This is TOO EXCITING Not to Share!

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead i am excited to share some news with you today actually on a subject that a lot of you have been asking me about over the last really year or so and that is about raising quail on the homestead for those of you who've been following along for a long time you know that i used to raise quite a few quail and i absolutely loved them but about a year or so ago we got to a point where we when we first bought the second piece of property things were just getting a little too overwhelming and something had to give and for a while that had to be the quail but no more this past weekend i actually moved all of my quail supplies from the homestead down here to the farm and got everything set back up and just yesterday i went and bought some quail from someone here in town and i'm so excited to share them with you show you what we have and to get started raising quail again let's go over here in the barn and see what we have all right so we're in the barn this is the quail cage my original quail cage that i had back at the homestead i moved this down i've got everything set up i've got their automatic water set up the feeders that i love using and you can see that we've got quite a few quail in here i've actually picked up 12 quail a variety of colors which is what i'm excited about this time in the past i've only raised what are called the pharaoh pattern of quail these are all katurnik's quail which is a japanese quail but in the past i've only raised what are called pharaoh which are kind of the like natural color let me see if i can find one of those to show you so this brown is what would be considered a pharaoh and that is kind of a natural or wild color for the keturnix quail now we have quite a few other colors in here as well you can see we have some of the white quail this one's got just a little bit of brown on his head but this would still be considered a white now none of these are pure and to be honest i don't care because we're just raising them for meat you know we'll be we'll be hatching eggs and breeding but we're not doing this for any kind of show quality or anything like that i just think it's kind of fun to have all the different colors this time here's one here eating out of the feeder right now let me see if i can grab this one this is what's called a tuxedo for obvious reasons looks like he's wearing a tuxedo we've got some light colored ones that i believe are called roo let me get those for you i just think it's fun to have all the different colors so this light color this would be what's considered rue and then i'm not really sure what this pattern is called i'm sure some of you guys will know but i just thought it was really neat looking so now the really cool thing is that a lot of these quail are considered celadon quail which means that they lay blue eggs so some of them will lay the standard brownish quail eggs but probably about half of these are going to lay blue eggs we actually got i think five eggs today and about half of i think three out of the five were the blue eggs so that is really cool um we should have here ten hens and two roosters if all my sex scene was right when we did it so um i'm excited we should be getting you know quite a few eggs every day we're gonna start incubating them soon and we are officially back in the coil business [Music] [Music] all right let me show you guys some of the equipment that i'm using inside of here the first thing is it are the feeders that i use these feeders i've been making for years actually from the very first time i started raising quail all the way back in arizona and this type of feeder if you race quail you know they're probably the messiest eater out of any animal we have on the farm because what they like to do is they like to get a mouthful of food and then they shake their head and they basically just spit out 90 of what's in their mouth and it goes everywhere so there's a ton of waste so with the types of feeders that i like to use which are these right here let me get one out so nobody jumps i make these just out of you know these storage containers and i've got videos on how to make these you can look back and find those videos but basically you just cut you know you just drill holes and i put these little pieces of pvc pipe little discs of pvc pipe in here that gives the quail somewhere to put their head so they stick in here they can get a mouthful of food even if they shake it around it goes right back inside of the feeder and there's really no waste at all this system works awesome the other thing that i am a big fan of with quail is automatic waterers now there's several different types that you can use but the kind that i have found to be the most effective are these kind right here that you can see at the back which is like a little cup don't escape over there a little cup and basically this cup holds just a little bit of water and when they and then they and when they peck at it it lets a little bit more water into the cup and it just always has a good supply of fresh water for them this is working just off of a five gallon bucket that i have up here at the top it doesn't need much water pressure at all this five gallon bucket is plenty of water to feed that and it gives them a good supply of water and no problem at all now during the winter i do like to use a different kind and i actually have one of these in here normally during warm weather i wouldn't have one of these in here but these guys weren't used to this type yet so i put this in just to make sure that they can figure out the other water but during the winter i like to just use these just these mason jar waters because i can come out several times a day i've got you know a lot of those and i can just you know switch them out several times throughout the day and uh that way it just keeps it nice and clean and those are super cheap i think at the feed store here in town they're less than two dollars a piece so pick up a dozen of them and you can you know always have fresh ones in the house waiting for them so this is my system i did put some lights up here as well because our days are starting to get short already uh we during the you know summer time we're getting dark at nine o'clock we're already down to about 7 30 that it's getting dark so i do have these lights up here i'll be adding timers on these so that they get plenty of light so they'll keep laying all winter long now a couple things that i've done different with this cage from when i had it at the homestead