat who broke her leg like that.

More fence repairs

The old fence needs some repairing. The mesh has collapsed over time by being pushed over by the dirt and rocks eroded from our neighbours driveway as well as just being old.

Dodgey Fence

The top to strands have been restrecthed, but the bottom strand and the mesh are looking pretty poor. The sheep will just walk straight through the gap. They like just walking through the fence.

What I’m doing to repair the fence is taking a short strand of fencing wire and attaching the mesh to the strands above it. Basically, I’m knitting new mesh wire into the fence so that it becomes a mesh fence all the way to the top.

New Wire

I start by wrapping the wire around the top joint of the mesh, the wire goes around both sides of the joint so that it doesn’t just get pushed along the mesh. I pull the mesh up as high as I can pull it and then wrap the wire around the middle strand. The wire goes up and over, then around in a figure of 8, again, so that the wire doesn’t move left and right on the middle strand. Finally, the wire goes up and over the top strand, around in a figure of 8 and then pulled around the main wire for more support.

Then repeat …

Fixed Fenceline

I’ve fixed most of the fence so far … I still have a couple of meters (about 8) left to do, but I ran out of fence wire. I’m going to have to buy some more fencing wire. D’oh!

Wednesday 21 November 2012

New High Pressure Water Cleaner has arrived …

I bought a high pressure water cleaner off e-bay. It’s a Memphis Aqua 3500PSI cleaner with a bunch of attachments. I need to clean out my chicken coop on a regular basis as my white leghorn chickens are suspected to have Marek’s disease (Turkey Herpes HTV). When the white leghorns die off, I will bring the Isa Browns into the coop. Before I do that, I have to eradicate the Marek’s disease pathogens from the coop.

I’ve read a few articles on the interweb about how to disinfect the coop for Marek’s and it appears that the process is going to involve some pretty nasty disinfectants. The Department of Primary Industry, Parks, Water and the Environment (DPIPWE) have the following article on disinfecting the chickens living area – Marek’s Disease, although they don’t mention a type of disinfectant to use. I have emailed the distributor of the HWPC to find out what chemicals I can use in the device … so I’ll see what I can do.

I’ve spoken with our vet (Montrose Veterinary Surgery) about disinfectants that are effective against the Marek’s disease pathogen, and her advice is to use Hospital grade bleach. My lovely wife and I decided that we’d like to find out, once and for all, if our chickens do indeed have Marek’s or if we have misdiagnosed the problem (I’m not a vet, so that is certainly possible). So we will need to take some of our chickens to the surgery for blood tests. I’m not keen on a post-mortem analysis, as that would be throwing the baby out with the bath-water.

If it is indeed Marek’s, then I will do a dry clean of the coop. That is, removing all of the chickens bedding manually, with pitchfork, spade and broom. Then I will use the HWPC with detergent to clean the coop out as thoroughly as possible, and then spray hospital grade bleach over the entire coop to kill the pathogens. All of this will be while the chickens are out free-ranging for the day. When the coop is clean and the bleach has dried, I will lay down new straw and wood shavings in the roost.

I will also need to have my other flock tested for Marek’s. If they both have it, then I’ll move all of the chickens in together, if not, I will keep them separated and repeat the disinfection clean-up on a regular basis (probably monthly).

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Sickle repair

A while back, I bought a broken sickle from the tip shop. The blade was in good condition and not twisted. The reason that the sickle was at the tip shop was that the tang was broken and the handle was long gone.

When I got it home, I beat out a new tang for the blade and welded it on, then ground it down (roughly) … and then it stayed in my shed for a while.

On the weekend, I did some mowing with my ride-on Husqvarna. I just went around the paddock fence line so that I would have an easier time of putting up the new fence. I also cut around the chicken coop so that the chooks could scratch up some insects.

As the goats hadn’t been out, I decided that I’d cut the grass closer to the coop than the mower could get … and that I’d use the sickle.

I honed the blade to a nice sharp edge and then went to town on the long grass, cutting it and dropping the cuttings into the wheelbarrow. Of course, not having a handle on the sickle gave my hand a pretty hard time … and before long, my hand was bleeding from the rough parts of the tang gouging my finger.

Enough was enough! Last night I took the sickle back to the shed and cut a new 2 piece handle from some spare cedar and then I cut some 5/32 brass rod to make some rivets. I cut the cedar on the band saw and then I drilled three holes in the tang and matched the tang holes with holes in the handle blanks. I gave the handle a rough shaping with my bastard rasp and then set the rivets (that just means I hammered the rivets until they were flush and then used the centre punch to finish them off, rivets in handles don’t need to be mushroomed, just thickened a little). Then I rasped at the handle some more until I got the shape that I wanted, then it was onto the sandpaper.

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The place that my finger was taking the most damage from was the 90o angle between the blade and the tang, so the new handle is cut to ease this into a soft radius. I also shaped the handle so that it fit the curve of my hand better. Later on, I’ll rub some linseed oil into the wood … but that isn’t all that necessary.

