Filed under: Chickens
Partridge Cochin chick
It’s hard to feel bad when you’re holding a chick.
We lost eleven chicks in one day. ELEVEN!! I called the hatchery thinking that this last batch was the last I would order from them. It turns out that I accidentally ordered the wrong bird. They tell you on their website that these birds can’t handle the altitude above 5000 ft. We’re at 6503 ft according to Google Earth.
You might be wondering why it would matter. Well, these chickens have been bred for meat. They gain weight as fast as possible, using as little feed as possible, for as short a time as possible. Great idea except their internal organs, particularly their hearts can’t keep up. So my four-day-old chicks died of heart attacks. Ah! The wonders of agricultural science!
I ordered 25 birds and I can expect to have zero survive. I’m going to see if I can salvage them by putting them on a feed with a lower protein content to try to slow their growth. We’ll see.
I was warned some time ago by a software engineer turned rancher that there was nothing like this life, but not to deceive myself. There would be train wrecks.
Chickens in the Freezer
In the spirit of a true City Girl Farmer, I decided to try raising chickens someone else could butcher. Butchering a chicken is like cleaning a big fish or cleaning a toilet. Any one can do it, but why would you want to?
I was a little disappointed with how Aurelio tasted. I had heard such wonderful things about how you could never go back to store-bought chickens after raising your own. Actually, it wasn’t a problem for me. He tasted like cardboard.
Talking with my chicken mentor straightened out a couple of things. I wasn’t raising the right kind of bird and Aurelio was several months old before he was butchered. The chickens we are used to eating are about 8 weeks old. It cost us $2.50/bird, packaged and ready to put in the freezer. Such a deal!
Our chickens were almost 9 weeks old and we just got back from the butcher in Simla. We dropped them off at 9:00 and picked them up around 10:30, after we had a leisurely breakfast at the Hen House Cafe. Lovely!
Filed under: Chickens | Tags: meat birds, raising meat birds, Rock Cornish chickens
I decided to raise some chickens for food this year. This time instead of eating one of our old roosters, I picked a breed designed for meat. Thomas and I made this portable enclosure for them. They only live in it for about a month before they are butchered. At $2.50/bird it is worth it to me to have someone else do the dirty work. I’ll go drink some coffee and then pick up wrapped birds on ice. You can tell I’m a City Girl Farmer, can’t you?
Outdoor chicken enclosure
Thomas next to the coop door he designed
We had been working on this off and on for a few months and finally decided to get it finished. Can you see where it says “Chikin Coop” across the top in purple chalk? That’s how you know where you are. 🙂
He designed it with a hen-sized hole so that the chickens could come and go as they pleased during the day. The only problem with that, as we soon discovered, was that young goats can get their heads in but are too stupid to figure out how to get them out again.
It was hilarious to come out and see a goat on his front knees, his butt in the air, bleating to be set free. The door had caught him in the act of trying to steal chicken feed.
We have decided to just keep the door closed for now. We will be having baby goats in the spring (you can’t say “kids” when you’re my age or people panic) and we don’t want them to endure the plight our little wether did.
Thomas locking the slider into place
Most people think of chickens as being among the benign farm animals, but not so! Today I went out to feed them and saw a gopher skin on the floor of the coop. The gopher had been opened up like a hard candy and his skin discarded like a cellophane wrapper. It looked a little like a miniature bearskin rug. The chickens had eaten everything out of the skin and that caused me to wonder about egg carton labels that claim their chickens are “vegetarian fed”. I guess ours are vegetarian fed, too, because the feed I give them is 100% vegetable matter. If you count what they feed themselves, though, I doubt anyone who raises chickens can honestly claim they are “vegetarian fed”—unless they post guards to make the bad chickens spit out the bugs and rodents they ingest. Just sayin’….
One of the projects we started was renovating the chicken coop.
