Now that we’re in full production mode in terms of eggs, washing them has become the latest addition to the daily farm chores.
Right now I’m using the same brush to de-poop the eggs that normally de-greases the cast irons… I need to remedy that pronto.
Our New Hampshire Red rooster has officially been christened Tom Waits, as he likes to vocalize his gravelly crow around 4 AM.
On the plus side, he’s started mounting some of the hens, which bodes well for future chick production. Watch out, girls.
Posted in Chickens
Will’s been making Julia Child’s coq au vin recipe for years, but always with broilers (quick tangent – many people today don’t know the difference between a broiler, a fryer and a stewing hen, knowledge we’ve lost in the past 50 years since the supermarkefication of our food supply. Broilers are the youngest you’d eat a chicken, which can be as early as 8 weeks with today’s hybrids. Tangent now over). This time, we actually used one of our roosters (mystery chick, not our New Hampshire Red) and the difference was amazing!
The whole point of the technique is to cook down the tougher meat of an older bird, so I shouldn’t be so surprised, but for a dish that I already found to be perfect, this was a culinary example of why we took on this whole farming venture… because you’re not suppose to use Cornish cross-, fatten up in half the time of traditional breeds-, Americans only ever eat broilers- chickens for everything. Not just because it’s unnatural, but because you can do delicious and interesting things with variety, the way our traditional, pre-giant refrigerator food culture understands. The very people who invented coq au vin in the first place.
So here’s a little photo montage of the entire creation. Be jealous of the mad skills of my awesome husband…
And then to really put things over the top, serve after finishing on an open fire while pressing cider (more on the cider pressing in a future post)…
pullet chicken egg, chicken egg, duck egg, double yolk duck egg
We got our first pullet eggs from the chickens today. Three to be exact. As you can see from the picture above, pullet eggs (the eggs chickens lay when the hens first start laying) are rather small. The awesome part is that the yolks are almost as big as a normal chicken egg, meaning the yolk to white ratio is way in favor of yolk, which makes for fantastic fried eggs.
The even more awesomeness is that in another week or so we should have enough eggs to start selling them to the restaurant, marking the first time we’ll actually get any payment for what we’ve been doing these last seven months. Woohoo!!!
My husband did an incredibly responsible thing – he scheduled a visit with our local extension agent to make sure everything looked okay around the farm. Here’s a brief run down.
Sheep
The good news is everyone looks healthy. The not so good news is that we may not have enough pasture to support 5 ewes and their lambs. The d’uh news is that the reason the sheep haven’t been eating much hay is that the stuff we bought turns out to be loaded with something called foxtail, which they don’t like. Also, it’s invasive. Awesome. The bad news is that it turns out that our pasture has the “wrong kind of grass” so it looks like we’ll be attempting to pull up wire grass (we were told to RoundUp and put the sheep somewhere else, but we don’t have a somewhere else, nor am I excited about the prospects of using RoundUp) and seed for things like clover. We also need to get our pH checked, so we are now equipped with soil samples.
Pigs
The pigs look great. The aggression we were worried about is really considered playfulness (think dogs). Also a plus, we’ve probably been feeding them too much so we can cut back a bit, which will help expenses. The pasture over winter, woods by summer plans was met with approval as well.
Chickens
The birds look healthy. She was a bit skeptical about our plans to breed without an incubator. Also, mid conversation, while hanging out with our New Hampshire Red rooster in the yard, a loud cock-a-doodle-do came from inside the coop. Turns out our mystery chick is a dude, which probably means he’ll be dinner sometime soon so as not to have two fighting cocks. If they can keep it civil until we move the New Hampshires down to the lower coop for baby-making this April, he may get a stay of execution. That being said, his penchant for crowing at 3 AM and waking up the toddler doesn’t bode well for his longevity.
Ducks
She’d never heard of ducks that don’t swim. The fact that my most common search phrase for this blog is “ducks won’t swim” begs to differ.
Overall, it was a good visit. It’s comforting to hear that all your animals looks healthy from someone who actually knows what she’s talking about.
Just this week, our New Hampshire Red rooster decided to start crowing.
Alston refers to him as cock-a-do-dooooo. I think it’s great, but my bedroom is also the farthest room from the chicken coop, so ask me again come spring when the windows are open.
Posted in Chickens
From what I’ve read, I should expect eggs at anywhere from 20 – 26 weeks, which means I won’t see eggs until about Jan. 2oth (the hens are currently 15 weeks old).
The three ducks from the original shipment (1 rouen and 2 khaki campbells) are already 24 weeks old. The other three rouens, including the drake (not that he’ll be laying anything) are 18 weeks old. I’ve read domestic ducks usually start laying at around 20 weeks if the light is sufficient when they reach that age. Being a mere 6 days from the winter solstice, I’m going to go with a no on that one.
Can you tell I’m getting a bit anxious (and hungry)?
Our goal with all the poultry is to day range, whereby we let the birds do their bird thing, wandering around their section of the property during the safer daylight hours, free to forage for grass, eat grubs and bugs and other assorted natural goodies, poop all over the place and scratch it back into the ground as fertilizer, and generally act like birds instead of zoo captives.
The upsides are a plenty:
1. We think it’s more humane. The chickens get to act like chickens, pecking and scratching. The guineas have enough space to really fly around. The ducks and geese can get their fill of pond-side greenery.
