Today I'm talking with Caitlyn at Quirky Quail Acres.

If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment.

Or just buy me a coffee

00:00
If you're a homesteader who wants to get paid for your content without living on social media, check out SteelSpoonFarm.com. Founder Jen Kibler teaches you how to build a real blog or your email list and use Pinterest for sustainable marketing. Inside her coaching group, Content Seeds Collective, you'll get weekly live coaching, a private community, and access to her Root Seller Resource Library full of tutorials and templates. Join today for just $37 a month and start building a business that doesn't depend on the algorithm.

00:26
A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Seals Spoon Farm. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Caitlin at Quirky Quail Acres in North Mankato, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Caitlin. How are you? Hi there. I'm well. How are you? I'm good, except I can't get through an introduction without stumbling all over myself today. I don't know what's going on.

00:57
Um, so I would normally ask about the weather because that's the question I ask on every single podcast episode, but you're only half an hour away from me. So I'm guessing it's sunny outside. Yep. Sunny and feeling balmy compared to yesterday. No doubt. Yesterday was terrible. I mean, it was pretty, but it was cold. Yeah, it hurt. It hurt, especially after tank top weather last weekend. Yeah.

01:24
Yeah, that was really nice. And I knew it was fall, spring, but I was like, I will take it. It's a good reprieve. All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. OK, so I again, I'm Caitlin and I am a mom and I work full time and we have our little farm here just outside of North Mankato, Minnesota. We

01:53
He are kind of jack of all trades sort of farm. We raise quail and we raise chickens and we have an orchard and we have a very large garden. Hopefully this year we'll also have a greenhouse. We also tap all of our own maple trees and we make maple syrup. And we also have, we.

02:20
We volunteer at a nearby shelter. So we have three rescue dogs. Um, it's just chaos all the time. It sounds amazing to me. Well, we're right there with you on the big garden and we have 20 apple trees. We have one huge wild plum tree. have some Alden plum trees. We have peach trees. have rhubarb.

02:48
We do have a greenhouse. have chickens, we have a dog and we have five barn cats. So there's a lot of overlap there between you and I.

02:59
I freaking love it. Yeah, no, I wouldn't choose anything different. um I'm so passionate about it. And it's I've never been one to like I don't want to go to the gym to exercise, but I want to be I want to be active all the time. I want to be I want to be moving and working. And I like I like the hard work and I like feeling accomplished at the end of the day. Absolutely.

03:26
So the reason that I asked you to be on the podcast, I have a little tiny ulterior motive and I don't usually. My husband and I have been talking about maybe getting a few quail and seeing how they do. And I'm guessing you know a lot about quail. So can you tell me all about quail today? Yeah, absolutely. So we, we raise Coturnix quail because A, they are the largest variety that

03:56
and that you can own really. um You don't need a special permit like you do for other species of quail because they are considered a domesticated species. uh Whereas for like, bobwhite, you would need a game permit. And also they don't lay as many eggs. um They are smaller birds, so they're not really good meat birds. Generally people raise

04:23
Bob White for dog training and stuff. we're not, again, our dogs are, they're pound dogs there. They'd be useless for that. um Anyway, and Coturnix quail lay about 300 eggs a year. um We don't raise exclusively jumbo because we like to go for a good mix of colors in our birds too, just because it's, you know, it's nice to have a pretty bird that you're raising also. So we

04:53
focus more on um egg and feathering color genetics, but they are highly productive. are their eggs are so nutritious when you compare them side by side with like an equal weight of a chicken egg. The nutritional profile is just phenomenal because they are heavier in the yolk. So then they have all of that additional um

05:22
nutrition to go with that. We find them very, very easy to raise. They were kind of our poultry introductory species. My husband had been wanting to raise birds for some time and I was kind, I knew, I knew that I would be doing the majority of the work and so I kind of said, whoa, hey, we're not going to dive in head first.

05:48
until I feel really prepared for this, let's try quail first because they require less space, they mature faster, they're productive enough that it can serve our family's needs off of that. We started with about 15 quail and now at any given time we're sitting at about 100 quail. so quail math equals chicken math. Same thing. very much so. And it's especially because it's so easy to hatch out your own.

06:17
They're mature in eight weeks. uh Some mature faster, but generally they're all mature by eight weeks and laying. You know who's a boy, who's a girl. So within two weeks or within two months, you can vent sex them and separate the boys from the girls. Unfortunately, they are not like chickens in you can't you cannot successfully have a bachelor flock. So unfortunately, um

06:45
The extra males do end up in freezer camp because um they are very unkind to one another if you have too many roosters in the cubby. But yes, we very quickly went from 15 in a hutch to now we have an indoor aviary in our barn because they are very flighty birds. They are very prone to oh

07:11
offing themselves if they get scared by anything. And so just with the number of predators we have around, we felt that it was best to keep them under stimulated a little bit in that sense. And so they have an indoor aviary that we have a bunch of hidey holes and we have artificial sunlight and we keep them as entertained as possible and they get to run around but they you know, they just seem to live their happy little lives they are.

07:42
They're sweet, they're beautiful. are what I would refer to as a feathered potato. They do not have brain cells or personality of some larger poultry, but that's okay. That's okay. Cause they are still lovable. Well, that was a very good introduction to quail. have a couple of questions.

08:04
Is it a pain in the butt to crack quail eggs? Because I've heard that quail eggs, you need three quail eggs to equal one chicken egg if you're going to do scrambled eggs. So is it is it hard to crack the eggs or is it just like cracking a chicken egg? It's just smaller. So you actually are best off using an egg scissors for quail eggs because they are. It's not so much the size, it's that they have a much thinner shell, but a much thicker membrane than a chicken egg.

08:33
So if you try to crack it, you kind of end up just crumbling it without actually breaking through the membrane. So um you can buy quail egg scissors and cut the top off and dump them out. So that actually makes it very slick and easy, way less getting, you know, digging shell out of the bowl or the pan with your fingers um than sometimes I have with our chicken eggs. using the scissors is very simple.

08:59
Okay, cool, I didn't know such a thing existed. So I have learned something new yet again on a podcast that I am doing. And then for the quail meat, my husband asked me to ask you this. said, can you ask her how she would describe how to cook quail meat and how it tastes? Does it taste like the dark meat on a chicken? What does it taste like? I can honestly, don't eat our quail.

09:28
because I'm just not a big meat fan. My husband reports that it is like the...