Big helper

This is the best chicken coop preparer around! Little Miss E can spread more wood chips in a minute than any other chicken farmer around.  :)

Last week we decided to separate our latest batch of meat chicken into two different coops. We had a total of 43 but have lots two since we got them. When we first put them into the coop it seemed so large for them. But within one week it was beginning to become overcrowded as these chickens are specifically breed to double in size each week. They left us no choice but to separate the flock into two separate areas. The above pic is the new coop we moved 20 of them into. We put down wood chips to help hold heat and help compost the manure they drop.

Apologies

I have to apologize for my absence here lately. When things are busy on the home front and farm front this is the first place that gets neglected. 

Please accept my apologies.

We have been gearing up for winter as well as the upcoming holidays. Pictures are soon to follow.

More Homemade attempts

 Pumpkin spice cupcakes with cream cheese icing

 Fresh crispy potato chips

Little Miss E voted for the cream cheese icing as her favorite!

Homemade or attempt there of...

With the change in temperature these days I have been very anxious to spend time cooking in the kitchen.  This past weekend I challenged myself to start creating one new dish each week for the family. This is in an attempt to break from my mold of cooking the same ole same ole for dinner. I also enjoy cooking and thought this would give me the extra push I need to try new recipes or any of the ones piling up on my recipe book shelf. I started out by making a chicken corn chowder on Sunday. All was going well until I realized that I was out of saltine cracker or anything similar to add to it. So in a very brave moment I decided I would make my very own saltine crackers. The recipe was beyond easy and ending up being a huge hit with little miss E and Farmer D. I don't plan on ever buying saltines again these are my new favorite pantry item!

Homemade Saltines
1 cup of flour
2 tbs of melted butter
3-7 tbs of water

With a mixer stir together the flour and melted butter, once combined slowly add a tablespoon of water at a time until you see the mixture become more of a ball of dough and the sides of the bowl are clean. Remove the dough and roll out onto floured surface, you can add salt here if you like. Once rolled out paper thin begin to cut your crackers to the size you prefer. I used a pizza slice and made rectangle shapes as you see above.

Live mail

 Above package is a shipment of 40 cornish rock X meat chickens and 1 rare exotic breed chick.

Our latest shipment of meat chickens arrived bright and early last Friday causing quite a stir at the post office. We got a call first thing (6:00 a.m.) that the chick were in and ready for pick up. Little Miss E just so happen to be up that morning so she and I bundled up and headed off to pick up or furry new friends. Upon arrival at the post office we could easily hear where they were holding our package due to the very large chirping the babies were doing. Miss E was so excited to take them to the car and home with us. I think picking up something real and live at the post office instead of just papers was lots of fun to her. These chicks were just born on Wednesday and able to ship within 48 hours without food or water because they are still ingesting part of there egg yoke sack during this time. However as soon as we go them out of the box as you can see in the picture above they were more than happy 

to finally have food and water. All the noise came to mere peeps once the heat lamp was put on them, these girls are happy and hot now. For the first week we have to keep them at 95 degree, each week after we can decrees by 5 degrees until they reach 5 weeks and they can pretty much make it on their own. With winter quickly approaching we may give them another week with heat at night just to be sure everyone is safe.

Red Meat Pork

We just took two of our Ossabaw Island Pigs to the processor over the weekend. We were excited to have the meat back in a record two days. As quickly as I could we cooked up some of our very own all natural pasture raised pork chops. This was a long and much anticipated meal. We were delighted with the taste and are happy to have a freezer full of pork to get us through the winter. The only draw back to this breed seems to be the lack of fat and increased muscle; which in most cases is a good thing but we didn't receive any bacon from these two pigs because of that.
The Ossabaw Island pig is a natural forager. This is much of the reason we choose to raise them on our farm. They do not require any additional feed when given good pasture to gaze on. With a large vegetable garden this year we have been very blessed to have extra to pass along to all the animals. They all go pretty crazy when they see Farmer D's farm truck back up to the gate filled with garden leftovers in the back. Check back with us in about 2 months and we will have some extra meat around to sell. One of our sow's is due in December and we will need to down size again.