We had our first crack at incubating and hatching quail eggs this fall! I just bought one of the cheap styrofoam incubators (it was $50 at TSC) and ordered the quail egg rotators off of Amazon ($50). I bought some quail eggs from a man up North so that I could vary the bloodlines. Quail take 18 days from set to hatch, with lock down at day 15. They are jumbo Coturnix and it was said to keep them around 99.9 to 100.5 degrees. We only had 7 hatch out of 18, but not bad for our first go. One more step to self sufficiency! Little by little we are learning and growing, taking small steps at a time! Have a great weekend everyone! 🐣
Ya win some, ya lose some…
This summer around the homestead has been full of victories in the garden. Our peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, spaghetti squash, pickling cucumber, celery and straw/black/rasp berries all had a great year! Lots of drying canning and freezing going on in this house hold.
I started all my flowers from seed this year, and they were amazing. I had marigolds, petunias and zinnias. I really think they help to bring the pollinators in when you inter crop them into your veggie garden.
Some of the sad news from this summer… First we had several quail die from and unknown illness 😦 and then a predator killed 5 more. I know have to lock them up at night, I always used to let them access their run at night, but I can no longer do that. We have eggs in the incubator as I type this so hopefully we will have replenished birds soon. Our neighbour also called the town to tell on us for having chickens (we only had 2 🙄) so we ended up having to bring them back to the farm we purchased them at. My town only enforces the bylaw on chickens if someone complains. She literally said nothing for 2 years, her husband passed away, and almost immediately called the town after that. I could tell the bylaw officer felt bad, he said you have a beautiful yard and a nice coop, and these animals are well tended, but they have to act on complaints. Very unfortunate, but I will be fighting to get the bylaw changed. The neighbouring town bylaw allows for 3 hens, so I’m hoping to make that change! Thanks for stopping in, I hope you all are enjoying your summer! 🐝🦋🌱🌸🌻🌼🌞⭐️🌈
Even though it doesn’t feel like spring…
We have to start preparing for the gardens! The plan for this year was to start my seeds in the windowsill, however, as soon as the weather brightens up a bit I will be constructing a 10×12 ft greenhouse!!! I am so excited! Every year we expand little by little, so we don’t have to borrow any money to do it. We also expand slowly as to not overwhelm ourselves either. Our 1/6th of an acre has such potential to feed our family and build skills and relationships. My children will grow up knowing where food comes from, and that is a foreign notion these days. Even if you have a small suburban lot or a balcony on the side of an apartment building, you can grow food! Teach your children to cultivate the earth! I promise you will never regret it. Once you harvest your first crops you will be hooked!
The Chickens and quails are laying like crazy right now! So even though it doesn’t feel like spring in Ontario yet, it is 🙂
My decision to leave ‘Corporate America’
I have worked in the oil and gas sector my entire adult life, since I graduated university (10 years ago). We all know that oil is down right now, and my company made the decision to downsize. I was one of the people that was laid off, as I played an administrative role and was not a necessity like an engineer or I.T. I was very upset with this, I was losing my pay, my benefits and my work friends. My boss wrote me a very nice recommendation letter to give to future employers during an interview (which I was grateful for). A lot of my family members were pushing me to go get a similar job and stay in the corporate world. However, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, I had other plans! For years I have thought to myself that I wish I could spend more time with kids and more time building my Homestead. So, I have made the decision to open a home daycare. There are pros and cons to all the decisions we make in life, but I felt the pros outweighed the cons! I am so excited to be employed by self, and I pray it is busy enough to pay the bills! Time will tell! Sometimes when one door closes, another one opens!
Carrot 🥕 ‘n Cabbage Pickin’ – A Lovely Afternoon
Yesterday my family went out and harvested most of the remaining carrots and some of the cabbage that was ready to pick! We got quite the haul! Yesterday was a true testament to the importance of letting your kids play outside and including them in homesteading chores:Sunday morning was brutal! My 4 year old and three year old were fighting all morning. Arguing over toys, books, anything! They were yelling at each other, tattling etc. I was trying to get some house work done but I thought I better get them outside and playing, maybe that would decrease the tension. I brought them outside, gave them their gardening gloves and away we went. For 2 full hours they did not argue one time. They were laughing together, helping me pick and wash carrots! They gathered all the carrot stems up and fed the bunnies, chickens and quail. It was like a peace and calming washed over the whole family. Not that a homesteading life will always be rainbows and butterflies, but I believe that afternoon was a true testament to the importance of giving children age appropriate tasks and responsibilities. This is the type of ‘education’ they will never receive in school. It is one that generations past always gifted their children. We as a society have to get back to teaching our own kids how to garden, cook, forage, animal husbandry etc. If we don’t do it no one will, can you imagine a society where no one knew how to do any of these things? It’s a scary thought.
