Ugh....HEAT

This heat is ridiculous. Hottest July on record. I can't remember the last day that the high was below 112, with most days being 115+. It's going to be 120+ for the next few days. The weather report always seems to be 5 degrees cooler than it is at my house, I put a second thermometer up because I thought maybe the first one was wrong. I went out and did a little tree pruning the other day because it was "only" 110, a beautiful day for yardwork.
It wouldn't be that big of a deal if I could just stay inside in my nearly pleasant 85 degree home, but if the chickens and quail are going to survive (the muscovies have a much higher tolerance for heat) I have to bring them ice for their water baths every few hours. I know those of you in the NW are dealing with 105 temps that must seem out of this world to you with little or no air conditioning, me and my birds sympathize.

Sorry for all the complaining. On a brighter note, the baby quail are doing well and I'm looking forward to replacing some of my crazy/aggressive birds with them in about a month.

Quail hatch #2!

This past weekend we had our second round of quail eggs hatch. These were all from eggs that my quail or my friend's quail laid. They hatched pretty early, days 14 and 15, and a couple on day 16 instead of the usual 17. I think this may have something to do with the fact that the eggs were laid in 100-110 degree weather, that may have given the ones that hatched a jumpstart on the incubation.

We had 39 birds hatch out of 92 eggs set, which is a meager 42% hatch rate, but a lot of the set eggs were old and were stored in far less than ideal conditions, at 85 degrees instead of the recommended 55-65 degrees. Three birds died, two of those were very sickly runts from the beginning and one I think was smothered or trampled the first night. Overall I'm pleased with the results and I'm going to do another hatch or two in the fall.

I am thinking about selling sexed quads (one male, three females) for $17.50 or you can add another female and make it an even $20. The birds would all be 3-4 weeks old. This is much cheaper than you can get them at any feed store around here. This seems like a good deal for the buyer and compensates me for my time, feed and hatching costs. I wonder how many takers I'd find around town.

Produce from June

Here's a shot of some of what's been growing at the tiny farm this summer. This shot was taken in late June, but I'm just now getting to it. The big thing that looks like a melon is actually a squash, the little green things in the lower right are a native passionfruit that is a volunteer in my yard. The jar has sun-dried tomatoes in it dried in the solar dehydrator, I plan on saving 24 cups of sun dried tomatoes for the winter as well as trying to grow some winter tomatoes. I have recently planted: Sub-Arctic Plenty, Stupice, and Siberian tomatoes. Hopefully I'll get closer to my year round tomato goal!

Been awhile! Birds in the heat.

Sorry for my lack of posts. Here's a synopsis of what has been happening at the oven usually known as the Tiny Farm.

It's been ridiculously hot here. This whole week the high is around 115 and the lows are in the low 90's. This means that the birds never get a break. The muscovies were being real troopers until today when they finally started panting and just hanging out next to the water dish in the shade all day and completely giving up on chasing me around, which seems to be their favorite thing to do. I don't know why they don't just get in the water.
The chickens are far less heat tolerant than the ducks and are really miserable. Every morning around 5:30 am (when it's a brisk 94 degrees) I give the birds some cool vegetables (lettuce, melon, cucumbers etc) to get them hydrated and cooled off. The sprinklers come on around 6:30 and get the area under their favorite bushes nice and wet. Around 9:30-10:30 when the temps get to around 105, I put frozen water bottles with no lids, in shallow pans under their bushes so they can drink the cool water or stand in it if they want to. I replace the frozen water bottles around 3 or 3:30 when the temps are about 115 and hose off the bushes they hang out under to make sure it stays damp under there for them. Once they go up to roost at night I hose their feet/roosting bar off, which they don't particularly enjoy, but I think it helps them.

The quail get their water from one regular water bottle and one that was frozen the night before so as it melts it makes nice cool water (until of course it heats up into unpleasant warm water). Instead of filling their dust bathing dish with sand, I fill it with ice a couple of times a day. Like the chickens, they stand in it and drink the cool water. I also put a few ice cubes on some heavy cotton fabric in the cages so it keeps the fabric cool as the ice melts.

As you can see keeping birds in the desert, especially the chickens and non-native quail can be a big pain, luckily it's only this much work when the temps are consistently over 110 for several days in a row. Which is hopefully less than three weeks a year. Even with the extra steps each chicken is laying an average of only one egg a week. (Interestingly, the quail are still laying around 5 each a week.) I know lots of people that don't take quite as many extra measures, but I feel like it's my resposibility to do what I can to make them comfortable since I'm responsible for bringing them to Phoenix.

I also have about 100 coturnix eggs in the incubator due to hatch around July 27th! This will be my first batch of quail eggs to hatch from my own birds, I'm interested to see what kind of hatch rate I get.

Coturnix Quail update

Some of you may remember that I hatched some quail about two months ago. About a week ago they began laying and I'm getting several quail eggs every day. I originally hatched 85, sold all but 17, but then sold even more as I figured out which ones were roosters. A cat killed one and caused another to himself pretty badly, which I ended up putting down and eating--- this was before the chicken butchering, it was much much easier and actually gave me the confidence to get the meat chickens. I had a few hens in one pen that were fine on their own but very aggressive when I put a rooster with them and they nearly killed him. Since I plan on breeding these birds that wasn't going to work, so I sold them too.



I ended up with too few birds so a friend that I had sold about 50 to was kind enough to allow me to buy 3 hens back. So now I'm at 8 quail, with a rooster to hen ratio of one male to 3 females. I plan on keeping one male for every five females and upping my total number of quail to 18. This will give me a dozen+ eggs a day since Coturnix are pretty reliable daily layers. A dozen quail eggs are equal to between 2-3 chicken eggs in volume.

