The Crane

Here I am with my crane. I made it today. It's 4WD. 

Knight Bus

Here is today's creation, the Knight Bus. We love lego sets but also love making them up from the big box of lego. 

Quincey's Lego World

This is Quincey here and this is my special section of the family blog. I'm going to blog my creations every day for a week. 

This is my monster truck and its made out of lego. When the front bit bumps on something the man falls out. 

Every morning I get out of bed and make a new creation for my lego store.

I love playing with my lego and getting new sets of lego.

These are both called fighter bomb jets. They are a bit like fighter jets but they shoot forwards and not to land. They are soldiers but they fight for peace. 

Chook house reno's

Isn't it funny how things work out. Just a few weeks ago I was talking here about how the chook's egg production dips in winter and the need for insulation in chook houses. Then I got some coolroom panels on Freecycle, which we have been looking for for the roof of the Hilton Harvest Chookship. The panels turned out to be no good for the job, so a light bulb went off in my head. Why don't I use the panels to insulate our drafty old tin chook house. So I got up early last Sunday and got to work (a nice cool day for a change). Amy strolled up after a nice long sleep in to view the progress. She casually remarked on how good it would be if we made the house taller so we could walk in to it. At first I thought that's a great idea, but then it dawned on me that a small project would turn into a 3 day mission. We debated this for a while until consensus was reached that we didn't really need to do the extra work (Phew!).

This is how it looked before the reno.

I did the roof first, with nice thick 150mm panels (the R rating of these is over 4). The panels are just aluminium on the outside with polystyrene on the inside. I cut the panels to length (with a grinder and saw). Then I ripped off the old roof and put some jarrah boards in to attach the panels to more easily.

The tricky part was lining up the holes in the panels with the wood. I had to drill one side of the panel, then flip it and drill the other side (didn't have a long enough drill bit). Then I pushed out the polystyrene between the two holes and put the panel in place. The next step was to put an 8" bolt through the hole and push on it to mark the wood, take the panel off and drill the wood, put the panel back on and put the bolt through, attaching it with a washer and nut the other side. I did this for all 6 holes, maybe I'll buy a long drill bit when I do it for Hilton Harvest! Anyway, it worked out well with only one hole needing to be drilled twice. The roof has a western pitch, so it won't radiate heat in summer and will keep the chooks warm in the winter nights.

I installed one 100mm and one 70mm thick panel on the western side too. Unfortunately I had to leave a piece of tin on one end because there wasn't room between the big adjacent tree trunk and the shed. This panel should deflect the hot afternoon sun in summer and keep the cold out in winter.

I also put in a panel on the southern side and one on the eastern side (thinner 70mm panels). These were easier since I just needed 90mm tek screws to attach them.

Lastly I put flashing on to clean it up a bit and I've allowed for the vents in the upper parts of the side walls to be boarded up in winter to keep the wind out and the heat in. I had some bits of zincalume left over from the solar pergola which worked well to cover exposed polystyrene and shed water. The shed is not solar passive unfortunately (that would have involved tearing it down and moving it and starting all over again), which means that the sun will not be able to heat up the place in winter. Still, I think it's a great improvement. The total cost for the project was about $100, mainly for the flashing and screws and nuts and bolts.

We had another disastrous egg sitting experience, so we've said "Bugger it" and got 4 hybrid Hi-lines from City Farmers. Here is one of them checking out the new accomodation.

We can't wait for the eggs to start flowing on a more regular basis.

Mooshine and homemade butter

We've just started to get raw milk (or Mooshine as we now call it, we took this name from our friends over east). Raw milk is unhomogenised and unpasteurised and for some reason it was made illegal to sell it for drinking many years ago in most western countries (it is now sold as bath milk to get around the legal insanity). I think a few people got sick from tainted milk and there was a knee jerk reaction to make pasteurisation mandatory. The fact is that hygiene standards are much better these days and the risk of getting sick from raw milk are tiny. Unfortunately in our risk (and benefit?) averse society the law has stayed with us and the benefits of milk as it should be are lost to most. So you can sell cigarettes, alcohol, guns, coal, McDonalds, etc but you can't sell raw milk! What a shame, have we lost our minds? Not only are supermarket chains ripping dairy farmers off by paying peanuts for their product, but farmers are also forced to make their milk inferior in order to sell it. And companies also have the cheek of taking the cream off and selling it for the same price as full cream milk (then they can sell you the cream separately and make even more money!). Raw milk tastes better and some people have found relief from conditions such as Eczema and Asthma.

