Even when the water has been sitting out in a watering trough or water-er all day long and is the temperature of bath water, as long as they have access to it, livestock will drink it. And it will keep them alive. They might not like it; it might have slime on the bottom. But in 100 degree temperatures, it will keep them alive. The younger they are, the closer to birth they are, the more they need water and lots of it. And the greater the chances that if they don’t or if they don’t have access to it, they will not make it. The higher the temperatures go, the faster they will expire without water and access to it.

This past week, the temperatures up in our area were absolutely mind-blowing. High 90s every single day. The first day was a holiday and although we filled all the animals’ waterers full, we also took off to do ‘our own thing’ for the day, forgetting …that sometimes, things happen. The chicks in one of the pens tipped over the waterer. We did not get back until late in the day. You can guess the result, though we were lucky and only lost a dozen. These were not brand new chicks; these birds were 6 weeks old. But it did not matter. No access to water and within a few hours, overheating. For the rest of the week, our son was at home and every day, he went up a couple of times during the day to check on the animals, make sure they had plenty of water. No more losses.

Water – it’s what animals need. All the damn time.

(photo courtesy of oddobjects)

This time, it’s slightly different because this particular hen is totally different looking than the other birds and we have a tendency to look out for her because she’s a bantam and about 1/3 the size of the Light Brahmas that she is with. The DH put some of their fertilized eggs under her and she has been a very good mommy so far. To give her more privacy and to put the chicks closer to the ground when they hatch, we moved them into another room, with a heat lamp (that’s why the color in the photographs is so red – the lamp is infrared). Readers who are familiar with the set up we had to raise the Light Brahmas when they arrived last year will remember this plywood box with the holes in it – we are reusing this as a corral to help keep the hen and her chicks inside and help hold the heat in as well.

Now, I probably should have read up more on moving broody hens – it can throw them off completely, which it did to this particular LRH. Once we’d moved her, she seemed to have no interest at all in getting back on those eggs, which considering it’s February, we were pretty concerned about. So, the DH tried a trick with an old lined curtain we had up there. He got her back into the nesting box (which my son had made out of three old feeding pans we had) and tucked the curtain all around her to block off the light. The next morning when he went out to feed her and give her more water, she was all cuddled down on top of the eggs and had gotten into the whole rhythm of the thing again. She jumps out, does her business, takes a drink, eats a little and is right back on the eggs again. Another method that supposedly works is to move a broody hen only at night, which I think the DH reproduced with the curtain.

Whew.

H-Day (hatching day) is now estimated at mid-week or so, so we’ll have to keep an eye out. Stay tuned.

Our little red hen, the Bantam we got as a gift, was starting to molt (that is, lose her feathers) and was hunkered down in one of the nesting boxes and was positively nasty. Wouldn’t leave; wouldn’t allow anyone to put their hand underneath her and frankly had taken on this sort of ‘loose baggy’ sort of appearance.

She’s gone broody.

Now if we were in the commercial egg production business, this would be a royal pain and we would be going through all sorts of gyrations to get her to cut it out, snap out of it and go back to laying eggs and being a productive hen. But on the other side of it, we’re NOT in the commercial egg business here at Chez Siberia and we’ve just gone through a PITN situation with trying to order Delaware chicks. Delawares are what American housewives put on the Sunday platter in the 40s and 50s, before the invention of the dino-chicken, Cornish Crosses (if you buy commercial chickens in the store, those big breasted halves and quarters are Cornish Crosses – we raised them a couple of times years ago. Never again). Now, we had a great experience growing out the Light Brahmas. They certainly are not as fast in terms of growth as a Cornish Cross, but you can raise them on pasture; they are not delicate and do not require careful watching in hot weather (Cornish Crosses tend to just lay there and die, frankly) and grow out to a terrific size and taste fantastic. But before we settled on light Brahmas forever, we decided we’d try Delawares this year as a comparison.

Us and everyone else. We thought we were getting the order in super-early. No luck – the hatchery was all booked until much later in the spring. Which is ok but now we will be getting a whole lot of chicks at one time instead of two, timed deliveries. This will take more work and watching.

