You can find garden tools going cheap at garage sales, online at places like Facebook or Craigslist, and at tip shops.

I like to go for the older tools. They don’t look as ‘nice’ as newer ones, so they often sell for less, but they’re far more sturdy. These are the ones that look like something from your grandpa’s shed.

Old tools will have solid timber shafts, strong handles, and the working end is made out of proper steel. Older spades and shovels will have nice strong heads instead of the crappy pressed sheet metal found in newer tools. Older garden forks will have solid tines that won’t bend in use.

I recently bought this fork, rake, hand saw and gardening book for $10:

Garden tools can be restored with very little work. The old grey timber shafts will come alive with a quick sand and a rub of boiled linseed oil. If they’re cracked or broken, you can usually find replacements at the tip shop.

The head can be cleaned up with a wire brush and steel wool, and then rubbed with a bit of oil for rust protection – chainsaw oil works well, but use whatever you have. Sometimes you need to add a screw or bolt to fasten the head to the handle properly. I like to sharpen spades with a few strokes of a file, too.

Old tools like these can be really cheap. Things like rakes, spades and garden forks are usually $3-5 each at my local tip shop. They always seem to have at least a few tools whenever I visit, and I’ve bought quite a few just to have spares around the yard.

I got this lot for $20 – a mattock and spade, saucepan (for use as a chicken water dish), two hand saws, leather tool belt, nice hardwood offcuts (for my woodworking hobby!), some metal brackets and two dog dishes:

Because they’re so cheap, I can leave tools where I use them. I’ve got a fork next to the compost heap. There are a couple different types of long-handled shovels in the back shed, along with a pry-bar for digging post holes. There’s a fork and spade on the front porch for use in the front garden, and an axe and block-splitter up the back where I chop firewood. Plus I have all my good tools kept in the garage.

I keep a rake, spade and garden fork in the 6-bay chicken garden, hanging on nails in posts, right where I use them.

Yeah, it’s not ideal to leave garden tools out in the weather. I at least store them under cover where it’s practical. But if you keep them clean and oil them occasionally, they’ll last many years even left in the open. And they’re cheap as anything to replace anyway!

You just came out to water and spot a nice lettuce, but you don’t have a knife on you to cut it. Or you want to clip off a broccoli head but don’t have your garden shears. So you try to harvest anyway, and you end up breaking a stem or accidentally pulling out a plant.

Even if you plan ahead, it takes 10 minutes of running between the front door and the back door and the garage to find your tools before you head out to the garden. And then you accidentally leave them out in the weather because your arms are full of produce.

Wouldn’t it be better if you just kept your garden tools in the garden, right where you need them?

I picked up this stainless steel letter box from my local tip shop for $5, including the post. It’s sturdy, weatherproof, and large enough to store all the garden tools I normally need. There’s even enough space to keep a set of gloves in there.

I’ve put it outside the door of the garden bays for convenient access. I can grab the knife and garden shears when I come out to harvest dinner. It’s simple to drop them back in when I’m done. If I see a broken branch that needs trimming, I can grab the pruning saw and fix it properly.

I keep a ball of string in there, too – you never know when you’ll need to tie something up. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t have the tool I need, I always forget to come back and do these little jobs!

Anyway, the 6-bay chicken garden rotation system is a low-labour, high-yield intensive vegetable gardening system designed to produce a continual supply of food for our household throughout the year.

The core idea is to have 6 separate fenced-off garden bays connected by a central aisle. Each bay is about 4.5m x 2m (16′ x 6.5′) in size. Five of the bays are growing vegetables at various stages of maturity, and the sixth is open to our small flock of chickens.

Our chickens are housed in the scratch yard. They are fed in there, and that’s where we have their water, shelter, nest boxes and roosts. It’s an area about 10m x 4m (approx 30′ x 12′), so plenty big enough for a small flock. I lock them in there at night, since the area is surrounded by corrugated iron and very secure against foxes and dogs.

Each morning I open up the gate to give the chickens access to the aisle and the current chicken bay. The other bays have gates to keep the chickens out of the garden beds.

