Much of Victoria is struggling to recover from a difficult challenging Summer and Autumn, with many struggling to feed their stock. This hasn't stopped us from beginning the switch to regenerative practices.
Embracing the transition to managing a small holding in a Gippsland hobby farm has certainly come with its challenges, but the rewards are truly worth it. This is a place for sharing the stories and lessons learned along the way as a new hobby farmer.
Personal stories
- Apparently everyone and their dog wants backyard chickens at the minute, but our chicken adoption has been a long while in the making. The heightened demand does add some complexity to our mission to populate our recently finished coop, but we are not to be discouraged.
- Getting our chicken coop from a state of disrepair to chicken-liveable was a much bigger project than we realised when we first started. It felt like an perpetual exercise of Murphy's Law, but we refused to let this thing defeat us!
- Swarming is something you want to avoid as a beekeeper. Avoid, or at least control. We hadn't anticipated this one, and had to learn quickly how best to deal with it.
- Keeping the sheep confined to one half of the paddock is a great way to get the most out of the pasture, but when the sheep needed to be moved, the fences needed to be ready. What started as a short project quickly proved to be a surprising challenge.
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Once your bees have started to outgrow the nucleus, this is how to transfer your bees to a Langstroth hive