Which brings me back to our friend, the LRH (aka, the Little Red Hen), who is very calmly sitting on eggs right now (the DH put a small clutch of what we think are fertile eggs under her earlier this week and she has accepted them, which is interesting since they are probably 2-3 times as big as hers but she is molting so she is not laying at all now). She jumps down to eat, drink and do her business a couple of times a day. We will move her and the eggs to a nest in the room next door, so that we can put a heat lamp out there, and bedding on the floor and have her closer to the floor (the nesting boxes are up on the wall – if she hatched chicks in there now, they’d fall out and get injured for sure). So, save the weekend of February 20th on your Save the Date calendar and we’ll see what happens. If she’s successful and turns out to be a good mom (and Bantams are supposed to be some of the best), perhaps once we get the Delawares going, we can get her to hatch some Delawares for us.

I’m sure there are those who are saying, “Well, why don’t you just get an incubator and hatch them yourself?” Good question. We’ve had only one other experience with a broody hen and she did a good job hatching. We have had experience raising lambs by hand, artificially and the babies had all sorts of issues – sometimes it is just better to have a mom to do it, to teach them how to scratch, to get them to run around and so on. We’ll see how she does. Being broody does not necessarily turn into being a good mommy. But we figured ‘what the heck’.

For more information on broody hens and breeding your own, see Broody Hens

Aunt Toby has written about eggs before, especially with regard to our little flock of Light Brahma chickens (and they are doing very nicely these days, thank you very much).Egg0sactly What We Were Looking For But, let’s review:

One large egg contains:
Calories: 68
Protein: 5.54 gr.
Carbohydrate: .49 gr.
Fat: 4.67 gr; 1.44 gr of which is saturated
Cholesterol: 186.56 gr.

Also contains:
Vitamin A
Vitamin B1, B2, B3, B6, B12
Biotin
Vitamin D
Vitamin E
Folate
Pantothenic Acid

Minerals, including 16% of the TDA of Iodine and 20% of the RDA of Selenium

So, one whole egg plus an egg white and you are covered in terms of protein on a per person basis. So, if you are making something such as scrambled eggs for a group of people, you can do everyone a favor and use whites for half of the servings and add a few extra whites to make up the difference in the volume lost by the lack of yolks.

I think everyone knows what quick and easy meals eggs can produce. Anyone arriving home from work, not having taken anything out in the morning (which has, cough, been known to happen on more than one occasion at Chez Siberia, I assure you), is still assured of a good, hearty, thrifty meal as long as there are eggs in the fridge.

Absolutely first rule in terms of serving eggs: Don’t turn the stove on high and just throw them in the pan. The protein in eggs responds better to low to medium heat. Second rule: Serve them on heated plates. I know that people think this is rather hoity-toity UK behavior but believe me – hot food stays hot longer if it is put on a hot plate. If you have to put a hot pad on the table so that you can put a heated plate on it, so be it (and treat yourself to some cork mats – Ikea has nice cheap ones). There is nothing worse than cold eggs. Not worth eating.

Easy Dinner 1: Think breakfast, only much nicer
Scrambled eggs with cheese
Whole Grain toast or some other form of bread product
Fruit Salad
Easy Dinner 2: Feel French without the flipping
Julia Child had her moment in the kitchen with an omelet; at Chez Siberia, we don’t take chances.
Count up how many people you have (for each person figure one whole egg and one egg white) and crack that many eggs and egg whites into a bowl and beat them well. Save the yolks and cook them up for your pets (they will love them)
Dice finely a small onion and half a pepper, sauté in a little bit of olive oil in a large frying pan that has a lid.
Shred up one half cup of cheddar cheese.
When the veggies are soft, pour the beaten eggs over the veggies and sprinkle the cheese on top. Stir lightly, cover and lower the heat until set.
Serve with whatever accompaniments you would like – ON A HOT PLATE.

This is a great way to use up already cooked and left over veggies such as broccoli, green beans and so on.

