Our second time killing & butchering a chicken

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 December 2011 in chickens | 10 comments

(WARNING: I’ve included a couple of in-progress pictures towards the end of this post and I’ve been very careful to pick ones that look little different to a bird you’d find at the supermarket. However, if you’re very sensitive, you might want to skip this article.)

We killed and dressed/butchered a chicken for the first time in 18+ months on Saturday – the first time since we had chickens of our own.

It wasn’t one of ours – our friend John B hatched some Silver Wyandotte eggs last year and they all turned out to be boys so they didn’t fit in well in his egg-laying matriarchy. They were becoming bullies so had to go. He brought one of the big fluffy boys to our house for us as his daughters have a bit of an embargo on him doing it at his house.

We killed our first chickens under his tutelage in April 2010 – just before we got our own girls. Again, they were some boys whose only crime was being boys – oh and forcibly having their way with John’s girl chickens, that was their crime too. We had already accepted that we had to be willing to kill chickens before we could keep them ourselves – for example, what if one was injured and needed putting out of its misery? or, as happened in this most recent case, if hatched eggs turned out to be boys. But as I mentioned in my blog back then, there was also the bigger picture to consider: if we only bought point-of-lay girls, then someone else was having to deal with the equal number of point of lay boys that were being born. (This great article by Throwback at Trapper Creek puts it better than I can.)

Wet day

Posted by louisa on Thursday 8 December 2011 in chickens | 3 comments

It has been decidedly moist* here today. I realise people further north/in Scotland have it much worse than us but it’s still very wet and windy.

The beck at the bottom of our garden is usually just a pleasant trickle amongst the many rocks – 2.5m/8ft wide but no more than 15cm/6ins deep for the most part (there are some deeper pools and Lily-dog knows the location of every single one). There are enough protruding stones that we can step over it in trainers without getting our shoes wet. Not today though.

It’s fast and dirty – the run off from woodland, farmland, golf courses and roadways – and when the wind drops, we can hear it roaring from the house. We’ve seen it a foot higher than this, right to the edge of the far bank, but this is busy enough.

(As a comparison this is what it looked like this time last year, just after the first load of snow. Much calmer and clearer. A few days after that photo was taken, the top couple of inches of the whole beck froze solid enough that I could just about walk on it.)

The chickens have also been complaining loudly to me about the weather of late. I asked on Twitter earlier if anyone knew if you could get snorkels for chickens but I think actually wellies and/or waders might be more appropriate: it’s very muddy in there.

Three Chicken Things

Posted by louisa on Sunday 27 November 2011 in chickens | 2 comments

Have you heard of Three Beautiful Things? Every day since May 2004, Clare has recorded three things that have given her pleasure during the day. Sometimes these are big things (like her wedding day or the arrival of baby Alec) but mostly they’re the small, everyday things that make life wonderful: the “tight fists” of roses set to bloom, the pleasant sound of snow and the magical transformation when separate ingredients turn into food.

I 3BTed every day too, for just over a year, but I got out of the habit – I do still notice things and write them in my head, just don’t commit them to paper/blog anyway. I should really get back into doing it again, because sometimes 140 characters on Twitter just isn’t enough to describe the beauty in the world.

Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning all this here and now is that I had Three Beautiful Things happen connected to me cleaning out the chicken coop this morning, and I thought I’d record them :)

1. We’ve had the chickens for 18 months now but today was the first time that I time it right to see an egg being laid. Lime is in the nest box when I first go down there so I leave her be – I sweep some leaves and retrieved Lily’s Oinky toy from the field where she’d dropped it in her running-around excitement. I peek back into the nest box around ten minutes later and see a big dry poo being pushed out – delightful – but then instantly the egg follows. It’s slippery and slick when it lands on the straw.

2. Blue hops onto the edge of the chest, clucking questions, as I dig clean shavings out of the bag. Her comb stands tall and red, her eyes are lemon and clear. Her neck feathers swoop sideways like a teenager’s fringe. Gingery-red, flecked with blonde and black.

3. Lime stands on my feet while I’m giving out pumpkin seeds so that she’s the closest to the treat source. It reminds me of how Lily sits on my feet when I’m cooking. The “please?” look on their faces is the same too.

And a bonus item:

4. As I stand at the kitchen sink washing my hands, the trees are alive with birds. A pair of chaffinches – a boy and a girl – hop about in the elder tree, the small blue tits are just tiny specks as they flit around the far away ivy bush and in comparison to them, it seems that the large tits in the cherry plum tree are truly defining gravity when they throw their big bodies into the air. Then I see another couple of birds in the holly bush that I hadn’t consciously seen before and I take in their noticeably longer tails and white mohawks so I can identify them later on the RSPB website. My hands are perhaps the cleanest they’ve ever been by the time I’ve had enough of the wildlife show.

