Hello! I’m a SAHM, homeschooling Mom of 4. I raise celadon Coturnix Quail and dabble in gardening :-)
I have a lot to catch up on and hope to post more soon. My chickens absolutely channel their inner dinosaurs 😂. They ran off with more than one piece of discards during my quail harvest last weekend. Kept trying to steal the whole thing too! Cute, fluffy menaces 🥰
I had a surprise hatch this weekend! I had set eggs but forgot to write it down and estimated the date later. Time flies apparently because I was 4/5 days off (out of 17) 😂. So my turning rack was off but still in the incubator, which isn’t ideal. But it worked out in the end! 35 healthy chicks from 2 different breeding projects and 3 celadons that I have to keep separate until they can be sorted into the main covey. One chick was dry in it’s shell but got trapped! I freed it but it was hilarious in the moment
10 tiny babies up for discussion! Actually it’s 11, but that last one is B10G1 Free 😉. Straight run, true blue celadon in a mix of plumages. Mostly EB based and roux for those who know quail genetics, hatched 5/12. Pm me if interested! (Local only)
Got my hutches re-arranged and did a little bit of shuffling around with the quail today! I have some beautiful heavy hens from Thieving Otter Farm and want to add their bloodline (and size!!) into my celadon lines. So today was the first step!
Step one- make more babies to choose from 😂.
Step two (three, four, five lol) pair with celadon roosters and select for heavy happy birds until they are also celadon only.
I had a hard decision today. Pair the two hens with one of my true blue celadon Roos, of which I have a few extra, or with one of my two remaining TOF males? Mine are on the small side and I don’t even think the hens will let them get near. One TOF roo is larger, with gorgeous plumage but has a shriek at the end of his crow that I just cannot keep long term 😂. So lucky little black chick gets his own harem! After watching a Coturnix Corner video about the different genetic lines the black quail have the potential to throw I wasn’t hesitant from a plumage standpoint to put him in the mix. He’s not the largest roo but he means business 😉. On top of all that he’s CALM and FRIENDLY which just goes to show how much work Rebecca has put into her lines. He was worth the effort it took to save and help hatch the little cracked egg that came in the mail.
Fertile eggs coming up soon! The hens are gorgeous but I’m not sure on the exact genetics that make up their plumage. One is a buff colored hen with small white patches under her chin and the other is buff white and blue all mixed up (and the heaviest).
Eeek!! We have chicks! My first ones hatched in the cabinet incubator. I can’t wait for them to finish hatching so I can get them out of there! Not the best video but it’s REALLY hard to get a good video through the plexiglass where the incubator is currently situated
Just finished packing eggs for the first time in a while! So EGGcited for the color variety I have now!
Just added my 5 teenagers to my main hutch! Here’s to evening out the numbers. I had to unexpectedly cull one of my main roosters which left me with only one mature celadon rooster to my celadon and non celadon hens. If I correctly identified the males then I only added 2 males and 3 females to the hutch- the remaining from my rolling hatch earlier this year. Now everything should be closer to the goal ratio of 1 roo per 5 hens to keep my fertility rates where they should be 🙂
It’s going to be a fun spring! I have older chicks in the grow out pen and eggs in the incubator 🥰
I had to separate out an injured rooster from my bachelor pen as overnight it was plucked bald and then got injured on the back of the head very quickly. Turns out “he” is a “she”! And a celadon to boot. I’m excited! My covey is solid blue so she will be an easy addition and help diversify my genetics to keep future generations strong 🥰
Picture of her egg and her hatch mates, and my surprise discovery today
My first normal colored egg from the hatching eggs I won from Thieving Otter Farm! It’s small of course, as she just started laying, but her and her 3 sisters make a welcome addition to my covey! It’s amazing how normal celadon eggs have become to me and this one just looks so different, it’s a bit of a shock
I posted about this in a reel as well, but we’ve had a very interesting experience with our last hatch. We had a rolling hatch as I was testing our fertility rates coming into spring (more about that later). So I had 4 sets of developing eggs in our incubator ranging in size from 1 egg to 5 eggs. Now that everything is hatched and in our brooder box, the age gap is 5 days from oldest to youngest.
