Chickens: From Coup to Freezer Also, More Homemade Wine Exploits & Romaine Seeds

Our free range tractor. These guys were voracious grass eaters.

We harvested 25 birds for around 100 -110 pounds of meat.

That's it -from coup to freezer. We took the birds to Eli Reiff at Reiff's poultry dressing in Mifflinburg, PA. I highly recommend him to anyone who's interested. He's been in business for 20 years. He cares about the birds, and he's doing the work of harvesting them humanely. We travel 2 hours to use him. Not to mention, the conversations and connections we make there are priceless.

Here's a sample of a conversation I had with Eli last Tuesday. He said, Try this experiment:

Take a regular chicken breast, the kind you buy in the grocery store, and boil it. Add nothing to the water, just boil it. As the steam rises, take a good whiff. What do you smell? It smells like... you know what. Now take one of your birds and do the same thing.  What will it smell like? It will smell like chicken. 

I'm not going to test the store bought chicken, We're just (Lord willing) going to keep raising our own birds. They are as identifiably other than food industry birds as homegrown heritage black tomatoes are from the store bought version of (something-someone-says-is-a-tomato-but-really-is-not) a tomato. They are completely worth it.

When all is said and done, we raised 25 "spring" birds for 10 weeks. They ate 5 80 pound bags of feed, (thanks to Jason and Heather for the feed). It is whole grain, locally grown,  and made with Fertrell organic minerals. All told, water, gas, butchering and feed. The total cost per bird was $7.00 or $8.00. That's only two bucks a pound. Not bad for the privilege of knowing where our food comes from!

Now for a few other goings on around spring garden acre...

Apple and strawberry wine waiting to be bottled and racked respectively.

The apple wine on the right is ready to be bottled and the strawberry wine on the left is just about ready to be racked again.

I met Chris the wine maker at Reiffs Poultry Dressing in Mifflinburg. Chris is a school teacher by day and 5th generation farmer, with his brother and their families, by the rest of the time. He is growing an amazing vineyard, right here in Hershey, PA. He helped me understand several things about wine making that I did not know in a very short time. Thanks Chris! I won't share these details now. Please just let me keep saying thank you, thank you Chris, especially for directing us to a vineyard in Shermansdale, (just up the road) where we can buy wine making grapes -a Noir variety and at a reasonable price! Yes, we're thrilled about this! We've talked about it. We've wanted to try it, but never known how to get grapes. Now we know!

Finally, we planted our first seeds for fall today -Vivian romaine. Our spring harvest of romaine was almost 12 pounds. We're hoping for 20 pounds this fall. We planted 60 starts. They're scheduled to be put outside on August 11. 

True Confessions: this is just a small part of the carnage of our spring seedling endeavors.

Vivian romaine seeds:our hopeful fall harvest under lights.

Yes, Chickens Eat Grass

One of the goals of the mobile chicken coup, as I understand it, is to provide fresh grass as feed. It cuts down the cost of grain and makes healthier, less fatty, birds. (Since raising our own birds, we've had a very hard time enjoying the fatty ones that rule the market). Mobile coups are a way to provide a controlled free range. They are priceless for small acre gardeners like us with close neighbors.

We've been learning that some birds are more eager to eat grass than others. Freedom Rangers, as their name suggests, are much more eager grass eaters than say Cornish Cross, whose only desire is that you would place the watering dish so close to the feeding dish that they don't ever have to stand up.

This time we have Silver Cross. We were a bit unsure of this breed's interest in grass, especially because (like the Cornish) they're bred to be big birds.

One way to encourage grass eating is to present grass to the birds before they ever enter the mobile coup. (Chicks always spend the first 2 or 3 weeks of their lives indoors, under lights). While these Silvers were still in the shed as chicks, we plucked handfuls of grass and clover to offer an alternative to grain.

We've been surprisingly pleased with this breed. They've proven to be very active, attractive and voracious grass eaters. Our neighbor calls them the perfect lawn mower.

This is our tractor coup. It's simple, easy to move and quite effective for free ranging (except in wind storms!).

If you look closely, you'll see the path of the coup on the right. There are several rectangle patches. Each one is a day's worth of eaten grass.

The Chicken and Frog Adventure

Last night a storm moved through our area with winds up to 60 miles per hour http://www.wgal.com/news/28042359/detail.html. Our light weight chicken coup is made with PVC pipe, tarp and chicken wire. It's not tied down, because I slide it around the lawn daily to give the birds fresh grass. Needless to say when the storm hit, the coup quickly flipped over!

