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Muddy Valley Farm

~ Life on a tiny west coast hobby farm

Muddy Valley Farm

Monthly Archives: February 2020

Is It Me?

28 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Uncategorized

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At lunchtime, I feed the equines a snack, then pen up my Wyandottes (who have free ranged all morning), so the next group can get out for the afternoon. They used to meet me at the barn and shadow me to the coops, but now my Wyandotte entourage is waiting at the gate every day.
We walk to the barn together, where they supervise as I hand out the hay, and on exiting the barn, I must pause to hold open the barn door for one laggard silver laced hen, the same girl every day. Then we proceed to the coops where they obediently file into their pen. Such devoted chickens. Is it me do you think? Or the handful of hen scratch I bribe them with?

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Chicken for Dinner

22 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Farm Produce

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What do I do with my extra cockerels? I sell hatching eggs, so that’s a question I often hear from customers. Realistically, in any hatch, half are gonna be boys and half girls. Until scientists figure out how to sex eggs, and they are certainly working on this, there are going to be surplus males. Millions get euthanized every year. So I always admire the pragmatic customers who ask me this question. They’re thinking ahead!

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In the wild, the males of most species compete to mate with females. Mother nature’s plan for the losers is that they don’t get to pass on their genes.  Instead, they can only contribute to the circle of life as food for other organisms.  Darwin’s survival of the fittest, or whatever you want to call it, it’s reality.

So if one is going to hatch eggs or buy unsexed chicks, like Mother Nature, one needs a plan for dealing with surplus males.

  • Sometimes you can find them homes. When I notice a particularly gorgeous, gentle male in my bachelor pen, I will offer him for free on my local “classified ad” websites, making sure to post pictures. I’ve rehomed a few over the years this way to people looking for purebred flock guardians.
  • Once in a while someone wants chicks to grow out for their own soup pot, and I’m always happy to give away extra males.
  • Occasionally I come across someone who wants to process unwanted birds for animal feed. Often though, these folks have more offers of free cockerels and spent hens than they can possibly take. They also want bigger birds. It costs me about $20 in feed to grow out a cockerel to eating size, not to mention the labour. It certainly doesn’t make sense for me to grow them out then give them away.

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So one of the things I do to avoid a rooster surplus, is try to hatch no more extra cockerels than I have room to grow out for my family to eat. I try to time it so I grow out one big batch a year.

Lazy me, I take them to the processor too. I’m happy to pay the $4-5 it costs per bird to be saved all that drudgery. I am by no means an expert at chicken gutting, plus it is a lot of work, not only the actual killing, plucking and cleaning, but the equipment set up and tear down too. And let’s be frank, it isn’t a whole lot of fun either. Resident Gardener leads and I assist, and neither of us enjoys it.

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Both Maria and me like donkey scratches way more than processing chickens.

I mostly hatch dual purpose heritage breeds, that give lots of eggs and make a nice carcass. I feed them all they can eat of a varied diet plus lots of fresh clean water because I know that whatever they eat eventually ends up in me and my family. My cockerels are ready to go to freezer camp at around 20 weeks, about the same time as they really start to get noisy. The crowing definitely helps me to say goodbye easily, although I find that due to flock dynamics, in any bachelor pen it is usually one or two dominant birds who do most of the crowing.

Now, the chicken you end up with when you grow your own is not like grocery store chicken. Home grown birds are harder to carve, because their bones and tendons are so much stronger. They are leaner, their breasts are smaller, and their dark meat is firmer. They also taste amazing. After you eat home grown, you will find most grocery store birds to be mushy, very fatty and tasteless.

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Because homegrown birds are more robust, braising is my go-to cooking method. Coq a vin. Butter chicken. Chicken paprikash. There are so many delicious ways to cook one, low and slow, in the oven.
Or I will use my instant pot, laying the pieces in a neat pile with the legs on the bottom, the breast meat on the top, adding a couple cups of water, then doubling the grocery store bird cooking time. I use the meat in chicken teriyaki or quesadillas etc., returning the bones to the i-pot with an onion or carrot or some celery trimmings, then topping up with water for a batch of yummy bone broth.