I'm surprised at some of the difficulties I've encountered with raising the quail. Like chickens, they don't always take to being mixed with new birds. With quail though at least you can usually add a hen to a group with no trouble but mixing bigger groups can be tricky and they can be very brutal. Quail can and will kill each other if they don't get along. For these reasons, in addition to the fact that they can be a little more difficult as chicks (because of their tiny size they are prone to drowning in even a small jar lid full of water, sidenote: they also require unmedicated gamebird starter feed-- they need the higher protein) I would say they are leaning between a beginner and intermediate poultry pet.

Even with those downsides Coturnix quail have so many things going in their favor I'd be very quick to recommend them! They are quick maturers and reliable layers. Quail roosters have a very pretty call, that most people would think was a neighborhood songbird-- sounds like "look at meeeeee", so for people wanting to breed birds in the city, quail can be a way to do that (they won't usually sit on their own eggs, you will need to incubate them). The call, while pretty can start up very early in the morning, so you might not want to have a large number of roosters or people will soon be onto you! They require only about one square foot of cage space per bird so apartment dwellers, especially those with a small balcony could have them and get their own fresh eggs. (Apartments are such close living arrangements I would probably skip the rooster here, but that won't diminish your egg supply!) People plagued by HOA regulations could have them too, as it's a small caged bird I believe it falls under "regular pets". They are easier to process than chickens if you are choosing to have some for the meat (the jumbo varieties can reach up to a pound of live weight). There are all different color variations, so if you are interested in genetics, you can do some fun experimenting with different crosses to see what color combinations you get.


My quail pens, bought brand new off of Craigslist for $50 each

It is recommended that you keep them on wire (in cages), this keeps the eggs nice and clean and the birds parasite free. They are great flyers and vulnerable prey so there is no chance of free-ranging them, but I may experiment with tractoring a batch down the road just to see how it goes. The backyard chicken movement really has momentum right now, but I know very few people that keep Coturnix quail, I'm hoping that more people discover them because they're great producers of eggs and meat and such a fun versatile bird.

Processing meat chickens

I was thinking about ordering a dozen or so meat birds this fall, my husband who likes meat far more than I, was pretty much on board. I wanted to do this a part of being more self-sufficient and also feeling like if I was going to eat meat I should have the responsibility of processing my own animals at least once in awhile and really respect how they get to the table. Lucky me was perusing Craig's list and saw that a feed store in town had 8 week old meat birds on sale, 5 for $20. They were not organic, but you couldn't even raise a meat bird conventionally for $4, so we brought them home yesterday morning and this morning we got up at dawn to dress them.

I won't give you details, but it didn't go as smoothly as you would hope. We used a killing cone made out of a very large plastic apple cider vinegar bottle and a very big knife. We opted to go for decapitation instead of bleeding them out or any of the other methods because we thought the chickens would suffer the least this way. Plucking the chickens took us forever (about an hour each), soooo many little pinfeathers. It was so frustrating that we skinned the last three. I was in charge of gutting, which was more nauseating than I was prepared for. (This is coming from someone who loved to draw and paint from cadavers when I used to have the opportunity.)

I thought I would feel proud of myself, or at least like now I earned my right to eat meat, but mostly I just feel sick. I have no desire to eat chicken for a verrry long time. These birds will be vacuum-sealed and frozen and will not go to waste, but it will be awhile. I know most people have better outcomes and feel a great sense of accomplishment, but both of us are leaning more towards being mostly vegetarians and will never butcher chickens again.

Delilah the duck has a surprise!

Well this morning I went out to feed everyone and one of the new ducklings we got was running around, she apparently had dug her way out of the pen and couldn't get back in. After trying to catch her for about 15 minutes (and the other animals "helping") I had to go wake up my husband to help me wrangle her. As soon as we got her back in with her mom I took care of the rest of the birds and thought I heard some cheep cheeps... well there's about 15 nests around our house with baby birds in them... but none of those are in the chicken coop. Here's what I saw:






Roxie gets a little curious

These are from the first round of fertile chicken eggs I got from the friend that has Dazzler, the rooster we had to rehome. We had 6 eggs, one broke, one was clear (infertile) and she got the other four to hatch. Today was only day 20 and these chicks were already nice and fluffy early this morning, so I think they hatched late on day 19. They're really chubby, I think because of the extra humidity that ducks provide. I have read several things about not letting the muscovies brood the baby chicks, one reason being that they sometimes step on and crush the chicks that aren't prepared for giant heavy duck feet, and also because ducks try to introduce their babies to water, which for a chicken chick, doesn't work out so well. So it made me a little sad, and Delilah very angry, but I put the chicks in a brooder.

She still seems to be sitting on the nest, she had a few chicken eggs that are a week old under her (I had no room in the incubator), so she may be trying to hatch those out. I also grabbed a few of the duck eggs from the incubator and gave those to her as well, partly as an I'm-sorry-for-stealing-your-chicks gift. I'll keep a close eye on her and hopefully she'll hatch out a second round that are due in a little less than three weeks (all of the remaining chicken and duck eggs are scheduled to hatch at the same time). If she manages to sit for that whole time it would be a total of just over 6 weeks. That seems like a really long time, but since Muscovy eggs take about 5-5.5 weeks to hatch, it's certainly possible she'll do it.

I counted this morning and I think we have 45 birds here at the tiny farm. Wow.

Four Easter Egger chicks warm in the brooder