Hello!
I’m not sure what fall is like by you, but here it’s been exceptionally (and unusually!) warm for late October in Minnesota!
Willie says “Happy Fall!” 🥰🐕
Farm Photos this Week
Farm Kitchen Inspiration
When we harvested our 96(!) chickens a few weeks back, I just couldn’t give up the carcasses full of meat bits. So they all went into the freezer until I had time to slowly work through them all.
Now I’m working on cooking them down and saving the meat to make into hotdishes and the bones are going into delicious bone broth.
All I did was briefly cook the full carcass in a pot with a little water – just enough to make the meat fall off. But NOT enough to make the bones collapse in a pile.
(I made that mistake a few times….you know how hard it is to get meat separated from teeny tiny chicken bones?? Ugh. Don’t do that…..)
The meat went into a chicken salad (mix a little mayo, onions, salt and pepper in a bowl of meat pieces; spread on breat – yum!) and then I put several carcasses together in a large roaster pan for 8+ hours.
Then I took a slotted spoon and sorted out the bones, and then strained the broth into jars. These are in the freezer waiting to be used in soups and other meals!
Chickens on strike UPDATE
In my last letter, I noted my frustration with our chickens who went from 20 eggs a day to 1-2.
After trying a number of different things in the last couple weeks, we are starting to see an upswing of 8-10 eggs a day!
Here’s the scoop:
Food – they don’t touch whole barley, whole barley and soybean meal, or alfalfa pellets, but they are loving the ground up sow hog feed mix with added soybean meal for extra protein.
Generally chickens like whole grains, so I’m wondering if that whole barley (which is a couple years old) is not edible to them….did it go bad somehow?? It seems ok to me, but what do I know? I’m not a chicken….. 🙄
The added light is probably a good thing. It’s a scientific fact that chickens lay more with added light. The light will stay on at night.
It was quite obvious that someone/many someones were eating eggs. I still think they weren’t eating 20 of them every day (so there’s still a problem), but it was obvious that the few they did lay, were eaten.
The addition of the feed they prefer as well as 2 golf balls in each nest seems to have done the trick. I believe it’s been a week since I’ve seen an eaten egg.
(Why golf balls? The golf ball theory is that they try to peck the golf balls, don’t get food, therefore give up eating eggs. In my experience, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe we’re just lucky for right now….)
The other thing we did was separate the white leghorns into a different location all by themselves since I strongly suspected they were the egg eating culprits.
The eaten eggs disappeared immediately upon removal.
However, oddly enough, the eggs that they laid in their new place weren’t eaten at all. Not one that I found. And instead 5-7 whole eggs were collected per day. What in the world????!!!
Even more bizarre….I put the brown and white chickens all back together again in the chicken truck and still no broken eggs.
Whatever.
Makes me want to give up on chickens. 🤨
But probably not….there’s got to be a way to figure out those little chicken brains…
