Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The meaties






So we planned to get meat birds. I called the local feed supplier and ordered 12 “broilers”. They arrived on April 16th, 2011. They were so cute. Exactly what you see in the hallmarkish Easter shots. Fuzzy, yellow, and soft. We went to pick them up the woman working passed us a box (no bigger than a shoe box), that contained our dozen chicks. We ordered their starter feed and grits (to keep them from getting “pasty butt”), and headed home. We had spent the days prior to pick up building a coop for meat birds. A coop that did not have perches or elevated areas, one that the birds could move freely in without any obstacles that could frighten them. This type of chicken is very timid, and also frightens extremely easily. Or so we read whilst researching Meat Birds.
It was new for us to have chicks that had no momma. The chicks we hatched under our bantams were pretty low maintenance as they has a broody hen taking good care of them. These orphan meaties on the other hand had to be coddled, right down to wiping their butts for them. If you don't check on their butt and remove any dried on excrement they will develop a syndrome known to chicken people as “pasty butt”. It is exactly what it sounds like. It causes an obstruction and the chicken is unable to defaecate and ends up dying. The task of chick butt cleaning is a little bit odd and especially difficult as they all look exactly the same and move around so fast that even with only 12 chicks you can't tell which ones you've already checked...
Enough about that.... all of our meat birds made it past that stage and were off to a good healthy start. We needed to install a heat lamp in their coop and tuck tape all of the edges so no draft could get thru to the chicks. In this stage they have no feathers at all to protect them, just each other. So they would pile up in a little clutch under the heat lamp until we would open the door and then they would scramble to get away from us. As the birds got larger and their feathers developed we were able to let them out to run in their enclosure. You would think they would have been itching to get outside, but having never even seen outside it took them a few days to all venture outside.
I don't know how much you know about meat birds but they are ugly! Their legs are like 4x the thickness of a layer and they grow at such a rapid pace that it seems obscene. They eat like it is the last supper at all times, and are lethargic at best.
It was easy to incorporate other chickens (6 bantam hens and one bantam rooster) in with them. They didn't seem at all territorial or aggressive. And so they lived 12 broilers and 7 bantams. That was until two weeks ago on Saturday. They had reached the ripe age of eight weeks and it was time to take them to the slaughter house. We had discussed if we would set up a “kill station” at our house but decided that for twelve birds it would be more cost effective to pay the $2.50 a bird to have them slaughtered and plucked and gutted for us.
So before work on Saturday morning we loaded the birds into specially designed boxes (we borrowed from the slaughterer), and headed up to drop them off and say our last goodbyes. I am not a huge sentimentalist nor do I have a problem with eating meat (especially not meat I raised and know to be happy, healthy, and organic), but it was a little sad and hard to drop those little dudes off knowing what they soon faced. The sadness only lasted til I remember how nice it would be to have a chicken roast once a month.
So after work on Saturday we went to retrieve our birds. They were in a huge basin of ice cold flowing water. All twelve of them (and a zip lock bag full of feet). We went to work packing them into bags and transporting them home. Once we got home we had to immediately wrap them in freezer bags and store them for the months to come. You would be amazed at how much space eleven chickens take up in the freezer.
That night we roasted our first home grown chicken. It was amazing and delicious....
Next year we will do it all over again...

The Garden




I have been meaning to start blogging for years..... I have always defeated myself before I even started. But I have a feeling I might be ready to make the commitment. As things are changing in my life I can't think of a better way to document them than this. I am always wishing in retrospect that I had documented my “transition” from my female body to my male self better. I did not. As a matter of fact, I never really documented any of my transition” and now almost fourteen years later I can only imagine what my life once was.
For that reason I now know that I am interested in committing myself to documenting these next steps and challenges in my life.
I am a 32 year old Transman (FTM). I recently married and am about to endeavour on perhaps the most brilliant part of my life thus far.... Starting a family. This is something that I always dreamed of, but never quite grasped how it would fit into my life. I feel so blessed to have met & married the most perfect lover and best friend i could ever have dreamed of....
A couple of years ago my partner and I decided to make the move from the city to the country. This is a decision I always knew I would make one day, but the day came sooner than i had anticipated with my sister and best friend becoming pregnant. We decided to leave the coast in June of 2009. We had dreams of landing jobs and housing easily in this community. Those dreams where not so realistic but after 2 years and many jobs (sometimes 4 or more at a time) we are finally starting to stabilize and ground ourselves.
December 2009 we moved into our current home. Being here has allowed us to plant ourselves in one place and start focusing on our future. A future that hopefully allows us to learn to live off of our land, raise a beautiful family, and have quality relationships with the people we love most.
Last year we planted our first garden together, learned to can & pickle, and started raising chickens for eggs. It was a learning curve for me coming from years of city living and small garden boxes vs. Wide open space and ground to work with. Our garden was small but perfect size for learning what we should and shouldn't do this year...

This year:

This year we planned in the winter/spring (which seemed to last especially long) to raise meat chickens as well as layers. We planned to hatch our own laying hens (with broody bantams as our mammas, even though they weren't their eggs). We planned a garden 4x the size of last years and several raised beds, a perennial garden and a garlic patch (which we planted on Hallowe’en last year) and we planned to can, pickle, jam, freeze, and dehydrate foods as they came into season so we could attempt to eat locally for most of the year.

This blog will be my “gardening journal” and hopefully I will find a way to incorporate other parts of our life too.