You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2009.
When our friends acquired three chickens for their backyard, I was pretty jealous. Fresh eggs every morning? Heck yes! I considered the possibility of getting my own, but their size and their obvious chicken-ness seemed prohibitive.
Then, I read an article that talked about quails and how they produce more eggs and meat for the amount of feed you give them.
Coturnix quails only require 1 sq. ft. of space per bird, are rather unobtrusive, and are quieter than hens. You can keep them in wire cages, rabbit hutches, or even aquariums.
Their eggs taste just like chicken eggs, with a higher yolk to white ratio. They make the cutest bite-sized deviled eggs known to humankind.
Extra eggs that wouldn't fit in the incubator
Coturnix quails can be kept in colonies, with a ratio of 1 male to every 3-5 females. As with chickens, you can keep hens only if you’re just interested in eggs.
They reach maturity at 6 weeks and will start laying around then. If you’re interested in eating them, they can be butchered at 8-10 weeks (for maximum size). They’re easy to care for, taking about 10 minutes of your daily time.
Downside – unlike chickens, it’s difficult to have live chicks shipped to you. They’re much smaller and much more delicate. You have to order upwards of 50, and from what I hear, many pass away on the trip.
I decided to incubate some ebay-bought eggs (yep, you can buy ‘em off of ebay!) in my own homemade incubator. Earliest expected hatch date for my eggs is April 1st, latest April 3rd. I’ll keep the blog posted.
I’ll also show you how to build your own one of these:
My homemade incubator and homemade egg turner
And I’ll show you how to build one of these:
Built from scratch by 2 people who didn't know what they were doing!
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: Still working that out…will post time investment for each related project.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: Estimated 10 minutes, will be posting daily time investments for each stage from egg to brooder to outside pen.
Composting is the ultimate in recycling. You eat a banana, throw the peel into your compost, it rots and becomes rich compost, you use the compost to nurture your vegetable garden.
So…how do you get a compost bin? Easy! You can buy one, or make one yourself. OR, if you’re lucky, you can get one for free.
Check both your city and your county websites for free compost bin offers. Sometimes they’ll make you take a class or take a quiz. I had to read a short booklet on composting, then took an online quiz. Our compost bin showed up on the doorstep a few days later.
If you don’t have this option, you can purchase one from your local hardware store. There are some pretty fancy compost bins out there with some neat features – it all depends what you’re willing to spend.
My mom built hers out of 1/2″ hardware cloth. She shaped it into a cylinder, and it sits inside her garden. It works for her.
What goes in a compost bin?
-Kitchen scraps
-Grass clippings
-Leaves
-Paper
-Manure from poultry or herbivorous animals
-Hair
What doesn’t go in a compost bin?
-Meat
-Bones
-Greasy foods
-Invasive weeds
The materials that go into a compost bin can be divided into two categories: Green (nitrogen-rich) and Brown (carbon-rich). Green items include the aforementioned manure, hair, green leaves, fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and weeds. Brown items include coffee filters, dry leaves, dried and brown grass clippings, dry leaves, paper, and eggshells. Ideally, you’d want a 3:1 ration of Brown to Green. Your bin can take anywhere from 3-6 months to turn into compost, depending on how well you tend to it.
Keep something on your countertop in which to place your kitchen scraps for composting. We use a tupperware container. Something with a lid is preferable. That way you’re not walking back and forth between your kitchen and the compost bin.
A larger container with a lid would be nice...we're working on that
Once in a while, you’ll need to water your compost bin (should have the moisture of a damp sponge). You’ll also need to turn the bin once every 1-2 weeks. You don’t have to literally turn the whole thing upside-down (though there are commercially sold bins out there that you CAN turn!). We use a cultivator tool and just rake it so that everything gets mixed up.
This is ours with fresh scraps thrown in
Refer to my prior post for what our freshly turned compost looks like. If you do it right, it should only have a faint smell.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Put your compost bin in a convenient location. We had ours by the back fence before, and none of us wanted to walk out there to throw the scraps in. We’ve put it in our vegetable garden, close to our kitchen (that’s it there on the left).
It's right next to the gate. That there is the kitchen window.
