That's Lunch

Well, Mr. Rooster woke us up at four am for the last time today! We were tired and hot and when he let off in full voice this morning I calmly got up, got the cleaver and quickly despatched him to Rooster Heaven, all while wearing a very fetching little pink leopard print nightie. I left the wolves to fight over his head and feet while I plucked and dressed him & popped him in the freezer. Poor old rooster! He was very handsome, and plump. The other chooks were alarmed at all the hubbub of course but I just waved the cleaver at them and said, "You gals just get to egg layin' and there won't be any more trouble." The dogs lay in front of the chook pen, gnawing on rooster feet, and the chooks went real quiet.

The humidity is still something like 57,000 percent with temperatures over 40 every day, it feels disgusting. There's almost no point in having a shower, because you can't feel the difference whether you're in the shower or out of it.

Apart from writing, my current project is researching compost, worms and bees. Because the soil is so poor out here, we have nothing to break down compost or mulch apart from lizards, who are more interested in eating bugs on the coffee table. One of the women in town, Svenja, came across a composting system called "bokashi", and she's had great results with it, so I'm going to make some bokashi buckets and worm farms. The bokashi bucket is basically an airtight container to which you add your scraps and bokashi microbe mix, let it ferment for a week, then pop it into a soil pit - it's fully composted within two weeks, and you just dig it into the garden. In our climate, the worm farms will be "in garden" boxes so that the worms can escape into the cooler soil below when it's really hot, then come back at night to feed on the worm farm scraps.

All I managed to grow successfully this season were rockmelons, basil, corn and gourds. The whole challenge with the garden is that the soil just gets so hot that anything that's not indigenous can barely survive, the sandy soil doesn't hold the water, and then there are no bees to pollinate the garden plants. The bokashi compost and worms, plus top layer mulch, should improve things a lot, and I can get a hive of native stingless bees - they'll have to be fed as there won't be enough for them to live on properly, but that's easy and then we can have fruit & vegies! I promised Gary that I won't let the pet bees sleep in the bed.