Egg production has been moving along smooth as anything. The girls are great, easy going, seem to be having a good time, and they’re pumping out 23-25 eggs a day. Besides giving them out to everyone around here, there’s been enough to take to market every other week as a CSA bonus, usually, half a dozen per share. Bob unearthed an old egg scale from somewhere in the barn, and I’ve been playing with it lately (for actual distribution, there’s no sizing, everyone gets a mix). Egg size has definitely increased. Where they were mainly medium with a few small at the start, they’re now maybe half medium, half large. The scale is the kind of old school tech that I love, with everything simple, open, obvious, and FIXABLE. It may be a little hard to read in the pic: there’s a little pointer, with a fleck of red paint on it, at the bottom of the open triangle of the indicator—this egg’s Large, just on the border of XL…
chickens
A simple (chicken!) sandwich
Roasted a White Rock chicken last night, today, got a Spicy Cheese Loaf from Fran, the baker beside me at the farmers’ market. (The market day went well, it was the first day of CSA shares: mesclun, spinach, radishes, garlic scapes, beet greens—it’s still early.) The chicken and the bread naturally organized themselves into a late afternoon simple sandwich…
Looking at it before the first bite, I realized that I’ve been thinking about FOOD a lot more recently. Not exactly my own diet, but on a more personal level than as a local veggie grower, probably something to do with the Endless Salad, more communal cooking and eating lately…
Part of the running stream of thought has to do with nutrition, what I know about it, how much I want to and need to explore further. I mean, do I really have any sort of basic IDEA of what to eat, beyond “lots of veggies, little meat, drink lots of water,” vague general guidelines like that? Do I NEED a plan? Should I RESEARCH? Consult with a nutritionist or a naturopathic doctor (I’ve been considering visiting an ND for an initial workup)? Sheesh, more RULES! All that is really clear is that most people around here (a “developed nation”) don’t know much practical stuff about the food they eat, me included.
The other part is about food quality, and local food. The one thing I’m quite sure of is that it feels way better to eat fresh food that you’ve grown, and to know where the rest comes from and what’s in it, and that wasn’t at all painful to discover. So, I examined this pretty local sandwich. The cheese bread listed the ingredients: flour, water, cheese, sugar, milk, vegetable oil, butter, yeast, dried chili peppers, salt. The chicken was raised here on the farm from two weeks old, fed mainly Purina (Cargill) starter and grower feed (nutritional content in percentages, contact the manufacturer for the actual INGREDIENTS), with some greens from the garden. The lettuce is from the garden. I poured on home-made vinaigrette dressing: extra virgin olive oil from Italy, pink salt from the Himalayas, fresh-ground black pepper, vinegar, Tabasco pepper sauce from…the store. The mayonnaise is from Kraft, it was in the fridge, the bottle says it’s “real.” It’s all ingredients within ingredients… I’m planning to make my own mayo, with eggs from the farm and oil from…Italy. Should I care where the flour in the bread came from? The cheese? The chili peppers? And what about the “vegetable oil,” what’s up with that? Should I make my own cheese and bake my own bread? When do I start looking around for organic chicken feed, how IMPORTANT is that, what’s the priority, how much can I afford to PAY?
I don’t have any neat point to sum up with here, I’m just being a literalist and looking at what I eat. When you start to question your basic eating habits in a very primitive way, they may not hold up to much scrutiny, and that’s unsettling. I’m curious. The story unfolds…
Definitely ready to lay
It’s back-to-back chicken stories, from chickens to the slaughter to chickens ready to lay! The hatchery moved up the scheduled delivery of the 20-week-old Shaver Red Sex-Links by three days, and today was it. These girls are cool, and ready to go, dropping a couple of eggs before they were even out of their crates…
At the feed store in town, the crates were casually stacked near the loading dock (and you can see MORE BAGS OF FEED waiting to be picked up, these are 88lb sacks of layer mash). Our 25 were in two crates.
Like any other trip to town, on this chicken run, I ended up with lots of extra stuff besides chickens: several blocks of compressed shavings, the layer feed, and a sack of scratch for the Frey’s dual purpose.
Back at the farm, I opened one crate at a time and let them come out on their own to explore their side of the Chickenhouse. The young ladies seemed happy, unflustered, in fine feather… Within a few hours, I collected the first three, still tiny, warm, fresh eggs! Felt great!
Chickens to the slaughter
Raising your first chickens, killing them, and eating them has gotta rank up there with other Firsts worth a little attention. Now, I’m at least part of the way there: the killing this time was done behind closed doors, with me on the outside—chicken PROCESSING. Still, first enough to be worth a few photos… I’d been cutting it close with booking a processing day for the White Rocks, the local processor is known to get solidly booked for weeks. I finally called yesterday, looking for a date in two weeks, and was told there was also a cancellation for tomorrow (today!). I checked out the WRs, and, man, how could I imagine them getting any bigger (I think I was mesmerized, waiting for them to explode)? So I called back and booked. We drove over last night to pick up crates (20 minutes each way), then it was up at 5:30 this morning to load ’em. As soon as I opened the door, all of the Frey’s dual purpose darted out immediately, as usual, while the WRs, who mostly go nowhere, stayed in: it was kinda fitting that the Frey’s stood around in unfenced-in freedom, ready to run (and they would’ve!), while the WRs kinda dumbly looked out at their crates (above).
