Free ranging chickens & ducks

Our 5 Blue Slate turkeys enjoying the morning in their house.

Our duck sitting on her nest of 8 duck eggs and one chicken egg.

Our broody banty hen hatched out 6 chicks

White Muscovy ducklings that we got on June 21st

Parkersburg

Parkersburg, Iowa...population 1,889. In 2008 tragedy stuck when an F5 tornado devastated the town on May 25th. The tornado flattened the southern 2/3rds of the town,destroyed the high school including the football field and killed 8 residents. Current and former football players came together and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace their much loved field. Their come-back season ended with a record of
Today, June 24th 2009, an unbelievable tragedy has struck Parkersburg Iowa again. At 8:45am a former student entered the school, went to the weight room and in front of several students shot and killed the beloved coach of the football team Ed Thomas. He was an instrumental leader in the community, not only on the football field but he was also a social studies teacher.
Our family did not know coach/teacher Ed Thomas, but having a horrible thing like this happen in a small town like Parkersburg makes you feel for their community. If you would like to read more about what has happened, as details are changing and being updated please go to www.kcrg.com or www.kwwl.com

Feelin' Broody

One of our little banty hens has made herself a nest and has been sitting on a clutch of eggs for close to 3 weeks now. If you remember it only takes 21 days for chicks to hatch out of their shells. So, since we didnt write down on the calendar when she started sitting on them I grabbed up a couple today and held them to my ear. Much to my surprise I could her little peeps coming from the egg....that means soon she will be hatching out some babies. I did sneak a couple of duck eggs under her, those take 28 days so hopefully she will continue to sit on the eggs and hatch those out as well!
Our big brown female duck, who has the very original name of "Ducky" couldnt be found on Monday. She is usually the first one out of the barn in the morning when I go out to milk. I thought that something had happened to her, but also found her sitting on her own clutch of 8 eggs and one chicken egg. Maybe she got inspired by the little banty and decided she wanted her own babies? Ducky becomes quite angry if you come close to her nest! I tried to get under her to inspect and see how many eggs she had, she flug her long neck around and gave me a quick tap with her beak. Oh no you dont lady, she was probably thinking. I did manage to see that she did have the 8 white duck eggs and her brown chicken egg. Where that came from I'm not sure as the chickens have been in the coop for a while. I may have to see if I can get that one out from under her and candle the egg and see if its even viable. We certainly dont want a rotten egg explosion, especially since we are supposed to be in the 90's for a few days this week. Ick! I butchered 8 chickens today too so its off to clean up for me. Stay cool!!! Summer is here.

Gobble Gobble

After our quick vacation to Missouri, we are back here in Iowa. It was great to see family, but also nice to be back home.
Sunday we decided to go to the farmers swap & sale. There were quite a few people there with lots of things for sale....rabbits, goats, a lamb, chickens, ducks, turkeys, even a couple of llamas and a donkey, also some craft items. After walking around and checking everything out, debating on getting more rabbits, discussing getting a lamb (she was adorable) we decided to get some turkeys. Well, 5 of them. The turkeys are Blue Slate, a heritage breed. They are four weeks old and are pretty cute. They peep quite a bit and are a really pretty blue/grey color with beige heads. It will be fun to see how many boys and girls we have. We wont be able to tell for a while. The lady that we got them from said that she has 2 pairs and gets quite a few eggs and that she has a hen sitting on a nest right now. These might be a great 4H project for Carter, and maybe a little money maker too if we have some extra eggs to hatch come next spring.
Gobble Gobble

