Cheep Cheep

Having baby chicks around is definitely the most fun we've had so far this year.  They arrived on Sunday morning, which means they hatched on Saturday.  Granted that's a rather small egg this guy is standing next to, but it's already hard to imagine that it could have held a chick.

As you can see, their wing feathers are starting to come in.  As soon as they have their adult feathers and grow out of their fuzzy, yellow chick feathers, they'll be ready to move outside.

Since it's so early in spring, we won't want them to go outside if it's too cold.  We'll keep them inside until sometime in April.  All this time indoors, however, means increasing their space so that they're never crowded.  We give them hay chaff to eat and scratch around in.  This get them used to foraging for food, a necessary skill when they're on pasture.  Hay chaff is the seeds and bits of grass left behind from a bale or flake of hay.  Imagine when you pick up some hay and everything that is left on the ground and on your clothes.  The chicks love it and it's is full of nutrition.  We also gave them some swiss chard yesterday, which they loved.

As soon as the weather gets warmer and the snow melts, we'll let them go outside for a couple hours in the warmest part of the day.  Even though they'll come back in at night, this allows them plenty of sunshine and again, lets them practice foraging.

In a month or so, they'll move to their portable chicken coops.  They'll have their organic grain, fresh water and all the bugs and grass they can eat.  The coops don't have a floor, so when we move them twice a day, fresh grass is underfoot for the chickens to eat.  We'll let them out of the coops during the day to stretch their legs and explore their pasture but it'll be really important to keep them in the coops at night so that they're safe from predators.

Their happiness and health consumes a lot of our time and energy right now.  From the moment we wake up ('have you checked on the chicks yet?') to right before we go to bed ('where's the flashlight, I want to see if they're ok since it's supposed to be cold tonight') we're thinking about them.  

They're pretty darn cute and a lot of fun.  I can't wait to watch them as they grow up and I'll be so excited when they're old enough to live out on the pasture.  They'll be happier out there and so will we.

A Flock of Firsts

Well folks, we are off and running.  Today, we received our very first broilers.  They are happy, healthy and pretty darn cute.  

This winter, we built a greenhouse and in the last few days, our first plants germinated.  Currently, the Chard, Kale and Bok Choi are up, while we're waiting on the onions, shallots and leeks.

And these lovely eggs were laid by...

these lovely girls!  We drove up to the Farm School on Friday and purchased 12 layers from them.  They're settling in to their new farm but seem pretty bummed about the snow on the ground outside.

There is much, much more exciting news to come as we begin our first season on our own farm, so stay tuned!

Fall Cooking

I miss a lot of things about summer, mostly peaches, blueberries and sunlight until 9pm. But you really can't beat autumn food. This weekend I made beef stew, butternut squash curry, corn and poblano pepper soup and pumpkin soup, all of which I froze for busy days to come. It turns out that working full time and starting a farm doesn't leave much time for cooking during the week.

This afternoon, Theo and I went to pick up four chickens from Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds. When we got home, we immediately set to making Apple Cider Roast Chicken. We omitted the parsnip and added squash and a potato. It's in the oven now and I can't wait until it's done! Plus, we'll have enough stock from the carcass that we can make a second round of soup madness in a few weeks!

Dessert is pumpkin ice cream and ginger snap molasses ice cream from Bates Farm in Carlisle. Wonderful!

Roast Chicken with Root Vegetables and Cider

1 chicken

2 tblsp butter

2 firm tart apples such as Granny Smith, cored, peeled, and cut into 1” dice

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1” dice

1 medium onion cut into 1” dice

1 large parsnip cut into 1” rounds

2 medium carrot cut into 1” rounds

½ head medium cauliflower cut into 1” chunks

Salt and pepper

2 c. fresh apple cider

Preheat oven to 400.

Rinse the chicken, inside and out, under cold water, and pat dry with paper

towels. Place the chicken in a flameproof (so you can put it on a burner later to

make the sauce) roasting pan large enough to hold it and the vegetables without

crowding. Smear the chicken with the butter, surround it with the vegetables,

sprinkle everything with salt and pepper, and pour in the cider.

Place the chicken and vegetables in the oven and roast until the apples have

practically melted, the vegetables are tender and brown, and the chicken juices

run clear when the thigh is pricked with a fork, about 1 ¼ to 1 ½ hours. Stir the

vegetables halfway through for even cooking.

Remove the chicken to a platter. Using a slotted spoon, remove the vegetables

and place them around the chicken, and keep warm. Set the roasting pan over

high heat and bring the cider and juices to a boil, scraping up the brown bits on

the bottom of the pan. Cook, uncovered, for 5 to 10 minutes, until the liquid is

reduced by half.

Serve the sauce alongside the chicken in a sauce boat or pitcher.

