Rat Attack & Egg Incubation.

We had a Rat attack at our chicken coop. Looks like our coop is not predator proof. Being the first coop that we built, we did not take all necessary precaution. Also it's a "simply built" chicken coop, built from recycled / used materials. The material that we bought were the zinc roof, netting and nails. This is also part of our trial project.

The Rat attack cost us 7 eggs that was brooding by one of our hens. It was gone one morning, totally gone, with nothing left, not even broken shell. We saw some holes dug on the floor (coop is on clay floor) and the drainage area. Had sealed off the rear section that have wide wooden fencing with small mesh netting. Set up a rat trap. Let's see if we manage to can any. Even the ping-pong balls (4) were missing. Had used it to fool the chicken to use the nesting compartment. Now it makes me wonder if it's a rat, snake or even monitor lizard. We had also brought in our 2 cats and 2 puppy to help. They managed 3 rats during the first week. We had also resorted to collecting the eggs to test out our incubator.

We also had some unfortunate losses. One of our puppies died and one cat missing. After incubating for 19 days, I find only 1 egg is doing well. After 19 days of incubation, it started to 'rock'. We then did a 'lock down' and set the egg at 37.8 C & 70% humidity. Let's hope for a successful hatch.

Busy, busy, busy at Parcel 5

We are as busy as a bee. We had harvested our sweet corns and field corns. It wasn't feasible. We only manage a small harvest for sweet corn. The field corn, we keep it for feeding it to our chickens. It need to be dried, de-skin, de-corn and dry again for storage. We still have not finished de-corning as now. Also we had planted some sweet corns on trial to access the feasibility again. We had 'fine tune' the planting distance/pattern which we shall do it in a bigger scale once we have the time.

 We had decided to switch to other shorter term crops and personnel reshuffle at our farm. We are trying vegetables such as Kangkong, Pak Choi, Kai Lan, Long Beans, Eggplants and chilli. We are also ploughing the land and making raised beds for the corps. This is taking up lots of our time.



Had finished adding an over flow outlet to the pool for raring Tilapia fishes. Had to postpone filling with fingerings as there is no one to look after it. Planning to build a shade over it as the afternoon heat does heat up the pool, as it's not a deep pool.
The patch ploughed by our guest already had long beans sprouting all over.


Looks like things shall keep us busy for a while. Am slowing down all our other plans until we sort out our work.