Quail chicks

They hatched about 10 days ago. Quail grow very fast, so they have little feathers already.

We are trying out a new heater. Previously we have used an infrared heat lamp, but that means the chicks keep waking up in the night and rioting - which gets a bit annoying.

You can see it on the left of the photo, they go under it and touch the surface above to keep warm - kind of like a square plastic hen. It is a lot cooler than the heat lamp and we have it at an angle so they can chose how closely they want to touch it. It is cheaper to run than a heat lamp and not a problem if it touches something - less chance of burning the house down.

Eating some quail

These male quail were getting quite old so we ate them. I made quail tagine.

They were in a cage that we needed for the young chicks which is why we finally got round to killing them. We have been meaning to since autumn.

Scotched Eggs Recipe

Friends have been making scotched eggs from our quails eggs. We have quite a lot now as we are getting between 10 and 15 a day, so I thought it would be a good way to use some up - I was making sausages anyway, so just minced a bit more. These aren't very dainty as I did the mince for the sausages quite course ground so you have to make it reasonably thick around the eggs or it falls apart. You could use less meat if finer ground.

You can make full sized ones with normal eggs and 160g meat per egg.

Did you know scotched eggs were invented by Fortnum and Masons in 17 something? I always thought they had something to do with Scotland!

Some quails eggs

For each egg 60g of sausage meat

Flour

Egg

Bread crumbs

Pan with about 1.5cm of oil in it. Or you can deep fry. Oil should be deeper for full size eggs.

Boil the eggs for 4 mins, cool and peel.

Put the flour, egg and bread crumbs in separate bowls - add salt to the flour if you wish.

Separate the sausage meat in to 60g balls

Put the pan with oil on to heat on a medium heat

Dip each egg in the flour. Then wrap in sausage meat - I do it by taking 2/3rds of the meat and flattening it on the table, then put the egg on to then the flattened remaining 1/3rd on top, I scoop the whole lot in to my cupped hand and squeeze it all together.

Roll the wrapped egg in the flour, then the egg and finally the breadcrumbs. 

Cook as many at once as will fit in the pan without touching. Do each side for 4 or five mins until golden brown. The oil sould not be smoking but should sizzle up when eggs are added.

Eating quail

We didn't do really well with the quail we hatched. We startd with 42 eggs, 13 hatched and 6 survived. We have just killed and eaten 3 of the 6. One because it had been badly pecked, the other two because they kept pecking the others. One was very small (the one that got pecked) but the other two were a good size - and delicious.

We have bought an additional 12 (9 females and 3 males) from our riding instructors neighbour. He just keeps them as pets, but has more than a hundred. Our riding instructor assured him we were not going to eat them! We did not lie!

We are hoping they can get on well enough to produce some fertilised eggs so we can try again hatching them. We will see. We seem to have problems when thy reach maturity, the males start prcking the females on the head. It is normals if they do it a little bit and the females often have a bald patch, but they seem to go way overboard and nearly peck their heads off.

Maybe eating the culpits will be a warning to the others :)

I just roasted them for about 15 mins with a bit of salt and oil on them. You can fry them a bit to brown the skin more before roasting them - but I never bother.

We killed the eggs!

We are pretty sure we have killed the eggs we put on to incubate a couple of weeks ago. The plug for the incubator got knocked out of the wall and it was the next day before we noticed. So they were well and truely cold. We have started collecting a new batch, but are continuing to incubate these in the mean time. We think a chicken is broody so we are going to put a few under her too.

Things aren't going too well with hatchlings this year. Only 6 of the quail have survived. Only 15 hatched and some were pretty weedy and have not made it. Shame! When the incubator is free again perhaps we will try again. Our riding instructor has a neighbour who has loads of quail apparently.

Baby animals

The quail eggs are hatching - they are hard to get a good photo of as it is dark in the incubator and very red under the heat lamp, and they are all bombing around like mad. Always a worry for the not yet hatched ones as their siblings crush them...

The baby rabbits are 10 days old now and doing fine. They pogo all over the place if the nest is disturbed so counting is hard, but I think there are 7. They have a reasonable amount of ginger fur now, and their eyes should open in the next few days.

5 of the 6 Ouessant lambs (the little black sheep) we hope for have been born and are doing well. Only Tiree hasn't had hers and she is quite small so we are not 100% sure she will manage one. 4 of the 5 are definately girls and we think the 5th might be too! A friend has goats and had only boys, so we are making up for it.

