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The Quinoa crop is starting to mature with the seed heads dying and drying off. The problem is that this is the time of year when heavy rain and thunderstorms arrive. Already some plants that matured their heads earlier have been rained on and the seed has swollen and then popped out onto the ground.

 I inspected some dried off heads in the field and none of them had any seed in them at all !

I suspect that high temperatures at flowering caused pollen sterility and no fertilization.

 I let the goats in to eat what they can, then I will mow.

 I will try sowing again later in Summer so flowering will take place when it is cooler and the seed heads will mature in Winter, which is usually dryer.

The Chia has yet to flower and some of the grain Amaranth is just starting to grow flower spikes.

The Niger crop was a disaster. I sowed it in early Spring but the short days at this time triggered flower production and all the plants had masses of flowers but very few leaves. This ment that there was very little seed produced. Fortunately I had some left over seed from the first sowing and I sowed this in early Summer. The plants are all growing well with no sign of flower buds yet. They should grow leaves only until the days shorten in Autumn and then start to initiate flowers, that this time should be able to mature the seed.

The Quinoa and Chia seed I sowed several months ago have grown well but so have the weeds. Chia is much better at out competing the weeds than Quinoa.

It has been very dry and the Chia has not been getting irrigation water because the quinoa and weeds have grown up above the sprinklers and restricted their spread. See pics.  The Quinoa is much more drought resistant than the Chia.

There are a few very tall quinoa plants and I am going to save the seed from them.

The grain Amaranth is growing well but is yet to flower and leaf eating caterpillars have attacked some plants.

I am relatively new to poultry breeding and so will be conducting experiments to get a clearer idea of what is possible.

I will also be growing some seed crops to augment the high cost of commercial poultry feed.

This season I am trialing Niger, Grain Amaranth, and Quinoa. They are suitable for feeding quails and chickens.

Niger is a relative of the Sunflower and the seeds look like miniature sunflower seeds. I bought some seed at a feed store and fed them to my Japanese Quails and chickens and they were eagerly consumed. Sunflower seeds are too big for quails to eat, so Niger is ideal to provide protein and unsaturated fat for rapid growth in the weeks before slaughter.

My quails are a meat quail strain which I breed to reach a minimum weight of 350grams at 6 weeks of age. Some exceed 400g at this time. The culls I eat and they are delicious.

I have sown quinoa seeds which I bought from the supermarket. They were from Bolivia. The germination was low but I have some plants growing. The seed has to be washed to remove the bitter saponins from the seed coat before feeding to the quails, who love the stuff. It is far too expensive to buy quinoa seed for quail feed, so growing it is the only other option. It would seem an ideal crop, since wild birds are deterred from eating the raw seed because of the bitter compounds in the seed shell. Both Niger and grain Amaranth may suffer from wild birds eating the seed before I can harvest it.