Replies

Daughter is thinking about raising some chickens too. For eggs first, but maybe will process some for eating at some point.

Neither of us have space to really do that, but she has a friend who is willing to let her use her land and help with the feeding for a share of the eggs.

52 days doesn’t seem like a huge expenditure of time. I was thinking that it would be like from spring to fall before they would be ready to eat.

Progress is slow in the garden as I'm spread too thin with our garden, the Church yard and I'm trapping moles for a friend a couple of miles out of town plus the usual errands. Most everything is planted that I am putting in this year and we have been thinning beets and carrots plus I hilled up the tators for the second and last tim.

A couple of photos several days apart of the transplanted corn …

Don’t ask what size the Jersey Giants are: they look like midgets next to the broilers. A standard chicken would be more like 120-180 days to table weight, depending on breed and what you consider ‘table weight’.

The broilers are just plain eating machines, with a metabolism that super efficiently converts feed to growth. They go through an enormous amount of feed in a short time, and can reach 10 pounds in 65-75 days, having eaten about 20 pounds of feed in that time.

I planned on 12 chicks, and about 175 pounds of food, with the last one going into the freezer when the food ran out: 3 new sacks, plus a half sack left over from the batch of chicks the snake ate last year. Of course, some of that feed also went to the 6 Jersey Giants, and that brings us back to about 120-140 pounds for these guys, pretty much on track. The heaviest go first; then a few more next week; and the “runts” a few days after that.

Meanwhile, there’s also 4 bunnies ready to be processed; then in 2 months, 5 more. The turkey fryer will be used with the pressure canner outside: no more extra heat and humidity inside! YAY!!!