It's actually a common question we get, "when are you getting a dog?". I guessed it surprised us too, when it finally happened.

Irregular laying and plastic training eggs moving nest boxes did confused us, but when the security camera detected movement after all the chickens had left the coop, it started to make sense.

The birth itself had been relatively successful, but before long it was clear that we weren't out of the woods just yet.

When we added Oreo and Toffee to the family in December, we thought we were bringing home two cows. As we watched Oreo get bigger over Autumn, our suspicions that we may have underestimated had grown.

Chickens have been a wonderful addition to the family. They do have their quirks and challenges, but their benefits far outweigh those. Eggs being only a small part!

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.

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.

Adding cattle to our hobby farm has been our plan since the day we moved in. After countless hours of researching breeds and weighing our options, we were finally ready to take the plunge!

Adding ten thousand livestock to a small hobby farm may sound outrageous, but that's just what we did when we populated our first bee hive.

The sheep were starting to out grow their modest paddock, and I had some new skills to learn.

This time we welcomed a surprise new entry to our family. It wasn't planned, but the addition of sheep bring with them a whole new challenge to our modest hobby farm.

There are a lot of things on a hobby farm that could go wrong. This one really took us by surprise.

I'm not entirely sure why I so badly wanted to have my own goats. One thing was for sure; There was a lot to learn.

An account of my experience shifting to the rural lifestyle from Melbourne to get started on a small hobby farm on a sloped property in the West of Gippsland.