Easy Dinner 3: More French Stuff – Quiche Me Quick
What we’re doing here is frankly taking scrambled eggs and combining them with milk and flour as a binder and then baking it (along with some additions) in a crust. If you don’t ‘do’ crusts (and Aunt Toby is not a dab hand at crust making herself – I think this is genetic and is due to my having hot hands), there is nothing wrong with having crusts from the store in the freezer.

Put the crust in its pie plate in a 350 degree oven for ten minutes to start cooking. While it’s doing its thing, combine:

4 ounces of grated hard cheese (cheddar, Swiss, etc.)
2 tablespoons of butter melted
4 whole eggs plus 2 egg whites, beaten
One small onion, chopped
½ cup of all purpose flour
1.5 cups of milk

After 10 minutes in the oven, pull out the crust and pour in the combined ingredients and put back into the oven for 35 minutes until set. Slice and serve – ON A HOT PLATE.

And finally, totally decadent and for when you have had a supremely awful day at work:
Put plates into the oven, on top of the toaster oven or however you get your plates hot.
Beat up one whole egg and one egg white per person
Reach into your fridge and take out that jar of preserves that you got for Christmas from the visiting relatives .
Melt some butter in a large frying pan (or light olive oil – the sort that says, “for sautéing” on it) and when hot, pour in the eggs.
Do NOT stir around. Coat the entire bottom of the pan and allow to set. When it is just set (not wet on the top at all), using a scraper (the silicone ones are especially good for this), carefully nudge this out onto (you knew this was coming, right?), a HOT PLATE.
Put a big honkin’ scoop of preserves on it, fold it up.
Eat very, very slowly……

But, we always knew, the DH and I, that at some point this fall, we were going to have to bring the chickens inside..someplace. The climate at Chez Siberia (Zone 4 on a good day) gets into the ‘oh, crap it cold out there’ state pretty quickly.

Too quickly. It snowed – twice this week. A freak October storm for sure and we lucked out in only getting 2 inches of snow. It was not that cold – in the 30s – but it was a rather sharp reminder that winter is coming. The DH and The Boy had started the work on the barn last week to make a winter space for the chickens but we were certainly not in a position to move them yet. The barn is actually the original brooder house (which was heated by a series of coal stoves actually) for the chicken farm that Chez Siberia was in the 1930s and 1940s. It is long and low, with windows (or actually the remains of windows – the former owner used to keep his horses in there and they ‘removed’ the windows in short order) all along the south side. A couple of years ago, we came up with hinged shutters to close off the openings, but we did not get out to the end of the barn because we did not use that end of the building.

Well, now we need to use that end of the building, so we needed to clean it out (which we did). We also put in a wall to make the space that we will be using for the chickens smaller (so that they are not trying to heat up the entire back of the barn with their body heat – they will stay warmer this way). These chickens are Light Brahmas Light Brahmas and are extremely large and fluffy birds with teeny ‘pea combs’ so as long as we keep them out of the wind and give them a space that is not too big, with the South-facing windows, they should be able to keep themselves warm through this winter.

Ordinarily, we’d just put on the shutters, but we saw some interesting pictures of chickens in the snow and it gave us the idea that perhaps the birds would, on nice sunny days (and we get those starting in January), like to ‘take the air’ as they used to say. We plan to use some scrap lumber and old windows to make a 3-sided ‘sunporch’. We’ll open the shutter (it’s hinged at the top), snuggle the ‘sunporch’ up against the outside wall of the barn, put the shutter down across the top and hook it down to the outside of the ‘sunporch’. But, let’s say that we just want to give them some fresh air? The DH came up with some screens that just fit into the window openings. If all we want is fresh air, then we can open up the shutters. If we want to use the ‘sunporch’ then, we’ll take out the screens from the inside of the windows and shoo the chickens out into the sun.

We’ll be able to do a bit of cleaning in their living space (always a job done much better and more ‘pleasantly’ in the winter rather than in the spring when the weather – and the manure – warms up) and get them some fresh air and sun at the same time. Win-win.