The chicken bay is an area where the poultry can dig in the dirt for worms and grubs, have dust-baths, and generally just be happy chickens. We throw in scraps from the kitchen, weeds, and trimmings from the other garden bays for the chickens to eat.

I also throw in raked leaves, horse and cow manure, lawn clippings, prunings, etc – anything that you’d normally put in a backyard compost bin – to form a compost pile in the middle of the bay. The chickens scratch through it, cleaning up any stray seeds or insects, mixing it up, and adding their own manure to the mix.

Every month, I rotate the chickens to the next bay in the sequence. This is the bay that has been growing vegetables the longest, so most of the plants have stopped producing and are dying back or going to seed. The chickens attack these plants with gusto! They gorge on the fresh greens, the seeds, the fallen or missed fruit and vegetables. They also clean up all the snails, grubs and other insects that have moved in since the plants were first sown.

Meanwhile, I prepare the bay that the chickens just left for a new garden. I rake out what’s left of the compost pile evenly over the bay. If there are any large or not-yet-decomposed bits, I gather them up and throw them into the new chicken bay to start the next compost pile.

I shovel a path down the centre of the bay to form garden beds, and I put pavers, timber or wood chips along the path to provide easy weed- and mud-free access. I spread a straw mulch on the newly formed garden beds, and I plant them out with herb and vegetable seedlings appropriate for the time of year.

At any given point in time, as well as the freshly-planted bay, the previous bays in the rotation sequence will have 1, 2, 3 and 4 month old plants in them. As a vegetable variety reaches the end of its productive life in one bay, a similar variety will just be hitting its stride in the next bay that I planted a month later. The food supply thus continues without interruption.

All of this chicken-moving and garden preparation takes me a couple of hours, once a month. I don’t need to do much weeding, since the chickens are eating stray seeds and digging up weed roots before they gain a foothold. The chickens also interrupt pest lifecycles; while problems are not eliminated completely, pests normally don’t build up enough of a population to cause major problems.

Living in the country, we have a lot of pressure from birds (particularly cockatoos and satin bower birds) and possums. So I’ve completely covered the whole perimeter (sides and roof) with chicken wire to keep the wildlife out. If I didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get a single tomato or bean! The internal partitions between the bays are half-height, about 1.2m (3′) high. This is high enough to stop our chickens from jumping into the growing bays, but it makes it easy to throw trimmings and weeds over into the chicken bay.

All the different elements work together over time, complementing and reinforcing each other. Together they form a system that gives us a continual, uninterrupted supply of fresh vegetables and herbs without the feast-or-famine cycle we’ve had with previous gardens.

And as an added bonus, the chickens provide us a continual supply of the highest quality eggs, thanks to their healthy diet and happy lifestyle!

I’m not sure what happened to Tom. He deteriorated very rapidly, and died during the day while I was away at work. I wonder if he may have been bitten by a snake the day before, as I had him clearing some rocky, shrubby ground. In hindsight he was a little off-colour when I put him back in his pen that night. Or he may have eaten something he shouldn’t have. But there are several problems that can kill goats quickly, so we’ll never really know.

First job when I got home from work that afternoon was to dig a bloody big hole. Perhaps fittingly, it started to rain while I was burying him. I’m going to plant a tree on top of his grave – maybe a chestnut or walnut?

I made a happy discovery while burying Tom – I uncovered some eggs while digging the soil. They were about the size of quail eggs, and at first I thought they may have been snake eggs. Unfortunately I had put the spade through one of them, but looking inside I found a tiny turtle! It’s not often you find turtle eggs buried in your backyard! I felt terrible for having killed one, though.

The little guy inside was fully-formed but with the yolk still attached, so I’m guessing they’re going to hatch in the next week or so (maybe around the full moon on Feb 4?). I think it was an eastern long-necked turtle, which we have plenty of in our dam. I carefully covered the rest of the eggs back over with dirt, and will be checking every day to see when they emerge. Sorry, no photos; I left the camera inside because of the afore-mentioned rain.

So there you have it, a very sad day somewhat balanced by the promise of new life.

It was well worth it!