I Love You

Please be my friend, fluffy chicks who will soon lay us delicious eggs. I love you.

Chicken Heads

See that brown chicken with the excellent comb and waddle?

See my headless chicken with no comb and no wattle?

I call this: operation draw the head on the chicken. Not so easy, it turns out.

Broilers

We're excited to be raising pastured broilers this summer. After these guys spent a few days in the brood house under heat lamps to get a little bigger before facing the world, we put them in their new home. We pull their 'chicken tractor' to a new piece of fresh grass each day and watch them run all around enjoying the sunshine and delicious bugs.

It's that time again!

This sure takes me back. Same scene, different season. And please, don't continue reading if you're not interested in the nitty gritties of chicken slaughter.

We were culling layers which is quite an interesting prospect since they each had a few eggs left. The challenge is to capture their peak of production (which is in their first two years) and then cull them when that drops off to maintain a profit. You don't want to be feeding birds who aren't producing eggs and while that might sound harsh, many farms have been ruined financially by farmers unwilling to make hard decisions.

We found eggs in all stages of production which was a pretty neat biology lesson. A few were fully formed and could have been eaten right then, while others didn't have their hard shell yet. The ones to be laid in a few days were simply yokes getting progressively bigger before the chicken produced the white and the shell.

Chicken culling is always sad and it's nice to do at a farm like Maggie's since there's plenty of other people around to go through it with you. We saved all of our layers for stock (and cat food!) so they'll be put to good use even though their days running around the farm are behind them.

Chicken Love!

How sad that we're culling chickens. How nice that they love each other.

This moment actually happened during a dissection (gross). Caitlin and I went to get eggs, not being cut out for sheep insides. Taking pictures of chickens was much preferable.

Chicken Slaughter part 2

So there are a few ways to slaughter a chicken. You can cut off their heads which allows you to know for sure they're dead but requires quite a bit of force and coordinated effort. Or, you can slit the two veins on their throats, but theres a slight delay between doing the first and the second and there's no way to tell how much pain Mr. Clucks might be in during that.

We were told that when we go to do it, we had to be very sure and very ready because the worst thing you can do (and I do believe this is worse than killing them) is to maim or wound them. You can't hesitate at all once you start. For our first few birds we each did, we had an instructor next to us with their own knife which was reassuring.

I finally stepped up to the plate and chose the throat slitting method (later I moved to the decapitation after I had practiced on a dead chicken and knew I could do it well). I think the worst part of the whole process was lifting the chicken into the cone. It was flapping and trying to get away as I held it by the feet. Once inside, it calmed down, except for judging me with its beady little chicken eye.

I took a few deep breaths and then picked up the knife and slit. The moment was a lot calmer than I had anticipated, followed by the chicken body flapping and kicking.

We didn't know if a sad or happy picture was appropriate so you can just look at whichever one you choose.

I cut off its head once it was done bleeding out.

The next step was scalding them. The trick was to leave them in the hot water long enough their feathers loosened but not too long they started to cook.

Next, we strung them up and plucked their feathers into trashcans. The chickens we raised were meat birds (the gross kind that can't walk since they grow so fast- next time we've asked for more normal birds) so they were bred to have easy to remove feathers. We slaughtered a rooster as well and he was much harder to pluck.

After plucking, we cut their feet off and and their necks. We scooped their organs out of their body cavities, keeping the hearts and livers. That was the only part I didn't do since I don't do so well with body innards.

As we moved through the morning, we accumulated a number of heads, guts and feet which we then took to the woods and dumped.

And, finally, we were done. Two days later, we had chicken pad thai. Delicious.

Chicken Slaughter part 1

Chicken slaughter was quite the day. We went down to the tool shed where killing cones, buckets, a pot with hot water for scalding and a long table for evisceration were all set up. It was a bit strange to see our barnyard transformed during breakfast. I had also just given the broilers (called that to distinguish chickens between layers for eggs and those that we raise for meat) breakfast and water before heading down to slaughter them.

We started by talking about a bit about what it meant to kill an animal for food. We were all pretty nervous (and pretty nauseous, at least in my case) and it was nice to take a moment before we started. Betsy, our resident rabbi, spoke a little about the cycle and rhythm of life and death and after that we were all a bit calmer and felt better.

We sharpened our knives while the water continued to heat (it had to be 160 F to properly scald the chickens so the feathers were easy to pull off). Reid, who was showing us knife sharpening, had just shot a pheasant that morning so he pulled it out of his truck and showed us, pheasant style, what we were about to do.

Below is pheasant sans innards:

Once we were properly trained and grossed out, we went to get the first few broilers. We put them in this nifty chicken box and they happily sat there clucking while we took out our first victim...

One of These Chickens...

One of these chickens is not like the others. Our little friend showed up one day and hasn't left. Identity crisis, perhaps. Or running from the law.