Today is a vibing-to-music-and-researching-the-best-way-to-cultivate-very-specific-plants kind of day. Next year’s food source isn’t gonna plan itself!
I realize I have basically not really promo’d this end-of-year project at all outside of Twitter, but I’m Kickstarting a manual to help others achieve what I did this year, which is: raising a quail army.
I really love keeping quails and harvesting eggs daily, and it’s a LOT more cost-efficient and easy to do than you’d think. Quail can be kept in places where chickens might not be allowed, and are just really cute :’}
The book is 80 illustrated pages of information about raising the domesticated Japanese Coturnix Quail (Coturnix japonica) for pleasure and as a low-maintenance food source. It’s silly and easy to read and IDK. I had a major death in my life last November and was in a really bad place until spring of this year, when I began my quail journey. Relearning to build, hatch, grow, and care for something really got me back on track after all the pain. Keeping quail really helped me relearn how to appreciate life, and I wanted to share that feeling!
The project is fully funded, but I’m trying to push for a stretch goal to add a bonus sticker sheet to all the physical book orders, so I figure I’d sneak back here to help achieve that.
The book SHOULD also be shipping out several weeks before the 2021 holidays, so that’s another nice thing. There might be some delays just due to USPS being hamstrung by its own leadership but, doing my best to get these into hands in December. Feels good to be making stuff again finally.
Sorry for RTing this huge post again, but wanted to say thanks for looking and supporting QUAIL PARTY! Due to interest, I was able to justify an minimum order of stickers, so every physical book order regardless of tier now gets a complimentary quail sticker sheet to go with it~
one more photo for the road (a pic of one of my quails, about 1 day after hatching) (if you like hatching quails btw, take a look in the backer-only updates on the project for some fun stuff)
Bill Mollison, the man who coined the phrase permaculture and co-founded the permaculture movement passed away peacefully yesterday. R.I.P. (May 4th, 1928 – September 24th, 2016)
Earth-cooled, shipping container underground CA home for 30K
“As a kid Steve Rees played in caves and learned how the earth could cool. As an adult, he buried two shipping containers and created an off-grid retirement home for himself and his wife Shirley.“
I planted a new strawberry last summer, I’m very particular about which and where I plant so I can tell them apart and figure out the best varieties for our conditions after some unproductuve duds. When I found these edible ornamentals with COLOUR FLOWERS I snatched them up, both for the novelty and easy identification! They’re a light and dark pink, specific to each mother plant. One tag said “Toscana”, which there is plenty of info online about but the other was something like “Havana” or “Hovana” but I can’t any information on it. Or even any other shades/names for pink strawberies besides Toscana, so make of that what you will. They are doing great as a garden perennial and also look fantastic cascading out of a hanging basket, which is how I origionally bought them.
I’m also very excited to see my buckweat flowering, although of the three pounds of seeds I planted it was considerably sparse. Rodents have been digging up my seeds just as fast as I plant them, sometimes eliminating entire crops before they can sprout, and it’s become an epidemic in our garden… I’m hoping to fill in gaps around the garden and between beds with Buckwheat to use as bee forage. A local homesteader recommended it for it’s fast growth and ease of uprooting when rotating crops. It also produces a dark molasses-like honey if a lot is available.
Here’s some hardy roses, greens clipped for lunch, our hugelkultur mounds with perennial berries and herbs, a ground cover of radishes and rye that I pull up and use as green manure (it’s been coming back for a few years, anywhere I drop the seeds), squash vines (on a hugel mound) with a cattle panel set up for a trellis, and tractor tire raised bed full of tomatoes.
Finally, what I’m hoping will be a snake habitat to control pests. It’s set into a hugel mound that the rodents made nests and tunnels in, there’s a water dish nearby and the bricks and rocks catch the sun and warm up. I’ll let the grass around it grow long to create cover. Strawberries grow on top.
We spend some time doing one-on-one work on paper and workbooks, but most of the time he’s living life by playing, exploring, and helping us. It turns out these are great ways to learn.
The end of the Driveway garden! Since we got the Big Garden going we don’t need it like we did and can spend our days working in the backyard with the animal and woods around us rather than listening to traffic. The backyard is also fenced better and a nicer place for the Kiddo to play while I work.
After tearing up the old fence and moving all the rocks we’d placed at the base, Lieblings used a box blade behind the tractor to smooth it out. Now we have a lot more space for parking and whatnot. The box blade is a pretty handy implement for leveling the ground, we also used it to correct the bad ruts (some were a foot deep) that form in the spring melt.
