Homegrown Food and Baby Birds

Alas!  With our wedding a mere 17 days away, I haven’t had the time to post as much as I’d like.  No worries though, I have a bunch more things planned (solar cooker, mini-greenhouse, and upside-down planting, oh my!), and I’ll be back to regular posts starting the beginning of August when we get back from our honeymoon!

In the meanwhile, our suburban sustainability has begun to really pay off.

We get fresh quail eggs every day.

Fry them in a pan with a little bit of season salt...and they make amazing appetizers!

My fiance’s jalapeno plant is growing more peppers than I though possible for such a small bit of greenery.  We’re contemplating how to use them all.  Ideas?

He likes to surreptitiously slip these into stir fry.

This was our first zucchini.  We’ve got a couple more that are almost ready, and more that will be ready in the next weeks.  We chopped it up, fried it, seasoned it with soy paste, and it was DELICIOUS!  Best zucchini I’ve ever had.

And our thirteen tomato plants are all growing a ton of tomatoes.  I can tell we’ll be making a lot of gazpacho, tomato sauce, salads, and salsa.

These are the "Extreme Bush" variety. So far I'd recommend - very hardy, lots and lots of tomatoes, minimal staking required. Let's see how they taste!

Here’s what our garden looks like now.

Mostly tomatoes on the right, eggplants, sunflowers, squashes, and cucumbers on the left.

VEGGIE GARDEN’S DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-3 minutes.  We’ve set up an automatic sprinkling system with different sprinkler heads for the different plants.  I just go out there to do some sporadic weeding, fertilize once every week or two, and to check what veggies are ready for picking.  Easier than going to the grocery store.

In other news, my mom gave me a few hanging flower baskets.  They look lovely.  I water them twice a day.  A couple of times while watering them, a little finch flew out of one of the baskets.  “How strange,” I thought.  The third time it happened, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence.  I brought a chair over, and peered inside.

The bird had built a nest in there!  Here I was, unknowingly watering her eggs.  From that point on, I watered really carefully around the nest.

Yesterday morning, they hatched.

The lovely basket my mom gave to me.

And inside…

Tired babies!

Be back soon!

The Vegetable Garden – An Update

Our vegetable garden is thriving!  I can’t believe sometimes that we grew all these plants from seeds.  We have a couple of fails.  There’s the bok choy – which my mom pointed out were a similar vegetable but not exactly bok choy.  And there’s the watermelon – which is small but may yet thrive in the coming months.

Cucumber, on the other hand, is amazing!  We’ve got sooo many cucumbers growing on our plants.

Veggie Garden view from the gate.

 We have a couple of pots of herbs on our deck.

 

Tarragon and Thyme

Basil

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Research your herbs before you plant them in pots.  I planted the Thyme and Tarragon together.  Obviously, from the photo, they do not make good bedfellows!  The Tarragon’s space has been invaded by the Thyme.  They started out the same size.  I’m going to have to move it to its own individual pot and hope it survives the stress. 

This is the grapevine we're training to grow over our deck for shade. We have two of these, actually.

These are the eggplants we're growing on the deck. We ran out of room in the garden!

Back to the veggie garden!

Our tomatoes just started flowering. Can't wait for tomatoes! See the image at the top of this page for how they looked as seedlings.

One of our many cucumbers growing. See, there's another one in the background!

Our veggie garden from the other end.

And that’s that!

Just a head’s up, I’m getting married in a little over a month, so don’t expect too many posts between now and then.  No worries though, we’ve got a LOT more planned for our sustainability projects.  Expect posting to return to a regular schedule come August!

I’ll be doing posts on individual plant care – for those plants of ours that do well.  How often to fertilize, what fertilizer to use, where to plant them, what the soil should be like, etc.

Quail for Dinner

My family came over for dinner last night – for my mom’s birthday.  In honor of her birthday, we cooked up the quail.  We used this recipe.  Bacon-wrapped quail stuffed with goat cheese.  Does it get any better than that?