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Sunday 18 November 2012

Gone Fishing …

Today, we planned to go fishing. A nice break, just fishing … how relaxing.

The chick’s water feeder broke this morning, so I had to get a new one today so that the chick’s had a water supply. While we were at the shop buying the water feeder, we saw a nice feeder that was much larger than their current one … so we got a new feeder as well. The old feeder held about 0.5 kilo of feed and I was filling it every morning and night, the new one holds 1.5 kilos of feed, so now I will only need to feed the chicks once a day, of course I will still be checking the chicks before and after work every day.

We went fishing at about 1pm and went to McGee’s bridge. This is a bridge over a large seawater bay in southern Tasmania. Mostly … we catch flathead.

My lovely wife was the first of us to hook a fish, she caught a mullet. It was a little bit small, so back in it went.

We caught some flathead a cocky (a young salmon) and my daughter thinks that she caught a bream … but I’m not so sure. It came off the hook just as she was landing it.

We had a lovely time on the bridge having a nice fishing adventure. Next weekend, we hope to go a little bit further down south and do some rock fishing. There was a nice spot that we found that has some nice rock ledges and rock-pools. If we get bored fishing, we can poke around in the rock-pools.

Saturday 17 November 2012

Best laid plans and all that …

Today I was planning on starting on the next fence hurdle. Before I did that, I wanted to strain up the previous fence. When I started to put pressure on the fence wire, the middle fence post fell over. The post was completely rotten and it had a huge population of ants in it. Oh well. The post was about 8” diameter, but under the ground, the post was about 1” in diameter. There is a lot of water under the ground here, so it isn’t going to have a good life.

I pulled the post out and it’s diagonal support leaving me with a mucky muddy hole. I dug the hole out a bit and put in a new post and packed some rocks around it, then back filled. I put in a pair of temporary supports and nailed them to the post and then poured in some concrete. Now all I have to do is to wait for it to cure.

Right, it’s off fishing tomorrow!

I need to buy a few more bags of cement and I’ll see about that other fence post.

Friday 16 November 2012

This weekend’s target

This weekend, I’m hoping to start work on the next fence hurdle. This one isn’t in as bad a state as the last one, but it is pretty bad. The fence post is part of the gate to the bottom paddock and the gate doesn’t close properly any more. Fixing this hurdle will allow me to straighten the bottom fence as well as fixing the gate, so it will be a good job to get it done.

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The cross bar from the hurdle is long gone. I used a piece of steel pipe to prop the fence post up, but it still isn’t straight enough to allow the gate to close properly.

I’ll need to pare the old wire away from the post so that I can lever the old post out. I can’t afford to take too long with this, or leave the fence down at all, my sheep are in one of the paddocks that this post is the corner of (in fact, the paddock that I am standing in to take the photo).

After getting the post out, I will put in a star-post to hold the fence up while I get the new fence post set. It is going to be difficult to set the hole because of the fences that will still be attached in-situ. I can’t use the petrol auger, so I’ll have to resort to using the manual auger and a spade.

When the hole is in, I will put the fence post in and concrete it. Then I will need to wait for the concrete to cure before I can reattach the fence.

While I am waiting for the concrete to cure, I’ll take the second post out and replace it and get the cross bar put in. The second post will be concreted in too, added strength is always good. The main reason that the fence has come down over time is that the next door neighbours property has lots of trees, and occasionally, they come down on the fence and it damages the wire. I can expect that the wire will be damaged again in the future, but that’s just the way it goes.

Sunday 11 November 2012

Brighton Show

Today, my wife, my youngest daughter, her friend and I all went along to the Brighton show today. This is another fixture in the show calendar of Tasmanian agricultural shows. Brighton is a fairly small show, but it is quite good.

The day was a lovely 20+ degrees (Celsius) with not a cloud in the sky. We arrived at 9am and the parking was easy.

I was very pleased that there were a couple of bullocks at the show. These immense animals used to be used throughout Australia to haul timber out of the bush. They caused less damage to the land, cost less to run and were much more environmentally friendly.

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Bullocks have a nice temperament and are immensely strong.

Here’s an animal that not many people would expect to see at an agricultural show … the humble Australian emu.

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The animal nursery was, once again, somewhere that my youngest daughter just HAD to go to. Most of the animals in the nursery were the property of the Jordan River School (Previously the Brighton Agricultural College). One of the blokes there had just finished his Veterinary training and decided to come along and help out.

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One of the local horse studs brought some of their absolutely drop-dead gorgeous Friesians

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The Friesian isn’t a massive horse, but they are very pretty. A friend of mine breeds Friesians, his horses are absolutely lovely.

Well, the main reason that I was at the Brighton Show was to watch the Dairy Goat judging.

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The goats were lovely, and the goat breeders were, as always, friendly and very helpful.

We went and had a look in the poultry display and had a look at the animals that were in there. There were some great looking birds in there. My favourite birds there were the Australorps.