Five to a crate, 25 in all, 30 minutes or so to loaded…no need to chase down these lumbering beasts (while I was packing, most of the Frey’s figured out no good was afoot and entirely disappeared around the other side of the chickenhouse, something they’d never done before, while a couple stayed to watch).
The processor is on a farm, a low building where birds go in live on one side, and come out the other, cleaned and chilled, weighed and government-inspected, ready to go…
Bob and a processing guy unload. It’s 6:45am. The paperwork is quick and painless, I didn’t even have to write or sign anything. The only sign of bureaucracy in action is the required chicken purchase number, a serial number that’s on the form that you fill out when purchasing the chicks. And the on-premises government inspector popped out and did a little of his own paperwork. Other than that, just processing choices. For a few cents more (like 75-85), you can have the chickens halved and put in separate bags, or halved or quartered in the same bag. We got 10 halved and separated, for when cooking a whole fat chicken would be a little too much. Modern conveniences?! :) I also chose to get the organs back (in the black bag; below).
Eleven hours later, it’s 5:30pm and we’re back. Matthew helps pack the big birds for the trip home and into the freezer. Average weight is around 8lbs (3.6kg), where the Frey’s are maybe barely 3lbs. Hmmm… Not the most satisfying little adventure, with three 40-minute round trip drives, and the chickens disappearing through yet another middleman, reappearing neatly packaged for $3 more… With the processing fee tacked on for good measure, these are EXPENSIVE chickens, but I’ll do the math, and review the overall, somewhat unsettling White Rock Experience…later. On the other hand, you can’t beat the results: a lotta REALLY plump chickens! Next up in Meat Birds, Take 1: waiting for the free-ranging Frey’s to bulk up, and THEN it’ll be a fully DIY field-to-table chicken dinner!
Chickens, bull, fence…
The chickens have been loose by day for a couple weeks in a small, temporarily-fenced run in one of pens just off the barn. Today, the cows were let in to the pen to graze down the long grass. The rough plan was to let the chickens free-range around the whole area, which is about half an acre, and the cows would act as bodyguards, keeping out…predators. Dunno, sounds like good plan, livestock’s all pretty new to me… Consensus was the cows would not respect the chickenwire, so I went to take it down, just as Monty the Young Bull discovered it. I couldn’t help watch, kinda fascinated by the slow motion, low key destruction, as he methodically butted down the posts…scratching.
From one post to the next…
…and now, the chickens, at least, the Frey’s Dual Purpose and the couple of White Rocks that follow them outside…are free as they wanna be!
Farewell to the Colonel!
After a full day of seeding and weeding in quite glorious sunshine, with pet chicken Colonel Saunders in attendance, Shannon took her leave this evening, heading on to other interning adventures. She’d worked just about every day of the last month. Our daily chats were…interesting! For my part, it was a really great chance to articulate lots of stuff that’d been bubbling around in my head. Tiny farming can be quite the mental trip, as well as a lot of work—having the chance to bounce ideas and thoughts off someone both completely new and cool to talk to, who’d also been on many other small farms (I’ve STILL to really visit another market garden), was a definite treat. I also at times argued against the market garden practicality of some of her well-thought-through ideas about gardening in a more holistic, permaculture vein, but in the end, they brought useful thoughts to the forefront. And of course, the spring planting and a bunch of other stuff got done. I guess it’s clear: Shannon was a cool person to meet in the field! I hope the…immersive Tiny Farm Experience was equally good for her, that she learned stuff and had fun as well! As I’m discovering, more than anything else, tiny farming is about people… (Guest photo by Shannon.)
Frey’s vs White Rock
At this point, it’s safe to say that I’m no fan of White Rock Cornish X chickens. Without a doubt, they convert feed to meat incredibly…efficiently—compare the lone Frey’s Special Dual Purpose at the top center of the pic, surrounded by hulking, waddling White Rocks two and three times its size. What they gain in meat, they lose in basic chicken-ness… This first flock of mine are lumbering birds, with no taste for the outdoors, no built-in scratching skills, they’re definitely not up for dust baths or foraging through tall grass. They sit around, eat like crazy, drink, and, here and there, just kinda spontaneously DIE. I’ve learned a lot from this first go-round with meat birds, and I haven’t entirely rejected the White Rocks—I’m saving my final…evaluation for after they’re off to the slaughter in 2-3 weeks. More to follow…