Also, if you end up getting one of the plastic ones with no bottom, dig it into the ground a bit. This will make your bin more sturdy, and less likely to fall over on a windy day or if someone accidentally leans on it or if your dog is trying to eat something in it…you get the idea.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 5 minutes-1 hour, depending on how you go about acquiring your bin.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5 minutes to toss stuff into the bin, 10 minutes every 1-2 weeks to turn the bin.
Stay tuned for quails!
We went to Lowe’s today to grab some supplies for our sprinkler system in the veggie garden and came back home with two fruit trees. Funny how that works, huh?
The three of us eat a lot of fruit – they make great snacks, smoothies, and dessert! We already have an orange tree in our backyard, so we bought an avocado tree and a tree with 4 types of pluots grafted onto it. My parents are skeptical of the last one, but it looks like 3/4 branches are showing the beginnings of fruit. The 4th has some blurb about cross-pollination with Japanese plums. D’oh well.
First though, we had two trees in our yard we intended to get rid of.
Honey, you have to pull the tree out. I'm taking photos for my blog.
The first was this prickly evergreen. I hate it. Its needles go through my gardening gloves, and it looks dumb by itself. We planted the avocado here ($25 at Lowe’s).
Much better!
We get high winds here, so it’s very important to support the tree. The next tree to get the bucket (ha ha ha) was the willow tree. Our neighbor gave it to us, so we planted it…but the more we looked at it the less we liked it. We’re considering a heist-like maneuver and planting the tree out by the river when no one’s looking.
I think he can see into our yard too...here's hoping he doesn't notice!
We planted the pluot tree here ($60, ouch ouch ouch! But the kid loves pluots, and so do we…).
I hope it eventually provides shade for the quail hutch
We also moved our compost bin from next to the quail hutch over to our garden. Devin used to pick things out of it and chew on them (why, oh why, are dogs so gross?). Since our garden is gated off, she won’t be able to reach it. Plus, it’s a lot closer to the kitchen.
We'll be able to use some of this with the garden very soon
We’re going to get a few more trees for our yard – probably almond, dwarf cherry, and lemon. Most trees come with instructions on how often they should be fertilized, how to care for them, and how to plant them. If you can, buy plant-specific fertilizer. I learned from my mom that the orange tree needed citrus fertilizer. We were using an all-purpose fertilizer before, and it wasn’t working.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Shop around, and fork out a little extra $$ for the larger saplings. Our orange tree was $15 and is about hip-height. Pretty pathetic, huh? We’re too cheap to replace it, but I would have much rather spent $10-20 extra to have something that is producing fruit now, instead of having to wait a couple of years.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 1-4 hours. It took us 4 because of the rocks and tarp we have, plus our soil is hard-as-rock clay. We mixed in a lot of planting soil.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-10 minutes. It takes only a couple minutes to water (less if you have automatic watering set up), and a little more time 1/month or so to go grab the fertilizer and fertilize them. When fruit is produced, you’ll want to spend some time picking them so they don’t fall to the ground and rot. I’ve learned the hard way that rotting fruit is a welcome invitation for a fruit fly infestation in your home.
For this weekend, I hope to post an introduction to keeping quail, as well as keeping a compost heap and how you may be able to get a compost bin for free (depending on where you live)!
Several months back, I mentioned to my mom that I was interested in getting a soy milk maker. I’m not too keen on all the hormones they pump into the cows, especially with a growing kid at home, and the organic milk is just too expensive.
She happened to have one lying around, and she gave it to me! Now, it’s very old (she used it when I was a kid), and she no longer had the directions, but it seemed pretty self-explanatory.
We checked the local co-op for soybeans, but all they had was the frozen edamame (don’t use this!! These are soybeans harvested at an earlier time. They won’t work). My mom recommended Laura Soybeans online. You can buy online, but obviously it would be cheaper to buy local. I bought 13lbs for $20 including shipping. Still looking for a local source…
Lots 'o beans!
I take 3.5-4oz of these and soak them in 1-2 inches of water. The beans need to be soaked for 8-10 hours. It’s easy to plop ‘em in and go off to work, or to soak them overnight.