What beautiful moments have there been in your life this weekend?

Five things

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 16 November 2011 in chickens, frugal, making | 3 comments

ONE. Two of the chickens are in moult – Ginger the Black Rock and Ms Mauve, an ISA Brown. There have been a lot of feathers about in the coop and run but neither have gone too bald (… yet?). Both have lost their tail feathers so look strangely round and last week both lost neck/head feathers, but Ginger’s have pretty much grown back now, so only Ms Mauve is left looking bit funny.

(I’m not keeping them/her in a separate run from the rest of the crew during the moult, just some of the others had just wandered outside of the run while I was taking photos. She followed shortly afterwards when she realised that there were leaves to scratch in out there, weeeee!)

TWO. Sticking to chicken related things, we’ve discovered that if chickens eat achocha, it taints their eggs like onions or (wild) garlic. I’ve been feeding the chicken some of the many, many achocha fruit we’ve had this season in an effort to get through them before the frost turns them all to mush. They weren’t sure about them at first but now om-nom-nom them up. We discovered the tainting issue – which isn’t unpleasant, per se, in savoury food but definitely there – on Monday, just after I’d taken them the remains of the entire 15ft tall wall of achocha to pick through. Monday’s eggs have been quarantined so they don’t accidentally get used for a dessert!

THREE. One of the reasons why I’ve not been writing much here is #NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. All my spare (and not so spare) time has been sucked up by that, so not only have I not been blogging much, I’ve not really been crafting or playing either. But on the plus side, because I’ve been so focus, I’ve written over 60,000 so far and I’ve not been idly browsing the web or eBay so I’ve saved money by avoiding temptation. Woo!

FOUR. Despite #NaNoWriMo getting in the way of my crafting, I have had a couple of evenings off from writing (when I was too exhausted/distracted to write the day we found Kia and after a busy day in the garden at the weekend) and I’m only about four rows off finishing the back of one of my crochet tops. If I hadn’t been writing, it would be long finished by now – and I’ve got an idea of how I can make another one which is just as nice but even quicker. Because I don’t already have enough WIPs…

FIVE. A little paranoid perhaps but I’m rather aware how quickly we’re getting through our wood pile. I cut a load of wood on Sunday but we’ve already nearly got through the ones for the “big” stove in the office. I think we might start using the central heating more until the winter properly kicks in, so we can see what it holds: I’m worried about racing through all our wood supplies now, then finding ourselves without heating for a fortnight during a super cold spell like we did last year (our boiler broke at just the wrong time). I much prefer our free heating from wood than our expensive gas, but I think I’d rather have a few weeks of expensive warmth than risk having no warmth at all!

What’s going on in your life this week?

Like clean sheets on a bed

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 9 November 2011 in chickens | 2 comments

My favourite thing about cleaning out the chicken coop: the flat layer of fresh wood shavings always gives me the same good juju feeling as when we put clean sheets on our bed.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

October 2011 – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Monday 31 October 2011 in chickens, less than 12 clothes challenge, meta | 0 comments

Carla-cat enjoying a spot of autumn sun – the woodstore is perfectly place for sunbathing felines: in the sun until nearly 2pm but also within a short stroll of their food dishes. Purrfecto!

Goals in 2011 progress

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moving swiftly on!

October mini-goals

I achieved more of these than my main goals – the accounts are finished (just waiting for John’s business accounts now then new mortgage a go go!), we finally finished the bathroom and we both batch cooked for the freezer – “ready meals” of pasta sauce, keema curry, enchiladas and spicy beef casserole (with corn bread) now await us! I also got some fabric for the cushion in the porch and found somewhere for the foam – just hesitating now about whether a soft cushion is right for there, or whether a can-put-your-foot-up-on-it wipeclean option would be better.

I think I would have achieved more on these & on my main goals if I hadn’t been distracted by other fun pursuits – crocheting and writing (the latter planning for my NaNoWriMo attempt, which starts tomorrow!).

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

Bloomin’ heck, I’m getting close! I’ve been on the look out for a nicer-than-my-scruffy-hoodies jacket all year and spotted a lovely M&S brown cord jacket in fab condition in a charity shop for £5.99 so bought it even though it’s close to being too cold to wear it. I’ve worn it loads over the last few weeks. I also bought yet another pair of jeans off eBay. They take me up to eleven things so far in 2011, eep, close!