The other flock have only had one lamb. It is a boy who we call rug as we have been wanting a white lamb so we can have a white sheepskin rug. We will let him grow to a decent size, maybe about a year before we take him to slaughter. We thought this showed that Harris was definately fertile, but thinking about it we are not sure as it could have been fathered while he was out of action - which would mean one of last years lambs (now in the freezer) was the father. It is now 5 months since Harris went back with the flock so we hope for more (up to 4) lambs any moment. Otherwise we will be eating hogget (which is sheep between 1 and 2 years old).

Poppy is useful!

We often complain to Poppy that she is the only animal on the farm who is not useful. After two years she was determined to show us to be wrong.

Two quail have escaped recently. One we kept seeing for a while then stopped. The other we had not seen since it winged off in to the distance a few days ago. Yesterday Poppy found this second one in the bit of the house that is being reroofed. It flew off, with Poppy in hot pursuit, and landed in a large bramble patch a couple of hundred meters down the hill. Poppy won't normally go in to brambles - she is a princess you know - but this time she dived in and came out with the quail in her mouth. She came running straight to us without even being called and placed the still alive quail in to Doug's hand. We have put it back in the cage with the others and she seems fine, just a couple of feathers ruffled.

Poppy got a lot of treats!

Quail eggs

One of the quail has started laying. The others are too busy pecking each other to death! 

Despite issues with the quail we have just acquired 41 eggs with the thought that we will eat any of them we manage to hatch, at about 8 weeks old so we don't need to keep them long enough to become such a bother. I was reading somewhere that 60% is a good hatch rate, we got about 4% last time, so hopefully we will do better this time!

New Quail Accomodation

The quail have been living in a cage inside the chicken fence with the chickens (they can't really free range as they would just fly off - although some people try it and it works although I think it would then be hard to find the eggs). This works quite well except they are quite hard on the ground they are on. Their poo is very strong and kills the grass and unlike the chickens they won't go in to a house - which is where the chickens seem to poo most, making it easy to clean them out and stop their enclosure becoming a poo swamp like the quails.
This cage was quite big as we thought they would like room to move around, but they stayed in one corner pretty much all the time, so we decided a smaller cage under cover and off the ground would be more practical. I debated with myself for a long time about whether a cage with a metal mesh floor was OK - we want our animals to be happy and comfortable. In the end I decided to go for it as it is so practical from the keeping them clean point of view - with the thought that we could put something else in as the floor if they seemed uncomfortable. They seem very happy (as far as quail express emotion), they wander about a bit, and spend the rest of the time sitting watching the world go by, which seemed to be their favorite activity in the other cage too. We now have them in the little barn attached to the house as their new house really needs to be under shelter, they seem happy watching comings and goings and only a bit but out by a giant dog face appearing right in front of them.

The cage has a slight slope so eggs roll forward for collection. In their other cage they just seemed to lay eggs anywhere although they did dig holes sometimes and lay in the hole but I felt it was for a feeling of security rather than egg laying as they generally seemed quite happy just dropping eggs wherever they happened to be - unlike chickens who like to lay all in the same place and in a secluded area which is why the chicken houses have nest boxes.

Baby quail

A while ago we set 25 quail eggs. Sadly only one has hatched. Poor little lonely quail.
As you can imagine, coming from such a tiny egg, he/she is teeny tiny. I will call it a he for now as that is what we hope it is so he can go in with the 4 girls and make fertile eggs for us to hatch some more of. All is not lost if he is a she though because we are about to lend our incubator to some friends so they can give hatching their quail eggs a go. Hopefully they can control the temperature of the eggs before incubation starts a bit better - difficult in the heat of the summer - we think that is what went wrong with our eggs. They can then give us a male or female depending what our little guy really is.
He is also a bit suicidal so perhaps he won't actually make it to grown up anyway! He tried to hang himself off the side of the incubator a couple of times, he has tried to drown himself and starve himself. We presume he is eating now, to have survived this long, but have never seen him at it.

Animal roundup

I thought you might like to catch up with what all the animals are up to as maybe some of them haven't been mentioned for a while.

Chickens
Only one chicken is laying at the moment. Very disappointing as we have nineteen! Ok only five of them are female and of egg laying age, but still... we think it is the heat. Friends and neighbors say their laying is way down too.
Of the twelve we hatched earlier in the year six are male and six female. We plan on keeping a male and giving three females to friends leaving us with three females in addition to the five we already had. We will then have fertile eggs we can hatch later if we want.
We will eat the five other males. We thought of doing the first one this week, but after a feel assessment we have decided to keep them longer. They are only 18 weeks at the moment so they have some more growing to do.