Yesterday afternoon we got our supplies all gathered to butcher the rabbit and roosters. I am happy to say this morning that all 7 roosters are in the freezer and the rabbit is in the refrigerator. Thankfully it wasnt as bad as I thought it could have been. My husband did the rabbit first....I wont go into any full details here as there are plenty of instructions online and even videos of how to butcher a rabbit. It was fairly quick and easy though since the fur pulled off like a sweater. Next were the roosters, which my husband went to work on. He got annoyed with the feathers about half way through so i took over. We had done the roosters like we were did the rabbit, kind of peeling the skin and feathers back and off like a sweater. Since these were roosters (not meat birds) and they were 4 month old there was not a whole lot of meat on them. After I got the first bird butchered....I took the wing, leg, thigh and breast meat off we decided to just take the breast meat, leg and thigh off the remaining birds. There was not much meat on the wing and it was a huge hassle trying to get those wing feathers and skin off! I need to get into the chicken coop again and go through the chickens. There are quite a few roosters left and we dont need them all so a few more will have a date with the freezer here in a couple of weeks. Its nice knowing that I can butcher them myself if need be....I figured that I could probably do it but you never know :). My dad and I fished for years together...we used to wager who caught the least fish had to do the cleaning. So I had experience cleaning fish and also doing the plucking of chickens but we had never butchered them this way before. I have to say that I prefer the skinning method! No hot water and yucky smell. Above is a picture of the butchered rabbit in a bag ready for the refrigerator. We are going to the auction this evening so I am planning on cooking it tomorrow. Now I just have to figure out what to make.......hmmmmmm

Roosters & Rabbit

Soy bean harvest October 6, 2008


Today is the day! The day that we are going to get the roosters and rabbits butchered. Hopefully it will not take too long. The chickens are going to be skinned (along with the rabbit). It just takes too much time to scald them and do the plucking, plus its just downright smelly! But I think that I have written about that before. Food was withheld last night so their systems should be pretty well cleaned out. Just like if you have surgery or some other kind of Doctors appointment and they ask you not to eat after midnight. That way your system will be cleaned out, basically so the food can pass through your body. We will probably have to do the deed in the barn since its supposed to rain today, we cannot put it off any longer. Well at least I dont want to....but I cannot butcher them myself. Well, I probably could but its much better to work as a team and get it done. I will let you know how it goes, wish us luck, on tomorrows posting. So, last night I was putting away leftovers from dinner. Gad, I feel something in my hair...I brush it out thinking that it is a lady bug. I look down into the bowl of refried beans and GAG it is a big brown disgusting hairy spider. I start yelling, ah that was in my hair. Something that I despise is spiders. I know, I know they do have a place where they fit into our world, but being in my hair or my house for that matter is not one of them.

Tomatoes after 20 hours in the dehydrator


Ok, so we didn't get the roosters or the rabbit butchered this weekend. We are hoping to get them done on Tuesday since my husband doesn't have to work. It might be better that way too since our soon will be at school. He isn't too attached to the roosters but the rabbit was supposed to be one of his. We had thought that it was a girl and he named "her" Phoebe....well now it is Pheobo. A big no no is naming an animal that you plan to butcher. We have 2 wethers that are named lunch meat and meat stick. They are out eating and being happy with the other goats but we try not to interact with them too much. One of our goats, Paprika (like the spice or the baby from Blues Clues) has gotten enormous! She has been running with our buckling boer goat and the buckling dairy goat that we have, but is possible that she was bred before we got her. Paprika was quite thin when she came to live with us at the beginning of July. I went back and looked at the pictures and cannot believe how skinny she was. We thought that maybe she had something called bloat....a goat has something called a rumen. It is a big fermentation vat for their food, but it also produces carbon dioxide and methane gas which they need to release either by belching or tooting. Yes, not very polite on the goats part, but they do need to release that gas or the goat can die. Now the dairy goat that we purchased in May must have miscarried in July as we had thought she might have. She was with the lady's buck from April 1-May 9th so with the 150 day gestation that would put her last possible due date as today. No signs that she is going to give birth so hopefully the bucklings that we have her with have done their job! We really want some goats milk. I love to cook, bake and experiment with foods in the kitchen. It would be great to be able to make cheese, yogurt and maybe even some goats milk soap. With the price of cheese too it would be nice to be able to save money where ever we can. The picture above is the tomatoes that I started in the dehydrator yesterday. It takes quite a while for them to dry out since tomatoes are full of moisture but in about 20 hours they are done. I had a few that needed to be dried a bit more. They get nice and dry and leathery when they are done. Last week I made some bread and added some chopped dehydrated tomato and some basil in the bread and it was delicious!