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| March 5, 2019 |
We try to make better choices and we also grow a portion of the food that ends up on our own table. At first it was just a variety of favorite vegetables that are always best fresh from the garden (or the Farmer's Market if you don't garden). I also subscribe to Imperfect Produce to fill in the gaps here and there. Last year we added Butcher Box to have some meat choices in the freezer.
Then in the spring of 2017 when we added our first flock of supposed laying hens and found out by the end of summer that half were cockerels. We had to put a stop to that. We butchered our first chickens the fall of 2017. It wasn't a great experience, but we (or I) decided that maybe we could do this. Raising chickens is quite easy, why not raise chickens for meat?
In 2018 we took our first step toward growing meat for food to fill our freezer and it was not a bad experience. We still have one chicken left in the freezer from our September harvest. The only thing that was not good about last year's harvest...our own inexperience. Growing laying hens isn't much different than meat chickens. A chicken is a chicken and they will eat if there is food to be had. We made a big mistake and fed the meat chickens an evening ration (although not quite equal to their morning ration) and it was not necessarily a good thing. We had a big fail in that the chicks grew so fast that their little bodies would grow like crazy, but their little hearts couldn't keep up. We ended up losing nine chicks to over-feeding. Imagine that! HUGE fail. Even with the fail we were pleased with the outcome. We had put homegrown meat in the freezer!
The changes that we made:
FEEDING SCHEDULE
First we did not over feed the chicks. They received two feedings a day for the first few weeks, up until we put them outside full time. That worked out great! Once they were big enough to handle a little extra food in the evening - which really was a bedtime snack of some scratch. We would throw some scratch into the chicken tractor as a way to get them to go in for the night. Yeah, chickens will naturally put themselves to bed - even the meaties, but it was just easier to do it while it was still light out so we only had one flock to deal with later in the evening. They got used to that routine in no time flat! Extra food for a growing meat chicken, they will not turn their beaks up to that. Also, this year's meaties were able to run around and eat grass and chase after bugs to help fill their bellies throughout the day (spoiler alert we got them a special fence).
GROW-OUT TIME
The other thing we did was give this batch of chicks an extra couple of weeks to get good and fat. So instead of harvesting them at 11 weeks old we did the harvest at 13 1/2 weeks. Even then, in the last few days I thought we would have some fatty's for sure and I was a little surprised that there wasn't a chicken that was six pounds! There was one that was close though. They really were quite large too. Our two littlest meaties were both 3lb 15oz. and the largest at 5lb 13oz. Not too shabby really. All in all we ended up with 115lbs 8oz of meat in the freezer.
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| Chicks first day on Grass |
The last thing that really made a difference would be the Shock or Not fence from Premier1 Supplies. First saw this on the Justin Rhodes channel last year. I saw how they could get their chicks out on grass much sooner than norm. This netting is a real game changer! The chicks were relocated from the Brooder to the chicken tractor at not quite 4 weeks old. They enjoyed days out on grass and evenings in the chicken tractor with the heat lamps on. It was still pretty chilly at the end of March so we kept the lights on them for a few more weeks. During the day they were free to explore their enclosed area and were happy to be outdoors. Last year's poor littles didn't have that opportunity. They had a teeny-tiny space that was more of a courtyard, a tiny one, to come out and look at something other than each other and to pick at some clean grass. They couldn't even get away from their own stinky poo. It would have been nice to have this fence last year, but it wasn't in the budget.
Processing day was fairly uneventful and we were able to finish the job with the help of our neighbor/friend in about two and a half hours. It took two hours for Tom to complete the killing, scalding and plucking and a few minutes longer for Julie and I to finish up the evisceration. I had a couple of other people who said they would come, but they didn't show. Which is fine, but it would have been nice to know that they would not be coming. In the end just having the three of us was nice as we didn't have to do any sort of instructions at the beginning - that would have definitely slowed us down. We'll be ready next year for new peeps though. Last weekedn I chatted with a friend of mine who asked me if this was something that she should do. I told her it's not for everyone, but at least knowing how the chicks are raised and observing the process wouldn't be a bad idea. We'll see - next year might be the teaching year.
With the changes that we made from last year's big fail, we ended up with 24 plump chickens. All brined, bagged, weighed and sitting in the freezer for a future meal. HUGE WIN!
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| Twenty-Four Chickens ready for the freezer. |
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| June 8, 2019 |
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