Wednesday, January 30, 2013

We have one black Australorp hen that likes to fly over her fence and come into the back yard.  She is a wanderer.  The other day, she was in my clematis vine, trying to make a nest up on the top!  She is such a funny bird!




Tadah!  She was in there!

Here is a picture of some of our turkeys that we raised. They are absolute food hogs and gobble up the feed as soon as you put it in the bowl!



 They look twice as big when they display their feathers like that.


We waited too long to butcher them and they got really big.  The last boy was over 40 lbs when he was dressed.  He wouldn't even fit in my scalding pot!

 Here is turkey sausage all wrapped up and ready for the freezer.
 And here are 24 pints of canned turkey.  Great for turkey salad sandwiches!

We lost all our buff brahmas to an attack last fall.  We think it might have been a stray dog.  It was early in the morning and it killed all our hens and the rooster died the next day of shock.
I sold all of my silkie breeders last year, I found them not be very hardy, more work than other breeds and not very productive.
I am also selling my houdan/polish mix girls so that I can have pure polish pens.  I currently have 3 polish pens and will put up pics soon.
I wanted to explain why I no longer breed these birds.  I have removed them from my current breeding flocks.

It has been while since I have written and our little postage stamp farm has had many changes.  Life moves quickly doesn't it?  I am going to concentrate on updating my blog page in the coming weeks.

Last weekend we butchered 6 broad breasted turkeys from last year.  We put 173 lbs of meat into the freezers!  We made turkey sausage, burger, stock, soup, canned turkey and of course legs and wings for baking.  We bought 16 turkeys last year and 8 more were given to us.  This was almost too much for us.  This year I will stick to 12 I think.  I also plan to buy 24 broilers.  I am day dreaming about what breeds I cannot live without this year as well.

Yesterday, I brought the incubator back into the house for hatching season to start. Today, it will get cleaned out and turned on for testing.  I am collecting olive-eggers, polish and mille fleur cochin eggs from my flocks.  I also have 3 dozen buckeye eggs on order and they will be in the incubator soon.

I can only hatch maybe one or two clutches of chicks before it will be gosling season!  I have the 16 geese separated into breeding pens.  They are so easily upset at this time of year.  I only have to walk over near they pens and they honk like a million car alarms going off!

It is almost light now, I had better go feed the animals.