In the meantime, the chickens do not seem to have been fazed at all by the snow. And when I’ve gone out in the morning, I’ve had to knock the ice out of the waterers, so we’ve started taking hot water up for them and we are feeding scraps along with everything else to make sure they get plenty of calories. But soon..very soon, they will be coming into the barn for the winter.

Heh – little do you know…

Yes, from a capital investment standpoint, they are probably the cheapest thing going; a coop or run can be cobbled together out of all sorts of left over stuff. If you live in a moderate enough environments, the amount of shelter that needs to be dealt with is small. They do start out cute – there is no doubt about that. Chicks are terminally cute..for about four days. In terms of ease to care for, well, the family cat can handle a situation with ‘left down food and water’ better, actually: Chickens don’t like dirty water or food. So you need to wash out and refill their waterers daily and if you are feeding supplements, then you need to make sure the feeder is clean also. In terms of safety, well, depending on the breed, the roosters can get pretty aggressive and in terms of height, a full grown rooster can be as big as a just walking toddler, so having the babies out with the chickens could be a traumatic experience.

The other thing and newbies are just amazed at this, is that chickens dig dust baths. Big, honkin’ roll-around wallows that they can get the whole of themselves into so that they can roll, wriggle, and flop around. They do this to help get rid of any insects (and they always have insects – it’s ok…no need to start running for the pesticide can). People don’t envision this because..well, people have not had ‘in the natural environment’ contact with chickens on a regular basis for about 50 years – chickens kept in cages or big coops don’t have access to floor space with deep enough bedding to dig themselves a foot bath..much less something they could actually get their whole bodies into.

So, as a public service, here is Aunt Toby’s Introduction to Chicken Excavation Behaviors, A Pictorial Atlas. These literally are this week’s projects from the Light Brahmas. Because we move them every day, I can tell you that they scratch things up pretty good on a daily basis, but major excavation work is done on an every-other day basis. It’s amazing – just like clockwork: “Oh, today is Thursday; we have to create a major earthwork today.” The holes don’t look particularly dusty – we had a lot of rain in the past 24 hours, but you’ll get the idea.

When the birds first got started scratching out holes, the holes themselves ranged in diameter from 3-6″ and perhaps 1-2″ deep. No great edifices here. No ambitious Pharoahanic (if such a word exists) stuff. But now:
Chickens obviously like, from time to time, to deal with the dust bathing in a communal manner, sort of like a Turkish Bath. One big honkin’ hole that multiple chickens can flop into. Since Aunt Toby’s chickens generally are very impatient birds (and seem these days to be more interested in ‘break out sessions’ more than anything else), this hole looks as if it could accommodate at least two hens simultaneously. The others will just have to take a number and wait their turns.

This example shows class ‘territorial’ bath building, the Classic 3-Holer Arrangement. On this day, I imagine that the birds just were NOT going to ‘take a number’ — and various hens decided to just muck it out by themselves.

This example shows what can be done by hens with creativity and ambition when the chicken ‘tractor’ has been left on uneven ground, throwing up great ridges between the baths, the socalled Contour Map Scheme. It would appear on this day, the birds were more interested in throwing up walls; perhaps there was a breakdown in political discourse that day.

And I’ve saved the most special for last, the Trans-Siberian Trenching Behavior. Built in the direction from Northwest to Southeast, these trenches are quite unique and indicate chickens focused on a mission. No distraction. No fighting for placement or authoritative position..just simple, concentrated cooperative digging. There are animal science specialists who feel that this is actually an indicator of advanced intelligence, that this trench is actually meant to enable the birds to worship the rising and setting of the sun. It is very difficult to ascertain the credibility of this theory as chickens do not have a written language(or digits capable of grasping writing instrument for that matter); however, it is an intriguing postulation. If we get up early enough and hide ourselves cleverly, perhaps we will be able catch them in one of their ancient ceremonies and be able to test this out.

Small? On the scale of “Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, Jumbo and OOOOO, That Hurts”, this particular egg did not even register as a Pee Wee. Pee Wee Eggs need to be 1.25 ounces. This one weighed 1 ounce. Flat.

