Tarcombe Farm

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Tarcombe Farm Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Tarcombe Farm, Farm, Little River.

Tarcombe Farm, Little River
Established 1864

Tarcombe Farm breeds Welsh Ponies, Fjord Horses, pygmy goats plus chickens for your backyard, raised with a focus on welfare, natural herd/flock living and thoughtful, regenerative farming.

Have you spotted the little white hut on our front fence? The Little River local's have!Five dollars a dozen and a carto...
23/09/2026

Have you spotted the little white hut on our front fence? The Little River local's have!

Five dollars a dozen and a carton return. That's all you need for fresh yummy eggies.

It's Laura's side hustle, and so far her customers have been excellent. The cartons come back, people put the money in. In the few weeks it's been out there we've only lost a few dozen eggs to somebody not paying, which is a much better rate than we expected.

If you're having a rough week (cost of living and all that!) and you need a dozen eggs, take them. We're not going to chase anyone for five dollars. We're happy to help out. All we ask is that you leave Laura a note saying thank you, because she's the one filling that hut and she's the one paying for the chicken feed.

What goes in there is the eggs that didn't make the grade for hatching, plus the excess, and we get far more eggs than we need. A hatching egg has to be a good size and a clean egg, because anything sitting on that shell can be drawn through it and kill the embryo when incubating. So we're fussy. A slightly small egg with some barnyard charm is a perfectly good breakfast but a bad bet in an incubator.

Anyone else running an honesty box? Tell us how yours goes.

Have your girls started laying again?Ours have. Every winter the eggs go quiet and every winter somebody on social media...
18/09/2026

Have your girls started laying again?

Ours have. Every winter the eggs go quiet and every winter somebody on social media asks whats wrong with their hens. Laying runs on daylight, and a hen needs somewhere around fourteen hours of it to stay in full production.

Birds have a second set of light receptors sitting deep in the brain. The long wavelengths, the red end of the light, pass straight through skull and tissue to reach them. Those receptors start the whole thing off. They tell the hypothalamus to release GnRH, that tells the pituitary to put out LH and FSH, and those are the hormones that wake the o***y up and get follicles developing again.

So a hen is measuring the length of the day through the top of her head. Super power!

We know the eyes aren't running it because ducks that had their eyes removed for research (ppor duckies!!) still responded to the change in light and came into breeding condition anyway.

The moult is the other half of it. Feathers are almost entirely protein, and a hen rebuilding a whole set of feathers has nothing spare to put into an egg. So they stop, they grow feathers, they look shocking for a few weeks, and then the days stretch out and it all switches back on.

Nothing we did. Just the light coming back. And the hut is full again.

Ever stood over the brooder wondering if your chicks are warm enough?The textbooks tell us the magic number is 32 to 35 ...
14/09/2026

Ever stood over the brooder wondering if your chicks are warm enough?

The textbooks tell us the magic number is 32 to 35 degrees Celsius for the first week, dropping about three degrees a week until they're fully feathered. Set it there by all means. Then stop looking at the temperature and look at the chicks, because they'll tell you.

All heaped up in a pile directly under the heat plate (or lamp)? They're cold.

Flat out against the far walls, as far from the heat as they can get? Too hot.

Spread out evenly across the whole brooder, some eating, some asleep on their faces the way chicks do, making that soft contented cheeping rather than a shrill one? That's exactly right.

It's the same instinct that works under a broody hen. She doesn't sit on them all day. They pop under, warm up, and then come back out when they're ready. A good heat plate or lamp setup allows them to do the same, they take themselves off the heat the moment they've had enough.

Get it right and you get quiet, busy chicks, doing chicky things. Get it wrong and you'll hear about it. Loudly.

We love to use heat plates here, set up on an angle. This allows the chicks to choose their own level of warmth under the plate. And of course, as they grow, we adjust the height of the plate as well as the temperature. An added bonus is a plate provides a hiding space that a regular heat lamp does not. Just like a mother hen, they can "hide" under the heat plate.

We have a range of day-old to week-old chicks available at the moment, various breeds all looking for their new home. We will shortly have some unsexed birds coming off the heat as well for those of you that don't have brooder setups.

What's in your brooder at the moment? Tell us below. Even better, spam us with cute chicken pics!

Brooder duty. These two were happy to sit still for a photo, which is more than can be said for the rest of them. We hav...
12/09/2026

Brooder duty. These two were happy to sit still for a photo, which is more than can be said for the rest of them. We have a range of day-old to week-old chicks available, various breeds all looking for their new home. We will shortly have some unsexed birds coming off the heat as well for those of you that don't have brooder setups.

