Top Ten Signs that YOU may live on a Chicken Farm

Top Ten Signs that YOU may live on a Chicken Farm:

10. Every time you go to a potluck event, you bring deviled eggs, egg salad, or chicken salad.

9. The crowing roosters wake you up at 5 am, 4 am, 3 am, 2 am, 1 am and midnight.

8. No one wants to eat with you because you always seem to get to the topic of how you "humanely kill chickens" (in graphic detail).

7. You feel at home when you get out of the car and smell the familiar chicken poop smell.

6. Your hands and arms frequently sport small peck marks from huffy hens.

5. You'll be sitting around in public and suddenly notice small flecks of chicken poop or chicken food on your shoes and/or clothes.

4. Your friends who do NOT have chickens have started avoiding you at parties because all you do is talk about your chickens.

3. When you call home, the first thing you ask is, "How're the chickens?"

2. Your to-go container at restaurants is a small bucket that you scrape all your plates into (and if you're not careful, you start scraping others' plates also).

And the #1 sign that you may live on a chicken farm is.....

1. When your beloved crawls into bed at night, you roll over, take a whiff, and ask,"Have you been cleaning out the brooder? Please go take a quick shower....." That chicken smell definitely sticks to your hair!

Butchering Week #3 And how do those dead, headless chickens talk?

When you are elbow deep in chicken blood and guts, you have to find something to laugh about. So, sometimes we play with our chickens, or should I say chicken bodies, just for a laugh. So, one day I was dancing my headless, naked chicken around, bouncing him up and down, and.... he squawked! Just as if he were alive! shocked me! And I realized that when I was cleaning him out, I left a bit of the windpipe in. Thus, when I bounced Buddy, it forced air through the windpipe, making the chicken squawk noise! So, yes, that's how it happens, as creepy and as funny as it is!

The first sad chicken delivery.....

We have had 7 batches of meat chicks delivered. 3from a place in Texas, and this was our 4th from this place, in the Midwest. The most "losses" we've ever had in the first 5 days was 5 chicks, which was from 'the other place,' and we were, of course, reimbursed for them. Otherwise, we only lost one or two, from pen accidents, drowning, or trampling. Chicks are very delicate, and the world, even a little box, can be dangerous!

As a matter of fact, our last batch was the best yet. 25 chicks plus one rare breed chick; all 25 grew to maturity (4-6 lbs, fully dressed), and the lovely cuckoo Moran is still in the pen!

However, this new batch, received last week, well, first of all, they somehow mis-counted and only put in 39 plus the rare one (unless one escaped en route). Then, when they arrived, there were already 6 dead in the box. Before the day was out, 7 more toppled over. The next day, 10 more died, despite our best efforts to keep them warm, feed them mash, give them water, hand feed them vitamins, etc.  we ended up with 12 survivors plus the rare one. Heartbreaking. Needless to say, we are getting a replacement shipment in a few weeks. I hope they arrive in better shape. I guess that sometimes something happens during the trip that stresses them out and they cannot recover. Bad fall, too hot, too cold, whatever. Anyway, I hope we don't have to go through that again!

At the same time as all that chick-death, the incubator chicks were popping out daily! Out of 21 eggs, 14 hatched, but one died after a day or so. Only two are light yellow-brown; one is grey; and the rest are black or black with white chests. Our friend gave us 4 fertile eggs to hatch. They all hatched little black chicks with yellow marks on head and butt! Unfortunately, one looks lame and will probably have to go tomorrow.

And, finally, when I was at the market, another friend said, "I have to get rid of these chickens." In her carrier was a normal-looking hen with 5 chicks that looked just like the Rhode Island reds that I got as my starter chicks 3yrs ago. They couldn't have been more than 2 days old. Before I knew what I was doing, I said, "I'll take them." I guess we'd better build another pen soon.

Butchering week #2, Test driving the chicken plucker, aka the chicken mutilater

Butchering week #2

Test driving the chicken plucker, aka the chicken mutilater

Our fellow chicken farmer and good friend loaned us her automatic chicken plucker, to help with the de-feathering process. The plucking is, by far, the most time-consuming part of the entire chicken processing. The steps involved in the process are
Kill them by cutting the jugular.
Drain the blood.
Cut the head off.
Scald them for 30 sec.
Douse with cold water.
Pull out all the feathers.
Remove all the insides.
Clean them up.
Weigh them.
Bag and label.

Anything that will shorten the process is welcome.

The "plucker" was not a set of robotic hands that gently pulled out feathers. No, it was a series of fat rubber fingers that rotated. You hold the chicken against the rotating rubber sticks, they slap the chicken, and the feathers are supposed to be rubbed off by the "fingers." Hmmm... Yes, some feathers were rubbed off, lots of skin was rubbed off, and some of the beautiful chicken meat was chewed up. Ouch! Mark that chicken "for home consumption only!" We are back to hand-plucking!

Butchering week #1

Butchering blog #1

Reflections of the Butcher

As we wait for the blood to drain,
   I flick the chicken poo off my pant leg
       with a bloody knife,
And we chuckle together
   as we remark once more
       that headless chickens
Really can talk.

Butchering week blog intro - READ FIRST

Butchering week blog intro - READ FIRST

The next few blogs will be about butchering week on our little farm. We had to butcher our 25 meat chickens in the span of 4 days. Some of the content may be disturbing to the faint-hearted; therefore, if you think you may be upset by the photos, the subject, the prose, or sometimes morbid reflections, please do not read the blogs that start with "Butchering week #". Other blogs will be of the same tenor as my usual fare.