Back to the carrots and cabbbage…
Most of the carrots I peeled, chopped, blanched for 3 minutes and then froze them in ziplock baggies for use in a nice fall time soup!
The rest I left dirty, unpeeled, in a brown paper bag in the fridge for use later this week. I am going to cook them with a nice pork roast.
The cabbages I cut into quarters and blanched for a few minutes and they went into the freezer as well!
Thanks for stopping in today!
What’s Happening around the Homestead?
Hello Everyone! I haven’t posted in a bit, it has been a very busy but productive month!The gardens are really producing, the quails and chickens are working hard producing eggs, and I have been canning away! I was going to post a few pictures of what has been going on around the homestead and talk about each one a bit! I calculated the size of my lot and thought I would share it with you. I have approximately 1/6th of an acre, which isn’t huge, but you can do so much with a yard of that size. You have to be smart and use permaculture principles to make it work though! That’s one thing I have learned in the last couple years, do what you can with what you have! I would love to have 5 acres out in the country and have a “farm” but that is not in the cards for my family right now, so I have to be patient and live how I want to live with what I have!
This is a picture of our ‘barn’ that houses the chickens and quail. A lot of sites say not to house them together, but I have had them together for about 5 months now and have had no issues. They have separate living areas and are not directly interacting with each other. We built separate runs for them on opposite side of the barn.
I have Americauna and Wheaten Maran chickens. They both lay an egg about every other day, sometimes two days in a row. The Marans have beautiful dark brown eggs, and the Americaunas have a blueish-green egg! The quails lay every single day, they are egg machines!
So far this year the garden has been pretty productive! We had a TON of cucumber and zucchini, the peppers are growing really well right now and we are finally starting to get some tomatoes! The one garden bed has powdery mildew unfortunately, so that may really hurt my watermelon, pumpkin and squash! I made a spray which was water, a tbsp. of baking soda and some dish soap, and that seemed to help a bit.
We grew some cucamelons this year, which was fun! They look like tiny little watermelon but taste like cucumbers. We are harvesting carrot and beets right now. The carrots we have been eating as we go, and I canned up some pickled beets, YUM!
Thanks for stopping in to listen to my ramblings! Hope everyone is having a great summer! Post some pics of your garden or homesteading ventures in the comments!
Inspiration – Simple Living
My family and I visited Genesee Country Village yesterday in Mumford, NY, and to say it was amazing would be a huge understatement. It is the largest living history museum in the U.S, and is on a 600 acre parcel of land. There were animals, gardens, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, yarn spinners, shops, brewery, shoemaker, apothecary etc. The fully furnished cabins were beautiful and quaint, but also showed the struggle the early pioneers would have faced. Disease, starvation, injury, doubt and missing your extended family would have plagued these brave people during their journey to homestead west. There are 49 outbuildings in this ‘museum,’ and one was as awesome as the next! They were as early as 1807 all the way to the early 1900’s. The best thing about it was there were ‘pioneers’ in each house living out what would have gone on in this time period. The blacksmith was making nails, the tinsmith was making lanterns, there was a man making buckets and butter churns, a potter making a fermentation crock, a women spinning wool into yarn. My kids had eyes the size of saucers and they learned so much in that short 6 hours day.
Going to this living history site made me yearn for the simple life even more than I did before. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad we have the medical advancements we have now, and I am thankful that if my garden doesn’t produce I *can* run to the grocery store and buy food, my kids won’t starve. It just made me realize how hard these people worked and how they had to constantly think ahead and prepare for the next season. One cabin had dried mushrooms on strings, dried herbs hanging from every beam, fermentation crocks filled with pickles and kraut, cheese drying, bread baking and food in a pot over the open fire. They didn’t have mason jars and fancy canners, they didn’t have food processers and driers. They had the sun, the air, salt and the sweat of their brow to preserve food. You couldn’t look something up on the internet, everything was trial and error. Winter was long and you had to have enough food put away for your family and livestock! I can’t imagine how much work that would have been!
The courage it must have taken to leave everything you know behind and trek across the country to endure the unknown is something many people in this lifetime will never experience. I am glad they have this 600 acre reminder of what life was like a few hundred years ago so we can appreciate what our ancestors would have endured. As hard as this life would have been I truly believe these people lived happy, simple lives and were surrounded by their loved ones. No one was rushing off to work in a cubicle, facing a miserable commute in a car they couldn’t afford. You didn’t run around like a maniac shuttling your kids from activity to activity. You didn’t have a 25 year mortgage on a house hanging over your head for most of your adult life. People lived and breathed family life, taught their own children hard work and discipline and people believed in the sanctity of marriage. So really, who was better off, us or them? It’s definitely up for debate.
