Red October - A Community Minded, Free-Range Chicken

The little red hen pictured in the banner photo was only with us for a week or so. She eventually took off over the fence before I could clip her wing. She took shelter a couple of houses up in a building site over the winter. We crept in one afternoon to find a pile of chicken shit on a stack of bricks and figured she'd been roosting there during the night.

We came back that evening with a torch and a towel and quietly crept down the back of the house to find her there perched on the top of the bricks somewhat bemused by our presence on such a cool night. I gave her a good eye-full of torch light before turning it off, hoping that it would give her some temporary blindness. I moved up next to her and prepared the towel for capture. With samurai sense she took off blindly into the night and over the neighbour's fence. We approached our neighbour's house in hot pursuit.

Our neighbour's at the time were a newly immigrated English couple who were quite well accustomed to our regularly adventurous pets. We tracked down the little red hen and she took off into a tree  at the edge of our garden. With the neighbour's permission I scaled the fence and found the hen in the top of the tree. I prepared for capture. Like a bat out of hell she took off again into the dark night and flew about 20 metres into the next street over a house roof, navigated around a street light in a sweeping curve and carried on another 10 or so metres to a group of trees situated in the next block.

This, to me, was all at once:

1. Impressive: for such a small hen to have flown that distance at night and with some accuracy.
2. Annoying: for now we had to widen our search and risk disrupting other neighbouring folk.
3. Perplexing: that such a new hen could not have settled in our lovely yard like all the other chooks we've bought in.

We immediately aborted the mission and went inside. Thanking the neighbours for their assistance.

Some time passed and we could both hear our hen and had sightings of her in our street a couple of houses down. We have been identified as the people responsible for releasing this savvy, worldly-wise hen onto the neighbourhood where she now struts her stuff and supplies eggs to a lady down the road whenever she is able to locate the current nesting area.

Clearly, Red October, as she came to be known has out-witted both cats and dogs, kids and cars, and has been adopted as a feral pet by numerous neighbours who sometimes courteously share with us some of the antics of this hen that could not be tamed, nor hunted down.

9 Aussie Gardening & Landscaping Blogs to Inspire You

This website page was discovered recently and much to my surprise and amusement Petit Paradis scrapes in at No. 9. I'm very honored to be in the company of the other blogs listed, they inspire me too. There are some great landscaping pics. Thank you Armstone.

While the posts on this gardening blog have been a little sparse of late, this blog is still an awesome source of information on permaculture. Based in WA, this anonymous blogger provides informative posts about how to set up a permaculture garden in suburbia. Petit Paradis has information on growing permaculture produce as well as gorgeous Western Australian blooms.

Armstone's Website links of 9 Aussie Gardening & Landscaping Blogs to Inspire You.

I did a post a couple of years back of other backyard gardening blogs that I thought were worthy of checking out. Sadly some of these are either retired, have sporadic postings or have completely disappeared altogether. I can relate to this. Having had kids and being involved in various community ventures, plus working and being a Dad - it is not surprising that sitting at a computer falls at the bottom end of life's priorities.

Guinea Pigs Update

Shortly after this photo was taken of our beloved Weet-Weets I decided to turn them Free-Range again. Most everything was growing in pots or containers and was away from those little nashing teeth. So I set up several little Safe Houses for them and let them go in the chook pen. This did not last very long. Soon they were out and about in the garden. Exploring and following us around as we tended to the garden. Missy Miss is particularly friendly and we had to nurse her at one point due to a rather nasty wound on her rump.

She came to say hello as I was tending to the garden the other afternoon and I picked her up. To my amazement the wound could not be found. Not even the hard callous on the skin where the wound was. Again my wife and I could only speculate that, as before, with previous guinea pigs, they find it advantageous to roam the garden as they get much more exercise and can eat when and what they like in the quantities they need. It makes for happier Weet-Weets we think.

Book Of Kin

The slope of rampant grass and stacked wood is soon to become our new Petit Paradis (or Kin's Domain).

About 4 years ago my wife and I were introduced to The Ringing Cedars of Russia series of books. We read the ones that appealed the most, at the time. I don’t recall the names, but I bought two books from the series for my wife to read while she was in hospital with our second child.

Part of what captivated Mrs Petit Paradis with this book series are the concepts of a Kin's Domain and a Book of Kin. Both are notions I have mused over previously, but in the series these concepts are written about through the context of a typically young, Russian couple who consciously set about creating a space of love for themselves and future generations. This space becomes the Kin’s Domain. They use their skills of observation and intuition to plant out trees and organise vegetable gardens, site and build a house and basically set things up to be happy, healthy and to their best ability, self-sustaining within a community setting.

I resonate with this idea. After all, it is basically what we are doing with our current house. The impact of such a thing is really starting to sink in though, as I refelct on what is occurring with our new build and the planning for the new garden. The house we are having renovated has been in my wifes family for a long time and we are the ones giving it an overhaul and bringing in a new and positive energy to it.

The garden is going to be started from the bottom up, so I am excited to teach my family the real process of building soil. I plan to document this process on this blog.

So, enter The Book Of Kin.

In the Ringing Cedars series they discuss a Book of Kin as being a journal that the family uses to record their experiences in building and growing their Kin’s Domain. My wife and I have used a garden journal to record the birth dates of pets, planting times of vegetables and extreme weather events and such things. Part of this is documented in this blog and I plan to continue this recording with renewed vigor. As I posted recently - this blog Petit Paradis, is virtually a Book of Kin for my own family, who will also be able to look back over the building process and the setting up of the garden. They will of course be helping alongside, but as our kids grow they will be able to look over posts like a family photo album and use it as a reference for future planning in the garden.

So, with these concepts in mind, this is the context for which the posts that follow exists.

The New Petit Paradis - "A line in the sand."

As posted earlier, to make posting to this blog easier I have limited the post labels to a dozen. These are the permaculture principles and to this point I have not added them to previous posts. The reason for this is to create a kind of demarcation point between the 'old blog' and the new. A leap from the original Petit Paradis blog that I started back in 2010 to a simpler assembly of notes and experiences, thoughts and opinions.

Future posts will have labels, older posts will not. If you wish to find articles on a specific topic then simply type keywords into the search area at the side of the page.

I will add these labels as soon as I post appropriate content relating to each label. This will create some incentive for me to mix things up a little in the very near future!

So, for the purpose of this exercise and to bring my wife up to speed with things, what are the Permaculture Design Principles?

These principles are to be applied to an overall permaculture design and I intend to share the many and varied ways that we apply them to our lifestyle in future posts.

In the meantime if you wish to see some of the earlier posts from 2010 you can take the trip to them from HERE. It's like time travel - hold on tight ...