This is how you make quails extra nommable!

Ready to go into the oven...

Out of the oven...I'm so proud!

Here's what our dinner plates looked like.

So that’s what you can do with your processed quails.

We also started getting eggs regularly yesterday, so we fried up a few for appetizers.

Here's a man-hand for comparison. They taste really good.

Suburban sustainability – starting to see the pay-off!

Processing Quail (Graphic Photos)

We processed some of our extra male quails last night.  It’s my mother’s birthday this weekend, so they’ll make a great part of bday dinner.  I won’t say it wasn’t difficult, especially given that I love animals, but I feel if you’re going to eat meat, might as well face up to the ugly side.

This is the method that we used.

Turn back now if you don't want to see birds turned into nommables!

Trouble in Paradise Part III and First Egg!

I’m learning some more about the quails. We removed all of the males, and then we dumped the biggest male back out into the pen.  Quiet so far.  I think we have about 2 unusually loud quails.  Ideally, they’re only supposed to crow 2-3 times a day, and it shouldn’t be that loud.  From observation, the rest of the males don’t crow as loudly or as often.  So now we’re considering breeding for quietness as well as size.

In other news, I went out there this afternoon, peeked into the shelter, aaaaaand, WE GOT OUR FIRST EGG!  My fiance and I totally high-fived over it.  For those of you keeping track, that’s seven weeks to the day from hatch day (only one hatched a day before, so I count Thurs as hatch day).

It's so little, it barely fits in the quail egg carton! Little baby egg!

Trouble in Paradise – Part II

Removing some of the males has really helped.  We have two males and nine females outside right now.  I’d heard the male crowing described as the loudness of a cat’s meow, but I’d really put it at somewhere between meowing and the barking of a small dog.  They seem to get into fits of crowing 2-3 times, and then quieting for 20 minutes-an hour.

This would normally be ok, except for two things.  One, our neighborhood is very very quiet.  It’s one of the things I noticed when we were looking at houses.  Like a graveyard.  Two, I like to sleep with the window open and I am a light sleeper.  No one else has complained, but it bothers me.

We have a space between our cabinets in the garage.  I think it’d make a great area for a pen.  This will also allow me to do some selective breeding instead of relying on colony breeding. 

Right now I’m in the process of designing an easy-to-construct, attractive pen with a couple features that will reduce mess and clean-up time.  It will be divided into 2′x2′ sections (large enough for 4 quail each) where I can do some selective breeding.  My little hobby will be to breed as large a coturnix quail as possible.

Hopefully this will also provide a nice reference for those people who would like to keep their quail indoors!

Coming soon…more natural home cleaning solutions.  We are also working on a larger project – brewing our own sake!

Trouble in Paradise

The elder group of quails is six weeks old, and they’ve started to crow.  At first, it was cute and little.  It’s very “wild bird” sounding.

This morning I woke up at 5AM to A LOT of loud crowing.  We had our windows open, and I’m sure this exacerbated the problem, but the weather is so nice it seems a shame to keep them closed.  Covering the hutch seemed to work, but I am not pleased with this development.

I’ve put four males into a cage in the garage (it has windows, no worries), so we’ll see if that quiets down the crowing outside.  Less males to more females means less crowing – or so I’ve been told.  I previously had a 1:1 ratio.  Ideally you should have 1 male to 3-5 females.

Granted, the crowing is no louder than a dog barking or a cat fight…but who wants to hear that at 5AM?

I’ll keep you posted!

Garden and Quail Update

Things have progressed quickly over this past month.  I’ve got seven new quail babies, the 4-week-olds have been moved into their outdoor enclosure, and we’ve planted our seedlings in the garden.  I’m very satisfied with what we’ve accomplished.