We've been getting Jersey milk lately and it has about 2 litres of cream in five litres.

Another great thing about getting raw milk is that you can make your own butter very easily. Here's how you do it. Firstly let the cream settle and pour  or spoon it off into a separate container. Take it out of the fridge and leave it to come to room temperature (30-60 mins). Then put it in a food processor or use a bar mixer to buzz it for 10-20 minutes.

When it's ready you may hear the motor change pitch or see globules of fat and butter forming. This is when you can pour it off through a sieve to separate it from the butter milk.

Then put it  in a bowl with cold water (so it doesn't melt) and press it with butter pats or a spoon to remove milk and air pockets and shape it. We do a triple rinse to get all the milk and water off. You should get roughly half butter and half buttermilk.

That's pretty much it. You can add salt if you like or just have it unsalted. Yum! You can use the butter milk as you like: it's supposed to be great for making scones; heat it up with some chilli and garlic, leave it over night and then warm it up and add it to layer pellets to make beautiful hot mash for your chooks; make your own low fat yoghurt with it; I just put mine in a cheese sauce for Macaroni cheese (Quin's favourite).

So there you go, unadulterated low carbon butter. I dig this youtube video, mainly for the accent (but don't waste the buddermilk!). If you live near a dairy farm speak nicely to the farmer  and you may even get your own Mooshine source (don't come across like a snoopy milk inspector though!). If you live in the city they may sell it at health food shops or there are bound to be a few hippies drinking it, just ask them where to get it... 

Front garden production

When you're a keen gardener and live in the burbs there inevitably comes a time when you run out of room to plant things. Our back garden is full to the brim with productive trees and vegies, so we've started to develop the productive capacity of our front garden and verge. This garden has mostly hardy, waterwise native plants and we love it for its beautiful flowers and the fact that it is low maintenance and attracts native animals.We planted a Macadamia tree a few years ago and it has struggled along without regular water since then. The same goes for our olive trees, so recently I bit the bullet and installed some drip irrigation out the front (I modified the old overhead system so it wasn't too hard). What a surprise, a few months later and the plants are positively thriving. We now have the following productive plants out the front:

Macadamia, which will be a large tree with delicious nuts. It's in the proteacae family, so it's sensitive to phosphorous. It seems to do well on straight compost.


Three olive trees (varieties are Mission, Coratina and Manzanillo), two for oil and one for pickling. Olives do well in our Mediterranean climate. They will take up to ten years to fruit without retic, but five years or so with. Water is valuable, but so is local organic food so they're on the retic. Note that the trees are trained to a vase shape in order to make harvesting and pest/disease control easier and to give the fruit enough light and air.

A curry plant. An Indian curry's not a curry without some of these yummy leaves.

A bamboo (Bambusa ventricosa), which we hope will grow us stakes for the garden. I got this from a friend and although it may not be the perfect variety I like to get plants from friends. In time I can say that's Wally's fig, Amir's pomegaranate or Wayno's bamboo and it will remind me of those people. This bamboo is a clumper and should grow big healthy shoots for staking tomatoes and beans.

Four Acacia plants. These will eventually become hosts for a parasitic native tree called the Quandong (closely related to another well known parasite, Sandalwood). I've planted the hosts now so they will be well established by the time I plant the Quandong in spring this year (two hosts per tree). Quandongs make the best jam in the world by the way.

That's it out the front for now. We are still fossicking around for more space. Just this afternoon Amy and I talked about taking over Quin's sandpit (unused for at least 18 months) for a plum tree...

Banana update

Our first bunch of bananas appeared a few months ago. Since then I've given it some potash, cut the 'bell' (male flowers) off and put a bunch bag over it to stop pests and keep the sun off it. The picture below shows the female (higher up and bigger) and male fruit/flowers.

The male flowers or bell need to be removed (emasculated?) since they serve no purpose and take energy from the bunch, so I chopped it off.

Here is a pic of the bunch covered with the bag, silver side to the North to reflect sunlight.

We've waited patiently as the fruit have grown and in the end we got a bit impatient and  harvested some bananas. Unfortunately it must have been too early because they haven't ripened off the plant. We've never done this before so I guess we'll learn as we go. You can tree ripen the fruit and the taste will be the best, but eating 120 bananas in a week or so could be a bit tricky so we'll try to ripen a hand at a time when the time is right.

The other plant has just started to flower too, so there should be a gap of about 4 months in between them. That's worked out well as we won't be flooded with fruit all at the same time.