The Roost Homestead

08/29/2026

Vibe for the weekend 🤍

08/27/2026

☀️ We’ve been a bit quiet on socials lately. As I’m sure you can all relate, sometimes there’s some burnout with homesteading. In some seasons, it runs your daily plans, dictates your week, and planning monopolizes your conversations and headspace.

We’ve enjoyed a bit of down time - everything’s on cruise control. We decided to not incubate or bring in anything new for the rest of the year. We have gorgeous cockerels growing up and look forward to future flock expansion but for now - we’re just feeling ready for temps to drop and are planning some camping trips ahead of the holidays.

08/23/2026

Our quail eggs!! 🤩

Local quail eggs now available!! 🪺
(Along with our local chicken and duck eggs!)

08/12/2026

🤒 Here’s how we deal with sick birds—

This weekend we brought home four Black Copper Maran pullets. We’ve kept them separated from the flocks, and now only four days here, one is sick. She went from 100% to about 15% seemingly overnight. Runny hind end, eyes closed, slumped over.

📌 Our protocol - Corid immediately for the whole coop, and for the first day or two we do an electrolyte mix to get some calories in: egg yolk, pinch of sugar, pinch of salt, pinch of baking soda, 1TB water.

⚡️ Some people rip on Corid, but we give it anyway having seen it bring birds back from the brink of death within 24 hours without any negative side effects.

🚫 We do not separate a bird, despite what ‘the internet’ says. We’ve separated and not separated - when a bird shows signs of sickness, the whole coop is already exposed. We don’t put a bird under more stress by isolating and crating - we leave it out in nature, with its flock. We also don’t want to spread anything around by creating a second spot for the situation to live in.

🚫 We do not overly coddle. We used to, and learned it doesn’t pay off in the long run. We want strong flocks and let nature run its course.

👉🏻 Everyone does what’s right for them, depending on flock size, availability, etc. We have three large chicken coops and a quail aviary, so with this larger number of birds, we found our boundary with reasonable care of sickies - I’m curious to hear yours!

08/12/2026

Our duck eggs at Valley Park Elevator & Hardware have a big fan!! 🤩

08/09/2026

☀️A beautiful sunny Sunday. I’m hoping everyone finds time for leisure today! What do you have planned??

08/08/2026

🥚 New layers! I know y’all understand - 6 months of work and care and finally, the first eggs! 🙌🏻

08/07/2026

🌧️ We were just stormed on for over 12 hours straight! The yards are all straight mud and wet 💩 , especially in the quail and rabbit spaces. I poured pea gravel and shavings in their spaces to give them some dry area to sit on. Once it’s had more time to dry out, I’ll rake and dust lime and DE to help the ground a little more.

I’m going to continue pouring pea gravel in certain areas, by waters, feeders and walkways, to try to prevent excessive mud pits. I think come winter and spring we’ll be grateful we did!

08/06/2026

🎯 A couple misconceptions we had about quail. I’m sure everyone has a wide span of experiences, but this has been ours after hatching over 200 quail -

👉🏻They hatch in 17 days.
📌 Not a one hatched on day 17. Most went to day 19 or 20.

👉🏻 They start laying in 5-6 weeks.
📌 Ours did not start laying until closer to 10 weeks.

👉🏻 They’re somewhat easy to tell males from females.
📌 This has just not been our experience.

👉🏻 They can be aggressive when introducing new quail.
📌 We never witnessed an ounce of aggression. Granted, our original crew weren’t fully mature yet which could affect that, but introduction was a breeze. Nothing compared to drama chickens.

👉🏻 Jumbo quail means jumbo eggs.
📌 We get quite a few small ones. This is our first generation of quail, and will only keep larger birds and incubate larger eggs. 🥚

👉🏻 Quail don’t need much space.
📌 Our quail have a large aviary and it gets dirty quick, so I question small spaces due to the frequency of cleaning. It also seems like the quail love running and having some headspace to flutter around in.

⭐️ We actually love the quail. They’re entertaining to watch, they’re resilient and low maintenance, and the egg hunt is always fun! They were a good addition to the homestead.

08/04/2026

🥀 I found spider mites on my son’s mini roses this morning, and was grateful for the ‘I might use this some day’ bin! 😆

Of the 72 other spray bottles of random mixtures from bleach to insecticides, I didn’t have (or couldn’t identify 🫠) any with a Castile soap mix for the plant. In this case, a random empty spray bottle was the hero, but so often it’s unsuspecting things that can come in really clutch, like a broken paver as a step for chicks, or the leftover hardware cloth to patch a hole.

So - the plant is in quarantine, and I actually remembered to label the bottle for future reference 😆