Harvesting Pears

Wondering what to do with your abundance of pears? We made Pear Bread, Pear Jelly, Pear Butter, and Pear Juice. And yes, we ate some raw.













Here's my Pear Bread recipe:

2 c. brown sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1/4 c. molasses
3 eggs
1-1/4 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1-1/2 t. ground cinnamon
3/4 t. ground cloves
1-1/2 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. ground allspice
4 firm pears, thinly sliced
3 c. flour

Preheat oven to 350 degree and generously grease two large loaf pans. Mix brown sugar, vegetable oil, molasses, and eggs. Mix in salt, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice. Stir the pear slices in, coating them evenly. Stir in flour. Pour batter into thte prepared loaf pans.

Bake for 50-60 minutes. Allow to cool in pan about 10 minutes before removing them and place them on a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

Muscovie Ducks

We have really enjoyed our Muscovie Ducks. They are quiet (unlike guineas) and eat more bugs than guineas. They are an excellent source of meat and eggs as well. These ducks will roost in trees (at least that's what they tell me - ours hasn't figured that out yet) which makes them able to be safe at night while sleeping.

We house ours with the chickens. They have a large "yard" to forage in and a small tub to swim in (although there is a pond very close to them and they haven't figured out how to get to that either). They are excellent layers and will sit on their eggs well with good mothering skills. We just love our Muscovies!

A Bigger Backyard

We've had a few people ask why we aren't adding new items to the blog. We are so excited to have expanded our "backyard", so we're trying to get that in order. We bought 16 acres of land, and a house, in the country. There are many differences to having a hobby farm in the city versus the country. Some we were aware of; some are a surprise. Kevin is working tons of forced overtime, so our process is very slow right now.

Let me share with you the blessings of God for our family - this land has some cleared areas and some raw beautiful Big Thicket woods - all fenced, established (though horribly grown-up with weeds) garden plots, old fruit & nut trees (again, out of control and not managed), a small pond, and a timber exemption (meaning super cheap taxes). We are so excited, yet overwhelemed due to the fact that the land was not managed properly. We have cleaned up the garden area enough to plant the end of season okra and fall tomatoes and are now working on an area for the chickens to provide them with a safe area for open foraging all day. I will post a photo when we're done.

We harvested some pears yesterday so I will post a couple of pear recipes that are good.

We also added guineas and Muscovy ducks to our homestead. Both of these do great with bug management and the guineas are an alert system. I'll post of photos of them soon.

The bees are doing good and if I could read their minds (if they had one), I would say they are enjoying the natural water source and nectar sources. One hive got ants in it, which is a new problem for us. If you have any solutions for that, let us know.

As soon as we get settled in, I'll add new posts and pics. We are so grateful to God for being able to buy this property.

Raising Quail

When you have limited space for your hobby farm, or you are in the city, you may want to consider raising quail. They are easy to keep, require very little space, are quiet and can provide you money, eggs, and meat. We raise Coturnix Quail (Japanese Quail) primarily. In seven weeks they will start laying and are big enough to slaughter.



This is our basic quail house. You can use a basic rabbit hutch for a small number of birds. You can easily keep 20-30 birds in here. We keep our immature birds in here and move them to the breeder box cage when they are mature. The breeder box cage has multiple seperate cages to divide them which helps you keep the ideal ratio of male:female birds together. A good ratio is one male to 3-4 females, depending on the male. The males are darker than the females and will frequently be seen mounting the females and pulling feathers off their neck. Yeah, not very romantic.

You will want to build your breeder cage with a slight tilt on the bottom the eggs will roll to the edge for you. We have an opening on our edge with the wire flooring extending past the bottom of the cage and the edge rolled to catch the egg. This is nice so you don't have to open the cage daily and upset the birds.



This is our watering system. We use the same set-up for our chickens - see that post for the bucket photo and directions. You may be able to see the small wooden box in this cage. We put dried grass clippings or small leaves and let them use this for dust baths.

With proper housing and diet, your quail will produce lots of eggs for you. There will come a time that you will start wondering what to do with all those eggs. Here's a picture of our babies hatching in the incubator. Yes, the egg turner is still in there - we obviously didn't count our incubation days right! We eat some (fried, scrambled, boiled and pickled) and incubate some.


Later I'll post some quail egg recipes. Yummm!!



