After we got chickens, my super talented sister painted me this egg carton…
I turned to my handy-dandy scanner/printer. What would I do without that thing??? I scanned a copy of it. Put in into a Word doc, made it 3” tall and 10.25” across. Copied a second one and saved it.
Then I printed it onto 8 1/2 X 11” label paper. You can buy it on Ebay HERE.
While I do consider myself to be a BBC chick, this post isn’t about my being a British television fan girl. I got five chicks on Friday from our local farm store.
Our first batch of chicks were all named German names. The second batch, foods. The newest girls after characters in our favorite BBC shows: Downton Abbey, Dr Who and Call the Midwife. They aren’t always our favorite characters but we picked the ones that had the best chicken names.
I picked up my five babies and brought them home in a box that looked remarkably like the box I would use to bring home fried chicken from the deli in… LOL
the take-out box
The big difference is that the chicken in my box was way cuter!
Clara, the Doctor’s newest companion
Photo courtesy of http://www.express.co.uk
Camilla, the very tall midwife. I may just call her Chummy…
The last three are all Downton women: Anna, Daisy & Violet…
Photo courtesy of pbs.org
Photo courtesy of pbs.org
I just love having babies in the house! Well, not when they get pasty butt… LOL
The Wilco sale flyer is for me what the Victoria’s Secret catalog is for other women… I look at it over and over, pinning over all the things I would love to have!
As luck would have it, they had chicken feed on sale and we were in need of chicken feed. This meant a trip to Wilco!
I was also in need of boots… Mine are all cracked and my feet get wet every time I have to change the chickens’ water. :o( There was a whole bin of black rubber boots right in front of the clothing department but not one pair in my size. My size required going all the way to the back of the shoe department where I would see all the other boots they have.
It was there that I fell in love with these boots from BOGS!
I was just sure that tromping around scooping up dog poop or shoveling out the chicken coop would be so much more glamorous, not to mention comfortable, in these babies! Then I saw the price tag: $80. What??? That was the sale price… $80!!!
Immediately the dream of fancy poop boots died. But then I got to think about it. My boots get covered in poop, paint, mud, grass… Would I really want my beautiful boots covered in all that muck??? How beautiful would they be then???
I think my $10 boots are just fine.
We spent the last week at Bible Camp. I came home to berries on the vine (strawberries and raspberries) and three little brown eggs in the coop!!!
The girls officially outgrew their bin. It seemed like one day they had plenty of space and the next, they completely filled it up! So at just a mere four weeks old, it was time that they got their own place.
I have to say, it’s a pretty nice place though. It does need a bit of work, but that will have to wait for some sunny weather that lasts more than 15 minutes at a time. I have big plans and big changes in mind for the coop this year! I can’t wait!!! Come on Spring, hurry up!
I feel terrible that their first night out, it snows! And tonight is supposed to be 28! Isn’t it March 18th???
But I know that chickens have survived for thousands of years outdoors, so my pampered little babies should be just fine… :o)
It’s hard to believe that only two weeks ago they were just little balls of fluff!
flying out of their box…
and going out on dates with cute boys to the movies. ;o)
I had my breeds all picked out. I knew exactly what I wanted my next flock to be. I wanted them all to be the same age. (Fewer troubles that way.) I just had to find a feed store that had them all the same week. I found them! And I didn’t even have to drive all the way to Portland to get them this time…
Trouble was, they were coming in at 9am on Friday morning. Co-op starts at 9:30 on Friday morning. It took a pretty early start, a bit of juggling and rushing about, but I succeeded! I had to teach my first period class with a bit of background noise coming from a little cardboard box though. :o)
I hated being gone the first couple of days they were home, but my boys did a fine job caring for them. I needed a bit of a refresher course, so I went back and reviewed my notes on baby chicks. It all came back… It’s sort of like riding a bike. You really don’t forget.
This time around I am going to name them all food names, black (or red) foods, to be exact: pepper, licorice, blackberry, olive, sesame and cherry. Guess which one is the red one??? LOL Unfortunately, all but one look exactly alike. I have no idea how I will be able to tell them apart. All except for Cherry.
Here’s a run-down on the breeds I chose:
Rhode Island Red: Great year-round layer, low maintenance, dual breed.
Barred Rock: early strong layer, hardy in bad weather, dual breed. I liked our last Barred Rock, Sophie, so much! I decided to get a couple more.
Marans: beautiful birds, decent layers, dark brown eggs. (I got them for their eggs) Mine are cuckoo marans and look much like Barred Rocks. This could be a problem with the whole naming thing… :o) But look at those gorgeous eggs!
Australorp: good year-round layers (this breed holds the record for egg laying), mellow and shy, good in cold or warm weather. They are a big breed and a gorgeous jet black!
Well… here’s the line up of our new girls. Names are subject to change and frequent confusion.
Sesame
Licorice
Blackberry
Olive
Pepper
Now we’ll just hope we don’t wake up to any crowing in the future…
This post is about lessons I learned about chickens and lessons I learned about myself this past week…
1. You can buy a lot of eggs for the cost of what it takes to raise chickens!
This is really what sparked this entire epiphany. When my girls molted and stopped laying I started to contemplate exactly how much they were actually costing me. I came to the realization that they aren’t really cost effective (I think I already knew this deep down) but just love having chickens anyway!
I figured the best use of my money was to butcher them now while they were still good for eatin’…
2. I am a practical, old-school kind of farmer.
I love having a farm in our backyard! I love having animals! But I also love raising my own food! And I raise chickens for food… Whether it is eggs or meat, that is their purpose. It’s not cold or heartless, it is what I raised them for.
3. I get a real sense of pride and satisfaction from raising my own food!
It is really cool to fill my freezer full of meat that I raised from babies, collected eggs from, butchered and cooked all by myself (with some help from my fantastic family and friends)!
4. I will not be buying chickens with black feathers anymore!
While black-feathered birds look gorgeous in the coop, they don’t look so nice in the roaster! Ugh! All those black feather ends don’t look very appetizing…
5. Flock rotation sounds like a good idea!
The city only allows me to have 8 chickens in my backyard. I think that this year I am going to buy only 4 hens. Then the following spring I will buy 4 more. This way in the future I will always have 4 prime laying hens and 4 for the freezer. I think this will be a much better plan! We’ll see how it goes…
6. I am going to miss having chickens!
: o( But I will be glad to have babies again this spring!
Today was butchering day and God blessed us with a gorgeous sunny day! My brother and his wife graciously agreed to raise a dozen Cornish Crosses for us.
While I can’t say that I enjoy killing the chickens, I DO enjoy the process. I like getting together and working with family. I like the sense of community and coming together to help one another. I like knowing WHERE our food comes from. I like knowing that our chickens had a good life, albeit a short life. They got to live in a cute, clean little red chicken coop and have my niece Ada for company.
These are pictures of our butchering process in no particular order.
Most of us did all of the jobs but some of us became a bit more specialized…
William was good at gutting and removing the lungs
Andy was very skilled at skinning
Dad did most of the scorching with the blowtorch
Frank and Will did most of the gutting
I was in charge of making sure they were nice and shiny clean
I love this shot of Ada and Zack walking back to the house!
It was a very good day on the farm! I love having two shelves of chicken in the freezer!
