Hi Folk,
We’re off to do a head count tonight, to make sure we can make good on our chicken promises. So far we’ve pledges for 102 hens, so it looks as though the Great Hen Sale has ended!
Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in owning some of our hens, and we can keep you on the back up list, in case any prior arrangements fall through.
See below for the sale info, and some pics of our midsummer flock.
Thank you very much!
Dear friends of Forty-K Farm,
After a good solid year of super-intensive, free range, integrated pasture based chicken care and egg production, it’s time for a break..!
And what a year with the chickens it has been; joy, tears, extremes of heat, cold, and wind (yes the ‘chook palace’ even ended up on its roof!), and lots and lots of The Good Eggs.
It’s a very tough decision to make, but one we hope will allow us to do it bigger and better next time, whilst we take a breather and refine our systems.
Importantly, we need to find good homes for 100 of our hens ASAP!
Given the hens are only 18 months old, and have had a great run out at Forty-K Farm, you should get another year or two good egg production, and many more years as quality pets, part time layers, kitchen waste destroyers, and garden-mulching companions.
Contact us via phone, text or email; we want to get names against all of our hens, ready for a big collection weekend both from the farm and the VEG Warehouse in Brunswick. Brunswick collection Saturday Feb 2 Farm collection Sunday Feb 3 (times to be confirmed) That way it will be business as usual with the eggs, and a clean exit date with no surprises.
Here’s the deal:
We’ve also got heaps of freshly milled, Certified Organic Chicken Feed, in 20kg bags, to take with the hens, or to keep your own existing hens happy. Finally an organic feed souced from within VIC & NSW, and not QLD, yay! Retails at $25/bag, or:
Or why not get started and buy a quality VEG Chook House, and receive three complentary hens and a bag of organic feed!?
Feel free to contact us for more info, or with other ideas (eg that you’d like to take over the chicken enterprise instead!).
If you’ve ever bought or eaten The Good Eggs, please take a moment to fill in our online survey; to know honestly how we have been received is the most valuable thing by far 
Thanks so much for your support and encouragement; to work with people who care where their food comes from is truly inspiring.
Check out the photos, above, and below!
Carey & Ellen at Forty-K Farm and Melton CSA
9746 7031
0423 554 398
careypriest@yahoo.com.au
http://www.meltoncsa.org
Highett Rd Melton
Wow – check out these photos with some pasture from our middle paddock. Look at that amazing green grass. What could possibly have caused it? Well known other than the generous bottoms of the chickens pictured in the background.
Our mobile chook house stays over a patch for a day or two dropping manure through the wire mesh floor. A couple of months later there’s some rain and then hey presto amazing green growth. Organic gets the goods.
These photos were taken a couple of months ago and now we’ve started the summer browning. But the pasture quality is still greatly greener than this time last year.
Using animals to improve soil carbon and pasture. Now that’s what we’re here for.
We finished today planting the last of our 150 trees from The Tree Project: black wattles, mallee wattles, sweet bursaria, manna gums and one or two other varieties that came to us without ID tags but seem to be doing all right! Thanks to Lex at the Tree Project.
Our tree planting efforts in the paddock were rewarded by getting to spend some time with our brown songlarks – two males in spectacular song flight! It took us a while to work out what this bird was, but we identified it from its distinctive metallic call.
. First time that we’ve noticed them here, and they join the fan tailed cuckoo as recent additions to our farm bird list.
Stay tuned for some photos of the lush spring grass – helped on by liberal dosings of chook and cow poo!
Sunday 19 August: Almonds are blossoming, and its now or never to give a light haircut and liberate the trees from old bird nets. Mulching to keep spring grass down, and munching – we’ll put on a nice spread, so keep your fingers crossed for good weather. See you soon we hope!
And not a moment too soon..!
On this early winter day, with a perfect size group of friends old and new, we prepared beds and planted a modest twenty square metres, with as much again to go in later this week.
Kindly supplied by Bromley Organics, the garlic is a strong flavoured, soft neck, Italian variety, and we can’t wait to grow it out!
Putting the Community back into Community Supported Agriculture!
Come on down to our film-night fundraiser:
Sunday May 27, 6-8pm, at the Yarraville Yoga Centre, level 1, 36 Ballarat Street Yarraville
Click on the image to enlarge, or at least to get a printable version to show your friends. Hope to see you there!
We featured in an article in The Age about local hero Nick Ray’s new website Local Harvest:
‘In Melton, 40 kilometres west of Melbourne, Carey Priest has taken a lease on a small farm. He’s starting slowly, beginning with a modest market garden and 100 free-range chooks that peck their way around the old olive and almond groves on the property.
Each week, Mr Priest supplies about 35 dozen eggs to several food co-operatives in the city’s inner west.
”Many of my customers have visited and seen the chickens and the conditions where their eggs come from,” he says. ”We run regular open days – it’s as transparent as it can possibly get.”
His farm is one of the initiatives listed on a new food website, Local Harvest, created by the Ethical Consumer Group.
Read the rest of the article here: http://m.smh.com.au/domain/green/taking-the-mileage-out-of-our-meals-20120324-1vqv2.html
And check out the fantastic Local Harvest website here: 
Pictured below is the first harvest, today, right then and there, of our much anticipated old school, heirloom maize variety “Kanga-maa”. Said to be one of the few strains remaining not yet contaminated by the rampant and unscrupulous spread of Genetically Modified Organisms (don’t blame the microbes, it’s not their fault). Whilst not every cob will be as full and lush as this one – and isn’t it a beauty! – we hope to now have enough seed, proven under local conditions, to grow a serious crop next season. Sown late October 2011, on the birthday of the most awesome Amanda, who grew the first batch in a tiny Yarraville plot!
We need the little white silica packs you may have lying around from supplement and or pharmaceutical pill packets; pills, nori sheets, biscuits, all manner of perishable items come packed with these moisture absorbing packs. They are non toxic, and can be safely dried, and used again and again. We need them for our seed storage, to keep moisture down. Please let us know if you can help!
It took awhile to realise that our broody Isa Brown really meant business, so full credit to her for seeing it through, even after being removed from the nest for weeks at first, she’s done it! The only names I’ve had for her are completely wrong (..Ben; broody hen, and now.. Men; mother hen), so help us out with a name!
Who said Isa Browns were bad mothers..