Old nest box
The old nest box was quite deteriorated and just awful to clean. I came across and idea perusing other people’s blogs and decided to build new nest boxes with cinder block, boards and dishpans. Sounds like a redneck solution, I know but it is much easier to clean and I enjoy chickens much more when they don’t stink.
boxes screwed onto board
We fixed some broken/missing slats where they roost and added some new roosting area as well. We currently working on a new front door and hope to have that done by the end of the week.
New slats
chickens investigating boxes
Thomas taking aim
We had been talking about it for a while but when I came home last night my daughter told me that one of our roosters had attacked her. My belly was starting to get full. We have one hen who I guess is lowest on the totem pole and she stays perched in the coop all day long because as soon as she gets down to eat or drink she gets gang-banged by the roosters. They are treading her back feathers off and I feel so sorry for her. They consume feed and offer nothing but aggression and horniness in return.
So Thomas and I decided today was the day. Some readers may have read about Aurelia who had to be renamed after we saw “her” climbing on to some of the hens. It was Aurelio’s turn today.
I almost called my chicken mentor to see if she could come over to hold my hand and then I just started thinking. What is the matter with me?? A hundred years ago a mother would send her child out to kill and butcher a chicken and bring it in to her to cook. How hard could this be?? So we got out the book, the gun, the pot of boiling water, some knives and a table and went to work.
Thomas plucking the bird
Cutting off the neck
I discovered a few interesting things about chickens:
- there is not as much blood as I expected
- a rooster’s testicle must be 10 times the size of its brain (which could account for it’s nasty dispositon)
- probably should have cold-plucked it since we were only doing one bird
- the whole process doesn’t take very long even with two squeamish and inexperienced butchers
- once the chicken has pissed you off enough it’s like fishing—a little gory, but not traumatic
My friend was right. It was great to know I could do it. The Simla butcher’s offer of $2.50 per bird done while I drink a cup of coffee still sounds appealing, though. I’ll post again after we have eaten him.
Aurelio in the fridge
Filed under: Cats, Chickens, Other animals | Tags: butcher, chicken, hearts, lard, liver, pet food
The coolest thing happened the other day. I had ordered some organ meat from the butcher to make cat food for Sam, our asthmatic Siamese cat. Naively, I had asked for 6 (beef) hearts and 6 livers thinking that would be about 20 lbs of meat or so. I was quoted a price of $1.50/lb. and told it would be ready in a few days. I went to pick it up last Friday and the meat was not ready. I was told to meet the butchers at the meat locker so we waited while some guy loaded up the beef he had ordered.
Moses lurking around the food processing project
You should know that the butcher and local grocery store is run by a Dutch family that has been in the meat business for 9 generations according to local legend. The latest is first generation American. Mama and Papa still have very thick Dutch accents and the kids speak American English with an occasional odd pronunciation. The children are young adults being groomed for taking over the family business.
My squeamish daughter taking a poke at a beef liver
Anyway, it’s finally our turn and the son takes my cooler into the locker and loads it up and he comes back apologizing because the cooler only could contain 4 livers and 4 hearts. He said, “I couldn’t fit any more in and it weighed out at 60 lbs. I figured you probably didn’t really want more than that.” Well, I did some quick calculations of how my grocery budget was about to be decimated, quietly crapped a small brick, and asked him if I should pay him there or in the store. The father and son kind of hemmed and hawed and the son said, “What do you think? She’s buying 60 lbs. What do we charge, a dollar a pound?”
“60 lbs.? Fifty cents.”
“OK. Fifty cents. Thats about $30. You can pay us here.”
I gave them $35 and just as I was about to leave, I asked if they ever have any hog back fat and/or leaf lard available for purchase. The son said it was funny I should ask because he had been in the mood for cracklin’s that day and just happened to have some lard already rendered. The father then proceed to scoop it into another lawn bag while the son gave me a quick tour of the meat locker. They handed me the lard at the end of my “tour” in a lawn bag and a cardboard box. I asked him how much I owed and he said, “Don’t you use that to make pie crust?”
The city girl farmer taking lard from the lawn bag and putting it into jars to freeze
So I’ll be bringing a pie to the butcher in a few weeks.
The City Girl Farmer 