Self care by growing a garden

Grow your own beef @Former-Member, lucky you, I miss that.

Dont necessarily miss the work that goes with it though.

We were completely self sufficient when I was growing up @Former-Member, partly lifestyle choice partly necessity when Dad became unwell and unable to work full time. Even had our own butcher shop. Chooks, turkeys, ducks, pigs, goats, sheep, beef & dairy cattle as well as small crops. Even had a cream seperator and butter churn. Hence the association with hard work I suppose. The constant supply of fresh produce was nice though. I might add that we brought new meaning to the term butcher but meat still tasted good.

@Former-Member@Determined Biggest things I've butchered have been chooks and bunnies, but yes, they do taste better than the shop bought meat.

We try to be a bit self sufficient, but sometimes it's necessary to fall back to supermarkets when situations mean it's not practical.

At one point we had two goats- a nanny for milk plus her kid. In reality, we didn't get much milk from her. problem was, being in town we couldn't separate the kid overnight. She would bawl so loudy that we would have been kept awake, and likely ended up on bad terms with the neighbours. So by morning, there would be less than a litre left... enough for our "kids" breakfast cereal.

We had to rehome the two of them on when I had major surgery. If we got goats again, for one thing, I'd want better fencing with a well designed browsing system; and for another, we'd move any kids on to new owners as soon as they were old enough.

Current animals are; two chooks, three bunnies and a guinea pig. Want to get more chooks and breed the bunnies for meat, but before doing that I need to build better pens for them. The chooks' one is barely big enough for the two we've got, and any baby bunny kits would fall straight through the large mesh on the bottom of the bunny pens. (They sit on the ground, so the mesh is only meant to stop them burrowing out. Raised pens with solid floors would be better for breeding.)

Heya all.

One of my carefully defended self care strategies is my membership of our local garden club. It gives me a social day out with a group who have similar interests. Yesterday the group went on a daytrip out to a native plant nursery and then lunch in a very pleasant botanic garden, with an optional afternoon tea stopover at a nursery that we knew had a good cafe on site. So I came home with an interesting bunch of natives to add to the garden. Morning's been spent planting a semi prostrate wattle under my casaurina, and a correa, a prostranthea and an adenathus in my shrubby never-watered patch down the back. The adenanthus is a red flowered shub that's got incredibly soft and fuzzy feeling leaves- the nurseryman kept us amused with the way he was absently stroking the leaves of a bush the whole time he was giving us an introduction to their nursery... question time at the end, one of the ladies in the group asked "Do you need to stroke it every day?" and I added that I was wondering how long before it started purring. I might need to dub it the Happy Kitty plant.