Once you get used to all this, you will want to progress to the next stage: butchering the quail. This is not hard to do - imagine yourself going dove hunting and cleaning the doves. You'll get about that much breast meat, by the way. Some people like to cook up the entire bird, but to me, the dark meat is so small on this bird that it's just not worth it. You can cook quail just like you cook chicken. If you find the taste different, just use half chicken meat and half quail meat. At this point, I don't find alot of value in butchering these birds. It's a bit too much work for the little bit of meat. However, in honor of trying to live a life where we waste nothing, we butcher at times but mainly reserve it for when we have an abundance of birds or need to cull out aggressive ones.



Finally, how do you make money off these birds? We sell them at times from one week old to mature. You can even sell the dressed out birds frozen (meat).

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it gives you another avenue to explore in trying to live off the land and provide inexpensive yet high quality food for your family. There's much more you will need to know if you plan on incubating quail. This post will give you enough to get started and let you decide if you think quail will be a good addition to your hobby farm. Get 6-10 quail - keeping in mind the proper ratio of male:female with the goal of raising them for eggs. Once you get that down and have become successful at using your eggs, you will want to learn more about breeding them. You will need an incubator, a brooder box and have a basic understanding of breeding to prevent in-breeding problems.

As always, we want to remind you to start small and expect big results!

Planting Guide

I think the biggest question we get is, "When do I plant...?" Here's a link to the Jefferson County (TX) Planting Guide. This is the planting dates I go by and I rarely vary from this. The only time I varied was due to Hurricane Rita and that garden didn't produce well. At this time of the year, the only thing you have left to plant is okra. Our okra was a bumper crop last year. It's easy to grow in our climate and easy to store. We eat some, freeze some (blanch first), can some, and dehydrate some.

Here's the link: http://jefferson-tx.tamu.edu/publications/PlantingGuide.pdf

For those of you outside of Jefferson County, search the internet for your local county extension office.

Another Chicken Coop Photo

As promised - here is a photo of our smaller chicken coop. We use this one for the young chicks.

Homesteading with Chickens

A simple addition for your homestead (city or country) is chickens. They are easy to come by, easy to raise, and easy to enjoy! This is a picture of our coop. If you are in the city, it would be best to have a chicken tractor which is a movable coop. See our coop on the left. We have made a recent revision to it that isn’t pictured here. We raised the water cups a little higher because they’d get grass clippings kicked up into the water cups. This has worked great. The water system we use is a 5-gallon bucket that is suspended at the end of the coop and we have a tube that goes from the bottom of this bucket down to the water cups. The water is fed by gravity with pressure regulators. This has been great and allows us to leave them for the weekend without having someone come over to check on them. Chickens need access to water at all times. Depending on the size of your chickens and how hot the weather is, they can drink up to 2 cups of water daily. The nest boxes & roosts are at the top. This allows us to collect the eggs from the outside, without ever going into the coop. We generally let our chickens roam daily, but this isn’t a requirement. They really enjoy getting out and happy chickens produce lots of good eggs. To the left is a picture of them going through one of our gardens before the Spring planting season. This allows them to eat the weed seeds, take dust baths to remove/prevent mites and lice, turn over our soil and remove some of the winter crop cover (we use rye grass).




Our Anatolian/Pyreneese dog, Anna, is seen in the photo protecting her flock while they are taking their dust bath. There’s not a lot to protect them from here, but once we relocate to our hobby farm, she’ll be busy. This is the time of year to get your baby chicks. You can either get them from local folks, your local feed store, or order them. This year we ordered ours because we were looking for a certain type of chicken.



We got Delaware chickens this year (see pic above). This chicken originated from the U.S. and is suited for meat or egg production. Yes, we will be incubating some of our eggs and butchering our own chickens this year. We did quail last year and it went well but those birds are so tiny! But, remember our philosophy? Start small and grow with time. Back to our new chickens – the Delaware breed is a historic breed and is considered critically endangered. This brings me to write about our latest venture in homesteading. We have made the decision to start selecting breeds that are endangered, yet good producers, in order to participate in the preservation of more than ourselves.

Before adding chickens to your homestead, check your city codes (if you care). Most cities will have a code against roosters but the larger your city, or the more high dollar homes it has, you’ll find ordinances against having any type of poultry. Most of the time, you can give it a shot and if no one complains, it’ll be just fine. If you have a privacy fence and keep your coop clean and move the chicken tractor around at least weekly, no one will even know you have these birds. But, of course, I can’t recommend that you break the law – just take this information and use it how you need to.

There’s so much more to tell you about chickens, but this is a good start and hopefully you are thinking about adding them to your backyard. They pay for themselves even if all you do is eat their eggs. If you sell them or butcher them, you’ll come out ahead. It’s a great investment that your broker won’t tell you about and it’s even tax free!