Here's a riddle: How many chickens does it take to lay three eggs/day? You guessed it, 42. Just as the nights become a touch longer than the days, my girls molt enough feathers to fill a mattress. (Yes, the thought did cross my mind but no, I am not going to attempt it. I learned a lesson from the whole saving dog hair to spin into yarn debacle.) The hens also stop laying eggs. No more homemade ice cream. No more breakfast for dinner. I really should have put some quiche in the freezer last August.
I refuse to buy eggs so I have taken to rationing my three eggs like a WWII war bride: "No Prince, we may not make cookies because I need the last egg for waffles in the morning."
A light in the hen house is a simple way to get the ladies laying again, but we have had another group of chickens keeping warm under the heat lamps for the past nine weeks.
A few months ago I took the last of our Faverolle carcasses out of the freezer to make soup. I have made broth out of a lot of different chickens in my day but nothing compares to the flavor you get from some Faverolle bones. While the boys seem slightly ambivalent about eating our own roast chicken, they are downright giddy when I serve up some Farmette Chicken Soup.
The thought of going back to the broth of supermarket chickens was disheartening, but the fact that it was already late August meant we probably didn't have enough time to raise free range Faverolles, before it got too cold to keep the birds outside and I was loathe to have them sitting in a chicken tractor eating GMO feed for a month or more.
The quickest way to raise meat birds to 4 + lbs is to raise Cornish Cross, but they horrify me. Cornish Cross are the poulet de rigeur of the poultry industry. They are ready to eat in eight weeks or less, compared to twelve weeks or more for most other breeds. They grow so big so fast that many of them suffer leg fractures and become immobilized due to their size. Imagine the movie, "Wall E" but with chickens.
I did some research to find a faster growing chicken that could still free range and decided on the Red Broiler. They are slightly smaller than the Cornish Cross, take a little longer to reach a respectable size for slaughter (10 weeks), but they are good foragers which means a more natural diet and less money spent on feed.
From the moment the chicks arrived, I could tell this was a hardy stock. We didn't lose any birds during transport and only one developed splayed leg. They were curious and not shy to explore and dine on all of the creepy crawlies and weed seeds in the garden.
Butchering and bagging chickens by hand is a stinky tedious process. With both the husband and I working full-time plus after school activities for the kids, we knew we would not have time to process the birds ourselves. Fortunately, we found a small family owned processing facility nearby. They had our chickens cleaned and bagged in a few hours. The added cost of processing made the chickens much more expensive than if I bought some Perdue Broilers at BJ's, but the taste, quality and humane treatment of the chickens made it a much greater value.
The true test of our Red Broiler experiment came the other night when I roasted the first one. The result was a tender succulent bird with lots of breast meat. The broth made the next day was gorgeous. Though not quite as silky and rich as the Faverolle, there was not a drop left in anyone's bowl.
I am hoping to hatch our own meat birds next time around with the help of a new rooster. Money will be saved and genetics known, but most importantly putting a meal on the table that is comprised solely from food you grew and nurtured: Beautiful red carrots and pale yellow onions that grew from the carrot seeds and onion sets you saved from the previous year, tiny garlic cloves from last Fall that turned into giant garlic heads this September and a chicken you raised naturally, with kindness and care from the day it hatched, is a magical experience and one of the greatest gifts you can give to the people you love.
