It is a tradition in our home that the Christmas tree does not go up until December 1st, and not one moment sooner. The girls went a bit crazy with the decorations this year.
North Pole Express
Rebecca's (closest in the photo above) kitten Oscar found a new favourite sleeping place.
Another birthday came and went.
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| One more birdbath to add to my growing collection. |
The perfect birthday present for this gardener.
It was hot, dry and very dusty.
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| Dust and soot from the Pinery fire ground |
The greenhouse was assembled down in the vegetable garden.
Trying to make sense of the instructions.
Samantha admiring her handy work.
The instructions where next to useless, but we got the job done.
I lost a few garden beds, but I'm OK with that.
Not long after this photo was taken, Samantha left for a coffee date in the city with her friends, she came home with a guest.
My youngest son, Kyel.
Best late birthday/early Christmas present ever. Apparently the two of them have been planning to surprise me for the last month. Sneaky buggers!
Christmas day lunch, minus the prawns and oysters that I couldn't fit on the table.
With two of my five children not with us this year, Christmas day lunch was a quieter than usual affair, hopefully next year we will all be together again.
We had another dust storm on Christmas day.
Not quite as bad as the one on my birthday, I don't think it will be the last either.
Some sad news, my last remaining chicken, Rosie, succumbed to heat exhaustion and passed last Wednesday, it was not a good way to finish an otherwise happy day. She will be missed. She was such a character, noisy and bossy, always looking for more food and complaining loudly if she didn't get any.
So for now I am chickenless, but hopefully not for long. I am doing a lot of research on different breeds this time to try and find the most heat tolerant breeds I can, ones that will be able to cope with the long, hot Australian summers.
Meanwhile my son is building a new chicken run for me, hopefully we will have a few cool days before he goes home so that he can get it finished.
So there you are, a few snippets from my December, how was yours?
It's so hard keeping chickens cool when it's hot. I used to try wetting the ground so they could have a cool dust bath (mud bath) and draping a wet towel over the hen house if they were inside. At the end of the day there's not much you can do, it's still very sad. Good luck finding some new ladies.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jac.
DeleteSorry to hear you lost Rosie, with temperatures increasing each summer the poor chooks are finding it harder and harder to cope. We have just had a couple of days in the mid forties and I put frozen ice blocks (they were large) in their drinking water and kept the ground where they dust bathe as damp as I could. What a gorgeous little kitten Oscar is! I haven't seen one of those types of greenhouses that big before where you can walk in, would be able to grow lots in there :) Happy belated Birthday! and enjoy the rest of your son's visit.
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DeleteI always do ice blocks in the water and wet an area for the chooks to dust bathe but it just wasn't enough this time. I'm thinking of setting up a misting system before I get any more. Thank you for the birthday wishes, I definitely enjoyed the time with my son, he flew home yesterday, hopefully he'll be back next Christmas
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