Suburban Sustainability

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.

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!

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!

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!