Two 90 minute pressure cooks, with the second set to start just before bed, makes for a pot full of still warm perfectly done bone broth ready for straining in the morning and soup in the evening plus a cup or two for the freezer. In this way, one bird feeds us for several days. There is certainly something to be said for producing one’s own food. It takes lots of effort, and can be frustrating, but the results when you succeed are invariably delicious. Mmmmmmmm, chicken for dinner!

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More Rain!

10 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by Jodi in Equines, Farm Improvements, Farm Life, Seasons, Weather

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On top of January’s once-in-10-years rainfall accumulation, we got more than ten mm of rain a day in February until the 8th when the sun finally shone.  Our muddy valley is sopping, dripping wet. Keeping the barnyard crew comfortable (and thus healthy and thriving) is currently a very hard slog.

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The farrier came last week and to our relief pronounced the equines’ feet to be in pretty good shape, better than most he’s seen recently. Lots of horses in our area are up to their fetlocks in mud and nowhere dry to stand. 😕

Luckily our hoofed creatures have a dry barn floor, as well as a high spot here and there in the paddocks to take refuge on. We’re hoping it will dry up enough that we can get the tractor in the paddocks to scrape the worst areas…but the rain keeps falling.  Maybe later this week, fingers crossed.

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We ALL enjoyed Saturday’s sunshine, and the sky (!) somehow a richer shade of blue than I remember. Washed clean I guess. Sunday morning we were back to steel-grey heavens, with a little sun in the afternoon.

Even my fully roofed chicken pens are soggy. I can’t count the number of mud-filled wheelbarrows I have sledged over squishy fields to dump on the poo pile. It’s sure a good workout!

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I’ve learned some tricks since those first few winters, when I literally had streams running through my chicken pens. All summer long I throw heaps of veggie garden thinnings etc. in the pens, giving the birds their own private compost pile nirvana while building up the ground litter. By winter, this high ground deflects the surface water run-off around the pens instead of through them. When the chickens track in enough water that the ground gets muddy, (it has to rain a LOT for this to happen) I can use my trusty Restore pitchfork to pry up and remove the top couple of inches of mud throughout the whole pen, revealing fairly dry soil underneath.  This year, I’ve already had to do this two or three times in each pen. I will have to stop soon though, the ground height is dropping, with actual puddles seeping up in a couple spots. Time to change strategy and start deploying pallets over the worst areas to keep my girls out of the muck.

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The dust baths are stocked full of dry peat moss and wood ash from the fireplace. The chickens LOVE it, more so in this weather of course. The ladies’ public baths are crowded! Some birds need a bit more care, developing pendulous mud balls on their chests that need clipping out, or rinsing if it’s warm enough and they can run around to dry. I have never, in all my years keeping chickens, had the pendulous-mud ball issue before. It just goes to show that there’s always something new with chickens.

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This weekend, I can feel spring just around the corner. The osoberry is beginning to flower, and the alder catkins are swelling. Soon they will be dropping everywhere, detonating on impact in little yelllow puffs of smoke, and my poor DH will be sniffling and closing windows.
Of course the winter-flowering hellebore and snowdrops have been blooming for a while now. I wonder if we will get another dump of snow before old man winter is finished with us? These last few years, snow in February has been a thing here. I guess we’ll find out soon enough!
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Rain!

01 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by Jodi in Seasons, Weather

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We close out January 2020 with [drum roll please] 262.6 mm of rainfall. Looking back ten years, a total surpassed only by Nov 2009’s 274.6!
And our little creek glorying in her power this morning, her raison d’être never more clear, roaring with joy as she ferries her precious cargo away, away, down to the Salish Sea.

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