Fertile? Maybe – possibly – but not necessarily likely as at this early date – a pullet’s reproductive system is still getting organized in terms of putting the eggs together, putting a membrane around it and putting a shell around it. Sometimes things get all mixed up and you can get eggs-within-eggs, eggs without yolks and so on. Odd Eggs

One of the things that occurred to me when I was looking up the weights on egg grades (and if you want to know more about eggs than perhaps you EVER wanted to know, go
USDA Egg Manual
is this: the weight of an egg is really sort of indicative of how much actual liquefied stuff is resident inside that shell. I realize that sounds sort of like an agricultural ‘No, duh” but for those of us who bake, the size of an egg – the sheer amount of liquid that it adds to a recipe – makes a huge amount of difference in terms of the end product. The more liquid in the recipe, the more dried ingredients you need to balance it off. Here’s a basic chart:

Egg Size………..Weight Per Egg in Ounces
Jumbo…………..2.5
Extra Lge………2.25
Large……………2
Medium……….1.75
Small……………1.5
PeeWee……….1.25

Now, let’s just look at that for a second. If your cake recipe calls for 2-3 large eggs (and there are a whole lot of cake recipes that do call for that – we’re not talking chiffon cakes or pound cake or anything like that) that is between 4 and 6 ounces of liquefied stuff. It occupies a certain amount of space in the batter. For the sake of argument, let’s say that your spousal unit went to the farmers market and thinking he’d do you a good deed, he bought Extra Large eggs instead of Large. If you use 2-3 Extra Large eggs, you are putting between 4.5 ounces and 6.75 ounces of liquefied stuff into your cake batter instead of the 4 ounces which would have been contributed by 2 Large eggs.

Better to hedge your bets and only put in 2 Extra large eggs (4.5 ounces), see how the batter handles that and if it is too thick, add 1-2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (such as the light olive oil made for sautéing and baking).

Why not just add another Extra Large egg? Because if you do that, then you have to balance that off with more flour and in a cake (especially if you have already added the flour and have beaten it up and the protein in the flour, the gluten, has been worked a bit), this can frankly make the cake texture “tough” and the added flour may not combine as well as the rest and you will end up with little clumps of flour in the cake when it’s been baked.

Yuck.

Or, let’s look at the other side of things. Now, I sincerely doubt that you’d be able to find, in your local “super-marche” small or even medium size graded eggs. Just like, your chances of finding anything other than Grade A or Grade AA eggs are basically nonexistent. But at a farmers market, you just might be able to find mediums or even smalls. What do you do then? Well, if you know you have mediums right up front and know that you need 4-6 ounces of stuff, then you can do a little bit of figuring and and jigger the recipe right from the get-go. Take out your calculator and multiply the number of large eggs called for in the recipe by 2 ounces and then divide that by the number of ounces per egg that is in the size egg you’ve got.

Voila.

And, this little egg here – well, it is going to be joined by many many brother and sister eggs over the next several months. Once a hen gets her egg laying system going, they produce, on average, 2 eggs every 3 days. And we have 12 hens out there. That means for every hen, in a two week period, we’re going to get (on average again..all dependent on feed, light, warmth, etc.) 8 eggs.

And we’ve got 12 hens out there. That’s 96 eggs. Every two weeks.

You see how people end up in the egg business?

Sigh. We knew it was going to come to this, right? We all knew that when Aunt Toby and the DH got chicks earlier this year, that some of them were ‘born for the freezer’, right? We got ‘straight run’ (that is, no one took a startlingly intimate look at their rear ends and decided which ones would grow up to lay eggs…and which ones would grow up meant for other things). “Sexed chicks’ cost more – a lot more – because it does take some skill to look deeply, passionately, into the rear end of a chick and be able to make that sort of decision. With ‘straight run’, you don’t know how much of which you will get, but you will get some of each.