Let me take you on a short photographic tour…

The welcome sign reads:

The Garden

Welcome to a community garden educational and dynamic demonstration site. Community volunteer members plan, build and maintain this area. We aim to promote:

• permaculture principles
• water harvesting
• building compost
• propagation
• organic pest control
• companion planting
• energy conservation
• aquaculture
• biodiversity
• sustainability
• growing food
• seed saving
• mulching
• networking

(and a little bit more that’s covered by plants!)

The garden is in North Wollongong, at the PCYC:

The garden area is an L-shape wrapping around a corner of a sports field, bordering on residential properties on the south and west, the PCYC building on the east, and the oval on the north side:

The design takes advantage of the northern sun (we’re in the southern hemisphere, so the sun is in the north) – low garden beds enjoy the full sun along the northern edges of the garden, with shrubs and bushes behind them, rising to a food forest of fruit trees along the southern side of the garden.

There are lots of banana circles throughout the food forest:

A nice bunch of bananas ripening:

I like how spent banana trunks are used to edge the wood-chip paths through the food forest:

There are lots of really nicely-made signs throughout the garden to explain details to visitors. There were several compost tea barrels dotted through the garden, making them convenient to fill and to use the resulting fertiliser (“magic potion”!).

Lots of useful herbs have been used as border plants, where they’re convenient to pick and release lovely fragrances as you brush by. Besides culinary and medical uses, they are also useful as animal feed, chop-and-drop mulch, living mulch, compost ingredients, and garden edging – in permaculture, everything has multiple uses, and every need can be met in multiple ways.

I really like this method of labelling trees – a piece of recycled inner tube attached to a wooden tag – it’s weather resistant, and won’t strangle the kaffir lime tree as it grows:

Coffee is a tree that likes shade, and so grows really well in a food forest understorey. These berries are nice and red, and ready for picking soon:

The paths through the food forest are nice and wide, giving good access for wheelbarrows and tools. They are mostly made from wood chips, which will hold moisture underneath for surrounding plants to access. As the wood chips decompose, they can be shovelled onto the nearby gardens and replaced with fresh wood chips.

The paths wandered through some beautiful little groves of bamboo. This is obviously a cool and peaceful place to sit in hot weather, as evidenced by the collection of chairs! The bamboo canes have also been harvested and used as supports and frameworks throughout the garden.

Behind the trees and bamboo, in the quiet back corner of the garden, is the chicken run. This must be heaven to a chicken – they’re a forest species, so would love all the shade, leaf litter, and bamboo to hide amongst.

There’s a classic bathtub worm farm inside the chicken pen – I’m sure they love to get the odd escapee worm!

The chickens have a very fancy house. It looks like it was recycled from a piece of children’s playground equipment.

Rainwater is harvested from the chicken house roof and feed into a couple of recycled olive barrels, which then provide drinking water for the chickens.

Near the chicken pen, and making good use of the mesh wall, is an equipment storage and plant propagation area. I took this photo to record how they’re propagating bamboo – I want to do this with mine:

There were also some avocadoes being grown from seed:

And of course, more banana plants:

The compost bays looked really good. They’re made from recycled fence palings, and maybe bits of shipping pallets. Fresh stuff goes into one bay, one bay is left to age and break down, and the third bay holds ready-to-use compost.

I took this detail shot to record how the fronts of the compost bays were constructed. There were three panels on the front of each bay, which slid down between two rails. When you need to turn the compost or shovel some out, you simply slide the panels up and out for full access. The tops of the bays are hinged, making it easy to load them up.

Maybe not that interesting to most people, but I like the inclusion of a materials receiving area in the community garden. There’s a gate to the road behind where I was standing to take this photo, so you can easily bring in a trailer or ute full of materials and unload it quickly. It can then be barrowed to where it’s needed within the garden.

There’s an impressive pizza oven in this open area, too. The hefty posts suggest there are plans for a cover for this area, which will be a really nice place to gather and socialise.

Looking back from the materials receiving area, you can see the tables and chairs nestled under the trees. This makes an excellent shady meeting and eating area, with plenty of open space for people to spill out to when large groups turn up.