Quail grow extremely fast! Our 5 day old already has noticeable wing feathers growing in while the hatchlings are still in “power-down every other second” mode. I definitely don’t recommend hatching this way unless you have space for multiple brooders and make sure that there is more that one baby in each (lonely quail babies are LOUD).
So why did I have a small rolling batch of hatching eggs? Why are there 5 days between the oldest and the youngest? Well, here’s what happened.
I learned something this year. Quail need artificial light to continue to lay through the darker days of winter. But the amount of light is important! I had installed these cute solar button mushroom garden lights that kept my girls laying all winter and also provided just a little light to my grow out or bachelor pad in the top pen of my double decker hutch. Well. It was enough to keep them laying but not enough to encourage full maturation of my roosters. So sometimes they would crow and once in a while do rooster things but no one, not one, was fertile enough to fertilize eggs for incubation. I was getting 0% development.
I got a better light (solar shed lights are amazing!) and put a few eggs in the incubator here and there to test the fertility as my covey was under a brighter light for a few hours into the night. It took a week or so but then the rate started to go up! So I stopped putting eggs in but didn’t have the heart to discard the developing eggs. So here I am. A rolling hatch that I didn’t think I would ever do lol. I am in the process of building another incubator as a dedicated Hatcher which will make everything easier in the long run.
For fun here are the stats on my 4 sets of eggs that just hatched
Set 1: 1/1 hatched
Set 2: 1/2 hatched
Set 3: 4/4 hatched
Set 4: 3/5 hatched (one I missed when candling, it wasn’t developed past 4d or so so it should have been 3/4 really)
Scrambled quail eggs from beginning to end. The eggs and basil came from our own backyard! YUM
Our chicks from Thieving Otter Farm are 3 weeks old! Way past time for them to go outside into the grow out pen 😂. They will be transitioned to our garage and then outside shortly! There are some beautiful colors in this hatch. The mischievous little ones had knocked their water over and soaked the bottom of the brooder box AGAIN so they have a fresh, clean setup today.
The little black quail saga is uneventful so far! She’s growing and still has some catching up to do but there’s plenty of time.
Ok, black chick saga time. No name yet, we will cross that bridge later 😁
This little gal (I’m speaking positively, I don’t know the gender of this chick) had the cards stacked against her from the start and it went downhill from there:
*Her egg was one of the smaller ones in the shipment
*She was a shipped egg
*Her egg was CRACKED
*I mended the egg with wax, but it was my first time ever trying it and it was thick
*Hatching humidity was off- my first winter hatch and it required a different approach! Live and learn.
*The wax and humidity combined meant that I had to assist hatching or she would have died. Even after scraping off the wax she couldn’t push the egg fully open
*Because of that her body didn’t want to unroll once she had been released from her egg.
A little physical therapy, a little splinting and she’s up and running with her hatchmates. She’s still a bit smaller than the rest, but some good food, water and heat and she’ll catch right up 🤞🏼🤞🏼
Better pictures to come! She spends most of her time under the brooder plate and is hard to capture on film because of her color
These little guys are so spunky and fast! We have a saga going on with our little black one, but I’ll make her own post 😉 2.5 days old and they are already growing in wing feathers! I lifted the heat plate to clean the brooder box, so please excuse their mess. I will start using a feeder in a few days! The quarter is only in there for scale
My hatching eggs from Thieving Otter Farm are hatching! 6/20 are out of their eggs already 🥰
Welcome to my page! I am an urban homesteader or micro-farm, whichever term suits your fancy. I raise standard size Coturnix Quail, mostly those with the recessive gene for blue eggs. There isn’t any nutritional difference between celadon (blue) eggs and normal quail eggs but they are pretty. Celadon eggs have a blue base ranging from light blue to teal and have raised speckles, if any. Standard quail eggs are an ivory color with inked on dark brown blotches. Both are pretty in their own way!
My goal with this page is to have a contact point for customers and to share our journey with quail and our dabbling in our kitchen garden. Anything I learn or am excited about is all fair game. I’d also like to share any facts or recipes I come across that may be keepers!
Ladson, SC
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