GARDEN

We grew all of these plants from seeds.  MUCH cheaper than buying a seedling at the store.  And you can get that wonderful smug feeling that you did it from start to finish =D

Green Zebra tomato plant

Bok Choy plant. I already want to eat them.

Butternut squash

Zucchini and Cucumber

Strawberries, so yum!

Our garden (I'm standing at the gate)

QUAILS

We moved them outside when they were 3 weeks old.  They’re doing really well and are getting bigger every day!

The hutch - we put them all in the upper section.

Quails venturing out of the shelter.

Quails snacking on some weeds! They're great little garbage disposals =)

I’ll post another update in a month or so.  Thanks for reading!

Making Your Own Paneer

Background: I looooove paneer.  It’s not easy to find where I live.  I hate going grocery shopping, and I especially hate going to a specific store only to buy 1-2 items.

Paneer is a type of cheese, used in several Indian recipes (paneer tikka masal, saag paneer, etc.).  It is very very tasty and is very high in protein.  Here’s a recipe.

INGREDIENTS:
9 cups milk (use whole milk)
1 1/4 tbsp salt
1/4 cups lemon juice

Lemon juice, salt, and whole milk. It's very simple.

Heat the milk to boiling – either on the stove or in the microwave.  Add the 1/4 cup lemon juice and turn off the heat.

Curds will form.

Put four layers of cheesecloth in a colander.  Pour the mixture through this.  Let it sit and drain.

Gather up the cheesecloth into a purse.  Tie this over a pot or over the sink and allow it to drain at room temperature for an hour.

Unfold the cheesecloth, reshape into a rectangle, and refold.

Put paneer in between two plates, and weigh down with something heavy.  Let this sit here for 1.5 hours, re-tightening the cheesecloth every 30 minutes.

Take it out when it’s done, and store it in an airtight container.  Cut into cubes when cooking for use in stir fry or other dishes.  Yum!

TIME INVESTMENT: Approximately 3 hours total from start to finish.  Active time runs about 15-20 minutes.  Very simple to make, and I will be doing this again!

Homemade Stick Deodorant

Most antiperspirants contain some iteration of aluminum in them.  Clogging your pores with aluminum is not the best idea for your health, and as my mom constantly reminds me – it has been linked to Alzheimer’s.

I mixed and matched a few recipes I found online for a homemade stick deodorant.  So…we’ll have to see how it works.

INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup arrowroot powder
5-6 Tbsp coconut oil
2 Vitamin E gelcaps
some drops of a nice-smelling oil (I just nabbed some hand sanitizer that smells really strongly, so I’m not sure if it’ll work or not)

My collection of ingredients

Mix together the baking soda and the arrowroot powder.  Arrowroot powder functions similarly to cornstarch.  If you can’t find arrowroot powder, you can use cornstarch.  However, I’d heard…things can grow in cornstarch, so I played it safe and stuck to arrowroot powder.  Fun fact though – coconut oil has antimicrobrial properties, so perhaps it balances out with the cornstarch.

I like to use a fork to mix things up. I find it gets lumps out better.

Take the two Vitamin E gelcaps, poke ‘em with a knife, and squeeze the contents out into the bowl.

Yum, Vitamin E!

I microwaved the coconut oil for about 30 seconds so it would turn liquid, and then mixed it in with everything else.  Add your nice-smelling essential oils (I hear lavender works well).  Mix it together well.

Then spoon (or fork) it into an empty deodorant container.

It smells kind of like I want to eat it...maybe I'll use lavender oil next time.

Try to level it off and then cap it.

Hmmm...Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorahydrex GLY makes up 14.8% of my old anti-perspirant.

I hear it takes a day or two to set, but since oil has a low melting temperature, I thought throwing it in the refrigerator might speed the process along.

What you've all been waiting for...the inside of my refrigerator!

TIME INVESTMENT: 10-15 minutes.

I’ll keep you posted on how it works.  I may also try a recipe for a cream deodorant later, and I’ll let you know which one works better.