Returning back along the northern side of the garden, we have the open, full-sun vegetable beds. Here you can see some bamboo trellises for growing climbers like beans and peas:

The root vegetable bed:

Looking along the length of the vegetable gardens:

Whew, that was a long post!

I hope you enjoyed this tour. The people who look after this permaculture community garden are doing an amazing job, and it’s well worth a visit if you live in the area. You can also follow them on Facebook.

If you’ve visited a community garden recently, please post links and photos below!

What to do?

Preserved Mandarins

Our first idea was to preserve mandarin segments in bottles, adding plenty of sugar to sweeten them up.

So, we started peeling…

I then stuffed Fowlers jars with the segments, dumped a heap of sugar on top, and filled the jars with water. OK, the one on the left got filled with brandy – I thought it might make for a nice dessert :-).

Then into the big pot they go, on top of a trivet to keep them off the bottom. They get covered with cold water. My Fowlers book said to bring the water up to 92 C, and hold that temperature for 45 minutes. I tied a piece of kitchen twine around the clip of the brandied jar, so I didn’t accidentally feed it to the children.

After processing, the jars are removed to cool.

I’ve only tried the brandy mandarins so far (what, you think I’d start with the sugar syrup ones?!). They were very strong (might have to try 50/50 brandy and water next time!), but really nice on ice cream. I’m sure they’d be amazing on top of a grown-up citrus syrup cake too – check out River Cottage Australia’s recipe from Paul West.

Peeling mandarins got real old real fast, though, so I went looking for another use for the mandarins.

Mandarin Cordial

We’ve made cordial several times before, using Jackie French‘s standard guideline of 1 cup of fruit and 1 cup of sugar, to 2 cups of water.

First, I juiced up lots of mandarins.

I then measured how much juice I had so I could measure out the sugar and water. I brought the sugar and water to a boil until the sugar completely dissolved, then added the mandarin juice and took it off the heat.

Once the cordial had cooled enough, I poured it into bottles (home brew bottles work great). The cordial should be stored in the fridge or in a cool dark cupboard, and it only lasts about a month.

(Yes, that’s one of Jackie French’s books in the background next to the Fowlers preserving manual!)

One glass of delicious mandarin cordial!

It’s really nice to make up this cordial using soda water – it makes great soft drink. I’m hoping there might be a Soda Stream under our Christmas tree this year :-).

What ideas do you have for dealing with a glut of citrus fruit?

Much to my delight, the people holding the garage sale were farmers. They had a lot of older “junk” farming equipment to give away, most of which they’d replaced with bigger/better/faster equipment over the years. I think they’d held onto the old stuff “just in case”, but were now taking the opportunity to clear out some space.

The first find was this awesome Tirfor T516 hand winch for $25. It’s a portable hoist that can be used to lift or pull loads up to 1.6 tons (or more if you use pulley blocks!). It came with a 20m wire rope that’s rated for 8 tons. The two levers on top are used to winch in either direction, so you can either raise or lower loads.

Tirfors are really popular with four-wheel drive clubs and emergency services, since they’re very portable and can handle fairly big loads.

I’ve wanted a hand winch for ages. They’re useful for all sorts of odd jobs around the property. This one is so much more serious than anything I’d looked at previously, and I got it for a much lower price. Yay!

While we’re talking about lifting and pulling things, I also picked up this chain block (I got everything in the photo for another $25). You pull on the smaller looped chain, and it pulls the larger chain through the block using a geared mechanism to give you mechanical advantage. This is the sort of thing you use to lift engines out of cars. I’m planning to build a trolley truck that will run along the steel girder in my garage, so I can lift and move stuff easily.

The medieval torture devices below the chain block in the photo are actually old fence pullers. You use them to tighten up wire fences. Interestingly, when I Googled how to use them, they turned out to be museum pieces! You can see the exhibits here and here.

I got the fuel pump below for $5. It sits in the top of a 44-gallon drum, and you pump by turning the handle. I reckon it’ll be useful for storing and pumping water out of barrels, or maybe for dispensing large-batch comfrey tea from drums.