for those of you who watched me build this cage i actually have a video on how to build this is i've added a door here in the middle i used to only have these two doors here and i kind of open out and of course all of the quail like to lay their eggs right here in the middle which made it very hard to reach over the feeders and into the middle to get the eggs so i've added a door right here so now i have access to basically the entire cage very easily the other thing that i've done that i've never really known what to do to solve this problem but i don't like the coil just being right on the cage wire all the time so i've tried rubber mats and things like that and it just hasn't worked out so what i've decided to do is just start putting hay in this end of the cage that gives them a nice soft you know kind of pillow almost mat to get off of the hay or off of the wire and several times a week i can just come and change this hay out there they have a good time scratching around it it gives them a little more natural feel and i just think that that's going to be a good system and we can just change it out compost that have some good compost and it's a win for the quail and a win for us now if you're new to raising quail you may be wondering why this cage is so short a nice long cage but not very tall that's actually intentional and it's something that's very important for quail quail have a tendency when they get scared by a loud noise outside or you coming in to collect eggs or something like that they have a tendency when they get scared to jump straight up in the air if you have a tall cage they'll actually jump up in the air and break their neck by hitting the top of their cage so that is really why it's so important to have a short cage this cage is only about 12 inches from the floor to the ceiling so even if they do jump it's not enough for them to get enough speed to hurt themselves so this type of cage by being short prevents that it keeps them nice and safe you know we've designed this cage to be long gives them a lot of floor space a lot of ventilation the area where this where this is located in the barn is covered on you know the back side and the roof but pretty much open on the ends and they get a nice flow of air through here all day it's going to be a great place for them and i think they're going to be really happy here so there you go you guys i am so excited to be back in the quail business you know i really think of quail personally as just kind of a hobby for myself a lot of the other animals on the homestead i feel like are something we really rely on like the cows and the pigs and even the chickens those are things that are you know more utilitarian around the homestead but the quail i just think they're fun i enjoy raising them they supply a good source of meat and eggs for the family i'm never gonna raise a thousand a year i'm never gonna get that big i'm gonna raise what i want when i want i'm gonna try to keep it as fun as i can this time around but you guys quail or something that if you have it raised you should definitely check into i highly suggest them especially if you're in more of a urban area because you can really raise a lot of these and get some good meat for your family all right now we're out in our orchard area you can see the ducks and the chickens behind me and you may be wondering why they're not in their moat area the moat area that we created for them last winter which is a double fence system all the way around this area why are they free ranging inside of the orchard area well there are always things going on around the homestead kind of behind the scenes that you guys don't always see in real time this past week was one of those things we actually had a pretty big project done on the homestead this past week something that we've been needing for a long time that we are so excited to finally have accomplished and that is that we had water lines installed strategically around the homestead around the farm so that we can get water to our animals to our gardens and to the greenhouse and so that over winter we don't have to be hauling buckets of water all over the farm this winter like we did in the past it also means that one of my biggest pains in the butt doesn't have to happen next summer and that is moving about 700 feet of garden hose out of the way every time i need to mow the lawn i think i can open a garden hose used garden hose store garden hose thrift store after we're done with this project because i probably own enough garden hose to get from here to wisconsin all right let's take a little walk over this way i'm going to show you what type of hydrants we put in and kind of explain to you how all of this works all right you can see that we had to move both of the hoop coupes kind of out into the middle of the orchard area while they were here working on this project normally they'd be right up against this fence the company that we used to put these water lines in actually have a really cool machine that they come in and it basically trenches and lays the pipe all at one time and they can just kind of drive around and install the water lines now there's still a lot of work afterwards to install the hydrants and everything but you can see i mean yes there there's some damage to the ground but for the most part this dirt is just laying on top of the grass and after we get a rain this is gonna wash right back and you're barely gonna tell they were even here so let's go down here i'm gonna show you this first hydrant that they put in which is the first one right here so this is the type of hydrant that we've had installed in like i said different places around the homestead in this orchard area we actually had three of these installed and we did that on purpose because as we've been telling you guys for about the past year our plan for this area is to divide this into three sections this section over here where this one is is going to be for gardens we're having a section for just the fruit orchard and then we're having a third section just for berries so each of those sections will now have their own supply of water now this type of hydrant is called a frost free hydrant not all parts of the country have these or need these we didn't really have many of these in arizona because we never really got enough frost or the ground never froze enough but here where we get cold and you guys who live in northern states probably already know about these this is called a frost free hydrant so basically the way this works is when the handle is down this is off and when