Silly Geese

Our Chinese Geese are growing well. We plan to harvest all but three (one gander and two female geese) the week before Christmas. While my wife will not miss them getting into the market garden -- they did a job on the radishes -- I will miss the funny way they flock about the pastures. They get all excited and have an almost deafening squawk when it is feeding time, but easily get spooked and run off flapping their wings. They are unable to fly more than a few feet but they make quite a spectacle of themselves trying.

Reducing Numbers on the Farm

Haven't posted much recently due to all the work around the farm. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving we reduced our poultry numbers significantly. First we took forty nine broilers and six of our Royal Palm turkeys in for processing on Monday November 12th. We recently purchased a second freezer in which to store said birds. The fifteen Narragansett turkeys we were selling were scheduled to go in Thursday night November 15th.

When I got home from work on Thursday and saw my daughter in the house she informed me that the turkeys were up by the barn. Since I knew Danielle had planned on having them loaded up into the dog kennels which we use to transport them I thought everything was set. After asking Julia if they were all loaded up she said "not exactly". It turns out that Danielle and the kids had been chasing our free range turkeys around our and our neighbors pastures for much of the day. She had only managed to catch two or three, but had localized a bunch with poultry netting up by the barn. Five had jumped the fences onto neighbors properties and were so skiddish from being chased all day that we were unable to get them back where they belonged. That night we were able to coax the rest of them into two of the stalls in our barn. Hopping to still get all of the turkeys to the processor for our 5:30 AM appointment Danielle and I woke up at 4AM on Friday to try to catch the wayward birds and get them loaded onto the pickup truck. We had no luck that morning with the five that had flown the coop so we decided to just take up the nine Narragansett and two Royal Palms we had been able to capture.

Over the weekend we were able to get all the birds back on our property, and confined in the barn stalls. Friends of ours who had arrived Friday night, got to see what a working farm is like, as Danielle and I plucked and processed four turkeys on Saturday. I remember their older son (~6 years old) asking me "is it dead" as I carried a recently deceased bird in from the barn to be plucked and eviscerated. Finally Tuesday night, two days before Thanksgiving I got around to butchering the last two turkeys, one of which was a rather large tom which would be our Thanksgiving bird.

All in all everything worked out fine. We were able to fill all our orders, have a couple birds in the freezer available for sale for Christmas, as well as a few smaller 8-10 pound birds for us to eat throughout the winter. The fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, along with the rave reviews of those that purchased the birds makes it all worthwhile.

Heritage Turkeys

We are getting ready to take our heritage Narragansett and Royal Palm turkeys to the processors next week in preparation for Thanksgiving. The New York Times has a short article on why it is important to keep these and other heritage breeds around.


The upper picture is our Narragansett Tom, the lower is our hen with her poults right after they hatched last May.

Load of Straw

With the dry summer hay and straw is scarce in these parts. Danielle has been calling around without much luck trying to find some straw for bedding once we move the animals back to the barn. Thursday she calls me at work to tell me that I am picking up 30 bales after work. She had talked to the farmer on the phone and got directions to his place. Therein lies the first problem. If you have ever received directions from someone who has lived their entire life in the same town you know that they do not necessarily give the best directions. I guess that is not completely fair. They do not give directions that an outsider can follow, since they tend to use landmarks and names for places and roads that are not the norm (i.e. not on Google Maps).

I am supposed to meet the farmer between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, which means in pitch black, due to the season and the fact that it is a new moon. I drive around for a half hour trying to find his place, turn out he does not actually live on the street he told my wife, and am unable to get him on the phone since it is busy. After going up and down a bunch of country roads I finally find his drive and pull into his place which has no outside lights on. The nice guy comes out and states matter-of-factly, "must of been hard finding this place in the dark".

He directs me to pull around to the back of his barn and we begin to load up the truck. I have a tough time keeping up stacking the bales as he tosses them in the back of my truck. He has no lights on the outside of his barn so I do my best to strap it all down in the little bit of light that is coming from inside the barn. Not happy with the security of my load, I drive a mile or so and pull into a McDonalds, park under a light pole in their parking lot and rearrange the load. Then it is a slow drive with blinkers on back to my place.

The kids ckome out of the house and are all excited to see the truck all loaded up and want to be on top of the straw mountain.





Then Danielle and the kids help me unload it all into our loft.



All and all it worked out fine, we now have straw for the winter, and I learned not to pickup straw from an unknown farm at night.