We got about 50% roosters, which is pretty good. We weighed all of them earlier this summer and the biggest and with the most development (combs, wattles, condos with sports cars out front), got to take the lottery as to who got courting rights with the hens…and which ones would eventually make the trip to Pepperoni-ville.

We eat meat. We obviously raise our own and buy from others who pasture raise their own. Raising your own really does give you a lot more control over what ends up in your own body and it also gives you control over the quality of life that your animals have. We always took the position that our livestock came first. No matter how tired anyone was; no matter how crabby anyone felt – taking care of the livestock always came first because that is the relationship between caretakers and domesticated animals, the animals who came out of the darkness and allowed themselves to become part of our lives.

For that, we owe them the highest quality of life that we can give them, since we have forever changed them, turned them into creatures of our convenience (which is why sheep now keep their fleeces on rather than shed them, which is what they used to do), and of overwhelming dependence.

Now, the DH and I don’t slaughter and dress our own birds (I hate all the ‘finagle’ words out there for this like ‘process’ – I also hate weeny-whiner weasel words such as ‘harvesting’). A long time ago, we actually tried that. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can cause the bird a lot of anxiety, pain, and upset on the way to becoming something for your freezer. It will also take you a lot longer than it does someone who does know what they are doing and who has the equipment to slaughter, scald, clean, pluck, eviscerate and package. One of the things that got us out of raising meat birds was the fact that we could not find anyone who would do this for us (ok – we are ‘chicken livered’ about this – slaughtering and dressing animals puts you in touch with a part of yourself that perhaps you don’t want to get to know that well).

One of the things that changed that whole scene has been the pasture raised meats movement, which has grown like Topsy over the past five years. We found out about the slaughterhouse we used from a lady from whom we used to buy pasture raised birds – when the DH spoke to the owners, it was obvious that the reason they had time and room for our little batch of roosters was that he has a contract for 10,000 birds a year with a local grower and fills in his schedule with people like us, families who raise birds for local farmers’ markets and so on. If he did not have that contract and income, there would be no slaughterhouse for us. When the DH and I and the Little Siberians raised sheep and goats, the number one barrier to our being able to grow our market was the fact that there was (and as far as I know, still is) no USDA certified slaughterhouse closer than over the border in Pennsylvania. This guy only does poultry(which makes sense as that process takes a certain number of specialized pieces of equipment) but who knows – with the interest in locally grown, perhaps we will again have a good USDA certified slaughterhouse in our area again so that farmers don’t have to haul their livestock 2-3 hours. Another new idea is to have mobile slaughter services which will come to farms; a group of farmers in Connecticut got together, wrote a grant and developed one of those which is used in common, cleaned in common and inspected on a regular basis by the state and federal authorities.

But back to the birds. We took them to the slaughterhouse yesterday. Except for the fact that the DH had a full schedule, he could have occupied himself for a couple of hours and gone back to pick up the already slaughtered, cleaned, cut up and packaged birds (we had half of them done whole and half done as halves), but he went back this morning to pick them up. We had weighed them the night before we took them up, so we knew approximately the total weight of birds that went in. And then we weighed the packages of chicken when we got them home. The dressing percentage was 73% (that is, 27% of the birds in terms of their internal organs, heads, feathers, feet etc. are considered waste), which is much better than for other livestock such as pigs, sheep and so on, where the waste can be as high as 40%. If you want more information about how to slaughter your own chickens, go Home Poultry Processing