I didn’t take a photo, but I also got a fairly heavy-duty staple gun and a stanley knife for another $5, and a full-length sledge hammer for $5.

All up, I was extremely happy with my garage sale haul!

What’s the best bargain you’ve gotten at a garage sale?

Meanwhile, here’s a really interesting-sounding program for anyone living in the Illawarra – this course usually costs $2,500, but you have an opportunity to do it for free…

WANT TO CREATE POSITIVE CHANGE GLOBALLY AND LOCALLY?

SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM ILLAWARRA 2014 – APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN

This program provides a unique opportunity for 20 individuals to:

• Understand your unique leadership potential for creating a sustainable future
• Refine your personal strategy and career goals
• Learn how to move from vision to action
• Develop the skills and networks needed to sustain positive change

Running from September to November 2014, this program is offered by the Centre for Sustainability Leadership (CSL) and uses face-to-face workshops (6 full days) and weekly collaborative online learning sessions. The program is funded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage and is offered to participants at no cost (valued at $2500).

Applications from all sectors of the community are welcomed and individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and Indigenous communities are encouraged to apply. Applications close 6 August 2014. Interviews 13 + 14 August in Wollongong (venue TBC).

For more information contact Jen Halldorsson on jen.halldorsson@csl.org.au or 0423 811 219.

You can also check out their web site: http://www.csl.org.au/programs/sldp-illawarra

I’m pretty sure we picked about twice as many blackberries as you can see in this picture. Isn’t that the way blackberrying always goes? Red lips give away the fate of the rest of the harvest!

After a bit of discussion, we decided to make a blackberry pie. Who doesn’t like pie?

The pastry was Megan’s always-delicious failsafe recipe, but we kind of winged the filling. It turned out pretty runny, so next time I think we’ll try tossing the blackberries in cornflour first to thicken up the juice.

Still, combined with home made vanilla ice cream it made for a deliciously greedy dessert!

These things are huge! This isn’t even a big cone, but it weighs several kilos, is covered in sharp spikes, and is bigger than your head. You wouldn’t want to pitch a tent under a bunya pine in a storm!

As my daughter said, you’ve got to enjoy any meal that starts with axes and hammers! Here’s the equipment you’ll need to get the raw bunya nuts out of the cone:

Just smash it open with the hatchet or a blockbuster. Or smash it on a rock. The idea is to break the cone down to the individual husks, most of which will contain a nut.

The husks are a little tricky to open, but if you start at the pointy end and tear them you should be OK. Inside, you’ll find a raw bunya nut. They’re pretty big – roughly the size of a large avocado seed.

Here’s a few in my hand to give you a sense of scale:

We got about 35-40 bunya nuts out of our cone, but really large ones are said to contain up to a hundred!

First, you need to carefully split the end of each nut to stop it from exploding when you cook it (a bit like chestnuts). There are two main ways to cook the nuts – you can boil them in salted water for half an hour, or roast them in a 200 C oven for half an hour. We did half the nuts each way just to experiment.

After cooking, you crack open the shells and remove the soft insides – again, a lot like removing the meat from a chestnut. Bunya nut shells are pretty hard and tough, though, so it takes a bit of effort. Pliers help!

It takes a little while, but you soon get the hang of it. And then you have a container full of beautiful cooked bunya nuts to work with! Of course, a lot tend to disappear during this final stage of processing :-).

We really enjoyed eating the bunya nuts just like this – they taste like little floury potatoes with a nutty flavour. A bit like Jerusalem artichokes. As for potatoes, the roasted ones had a better flavour than the boiled ones. I reckon they’d be a great side dish served hot, tossed in salt and butter.

Some people make pesto from them (replacing the pine nuts), and they’d be nice in a soup or stew as well.

Next time I have the opportunity, I’d like to try roasting bunya nuts on a campfire – people say the smoky flavour really complements them.

Have you tried eating bunya nuts? What did you think? Any recipes to share?

It was a pretty simple system to set up, and it works well even on fairly large properties. I think ours can handle up to 2 km of perimeter.

