Hatching Chickies

My mother has hatched eggs and raised chickens for years. She is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to egg hatchery. This is the first year that she will not be hatching eggs. I can't imagine my mother without a couple of incubators full of eggs in the basement. My husband decided that he would like to raise Coturnix Quail to put in our freezer. Perfect timing! I know just where there are some nice incubators not in use. (And the wealth of knowledge to go with it). We worked it out with my folks, now we have 2 incubators, a hatcher, and brooders.  We do not have a basement. Crazy as it may be, our incubator is set up in our dining room. These incubators are pretty large set-ups. My mother was a serious hatcher. By now, my husband's enthusiasm has rubbed off on me, and I am just as excited to begin our new adventure. I want to be "close" to this hatching process. So the dining room is the perfect place. The garage was an option, but in an effort to keep the electric bill lower and to keep the incubator from having to work so hard, we opted for inside the house. Makes sense, right? 

So our adventure has begun. We now have quail eggs and chicken eggs setting. We incubated one set of quail eggs in a smaller incubator and waited and waited for them to hatch and not one egg hatched. It could have been cause of a faulty old incubator, wrong temperature reading, or the chance that the eggs were just not good. We still have our fingers crossed for some quail.out of the next batch of eggs set. 

We only have a few days to set up our brooder and a few weeks to have housing for the quail. Every day that the weather is decent you will find me outside with power tools and a hammer building a quail coop.  We have some used lumber and will have very little $$ invested into this project. I have become an "Old mother hen" watching over my eggs.