That's my colander inside a pot
I hold on to the water used to soak the beans in and water my garden with it. I fill the water up to the 2nd line on the soy milk maker. The soaked beans go into the filter cup, along with 2tbsp of oats. The oats make the milk thicker and give it a less watery texture. I put 1/2tsp of vanilla into the water as well as 4tbsp brown sugar.
Stir the sugar and vanilla into the water until dissolved
Then I screw on the filter cup, pop the top on, plug it in, press the buttons, and let it run! In 10-15 minutes (I don’t keep track, since I’m usually doing something else) the soymilk is done.
Soy milk makers still look a lot like this
It comes out all hot and foamy. I like to drink it like this.
The grounds are great for composting (if you have a compost heap…if not, stay tuned!), and the milk is delicious. My fiance compares it to pudding, and my stepson-to-be loves it. Sure, I’m trading hormones for a smidgen of sugar, but I think it a decent trade-off. I’m still tweaking the recipe, so I’ll let you know if I find a better way of doing it.
Delicious! It goes quickly, so go make some more!
The soy milk maker itself isn’t very expensive. I saw a similar model to mine sell on ebay for $55. Going by the calculations on the Laura Soybeans website, it costs me approximately $1.25/gallon to make. I’m sure I can do it much cheaper if I find a local source.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: However long it takes you to buy a soy milk maker and beans
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5-10 minutes, soak the beans for 8-10 hours, but you don’t have to watch them soak, just as you don’t have to watch the soy milk maker for the 10-15 minutes it takes until it beeps =)
Due to the money it saves, the low time investment, and the low initial $$ investment, I’d highly recommend making your own soymilk. I’ll venture into making my own tofu from this later.
We moved into our house in July. Most of the yard was already landscaped, and one of the side yards had been turned into a dog run.
The side yard gets a good amount of sun, and we have a little dog – thus no use for a dog run…so we decided that this area would be our garden. We thought, “Oh, we’ll just move this bark here.” In reality, it turned out to be a lot tougher than that.
Note the gate - perfect for keeping puppies out of gardens!
We moved the bark, and there was a black tarp underneath. So we moved the tarp, and there was sand underneath. FINALLY we moved the sand, but there was hard-as-rock clay beneath that.
Over two weekends we bagged up all the bark and put the sand into bins. We didn’t throw it away – we posted it for free on craigslist and a few different people picked it up.
We wet down the clay and used a shovel to loosen it up. We bought a lot of garden soil (we bought most on clearance from Target – this was at the end of summer – for $2/bag). We mixed this with the clay and made raised beds.
Bins, bags, and a hose, oh my!
Those were our winter crop. Of everything we grew, the chinese cabbage and the broccoli proved the most prolific. The taste difference between the store-bought chinese cabbage was pretty large. Home-grown was much more flavorful and very, very tender. Small differential between home-grown and store-bought broccoli.
Here’s what it looks like now.
Two neat little rows...we kept some of the sand.
The black hose going around we just installed yesterday. We’re planning on adding an automatic watering system back here to reduce the daily time investment. We’ve pulled up most of the winter veggies and planted some seedlings out here. The sugar snap peas seem to have come into their own just now.
Pretty flowers and edible = a winner
The strawberry patch is starting to grow some little strawberries now that the weather is warmer.
Can't wait to eat these!
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE:
If you’ve got clay for soil, do yourself a favor and borrow a rototiller from someone. Breaking up the clay was back-breaking work. That’s what took us the most time. Do raised beds so you can have better control over the content of the soil. Keep in mind how deep the roots will go. Cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower all have shallow roots. Plants such as tomatoes and carrots have roots that go deeper.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 2 weekends’ worth of labor, less if you don’t have to move bark and tarp and sand.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5-10 minutes
Tomorrow – an entry on making your own soymilk.
I think the first thing a lot of people think of when they think of self-sufficiency is…vegetables! Anyone can grow veggies, even people who live in apartments.
I’m trying something new this year – growing vegetables from seed instead of buying the young plants from the nursery. I find you can get more variety this way, and it’s $2.50 tops for a whole packet of seeds as opposed to $2.50 for 1-6 plants.