Quail
Most days we get four eggs so the quail are doing better than the chickens! We have some quail eggs in the incubator, they should be done in a few days. I candled some and couldn't see anything going on - but we shall see. It was very hot when I got them which doesn't help the parents fertility or the health of the eggs themselves. We hope some will hatch and we can keep a male to keep with our females. We will then have fertilised eggs which we could incubate and raise the chicks for meat.

Rabbits
We have tried to mate the rabbits a few times. We put the female in the male cage as recommended, he cowers in a corner and runs away if she approaches. The cowering and running has got a little less each time we have tried - three in total. We have arranged to take one of the females to a stud bunny. He is a pet bunny of one of our friends. Hopefully Bunny Boy will grow up sufficiently to do the biz soon. Otherwise he is for the pot!

Cat
Sambuca seems quite happy and has caught a couple of rats recently (healthy country ones, but still yuck). She mainly stays out of the house as she is meant to, but got stuck upstairs yesterday after sneaking in. We heard some bumps and crashes and had to go upstairs with boots on (and other clothes too of course!) and a stick to see what was going on. We heard a concerned little meow and realised what had happened. Phew.

Dog
Poppy is recovering ok from the dog attack, although she is insistent on licking the wounds which doesn't help them. One was healing well until she licked the scab off again and again. We have had to tie a bin bag round her back end to try to stop her licking it so much. Pretty stylish looking let me tell you.

Coos
Hainoa is still pretty frisky and shy. She runs around the field frolicking sometimes, this can be a bit scary as she is quite lumbering and you wonder if she might mow you flat. Mostly she doesn't though. She comes running over to the fence when we appear for her daily feed of cow nuts. She isn't as friendly with Hélora as she was with Hoppy but they get on well and she is glad to had the company. Hélora is very friendly and wants to be stroked by everyone.

Horses
We are having a bit of a trial keeping shoes on the horses. We have got some very natty boots for Daisy - they look like round trainers however they didn’t last very well so she is going barefoot cold turkey. Seems to be going ok!
Owen lost a shoe (a few days after replacement would have been free - the farrier offers that for the first 4 weeks), the farrier came and replaced it. That afternoon Voltaire lost a shoe. Then a few days later Owen lost his other shoe.
We don't blame the farrier as some of the shoes have been put on by other people. We think it is the mud and perhaps the hill causing the back feet to slide in to the front which then levers the shoe off. We are thinking about trying to take Owen without shoes like we are Daisy. We have contacted a barefoot specialist who will hopefully come and have a look and advise us.

Sheep
At the moment we have 19 sheep. We plan on getting rid of almost all of the lambs from this year. There are nine; three females, five males and an unknown (the mother is really shy and the baby more so - going to be eaten either way)
2 will go to friends as meat
3 we will eat ourselves
2 are going to a friend who has recently bought some Ouessant sheep (from the person we got the pigs from last year! We went along for the ride and to say hello)
2 will join the flock

We have sheared 3 of them and have another 6 to go. Aaaaargh. We better get on with it before it is winter again. They would be cold!
Have I forgotten anyone?

Quail

We have been hoping to get quail for a while, but haven't seen them for sale round here. I am sure they must be but we don't know where to look! I went to Toulouse to pick up Janet from the airport and collected 4 females on the way from just near Toulouse. Very convenient. They kindly laid 4 eggs in transit, but have only been doing one a day between them since then. Hopefully they will get over the shock of the journey and all start laying soon. The eggs are very tasty although being so small they are a bit of a fiddle. One got injured when I tried to catch her to move her from her transit cage to her new home, she panicked and flapped around madly and broke a wing feather and injured her leg. We thought perhaps it was broken and that she wouldn't make it, but she is walking on it now, only a week later so I guess it was just strained in some way. She won't have to be put out of her misery and eaten after all!

At the moment they are living in the run from the chicken house. It comes in to two parts, we are planning on building them a shelter to attach to one half and reattaching the other half to the chicken house.

Then on the trip to deliver Janet back to Toulouse I collected some eggs (from a different place - so they are unrelated). We are incubating them and will keep a male and eat the rest. I ordered 12 and got 26 for the same price! I guess the quail had been laying well!
Quail eggs are tiny so baby quail must be teeny weeny. They grow to adult size and start laying eggs within 6 weeks apparently (compared to perhaps 20-24 weeks for chickens - bit more eating on a chicken I guess!).