Once in place, you have to go through a training regime with your dog to teach it not to linger near the boundary. The audible warning tells the dog when it’s close, and if it continues toward the fence it gets an electric shock from the collar. One or two hits from that, and they stay well back – just like pigs with electric fences.

When I mowed the lawn last week, though, I caught the wire with a wheel of the mower and broke it. The signal box beeps to warn you if the wire is broken, so at least you know straight away.

It’s easy enough to repair a break, and a couple of repair kits come with the containment system, but it’s difficult if you haven’t left any slack in your boundary wire. Luckily, I left a few strategic coils in it just in case:

So I pulled some extra wire back to the break, then stripped the ends…

…twisted them together…

…put a connector on it…

…and then inserted the connector into the provided weather-proofing capsule:

The capsule is full of a non-conducting paste to keep water out:

It simply snaps shut when you’re done:

I then mount the joiner on the fence, with the opening facing downwards to prevent rain getting in:

Simple!

Anna Hess (of The Walden Effect blog) has recently published a couple of really good eBooks:

• Growing Into A Farm: Before The Walden Effect tells the story of Anna’s search for land, falling in love with her property, struggles to make it into a home, and finding the love of her life. I’m only part-way through it so far, but it’s great learning the backstory to one of my favourite blogs.
• Low-Cost Sunroom: Heating Your Home With Free Solar Energy was actually written by Anna’s dad, Errol Hess, many years ago. Anna has edited and updated it and released it as an eBook. It details excellent plans for adding an economical sunroom onto the side of your home.
• The Weekend Homesteader: A Twelve-Month Guide to Self-Sufficiency (paperback or eBook) was published a year ago now, but I had to include it because I got a mention in the acknowledgements section :-). It’s an excellent book full of “weekend-scale” projects like putting up quickhoops, preserving, collecting rainwater, etc. What I really like is how the projects are organised by month, so you can always find stuff that makes sense for the current season (and yes, the appropriate months are also shows for us in the southern hemisphere!).

Herrick Kimball’s The Planet Whizbang Idea Book For Gardeners makes a good shelf-mate to The Weekend Homesteader. It’s full of project ideas and tips for gardeners (as you might have picked up from the name!) – I’m currently building the yoke, and will soon put up some trellises using his t-post (star picket) designs. Herrick writes The Deliberate Agrarian blog, another in my must-read list, and has previously published very high-quality plans for building your own apple grinder and cider press, chicken plucker, chicken scalder, and yard cart.

The most recent book I purchased was Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts: And Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here – yeah, long name! It’s a sketch-style ideas book for building treehouses and cubbies for kids and grownups. Some of the designs are pretty out there, but I’ve gotten a lot of great ideas from it. The author, Deek Diedricksen, also blogs about building cubbies and tinyhouses from recycled and scavenged materials at Relax Shacks.

The Greening of Gavin – My First Year of Living Sustainably is about 18 months old now, but is still an excellent read and very relevant for Australians wanting to live more sustainably. Even better, it’s free! The author, my Victorian mate Gavin Webber, blogs at The Greening Of Gavin. I’m planning to use his Build Your Own Backyard Clay Oven book at some stage to build a pizza oven, and Build Your Own Small Solar Power System details the building of a very handy little solar-powered backup power system. Gavin is also a dab hand at cheesemaking, and has written the guide Keep Calm And Make Cheese.

And last – but not least! – Greg Foyster has written Changing Gears. I’m keen to pick up a copy of this book. You can keep informed of author appearances etc from the Changing Gears Facebook page, and the book itself should be available from local bookstores (it doesn’t appear to be on Amazon, BookDepository, etc yet). From the promotional materials:

Changing Gears is a riveting yarn which follows Greg and Sophie’s incredible bike expedition investigating how we can live a simpler life. Greg interviewed some amazing people through regional Australia he met on the road – from a barefoot monk, to an 18th century woodsman, to a household that lived without any electricity for 20 years. He also interviewed iconic commentators in the sustainability movement – from Clive Hamilton to Costa Georgiadis to Dr Samuel Alexander (UniMelb & co-founder of the Simplicity Institute). Greg’s adventure was a baptism of fire to begin with and a far cry from Greg’s former high powered job in advertising – the furthest he’d travelled on bike was 50km and the longest he’d been in a tent was at the Falls Festival for 3 days! This trip required him to cycle for 9 months (an incredible 6586km),  live with his partner 24/7 in a tent for 9 months, have only 2 changes of clothing for 9 months, savour road kill and in Qld cycle the whole day with only a diet of raw food.

