That, my friends, is a chicken in a tree. No kidding.
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!
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
First egg
Notice that funny Frankish syntax? Sorry. I have a French reader who loves to make fun of Californians who move from the city to farms and then blog the most mundane aspects of farm life as if they were miracles of nature, never to be seen again by mortals. I couldn’t resist!
Actually, our March batch of pullets started laying a couple of weeks ago. We’re up to 4 pullet-sized eggs a day now and expect the other hens to be up and running no later than the end of next month.
I confess I’m very excited. I know that it will be a chore to collect eggs soon, but now it’s like a treasure hunt each time I go out to the coop.
The City Girl Farmer 