The birds were immediately exposed, soaking wet and huddled together in a hopelessly vulnerable mass. Some birds were missing. They had fallen into a storm ditch nearby that was beginning to swell with water. I found them by listening to their cries. They were huddled up under an eroded embankment. I had to feel my way in to find them.

In the meantime I flipped the cage over the exposed birds on the grass. Once I'd gathered the rest from the ditch, I wondered how to get them all through the rest of the storm. I knew the cage would flip again. So I did the only thing I could think of. I climbed inside the cage with them and held onto it. My heart raced, Bel worried and Calvin thought I was going to die for sure. The wind picked the cage right up of the ground a few more times, but I managed to hold it down. When things finally calmed down I climbed out and shuffled all 25 birds into the shed where they could calm down and dry off... At least I thought all 25 birds were there. One was actually missing, but we didn't know it 'till the next day.

In the morning, as we took care of the birds, we heard a squawking sound coming from the ditch behind us.  Bel said, "Is that a chicken?" We both looked around at the eroded embankment when up jumped chicken number 25. He was missing, and we didn't even know it. All but forgotten, spending the night in the ditch, he should have washed away! Not this bird, he wasn't ready to be forgotten. So over he came as proud as he could be to the cage for his victory meal. 

He was in pretty bad shape -so covered in mud that it was sticking to his eyelids. His tail feathers looked like an arrangement of broken stems in a vase, and he was a wee bit disoriented.

He is just a meat bird -but for the ordeal we experienced last night and for our amazement and joy at seeing him come up from that ditch this morning, we're thinking about making him a permanent member of Spring Garden Acre.  Doesn't he deserve it!

Here's the little storm chaser now. See how different he looks from the other birds. He's literally caked with guck and mud from the night before.

To top things off, Bel and I were sitting in our living room talking by candlelight in the storm (the power was out) when this little guy came hopping across the living room floor. He was seeking shelter I suppose. Yet another survivor.
What a wild night! Thankfully the garden was alright. Some of our cauliflower plants were tipped over and our peas are shaken up a bit. But all in all, everybody made it safe and sound.

Raising Chickens for the Family

Today we picked up 25 locally hatched chickens from a farmer to raise in our backyard. This post is about the last part of what we've included in our blog heading "and keep a few chickens for eggs and meat." We try to raise or to know the farmer who raises, the animals we eat. This is part of how we do it.

The Silver Cross breed is not our first choice, but they come from a local hatchery. They're available now and we've gone without chicken dishes since March -the last of our early fall brood. They're also healthy birds that we'll raise right.

I know why I'm smiling behind the camera, because we'll have chicken in the freezer again! But for C. James (who definitely knows from experience what these birds are for), this is just a blast!

The chicks cost 1 dollar each at the hatchery. The local, whole-grain feed will cost 2 -3 dollars per bird (23.50 per 80 lbs). Between gardening and keeping chickens on less than an acre, we don't have the resources (or zoning privileges) to butcher them ourselves, so we have to pay for that. It will cost us 2 dollars per bird. Fuel for feed pick up (it's 50 miles round trip) will add at least 1 dollar per bird.  We'll raise these birds to be about 6 -8 pounds each and harvest 3 -4 pounds of meat.  All told they'll cost around 2 dollars and some change per pound.  We'd happily pay 5 dollars a pound just for sake of this experience!

We'll keep them indoors at first in our 12 x 20 foot shed and under lights until they grow permanent feathers. Then we'll move them outside into a half-covered but airy enclosure made of PVC, chicken wire and a tarp. We'll move their enclosure around on our backyard grass. It's spacious and dry, keeping them out of the direct sight of our accepting neighbors and safe from predators. In the past, we've seen hawks land on the enclosure, and fox scat on the ground around it. Have you ever heard a fox shriek in the dead of night? I heard that sound for the first time last fall. It scared me, so shrill and eery; like nothing I've ever heard before. The birds are happy to have a safe and comfortable home, and we're thankful to have them for food.  We take it as a fair trade off. 

I'll move the enclosure to new grass twice daily, once before work in the morning (I hope nobody at work minds the occasional muddy splashes on my dress shoes) and once after dinner. When they get bigger, I'll need to rake the manure into piles and shovel it into the compost bin.  As long as I move them twice daily (which has been a very relaxing part of my routine), the birds will always be on fresh grass.  It takes a bit of a toll on our lawn, but it's worth it, especially when you take into account the hot manure that, after raking, is great fertilizer for the lawn soil and a great accelerator in our compost bin.

All told, we're looking forward to fresh chicken again, in early July!