"Balmoral Park" farm garden

I am on a big learning curve about breeding poultry. We successfully hatched 13 out of 17 turkey eggs in an incubator. When we moved them to their heated box two of them died within the first few hours. One of them had never looked really well but the other one looked fine. So we are down to eleven as you can see from the picture they look OK and hopefully they will all grow up now. I also had a chicken sitting on a dozen eggs and was optimistic that I would get a dozen chickens. Right on schedule on monday morning I noticed she had one little black chicken. The next day she abandoned the nest with ten eggs still unhatched. So we only got two chickens. Both little black ones. There was another broody hen so I decided to set her on some eggs as well. As Peter is busy building I have been trying to do all the poultry management. So I made a nice nest area with a dozen eggs and went to get my chook. She made a bit of a fuss but not too much and I was gently carrying her into her nest when...

The last two lots of Turkey eggs we sat under broody hens came to nothing. We had pretty much decided that our very handsome gobbler was a dud. however Peter decided to borrow an incubator and put 18 eggs in it. Just a few hours ahead of schedule the first little turkey appeared. So far 13 have hatched out and are doing really well. They are very cute. We hadnt used an incubator before and were a bit worried as we had a few power outages. Luckily I woke up the other night when the power went off and we wrapped the incubator in a doona with a hot water bottle. It must have worked. I quite like the idea of being able to plan our poultry hatchings a bit with an incubator as some of our broodies are unreliable. just had a duck sit on five eggs for two and a bit weeks and then just up and leave them! I finally have some broody chickens though and one of them is sitting on a dozen eggs that should hatch tomorrow. Here is the first little turkey, isnt it cute!

My daughter Sally and I recently spent five days in Paris. We stayed in a tiny apartment in the Marais district. The plan was to eat like Parisians, buy fresh local food daily and prepare it in our apartment. We called it our Paris food Safari. We had a great time discovering Paris via food. Each day we set out with a destination in mind and armed with our shopping bags. When we found a good market or food street we eithr purchased our food for the day then or planned to come back later. The produce available in Paris was amazing and we really enjoyed eating beautiful simple food. this is a picture of our second nights dinner.Baby artichokes, tiny potatoes, the crunchiest green bean, sardines and a salad. Now I am back home in Eugowra in Central West NSW. No daily food markets, no little green grocers, no cheese shops. It is a challenge to eat like a Parisian here. However I am determined to eat as well as we can. We grow a lot of things so that will make sure we eat seasonally. Althou...

As a result of all the rain we have weeds everywhere this spring. I know these capeweed are a weed, but it just looks like a carpet of yellow daisies everywhere so i dont mind them. I am sure the ground cover is good for the soil, they come and go quite quickly and mulch down. The bees love them as well. Contrast them with the little purple and yellow heartsease that I planted a few years ago. They also come up everywhere. They have spread from one small planting all through the garden. I like the random nature of self sown plants. I have some poppies that will flower soon and I hope they will also spread through the garden. Maybe i will regret all the self seeding one day but at this point I enjoy it. The Lavender is also magnificent at the moment. Lovely colour and aroma. Heartsease in the rose garden. Yellow capeweed

When I went away at the start of August we had already had a very good year so far in terms of rainfall. However our dam was only half full and we were still not getting a lot of runoff. Wyangala Dam, the big water storgage dam near hear was only about 7% full. We have never seen it at more than 14%. What a difference a month makes. Our Dam was almost full when I arrived home and has since filled right up to the top. Amazing, it is over 2 metres deep, so that is a lot of water for our garden in the coming seasons. Today I went to Wyangala Dam to do a rehearsal for a wedding I am doing there next weekend. It is at 35% capacity and still has water coming in. Last time I was there the houseboat in the picture was about a kilometre from the water, I will get a picture of the whole dam next week. It is an amazing amount of water. and it looks as though the rain is going to keep on coming. Somehow, cant seem to move the photos around but hope you get the picture!