2. The birds get more variety in their diet beyond their grain-based feed, so their eggs are tastier for us (and have that tell-tale dark almost burnt orange yolk). There’s also supposed to be some science saying that pasture-raised birds lay eggs higher in brain-building omega-3 fatty acids, but I’m too lazy to provide you with a link.
3. All this foraging means the birds eat less feed, which saves us money. Also on the budget front, their homes don’t get dirty as quickly when they spend their days outside, so we don’t have to clean out their houses as often or pay to replace their hay as often. Also, pasture-raised birds are said to get sick less often (as they aren’t just pecking around on ground they’ve all been pooping over), so hopefully we won’t lose any birds to disease.
4. My personal favorite, this place just feels more like a farm when there are chickens in the pasture, and ducks and geese wandering the front yard.
There are also downsides, the biggest one being day ranged birds are more vulnerable to predators (hence Scout). The other biggie we’ve found this past week is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass to round up birds each evening, something that has not been aided by the Fall Back of daylight savings, meaning I don’t get home until past dusk so poor Will is left chasing guineas around their enclosure in the dark.
Here’s how it’s going so far:
Chickens: You guys rock. Once the frost melts, Will opens up the hoop house and the ladies hop outside and start exploring. We have a “yard” fenced for them a la electrified poultry netting since they are our most vulnerable birds (still relatively small and not so good in the flying department). Some of the hens can still fit through the holes of the netting and slip outside into the wide wide world, but so far they keep coming back. And, as long as Will waits until the sun starts to set before heading back to the hoop house, everyone puts themselves away, hanging out on the roost when the doors get closed for the night. Easy!
Ducks and Geese: The ducks get locked up in their house at night, which doesn’t have food or water in it, so they are the very first chore every morning. Once Will opens the doors and refills their water and food, he leaves the gate to their yard open and the geese and ducks eventually end up wandering our front lawn. The geese look like they are duck shepherds, waddling tall as the quacks scurry about. Sometimes the ducks and geese will put themselves back in their yard, but often it involves some chasing. It still beats the days when we’d have to catch the ducks and toss them in their house (they put themselves into their house at night, finally!), but it’s not as easy as the chickens, or when we just kept everyone in the yard.
Guineas: These birds are a whole different ballgame. As you may recall, we had a jail break when we first moved the guineas to their current enclosure in the lower yard, so we’ve been pretty gun-shy about letting these birds loose. While flipping through a copy of Gardening with Guineas trying to determine how big a house we need to build them, Will read something about starting to day range your birds around six weeks. Yeah, ours are eleven weeks old. Opps. So the next morning during chores, we head down to their enclosure and leave the door open, waiting for a mass exodus. Within minutes, all 15 birds are perched on the bottom wooden strip of the doorway, careening their heads around, but not a single one would venture across the threshold. Not one bird left that first day.
On the second day, the door was again left open, and by around 4 PM all the birds were outside the enclosure. They explored for about a half hour and were back home. Sweet! The third day, not so much. They left earlier in the morning and spent most of the day outside, popping back in during the late afternoon to snack on some feed. They again headed outside, and outside they stayed. At dusk, Will tried to herd them back, but that devolved into a twenty minute chase where the guineas would run along the railroad ties lining their enclosure, only to go wide just as they reached the side with the door, making it completely impossible for Will to chase them anywhere but back around again. He gave up when all the birds took flight and proceeded to roost on top of their enclosure. And that’s where they slept, with Will muttering all night something about what do I care if we don’t have any guineas left tomorrow.
Again, are you seeing why most farms don’t raise these birds?
Since that night we’ve had two nights where they made it back inside and one where they again opted for the penthouse. So yes, day ranging in this case is decidedly more difficult for us. Of course, the whole reason we have guineas is so they can eat bugs, so they won’t do us much good if we keep them locked up. Assuming we have any left come spring.
Overall, I’d call day ranging a tentative success.
This weekend, we let the chickens into the yard for a bit so the kids attending our farm warming party could have an animal to pet. The ladies were a huge hit. In another two weeks or so we’ll make this a regular part of their day, but we’re really waiting to hit that 10 week mark before we let them out in the open with only the electric fence for protection.
Picture courtesy of a colleague’s wife, who was kind enough to share this with me. Also, I think Alston has a crush on their daughter (they are only 1 month apart).
Posted in Chickens
Last week, Will moved the now 6 week old chickens to the hoop house.
This will be their permanent home, and we’ll use the electric poultry netting to day-range them on various parts of the pasture, once they are a bit bigger (i.e. less tempting for hawks).
A good friend of ours gave us the laying box house he’d built before he decided that he’d be moving his birds every week (making the wooden structure too heavy to be practical).
Our birds won’t be laying until about January (which is not exactly peak production time, given how little sunlight there us, but should have us in full egg mode by spring), so right now the girls are just exploring the structure. During the day, several hang out underneath it.
Will and his dad built the roosting, well, I don’t know exactly what you’d call it. In order to make something that would fit through the door, they built it with hinges at the top, and then chains on the side (think easel), so it can easily fold/unfold. Pretty slick, or at least I think so. The girls seem to be using it some during the day, although I don’t tend to go to that part of the yard after dark (as it is SO dark on our property – I’m still adjusting to that aspect of country life), so I can’t say if they are legitimately roosting on it or not. Oh well, it’s there if they so choose.
Posted in Chickens
