They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
Thursday, the Feast of the Assumption, was a very busy day. We slaughtered two ganders, two roosters (for stew meat), five older hens (also for stew meat) and 27 Cornish cross meat birds. The work started the night before with setting up the kill station. We learned from last year it is good to have… Continue reading Chicken Dinner
About 10 days until they are ready! This year, when we butcher them, we are going to look carefully for the nuggets. The question is, does each chicken have a single nugget that is an individualized shape? Or does each chicken have the full menagerie pterodactyl, a Tyrannosaurus, a stegosaurus, and a brontosaurus?
The pigs have less than a week remaining before they go off to the butcher, and the meat birds are now four weeks old, halfway through their brief lives. It is time to get them out on grass, but we don't fancy the attrition rate we had last year with the chickshaw only. We would… Continue reading Bird-Mobile
Considerably more than tins, a bag to feed them, but, if they all survived to adulthood, we should be able to turn a profit on their meat. Early morning, breakfast picnic on the back of the truck. We replaced the old wooden feed trough at the chicken coop, because it was too small for the… Continue reading Meat the Birds!
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family! With yesterdays turkey carcass simmering on the stove with onions, carrots, celery and bay leaves, the house is filled with the smell of fresh turkey stock. Later today I will be straining and canning this up for use later use in soups. The… Continue reading Gobble Gobble!
Saturday was a busy day at the farm. We had 11 chickens to butcher. The kids helped us get set up, But some of them are too small to help, and they spent most of the morning in the Redneck playpen. How longest part of the set up was waiting for the water to get… Continue reading Chicken in the freezer
Thursday… Friday morning. Friday afternoon. What a difference a Day can make.
Some friends gave us a rooster last weekend. Handsome feller, but so far hasn’t really meshed with the gang, so to speak. But onto more important news, we have now had the geese in the paddock with the meat birds for two nights, and have had the same count of meat birds both mornings. It… Continue reading Geese on Guard
As we mentioned in our last chicken post, we did get the meat birds out on past year. We have a few critiques thus far. Let’s just say the system has pros and cons. First the pros: Super easy to do the chores. Just put the feed in the feeder put the water in the… Continue reading Apparently the meat birds are tasty
For our meat birds we have decided to pasture them using a Justin Rhodes style meatshaw. This should allow us to get them out on grass for the remaining five weeks of their brief lives. We started out a few weeks ago at Papa's house, where Seppi and Daddy cut most of the pieces out… Continue reading Building the Chickshaw
Little Farm in the Big City 