It’s been a while, but thought I should update you on our bird status. From the goose eggs, we ended up with 5 babies. Kevin hatched one himself, and this gave us Scooter, who thinks we’re Mum and Dad. Fun times! She lived in the house initially, and then on the deck, but she grew up so quickly and now, whilst she lives with the rest of the flock, she’s definitely closer to us than the other geese are.
Recently, we also added to our “family” with 10 ducks, and 13 chickens. The ducks are just crazy! When we put out their food, they’ll be climbing all over one another, and then they go for the bits of food that the messy geese drop.
With the chickens, we got 2 big brown roosters, 4 white bantam leghorns, a pair of Campines, and 5 little black chooks, however one of the little black ones has since passed away. The new chooks live quite separately to our existing girls, but we’re already hearing some crowing from the boys and it’ll be interesting to see if any babies appear too!
We had all sorts of plans for our house – most of which have had to be shelved. We initially thought we could sub-divide a couple of paddocks off, and this would help pay for a new house, but Council said “no” to subdivision.
Then we talked to an architect about the possibility of moving our existing house to another part of our land, and then building a new house, but the costs were HUGE. So that’s a “no”.
We found a company called Easybuild who build modular, affordable homes, but that too was outside what we wanted to pay.
Now we’re thinking of extending the current house, and adding a relocatable 2 bedroomed unit on the side to give me a craft room, and an additional guest room/office. If this works, it’s a great compromise, and, we believe, won’t require planning permission. Watch this space!
Our lovely local friendly farmer took away his sheep a while back, but we’ve got some back again, which is nice. We’ve also had 6 of his big black bulls on our land but they’ve been so naughty – eating the roses, poking their heads through the fence, and now they’ve burst a water valve and Kevin is NOT happy! I hear they’re moving on soon though.
So that’s where we are for now!