Monthly Archives: July 2013

Door County Cherries

Recently we were in Door County and we took a little time to pick 40 pounds of tart cherries. Picking them was fun, and really didn’t take that long at all:   Pitting them, on the other hand, took forever: … Continue reading

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Meat Chickens – Initial Reflections

It’s been about a week since our first batch of meat chickens all graduated to the freezer.  We’ve enjoyed a much simpler set of morning and evening farm chores, are already using one of the electric netting runs that had … Continue reading

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DIY scalder and processing take two

We had many more birds to process and scalding the birds in the house was not going to cut it for the volume of birds we had remaining. We thought about a turkey fryer but Josh was pretty sure that … Continue reading

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First Mostly Home-Grown Meal

Our gluten-free modification of the classic beer-can chicken recipe involves using hard cider, which works fine once one trims the very large Crispin can down a bit.  The rooster we were cooking (from the DIY-processed batch) was so large that … Continue reading

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Processing Meat Birds: Wrap-Up

In the end the birds were way overdue for processing and we had just gotten to the point where we really figured out how to quickly go through the process; however, we burned out the drill we were using for plucking … Continue reading

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Divas

On June 12 the chicks that I excitedly ordered in February arrived. When I ordered them it was winter and our egg production had gone down because the old girls lay less in winter after their first year and the … Continue reading

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Goats in the Chicken Coop!

Shortly after we moved the goats to the chicken run to clear brush we learned that we should have prepared the coop a bit. I was in the garden and hear what could only be described as a kerfuffle in … Continue reading

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Missing Turkeys

Last night at farm bedtime, there was just one lonely turkey in the coop!    Fortunately this morning I heard the telltale sing-song calls of turkeys trying to locate each other, and found the missing two nestled in the tall … Continue reading

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Turkeys and Chickens, Living Together

Just two days after first moving outside, the turkeys showed up one night in the chicken coop.  I’d read that this might happen, and we’d already decided that we weren’t going to manage around the fear of blackhead disease, but … Continue reading

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Corn Down

Last night, we had a crazy storm. Tons of lightening, hail and wind, for about two hours. Today, the corn was down: I think I will stake it and see what happens.

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