Do you know when the best time to plant for the Metro-East region is? 6 weeks before the LAST frost date…For our area, the last frost date is April 19.
Since I don’t have seed mats, I will be starting inside the house next to all the elderberry cuttings as my greenhouse is not a hothouse, despite all those quail living inside it. Over the next year I’ll be learning more avenues of permaculture and ways to heat the greenhouse passively and with solar, but for now – my seeds hit the peat pots next week and the week thereafter. I still have work to do to get this greenhouse ready… as you can see in the picture here.
We are building Hugelkulture based raised beds, and my plan is to change as much of that backyard as I can to growing space and social space. It’s really torn up right now due to the puppy. Who knew that a part Husky, part Heeler, part Yellow Lab, part Great Dane would be a mud season rototiller?
A lot of my back yard looks like pigs rooted up crabgrass, and while I won’t be heartbroken for weed control, nor turned soil, I personally think I’d rather have gardens, and pathways and a gazebo and a fire pit and beauty there vs the shape of a long passed above ground swimming pool and a former weed jungle that grew up in it’s passing.
I should have taken before pictures, this yard has been a long time in the renovation as 6 years ago the back fence was falling in, and now it’s replaced with a 6-foot tall wood fence – that was three years ago. There were holes along the north wall of that fence where stumps were removed of long-dead trees, and those have been filled in – where they still have deep impressions that have caught my ankle once or twice over the years I’ve lived here. My plan is to continue to nourish the soil in those spaces and then sit large planters with elderberry starts on them , or other growing plants that can be removed to fill it in once again as it settles. It takes a long time to fill in a hole where a tree once stood. It’s a safety hazard, so I have to think smart.
My hope is to have a lot of starts (starting some for others too) and a lot of greenhouse babies coming on soon in the next few weeks. I am excited to say it won’t just be the plants as babies.
Our first hatch joins the grownups next week. Can you believe it? Blondie, Silver, Alpha, and their peers are off to the grownup cages. Some will be breeders, some will be waiting their turn to go to Freezer-camp. We suspect Alpha is female (I haven’t checked lately) so if so she gets to stick around. Blondie is growing into a beautiful lavender shade and male or female, that bird is sticking around, as is the lone Italian feather pattern male and of course Silver – our only Grau Fee pattern bird. Everyone else is named breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and even Blondie, Silver and Alpha are more descriptive names than actual appellations.
In my last post, I was sad about my eggs not making it. I was also understanding because it wasn’t the breeders fault. Yesterday, the 22nd of February we got a shipment of Celedon eggs as a replacement for the eggs that didn’t make it from the last shipment… these were not solid blue/green eggs that I really hoped for but they are pretty and will get to grow up to make more pretty birds as long as they meet the temperament check… the eggs had a lot of brown spots to them, but my goal is to selectively breed until I get my blue/green eggers. We are going to swap out our males in flock A for those carrying the Celedon gene as four of the hens there carry the gene as well.
Growing these up will only take a little while as these are not even in the incubator yet – they are sitting in sand point end down, waiting for 24 hours from when they arrived at our house and began to settle to go into the incubator. Sand is just easier for me to keep them in as I don’t have a quail egg rack and it’s nice and room temp. But in 9 weeks they’ll be in with the rest of the grownups, and poor Gary will have to build me yet another stacker cage or two (we have two right now, with 5 cages total as the new one is finished and ready to be moved into the greenhouse so the other can be moved out for retrofitting – design mods made while learning to build as to what was better for our needs.) As for what color pattern, and what we intend to encourage? We’re going to decide once they are old enough based on temperament as no one wants mean birds, the mean ones go to freezer camp first, and then we’ll see what we end up with after that.
86 of those 91 shipped to us made it to us unscathed. We are adding in 20 of our own birds’ eggs to the incubator this afternoon in hopes of seeing our own fertile eggs from the first batch (including our own Celedon gene carriers) hatch.
Poor Gary will be building me one or two more stackers soon I think.
That’s ok – we’ll have processed birds in the freezer at “camp” for our family and eggs available for sale. Contact us if interested. Annie is happy to enable yet another new Quail Mama or Quail Daddy like she was enabled just months ago… and Gary is happy to discuss what your needs are for a custom-built cage as it enables him to tell Annie he needs more tools to do even fancier builds.
Annie is a semi-retired homebirth midwife, the Director and head doula trainer for the MattieMarie Traditional Birth Studies program, and a Farmer’s granddaughter. It all ties into her mad plan to be as self-sufficient as she can while returning to her roots.