Consider yourself warned.

I love my hairdresser!

I must have an amazing haircut! I am no good judge of how I look, because I always think I look horrible. I used to spend several minutes (well, maybe 5) on my hair, with mousse, blow-drying it and trying to get it to look like it has some body, then spraying it in place so that it continues to look like it has some body for a few hours. Well, since we now have 85 chickens and 4 dogs, and usually have to leave by 10 in the morning, I really haven't had much time to fiddle with my hair. So lately I have been doing more of the "I'm-in-a-hurry-abbreviated version." Which is 1) jump out of the shower, 2) towel dry, 3) run a comb through it, 4) put a dab of maximum-hold gel in it, and 5) run my fingers through it, letting it dry through the day.

Now, the coup-de-grace! I walked into a starbucks the other day, passing the counter, noting that there were two young women at the pick-up-drinks counter. After we made our orders, we went to the counter where they were standing, and they stopped me (me!) and said, "We wanted to tell you that we love your hair." I responded with, "Do I know you from somewhere?" trying to check to see if they were friends just trying to make me feel better (like everyone else). "Oh, no," they responded, "we just think you hair is just perfect, you know, the way it frames your face and all." Now, remember, I am 20 lbs. overweight, and am wearing NO makeup. I stammered a "Thank you" and went on my way. All I can say is, "I love you; you put the GOD in Godfrey! My miracle-working hairdresser! A cut makes all the difference!" At 60 years old, my time has come!

What keeps the Chickens Laying??

I don't know why, and I guarantee that I am NO chicken expert (see previous blogs for proof of that!), but for some reason, when all the chickens around here are taking a break for winter, fall, or molting, whatever, mine are still plopping out eggs. We get 12 to 25 daily and have about 30 layers. I have some theories, but that is just what they are, theories, and probably just a bunch of hooey! But I will share my chicken hooey with anyone who cares to read about it!

For one thing, we give our chickens a varied diet. We think they like it. Our chickens have to be penned, or our dogs will eat them for snacks, so they cannot freely forage. But freely foraging chickens eat all kinds of things: bugs, flowers, grasses, worms, mice, leftover food from the trash, dead stuff, fallen fruit, vegetables, etc. So we do our best to give them the variety they crave. We feed them layer pellets and scratch grains (to be sure they have a balance of the correct vitamins and minerals for proper nutrition and egg-laying). Then, we give them our special rice mash. The base is cooked all natural brown rice (good for them and less expensive than prepared feed), and we add a variety of old sourdough bread (we make way more than we can eat every week), crushed eggshells, leftover scraps, gravy, organic soy milk, milk (sour or fresh), outdated yogurt, sometimes a can of cat food, etc. Mixed all together, it's a chicken-yummy mash! Then I throw them any bits of meat, bone (cracked to reveal the marrow), vegetables, fruits, etc. We have two garbage cans chained up by some of the vegetable stalls at the Kona market to collect the overripe papaya  that the vendors throw out. We bring it home twice per week for our papaya-loving chickens!

The other thing is social  change. Some people say that chickens like routine. Although that may be true, I think that they sometimes become complacent. Then they think, "Hmm, I've been laying all these eggs. It's hard work. I think I'll take a vacation, and just eat and ay around for a few weeks." Say, what??!! Let's say I take a vacation and don't feed you for a few weeks? Anyway, my observation is that chickens are very competitive, and they can be happy without being "content." And I think happy and challenged is better than happy and content. So we try to change it up on our chickens every now and again. We keep some young hens in with the old, and it seems to get the old ones laying again, as if to ensure their place in the "pecking order." The roosters are busy protecting and teaching the new hens, while maintaining their turf, so no one has any time to be bored and think about vacations! Right now we have a pen with 7 hens and a rooster that has always yielded 4 - 6 eggs per day. Well, I sometimes am getting 1 these days! So, since the pen can hold 5 - 8 more chickens, it's time to move some of the young ones from the transition pen to this one (called the Mary's pen). The only problem is, we want to move them at night. Well, they all sleep upstairs in the waaayyy back corner, and, uh, well, we can't reach them. oops. So, as soon as Pat makes a little adaptation to the pen, we will move them :)

More later!

Pie from the Past

My grandmother (Nana) used to make this pie that we called Crumb Pie or Shoo-Fly Pie. I loved it; we all did. A child, I never wondered what was in it, just happily ate it, as many pieces as I could finagle.

I was at my sister's a few weeks ago (see last blog) and she told me she had the recipe! Yay! So, tonight, Pat and I had our favorite dinner, Pie! And it was Nana's Crumb Pie! Freshly made in my kitchen! And it was... Gluten-full, filling, made of all things I shouldn't eat, not too sweet, high in iron, and absolutely deeeelicious!! We are now contemplating the second piece. This is definitely a depression-era recipe, but one you can try if you need a dessert and have nothing fresh on hand, only staples. The ingredients are flour (lots of it) butter or shortening, molasses or dark syrup, water, cinnamon and a little baking soda. Put into two pie crusts. Now, to make it somewhat healthy (hahaha), I used coconut oil, organic flour, and dark molasses. The pie is easy to cut, has a lovely chewy consistency, with cinnamony crumbles on the top. mmmmm....