Nice! I’ve been pondering starting a popcorn landrace. My sons really like popcorn (even though one of my daughters is allergic to it!). If it’s quite productive for a small space, that may be a great tip.
I can definitely see rye and sorghum growing great for you. I’ve seen sorghum from birdseed volunteering in a neighbor’s unirrigated front yard, and I’ve seen a whole field of rye growing feral next to a highway. Rye has poky seed heads, so I wouldn’t want it growing feral in my back yard, but I wouldn’t mind sorghum as part of my ground cover polyculture. Actually, I kind of already have sorghum, since I have lots of johnson grass back there.
If grains would be all quail need to eat, that would definitely make quail an interesting possibility for a laying flock in a back yard that grows all their feed.
Do quail eat corn, sorghum and rye? I’ve been toying with the idea of a quail landrace recently and have only just barely started looking into how I would keep them as naturally as possible in their own food forest.
I haven’t watched any of her videos yet, but I met this lady at a local farmers’ market:
She said she loves the online community about raising quails and that there’s loads of good information online. Since she was selling quail eggs (and pre-orders of chicks!) at a farmers’ market, my suspicion is she’s had a lot of experience raising them and may be a great source of information about how to raise them comfortably in an urban environment.
Thank you so much! I haven’t been able to find much, and the good stuff I did find was hidden behind ridiculously huge paywalls lol so thank you for this!!!
Hi everyone, I only see this thread now, otherwise I’d had joined the discussion earlier.
I’ve had chicken for over 10 years and quail for two years in the past. I found tons of information on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CoturnixCorner
As mentioned earlier in this thread, male quail have quite a vocal call. Females are much more quiet. But I think if you’d have just one male, the ‘competition calling’ would be minimal (unless there are wild quail in the surroundings). They fly. They are a favourite snack of many predators. For these reasons you’d need an aviary where you can stand in, or relatively low cages, because they also spook easily and when they spook, they fly right up, gaining velocity, and might break their neck hitting a ceiling that’s just at the wrong height.
Newly hatched quail are tiny, and need a surprisingly low positioned heat plate. Their feed also needs to be quite fine.
As mentioned earlier, they stop laying when the daylight hours are too few.
You can’t free range quail - they don’t have a homing instinct and will just wander off.
They are fun to watch, their eggs are really pretty and tasty, but tiny.
I don’t have quail anymore, I only had them for two years (next to chicken, that I then chose as the only poultry).
I first had them in a low cage (about 50cm high) on the ground, with a natural setting for them. It was fun watching ‘quail TV’.
But cleaning the coop was cumbersome, I had to catch the quail and put them in a temporary cage, then clean out or move the coop (took 2 people to move it).
The second setting was a voliere I could walk in, 2m high and the description as I mentioned before. There was a small door they could walk through to an outer pen under a cherry tree, with tall grass, insects etc. The outer pen didn’t have a roof because of the cherry tree, we clipped the wings of the quail so they couldn’t fly away. Their food and water was in the voliere, and I’d lure them back to the voliere in the evening to keep them safe.
Until I forgot to close the little door one evening, and a marten had a feast that night, leaving only feathers behind. So sad, it was a stupid mistake of me. That was the end of my quail keeping.
In the shorter cage, did they have an earth bottom or a wire bottom? I was thinking I would start with a shorter cage and burry it in the ground so they could have earth as their floor, and my hope is then I won’t have to clean their pen floor as often. What do you think?
In both cages they had an earth bottom. You’ll have to clean, deep mulch or move the cage about once a week, depending on the size of the cage and the number of quail.
To keep a digging predator away, you need to have wire mesh in the ground horizontally, like hems of a skirt (the cage) flowing outwards, if that makes sense. Otherwise a fox will dig until it can get under the vertical wire mesh wall.
My lower cage didn’t have them, but the yard was already fenced for the chicken, and I have a LGD (livestock guardian dog) . The higher voliere was in another place, we moved. My LGD was inside for the night when the quail disappeared.
Yea it that sense, thank you, I didn’t know that fox would just keep digging. I was thinking 6-8 inches might be enough
My initial thought was a 4ftx4ft pen with 5 females and 1 male. We have a ton of bunch grass that grows, and I was thinking of keeping them there, with separate nesting boxes off the side of the initial 4x4 cage
lol so thank you for this!!!