Do you have any good books (or eBooks) to share? What have you been reading lately? Any suggestions for what I should read next?

So, needing replacement chickens for our very elderly Australorps, I had to act.

The basic idea for this hack was to use a Fridgemate digital temperature controller (the same device I’ve previously used to turn a chest freezer into a super-efficient refrigerator) to accurately control the temperature of my Hovabator incubator.

The Fridgemate temperature controller (I bought mine from MashMaster for under $50) can be used to automatically switch an appliance on and off to maintain a set temperature. You plug the appliance into the Fridgemate, and the Fridgemate into the wall, and it controls the power supply to the appliance. In refrigeration mode, it will turn the appliance on when the temperature rises above the setpoint. In heating mode, it will turn the appliance on when the temperature drops below the setpoint. They’re normally used to maintain home brew at the optimum temperature for fermentation.

Hovabators are a very cheap and simple incubator. They’re really just a styrofoam box with a heating element and a thermostat. The built-in thermostat isn’t very accurate, though, and tends to drift as the room temperature varies. They’re also very fiddly to set properly.

My original plan was to set the thermostat very high, and use the Fridgemate to do the switching. But because the thermostat had now failed, I simply bypassed it so that whenever the incubator has power supplied, the heating element will be on. If you hack a device like this, make sure you clearly label it so someone doesn’t plug it in and burn it out!

In the photo below, you can see how I did this. I just cut the two wires to the thermostat (in the background, on the left) and joined them together with a BP connector.

The Fridgemate doesn’t come with a mounting box, and you have to wire it up yourself (if you’re not qualified, please get an electrician friend to do this for you!). You don’t want bare wires lying around, so you really need to mount it in some kind of case. I was looking for a suitable box at Bunnings, and chanced upon this cute little MDF craft box for a few dollars. Perfect! I cut a mounting hole in the front for the Fridgemate, and drilled holes in the rear for the power and temperature probe wires.

I also bought a cheap 3 metre extension cord while I was at Bunnings. I cut it, so I could wire the Fridgemate into the middle of it. I cut a 10 cm section out of the middle of it to give me the bridge wire I needed as well.

I threaded the cables through the holes and the front slot of the box, and then wired up the Fridgemate. This photo may help anyone trying to set one up. The bottom cable is the incoming power supply, and the top cable goes to the appliance. The black cable in the middle is the temperature probe.

Once it was wired up and confirmed working, I pushed the Fridgemate back into its mounting hole and tidied the cables up. It’s not in this photo, but I put a tight cable tie around each power cord where they come through the holes in the box so they couldn’t be pulled out. The probe wire was very tight in its hole, so I didn’t need to do anything special with it.

Having the Fridgemate installed in a box like this is a lot safer than running it bare (please don’t do that!), and it’ll make it very easy to use for other projects as well.

Time to connect the incubator up!

The temperature probe was inserted through one of the holes in the incubator lid. The probe itself should be positioned just at the top of the eggs, approximately in the center of the incubator (i.e. not too close to the heating element that runs around the inside of the lid).

And here’s the finished setup. I’ve only just turned it on, so the temperature is only 29 C, but the controller is working beautifully.

In case anyone else is interested in using a Fridgemate for something similar, here are the settings required:

F0 (temperature differential) = 1 C

F1 (compressor delay time) = 1 minute

F2 (min temp limit) = 0 (or anything lower than your desired setpoint)

F3 (max temp limit) = 50 (or anything higher than your desired setpoint)

F4 (operating mode) = 2 (heating)

F5 (temperature calibration) = 0 C

The setpoint is set by holding the SET button for 5 seconds, changing the displayed value with the up and down arrow buttons, then pressing and holding the SET button again for 5 seconds. It will now control the temperature to within 1 degree C of the setpoint.

