I was stuck in Hawaii for 3 weeks after my Dad had emergency surgery over there. The last couple weeks since getting back have been a little busy to say the least with work going into busy mode for the Christmas season etc.

I started writing a trip report which can be found here if you want to know more about what happened.

I’ll get around to telling you more about that, and about life changes I’m going to be making as a result of what has happened, when I have more time. Which will likely be in the new year.

Have a very Merry Christmas, and all that.

My favourite chicken has taken to sitting on the eggs the other chooks are laying. She isn’t obsessive about it, she is more than happy to be kicked off the eggs when I collect them, but if the eggs are there she wants to sit on them.

Zeolite is a nitrogen absorber. Once it has absorbed all the nitrogen in the chicken coop I can use it on the garden as a fertiliser.

Here is the Zeolite in the bags we buy it in – it is $10 per bag. It lasts somewhere between 2-4 months just depending on how often one is able to scoop out the poop. If I don’t touch it at all, it’ll need changing in about 2 months – if I scoop regularly it’ll be 4 months.

Here is the outgoing zeolite and rice hulls. It is probably about 3/4 of the amount initially put in – the chooks scratch quite a lot of the material out across the months but thankfully a large portion of that material ends up on the pavers we have out near the door so that can be scooped up with a shovel and put into the garden. And of course there is quite an addition of chook poo to the material!

This material goes onto the garden as mulch and fertiliser and the garden loves it. There are some seeds in there so it does need a little more weeding than your average garden but it is so worth it with the results one gets.

And here is the pen when the new material has been added. The chooks come out and cluck and scratch up a storm, they love the new stuff.

I try to keep the zeolite in the middle of the pen and put the rice hulls (the cheaper material) out towards the edges in the hope more zeolite will stay in the pen.

So there you have it – a clean chicken pen, happy chooks scratching about, a happy garden thanks to the awesome fertiliser, and a happy me because I feel better when it is all clean and purty.

As soon as I take the iphone out she stops posing in whatever cute pose I wanted to take the photo of, so I keep ending up with shots like this

On the 11th of November this is little kitty sniffing them to see whether they are worth chomping on. She has a thing for grass and things that look like grass but she chose not to chew at these. They’d been in the ground for maybe a week.

I fed some to the chickens over the following days, picking from the centre of the plant as I hoped they would bush outwards a bit. This apparently encouraged them to flower. Here they are on the 22nd November -

And here they are just 3 days later on the 25th –

I had no idea they would flower. They taste great, and have the advantage of growing quickly and also tall away from the ground so they are easy to keep dirt free and rinse off when it is time to eat them.

According to Wikipedia they are resistant to cold and grown in winter in Japan, and you can eat them hot or cold. I’ll keep an eye out for them at the garden place and if I see more I’ll be buying them to plant in some of the large pots I have which are plantless. I think Mizuna would do great in a pot as well as in the garden and if it is close to the back door I can just pop out and cut some for salad.

The chooks absolutely love it – probably it is their second favourite green thing to eat after Kale.

We had a couple of super hot days and then quite a bit of rain. The plants seem to be loving it, I can see real differences between photos I took on Friday and photos I took today.

Newly planted, can’t wait to see how they do.

The Other Half was doing some weeding around the water feature when he thought he saw the body of the fish which died a few months ago. Turns out it was not a body it was a live fish, and it has been existing in there somehow for several months without us feeding it – I gave up when I kept not seeing it and figured it had expired.

It does not like people so it just hides under the fountain part of the water feature and that is why we never saw it..

I’ll try to put some pics up of our antics touring various places in Australia and certainly you will hear all about the shopping in Hawaii.

Happy moments for all!

The garden is looking very awesome and I’ll update with some pics later this week when I have a moment.