I planted some seeds back in early February, but I think I transplanted them outside too early (unusually late frost killed a few) and apparently we have a slug problem.
OH, the carnage! Alas!
We’ve started to go out and pick the slugs off at 10:30PM at night, but this takes time and effort, and that is what we here at Suburban Sustainability are seeking to avoid. I’ll address ways to combat slugs and snails in a later post.
Starting seeds indoors is a great way to get a head-start on the growing season. It’s >70 degrees F outside right now here, and judging from the size of the plants at the local hardware store, I could have started my seeds in December or January for a super-early start.
I bought some of these Ferry-Morse mini-greenhouse plant trays ($9.00 for three with plastic covers, drainage trays, and 72 little pots per tray) and some seed-starting mix ($5.00). I will attest that they are brown-thumb-proof, as a chronic brown-thumber myself.
Note the "Quick 'n Easyᵀᴹ" in the upper left corner...YES!
This stuff is super-fluffy, so I like to wet it down a couple times before planting the seeds in it. Just a note: this can be done indoors, but I’m the kind of person that ends up throwing dirt everywhere despite my best intentions. Do it outdoors or in the garage if you’re this type of person. Your spouse/significant other/cat will thank you for it.
My Selection
Cucumber died of frost, corn and zucchini were eaten, and spinach died of reasons unknown. I’m doing a take 2 on that one. Still trying to earn that green thumb…
P.S. Next time I’m going to avoid buying the plastic receptacles. They say that the plant easily “pops out” and that the receptacles are reusable. I found this to be the case only a fraction of the time. I ended up cutting a bunch of them up and tossing them. I’m going to go for the biodegradable receptacles next time ($2.00 for 50).
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE:
Butternut Squash
All of these Butternut Squash seedlings were planted at the same time. Look at those two new nubs of green! I think that’s about 2 weeks from the time the first ones came out. When I transplanted outdoors, I threw away what looked to be empty receptacles with non-growing seeds. They probably would have sprouted. So be patient, and give it some time. You may be pleasantly surprised.
In several weeks, you’ll have something that looks like this!
Mostly Tomatoes - will be transplanting to cups soon...
Keep them next to the window, and try to rotate the trays 180 degrees once in a while so the seedlings don’t lean permanently in one direction. Watering is minimal with the plastic covers – the soil should feel moist to the touch. I leave the cover on until the seedlings get too tall, then I take it off and water every 1-2 days.
I prefer to keep mine in the guest bedroom with the incubator, since it warms the air a bit…but that’s another post =)
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 15-30 min trip to the hardware store or nursery, 10-20 min to plant the seeds = 25-50 minutes
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2 minutes
Hello, my name is Andrea Stewart, I’m 26 years old, am engaged to be married on July 11, and have an 11-year-old stepson-to-be. We moved into our suburban home last July. Both of us are interested in preserving the environment (and our bank accounts!). We have a puppy named Devin, a cat named Zorro, and four fancy goldfish named Mojo-a-Jo-Jo, Cujo, Godzilla, and Fry.
Since my fiance and I work full-time, and our location is prohibitive, we’ll be looking at simplistic ways to increase our self-sufficiency.
Our Location
Ah, home sweet home. We live approximately 5.5 miles from downtown Sacramento. When the weather is nice, we like to bicycle in to work. We are by no means in the middle of the country.
Home, Sweet Home
The view from our front yard - there's the Port of Sacramento
Our Backyard Deck
Our Backyard, we'll get to that terracotta-colored thing later...
As you can see, another constraint we’re working with is our neighbors. Met ‘em on both sides, HOWEVER, they can see straight into our yard. So anything we do has to be neat, contained, legal, and quiet. Preferably, it will be visually attractive. No goats, chickens, miniature cattle…anything like that. We plan to live here for a very long time, and would prefer not to be chased out of the neighborhood with torches and pitchforks.
I’ll be documenting both our successes (so you can duplicate them!) and our failures (so you can avoid them =( ).
So here’s to saving our planet and our wallets one household at a time!
…and in case none of that sounded good to you, here’s a gratuitous puppy picture begging you to stick around.
I'm a puppy