19/08/2026

Day Old Chickies!!

We have our first hatch of the season, and all these wee little cuties are looking for homes. Must go in groups of at least 3 and they will need heat obviously. All unsexed.

Rhode Island Red $15ea (3 available)
Light Sussex $15ea (12 available)
Easter Egger / Rainbow Layers $10ea (30 available)
Australorps (Black, Blue & Splash) $15ea (10 available)

Pickup from the farm in Little River, or can be pickup Glenroy by arrangement.

Now here's a beauty. This gorgeous blue egg came from one of our Cream Legbars, and there are actually two things going ...
30/07/2026

Now here's a beauty. This gorgeous blue egg came from one of our Cream Legbars, and there are actually two things going on with it worth a closer look.

First, that lovely blue colour. It comes from a pigment called oocyanin, which our Legbars carry thanks to the blue-egg gene. What's special about blue is that, unlike brown pigment which only coats the outside of the shell, oocyanin is laid down right through the shell as it forms. So a true blue egg like this one is blue all the way through, inside and out.

And second, see all those little bumps dotted across the surface? Those are extra bits of calcium, tiny raised granules of calcium carbonate that settle on the shell as it's being made. It's known as a pimpled egg, and it gives the shell that gently gritty, sandpaper feel. It's completely harmless, doesn't affect the egg inside at all, and it's perfectly good to eat.

Two little quirks of nature on one egg. We think it just adds to the charm.

Have you ever picked up an egg dotted with tiny white speckles like this one and wondered what they are? Good news, ther...
29/07/2026

Have you ever picked up an egg dotted with tiny white speckles like this one and wondered what they are? Good news, there's nothing wrong with it at all. Those little pale flecks are simply extra deposits of calcium on the outside of the shell. An eggshell is made mostly of calcium carbonate, laid down layer by layer while the egg spends around twenty hours forming inside the hen.

If that calcium-laying process gets a little interrupted or uneven, some extra calcium can settle in spots on the surface, giving you these speckles and bumps. They're completely harmless, don't affect the egg inside one bit, and the egg is perfectly good to eat.

We think they give each egg its own bit of character, a lovely little reminder that every one is made by hand, so to speak, by our hens.

28/07/2026

Ever wondered what we're looking for when we candle an egg? Here's a little lesson from the farm.

Inside every egg, at the rounded end, there's a small pocket of air called the air cell. Normally it stays put, held neatly in place between two membranes just under the shell. But if an egg gets knocked, shaken or jostled about, those membranes can come loose and the air cell detaches.

When we then candle the egg and gently tilt it, you can see the tell-tale sign: the air bubble rolls and wobbles around instead of sitting still, sometimes breaking up into lots of little bubbles drifting through the white (the albumen), just like in this video. It's called a detached or ruptured air cell, and it's one of the most common things we spot when candling eggs that have been handled roughly or travelled a long way.

It doesn't always mean the egg won't develop, but a damaged air cell can make it harder for a chick to hatch, which is exactly why candling is such a handy tool for us to check what's going on inside. In this specific egg where it's fully ruptured, you can see all the air bubbles rolling around. We wouldn't bother incubating this because it's highly likely that it would not develop at all.

Sometimes, if it's just a little bit of detachment of the membrane, the egg will still successfully incubate.

Do you have a favourite chook? Does one of yours always come running up to you?Researchers believe hens can recognise an...
27/07/2026

Do you have a favourite chook? Does one of yours always come running up to you?

Researchers believe hens can recognise and remember more than 100 individual faces - both other chickens and their favourite people! We definitely see it here. We have one called Cinnamon who absolutely adores Laura and comes running for pats whenever Laura heads out to the coop. She tolerates me too... but mostly because I'm the one who brings the food!

Tell us about your favourite feathered friend below.

We love watching our chicks grow. Did you know their feathers come in a set order? When they first hatch they're covered...
26/07/2026

We love watching our chicks grow. Did you know their feathers come in a set order? When they first hatch they're covered in soft, fluffy down, but the wing feathers are the very first to appear, growing in within just days of hatching. The tail feathers come through next, usually around a couple of weeks old, and the body feathers fill in last of all.

By around three to four weeks most chicks are fully feathered. That's why they can look a bit gangly and half-dressed in the middle of it all, with feathered wings but bodies still catching up. It's all part of growing up strong and healthy even though they look a little 'ugly duckling' for a bit.

If you're interested, we will have day-old chicks available as the season moves on, lovingly raised with great care from the very start. We also take order for hatching out chicks on demand - part of the way we reduce wastage of unwanted chickens being hatched out.

Address

Little River, VIC
3211

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