Here’s a link to the full Fridgemate instructions.

Chicken eggs require an incubation temperature of 37.7 C, but because the temperature probe is located just above the tops of the eggs and the heating element is above the eggs, it’s best to go a tad higher (38 C / 100 F). The eggs themselves will then be at the correct temperature. You can only control down to the nearest whole degree with the Fridgemate anyway.

The incubator is now getting settled (it’s best to run it for at least half a day to get all the parts up to temperature before putting in eggs), and I’m going to set some eggs in it tomorrow morning. With luck, we’ll have chicks in three weeks!

Have you ever done a project similar to this? How did it go? Do you have any incubating tips to share?

I had a friend come over today to have a rabbit “serviced” by one of my bucks. She was borrowing the doe from a friend; she’d raise a litter of little bunnies, return to the doe, and be on her way to her own meat rabbit herd.

We put her in the cage with Barney, my senior buck, since she hadn’t been bred before. He knows what he’s doing.

As soon as the doe saw Barney, she tried to mount him!

“It’s OK”, I said confidently. “Sometimes females do that to try to show dominance. She’ll settle down and he’ll do his job in a sec.” Because, you know, I’m such an expert.

Something didn’t look right.

I lifted the doe off Barney, and held her upside down. Turns out she was a he! I said, “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.” (Somewhat topical for this week – RIP Lou)

My friend was quite embarrassed and disappointed (as was I!). Neither of us had thought to actually check the rabbit, we just took it on faith that her friend had lent her a doe.

It turned out OK in the end. I sold her a couple of my 2-month-old does that she can eventually breed from. I think they’ll serve her well.

Our Indian Runner drake had been making a nuisance of himself, chasing down all the poor hapless female ducks and having his way with them. Even the pekins and muscovies!

It got so bad that one of our muscovy girls escaped the pen, and we just couldn’t keep her in. She was spending nights on the dam, risking life and limb with the foxes, just to try and get a bit of a break.

Something had to change.

I finally got time on the weekend to sort him out, while the kids were at the Jamberoo Recreation Park with friends (have I mentioned how much I love their season passes?!).

First, off with his head on the chopping block. That went to the dog as a special treat. Once he’d bled out, I hung him over my processing station, with butcher’s hooks through his ankles.

This drake was at least a couple of years old, so would be a bit tough. That usually makes them harder to pluck, too, and their skin isn’t as nice as a young bird. I was short on time to fire up the scalder, plus I was only doing one bird so it wasn’t really worth the fuss. All of which led me to skin this one.

First, I hosed the duck down to clear off any dirt and dust and to get the feathers all wet. I find this keeps the feathers under control so they don’t blow into everything, and makes the job a bit cleaner. Then I carefully cut around the ankles to open up the skin, and started peeling it back to expose the legs.

Once the legs were done, I continued cutting the skin around the front and back so I had fully exposed right around the body.

Working carefully, I then skinned upwards around the tail and vent. You have to be gentle here so you don’t tear the belly open and make a mess. Next I pulled the remaining skin downwards to expose the body down to the wings.

The wings are tricky to skin. They’re pretty scrawny on a duck, so I just cut them off at the first joint. Once the wings were done, one final pull downwards on the skin exposed the whole neck.

Done!

I jointed the duck at this point. I find it easier to to do now, before gutting it – it gives you better access later on.

With the parts all removed, all you’re left with is the tubular body. It’s quick and easy now to open it right up and clean it out.

Being a tough old bird, we cooked it in the pressure cooker. I followed a Nigel Slater recipe, but cooked it for about 30-40 minutes at full pressure instead of 15. He’s cooking a young tender bird; I’m trying to soften leather.

I put the neck, gizzard and carcass in the pressure cooker along with the rest of the cuts, and separated them out before serving. They add more flavour to the stock. After serving up our dinner (which was delicious!), I picked all the meat off the remaining carcass bits and returned it to the stock in the pot. I reduced it right down to a thick ragu, and froze it for a quick pasta dish another night.

Life in the poultry pen has been a lot more orderly ever since.