Animal Systems – Page 3 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

June 1: chicken feed

2016/06/01 Danielle 0

One of the issues that anyone with pets or livestock runs into is feeding them. Not just the expense of providing them with the best possible nutrition, but also the practicality of it. The cats, for example. We make up a raw meat mix for them, using human grade beef mince, minced ox heart, minced ox liver, calcium, gelatin, and a selection of supplements. Amusingly, it ends up being cheaper to do that than to feed them commercial cat food, although it does involve an early morning start every month or so to go to the meat market and […]

the great livestock debate

2016/05/23 Danielle 0

As may have become clear by now, I adore animals. Fur, feathers, scales – they are all awesome in their own special ways. Even guinea fowl (noisy, dumb as bricks, but pretty and useful and lovely) and rabbits (destructive, tree-ringbarking wild versions are annoyingly hardy, while the tame meat-breed ones die far too easily) are pretty cool. My problem is deciding which animals to keep. I mean, I obviously can’t have them all. That would take more space than we have, and feeding them and taking care of them would take more time and $$$ than we have available. […]

Re-use, repair, recycle

2016/04/28 Danielle 0

An unexpected vet bill a couple’ve weeks ago (furbabies are epensive when they get sick!) ate into our infrastructure funds a little, and although we do have pet insurance, it’ll take a few weeks for any of those funds to get back to us for use. In the mean time, we have ten baby guinea fowl which are almost big enough to need their own grown-up enclosure, so they can start learning where home is. Not to mention the five wyandotte chicks which are growing daily, and sharing a brooder box with the guinea fowl keets. We do […]

plant profile: honey locust

2016/03/23 Danielle 0

I’ve just ordered another selection of wattle seeds, to germinate and plant out. These are all varieties with edible seeds, so they’re a pretty good multi-purpose plant. The idea is to plant about half of them in our Zone 5, along with holm oaks, cork oaks, stone pines, and a variety of other semi-wild food plants and bee forage plant species – the other half will go in the pasture/woodland area as shade trees. This pasture area is going to include a series of paddocks through which our poultry and the hypothetical future goats (and maybe cow!) will be rotated. There will […]

Animal Profile: Guinea Fowl

2016/03/08 Danielle 0

This is the first animal profile I’ve written, to complement the plant profiles (of which I will post more, soon). Guinea fowl, specifically the common helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris) are native to Africa, but have been widely introduced to other areas with similar climates. They’re not an uncommon sight on farms and rural properties in WA. As far as I can tell, the main reason is that they’re very, very good at controlling insect populations – including ticks and the various crop-destroying grasshoppers, locusts, and beetles. They also eat flies and maggots, so they help control the fly plagues […]