Whew, it’s been a while! Had a family emergency, and the whole world sort of dropped away for a bit. But, I’m back.
Our winter garden is growing well. We’ve got lettuces, cabbage, mustard greens, bok choy, onions, kohl rabi…lots of stuff! The green beans lived out their life and withered with the chill, and we had a bit of a fail with the spaghetti squash. The spaghetti squash ended up getting powdery mildew, we thought we’d take care of it when we got back from vacation, and…it was dead by the time we got back. I’ll post on powdery mildew later.
Two out of our three garden beds. We're planning to build one more.
Bok choy, ready to pull out of the ground and eat!
For the first couple weeks of winter, our quails stopped laying. Quails depend on light as a queue to lay eggs. Less light, no eggs. So once it starts getting dark, we plug in some Christmas lights and leave those on for a couple hours. Pretty AND functional!
We moved the quail hutch closer to the house.
A full day's haul from our quails.
We’ve been eating out of the garden nearly every day now. The mustard greens are a quick producer. Instead of uprooting the plant, we’ve been clipping the leaves off, one by one. They’re great in stir fry and in soups.
Burgers made with produce from our garden - chives, quail eggs, and lettuce.
We’ve been working on a new, fairly involved project recently. I doubt it will save us much time, but it will save us money…
What do sushi rice, rice koji, and sake yeast have in common? HEY, get out of the picture, sake bottle!
We’re going to be homebrewing sake. The hubby and I love sake, so this will be a fun experiment. I’ll keep y’all posted.
3 comments
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March 17, 2010 at 4:31 pm
quickgardens
Welcome back. It’s that time again. Good to see you are still planting. Look forward to your next post.
April 19, 2010 at 6:58 pm
kelsey ruehl
hi i am 26 as well. my husband i also work fulltime and we have three kids. we have a little urban farm. i am getting 25 live day old quails in a week and wondered if you had any pointers
April 20, 2010 at 5:07 am
suburbansustainability
Oh, good luck with the quails! For pointers, since you work full-time and have kids, a good watering and feeding system really helps cut down on the daily time you have to invest in caring for your quails. We use those rabbit/guinea pig waterers with a catch tray beneath. I’ve seen some fancier setups, however, with a central area to re-fill water, so I may look into that. We use rabbit feeders we modified for the quails. Something you can re-fill easily, and that doesn’t have open access to the food. Quails are big food wasters. They fling bits of food about in search of that perfect bit (which, coincidentally, seems to look exactly like all the other bits). We covered the opening of our feeder with *ahem* an old, cut-up beer can, and then cut holes in it so they can stick their heads in. I’ll post about it in a couple days.
Recruit the kids for egg-gathering if they’re old enough. They’ll probably get a kick out of it, especially if they get one that’s still warm. Also, the more you handle them as babies, the more friendly they’ll be. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any specific questions!