the handle is up it's on the way that this prevents from freezing over the winter is when you turn it off all of the water that's up in this pipe actually drains back down and out the bottom of the pipe and then there's no water here to freeze it goes down below the frost line so that there's never any water to freeze now obviously we won't be able to be running garden hoses like this over the winter but we will be able to use these to fill buckets and things at like i said different parts of the homestead so we don't have to be carrying things so far over the winter so this is going to make life so much easier having these installed i can finally wind up all of those garden hoses and we can get a lot more strategic about getting water to the animals and all of the things that we're growing i think this is the hydrant that i'm the most excited about because this hydrant is going to be able to allow us to have water to the greenhouse even in the winter i talked a little bit about this in some of our previous videos when i was showing how the irrigation system is going to work in the greenhouse but i don't think it made a lot of sense to a lot of you until we can actually show you now that the hydrant is here so currently in order for me to hook up the irrigation in the greenhouse which here's where the hose hooks up to to to feed all of the lines inside of the greenhouse i would need to run a hose all the way from our well house which is about 300 feet away now because we have this hydrant here i can make myself just about a 10 foot hose run it from right here at this hydrant over to this connection right here and that's the only piece of hose that i need so when i'm done watering for the day i can turn that hydrant off have a nice frost free option there i can disconnect that hose on each side bring it in the greenhouse there'll be no water in the hose and it'll all drain out and that won't freeze up either and we can just use that all winter long now there may be some water that stays in these lines inside the greenhouse i do have it so that i can open the far end of this and because the greenhouse is at a little bit of a slope it should all drain out but if there is a little water it's really not that big of a deal if it freezes overnight there's not a single day during the winter that this greenhouse doesn't get above freezing during the day so we may have to adjust our watering times a little bit so that we're hitting that time of day when it's above freezing and the lines have thawed out but there's never going to be a time where we can't water this is another thing that i'm super excited about as far as these water lines go now we're running out of daylight so i'll try to keep this pretty quick but you can see behind me our pond this is one of the ponds that we have here on the farm but this is by far the biggest pond this is the one that i'm hoping to someday turn into a fishing pond it's big enough it's deep enough and i should be able to have fish in there but right now we have to allow the cattle to get in there because it's the only source of water for them when they're over in this area not anymore now that we have these water lines installed we actually ran one down here so that we can have a water tank for the cattle down in this area which means at some point probably not anymore before winter but at some point i can get busy fencing this pond off to keep the cattle out of it and we can finally start using it as a fishing pond now along with this paddock we've actually had a hydrant put in every paddock that we move the cows to so that from now on we don't have to rely on ponds at all last summer and this summer in two of our other paddocks where we have much smaller ponds those ponds actually went dry and we weren't able to keep the cattle in there during those times so by having these hydrants all over the place now we can actually move the cattle where we want them when we want to versus having to rely on the rain for those times of year when we have kind of a drought well looks like they heard me talking which probably means that they think i'm bringing them some grain but we only do that in the morning so they might think that they're about to get a treat but they're not going to get one tonight let's go a little closer our cattle are actually pretty friendly so we can get and talk to them and pet them but they're not as friendly as our dairy cow hey girls how are you well i see all of the cows and their calves but i don't see tex coming yet he usually tends to be more toward the back this paddock is actually where we're going to plan to separate tex over the winter at least that's our current plan we've got a little bit of fence that we need to fix to make sure he's not going to have a way to escape but we think our plan is to keep techs in this area over the winter and that's another reason why these water lines were so needed yet before winter because otherwise we'd have to be out here chopping holes in the ice in order for him to drink over the winter and that's not a fun job especially when it's really cold out oh there's tex all the way at the back [Music] [Music] um [Music] and of course here on the other side of the driveway rose and babe had to come say hi rose is our jersey cow she's the one that we're currently milking and babe is her calf who's about eight months old now so she's still got quite a while before we'll ever start milking her but we're excited for that day to come we've also installed some water lines over on this side for them so that we can have a water over here that we don't have to run 300 feet of garden hose to so you guys that is some of the exciting things that are happening around the homestead like i said there's always things kind of happening in the background that we can't show you as things are happening either because it's work that we're having done and not everybody wants to be on youtube or it's just things that we need to accomplish but we're always excited to share with you the improvements that we're making and show you how we're continuing to learn to live a better life out here in the country hey if you're enjoying our channel and you're enjoying our content i hope that you'll hit that subscribe button before you leave don't forget as always the absolute best way that you can help us is by sharing our videos on all of your social media and until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 33,542

Rating: 4.98769 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: edniV5SjQMY

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021