This year was an experiment all the way around:
1) We had never raised this breed of bird before. These are Light Brahmas, a ‘dual purpose’ bird, so they can be kept and raised for meat as well as eggs. These birds were 16 weeks when they ‘went down the road’ and the largest one had a live weight of 5 pounds 15 ounces. Broilers that are raised under confinement conditions are sent off for processing at 6-8 weeks. Most are usually a triumph of breeding called a ‘cornish cross’. These birds MUST be slaughtered at 6-8 weeks because they have been bred to grow so big in the chest and at such great rates that if you keep them longer than 8 weeks, their bodies are too large for their legs, the legs start to buckle, they have tremendous difficulty moving at all and start having age-related chronic diseases and problems such as heart attacks. Light Brahmas are a traditional chicken and were a wonder of scrounging for their own food in the pasture, eating bugs, worms, grass and clover as the complement to the grains we give them. They were also actually pretty calm birds in comparison to the Columbian Wyandottes we used to raise, who seemed to take every opportunity to peck at, bite and flap at the Little Siberians, who avoided them like the plague.
2) This was the first time we had ever tried to raise chickens out on pasture, using our moveable pens. This worked better than we ever expected; the birds got fresh air and sunshine, got to eat fresh grass and pasture plants every day(we moved them once a day, every day), scratched up the ground and have been doing a great job fertilizing a pasture that frankly had not been in great shape for a very long time. On the other hand, as someone who has raised chickens under ‘chicken house’ conditions as well, I have to say that there is nothing quite like going out in the rain to move, feed, and water the chickens, only to have to stand out in the rain to do it. In the summer, the temperatures are not cold, but I can’t see doing this in late October, when can be raining and 45 degrees. We will be setting up a dedicated area for the chickens to spend the winter, with nesting boxes and a sun porch, so that we can bring them in by the 2nd or 3rd week in October.
3) Not leaving anything to chance, we got a big bag of ‘pasture plant seed’ – mixed perennial and annual plants for reseeding pastures and every day, when we moved the chickens, we’d scuff up the areas that they had scratched bare, watered the ground well, and threw down some seed. We’ve had plenty of rain this summer, which has helped, but we are looking forward to seeing how putting chickens on the pasture will improve the quality of the pasture over the next couple of years.
4) Plans for next year? Well, if we have any hens that decide to ‘go broody’ late in the winter, then we just might be in the chick raising business. We’re also thinking seriously about finding a hatchery that does Delawares, which up until the invention of Cornish Crosses, were the meat bird of choice, and trialing some Delawares in our pasture alongside the Light Brahmas to see how they do Chez Siberia.
5) The proof of the chicken of course is going to be ‘on the plate’ – so our next experiment will be slow roasting one of the birds this weekend. I’ll report back..after I lick my fingers.

For more details on pastured chickens and how to get more out of your pastured chicken purchase, go to here

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)

Which didn’t look so hot when the thing fell over and he came down to the house to ask me about how to figure out how long the bottom had to be, given that he was working with a trapezoid rather than just a right triangle (we will draw a veil over this episode, since it is a somewhat embarrassing issue that the DH had to ask Aunt Toby, who was voted “Least Likely to Succeed in Math” three years running in high school. Geometry, however, is something Aunt Toby ‘gets’, so this was not a terribly difficult thing once I had drawn the whole thing out – sewing helps tremendously with geometry and vice versa).

Now, we just put the chickens out this morning and a very interesting thing happened. Recalling, if you will, that the DH and I got the chicks from a hatchery where, the little buggers were hatched, dried off, popped into a special cardboard box and courtesy of the US Postal Service, arrived at the Central Post Office of our local Big City. We brought them home and popped them into a larger wooden pen in the basement where they were entertained with food, water and wood shavings. Then several weeks later, they were transferred in another cardboard box to their next, larger pen up in what we euphemistically refer to as ‘the barn’, where they had wood shavings and shredded paper for their bedding. Their clawed little tootsies never hit the ground ONCE for the past eight weeks.

Yet, this morning, when we put them out, they set out IMMEDIATELY to doing their chicken-y business, scratching at the grass and dirt, eating bugs, and generally turning the grassy area underneath their new outdoor coop into a mess of dust baths, scratched up plants and thoroughly explored environment. It’s not as if they had older, more sophisticated hens and roosters there holding ‘How to Be A Chicken 101” classes. One moment, they were chickens inside a barn, living an indoor life; the next, they were outside doing the same things that chickens in the wild have been doing for thousands of years and what domestic chickens did even on commercial enterprises until some point in the 20th Century. Hard-wired doesn’t begin to even describe this.

Except for the issue of so-called ‘efficiency’, it makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered to build giant chicken batteries and stuck them into cages, doesn’t it?