Category Archives: quail

Tomatoes, quail and dragon fruit galore!

Posted on by

February has been busy and productive at McCarthyPark 2! Our quail hatching last month wasn’t great, with only 10 hatching, so we bought some tiny day old quail chicks and added those to the brooder box, and transferred the older ones to a cage outside that is set up with a heater (but fortunately isn’t as stinky as it is outside!). They are all doing very well, and growing so quickly!

We have also had great success with our dragon fruit again this year, with a total of 24 flowers turning to fruit. It is particularly good that the flowering has been a bit better spaced out, so we are able to pick and eat some while the others ripen. We hand pollinated again just to be sure as some of the flowers are under the pergola roof.

And tomatoes….. oh my goodness we have had such an abundance, just from four plants in the aquaponics- a Roma, yellow pear, and two different cherry tomatoes.

This is just one, that produces the most beautiful large cherry tomatoes!

Every weekend has been spent preserving, as well as eating fresh and giving away heaps! So far this summer we have canned cherry tomatoes and crushed tomatoes….

The cherry tomatoes siphoned a bit, but will be ok for a while.

We have also canned (and eaten!) jars of shakshouka, creole sauce and salsa- we have plenty to last for a while once the tomatoes stop producing (no signs of that as yet though!)

The shakshouka was made by adapting the spices in the Ball Book recipe for spicy creole sauce- yum!

Summer bounty!

Posted on by

We have had a mix of weather so far this summer, with some heat but also lots of wind. Despite this, we have had some good growth – particularly our grapes that were planted around the ‘duckagon‘. They have really bushed up and now form a fabulous shady pen for the ducks, and there are lots of bunches of grapes too!

The bees seem to have finally settled….. at least one hive anyway. After some extensive bee dramas, which involved completely emptying each hive some distance away and then setting it up again and letting the worker bees fly back, we installed a nuc into each, complete with a queen and brood. Hive 1 is certainly on its way, with the new queen visible and laying well. Hive 2….still not sure, but the boost from the nuc has helped but there was no evidence of a laying queen, so we have put a new one in yet again! Fingers crossed.

As we usually do in summer, we have incubated some quail eggs and now have 10 very cute quail chicks. They are so tiny when they hatch, but grow and grow at a great rate! These little ones were hinting that it was time to come out of the incubator and into the brooder with some food!

Quail again!

Posted on by

We successfully incubated more quail earlier this month, and with 14 in the brooder box it was getting quite disgusting! We found a great guinea pig/rabbit cage in a roadside collection, strengthened it up and converted it to a great little brooder for the quail. Rather than keeping it inside (a brooder sure does get smelly with 14 quail in it) this one is kept outside in a protected area.

They were so excited to be able to run around, have a big stretch and especially have a dust bath!