It's been a busy Summer here at Hillcrest Farm. We've learned a lot about vegetable gardening and its related joys and pittfalls. We've had some births and some deaths. We've had a lot of lovely guests and some unwanted pests. And finally we come full-circle: we've now spent one entire year on the farm.
It's Fall now and our Maple stands proud but naked again.
CHICKENS
One of the most exciting experiences we've had this Summer has been that of raising chickens for meat and to add to our layer flock.
We ordered twenty-eight day-old chicks from Frey's Hatchery. The wee Plymouth Barred Rock birds arrived at the local Feed & Seed store on April 14, tightly packed in a tiny cardboard box that looked like Chinese take-out.
The little ones were just so sweet that it was difficult to imagine that we'd be eating them in a short while. We tried not to think about it. We made our very first brooder box out of an old bathtub which we set up in a separate pen of the chicken coop.
As Summer arrived, the little ones grew into beautiful teenage chicks and we allowed them to join the general population (consisting of two Red Sex Link hens and our little banty rooster, Stuster). We sent them all outside to play in the grass and catch flies and mosquitoes.
We arranged for them to have a jungle gym so they could grow into healthy, happy chickens, which they did.
Out of the twenty-eight chicks, three roosters came out. One of them matured before the other two. He was so glamourous and gorgeous that we initially decided to keep him for breeding next year's batch of chicks. We named him Clarence. He kept himself very busy with the gals.
Maybe a bit too busy. Clarence quickly earned the nickname "You Sexy Beast". He became extremely aggressive. The girls were constantly running away from him and fighting him off. He even started challenging me when I entered the barnyard, puffing himself up and darting at me - even as I challenged him back. One morning, he figured out that he was four times bigger than our beloved Stuster, our very small pet rooster, and beat his face into the ground - nearly killing him (our little Stuster never fully recovered from this attack and became ill and died shortly after despite all our efforts to make him better). Clarence became more than we wanted to handle and we decided his time had come.
Clarence was served up in a beautiful soup that night for dinner, with some dumplings. It was sad to see this splendid bird go. He was very delicious, however.
Of our remaining twenty-seven Barred Rocks, we traded four hens and a rooster for a deep freezer. Summer came and left and it was suddenly Fall. We needed to start butchering our feathery friends and place them in our new freezer.
It's not easy killing your friends. But such is life on the farm. You feed your animals and in turn, they get to feed you. Catching a chicken is not easy either. Physically or emotionally. You've got to really get in "the zone" and come to terms with the fact that this was your purpose from the very start, even as you first picked them up in their little Chinese take-out home. After catching the chicken, I like to make a little prayer of gratitude and then thank the bird for its generous gift before I hand it over to Stuart for the killing. I've killed once and decided that it was enough for me. It's now a "man job". I get to catch, pluck, clean and cook. I'm fine with that.
It's amazing what you find inside a chicken:
Every egg that chicken was ever going to lay is already formed inside its belly and you get to pull them all out. From a fully-formed, ready-to-lay egg with shell to a large, shell-less yolk to a medium one, a small one and loads of itty bitty ones, some even too small for the naked eye to see.
We meant to perform the slaughter in one day but due to inexperience, we've had to extend it over many following Saturdays. Seven is the most we've been able to do in one day. I guess we're not very thick-skinned in that department yet. It is a daunting and exhausting task. I've come to the conclusion that maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.
When I lived in the city I often wondered whether I should become a vegetarian when looking at the meat counter in the grocery store. Where do these animals come from? How have they been raised? How did they live? How did they die? I never knew. My conclusion was always that I love to eat meat and could never do without. I put my head in the sand and purchased another piece of mystery meat, neatly packaged in plastic and Styrofoam and absorbent napkins.
This new experience of raising our own meat allows me to be more comfortable with my eating choice, but most importantly, more uncomfortable with it. My conclusion is that maybe it's not meant to be so easy to eat meat. It's not at all easy for other carnivorous animals: they have to go hungry and chase and hunt and kill and succeed and fail. The process is not the same for us, but perhaps I'm supposed to look death right in the face and know EXACTLY what it is that I am eating. It tastes a lot better in the end, as strange as it seems.
Our raising meat has been fraught with successes and failures. Our chickens are a little bit skinny. Their meat is a little bit tough. We've learned our lessons and hope to make different choices in terms of breed and feed in the years ahead, but we now find ourselves changed and humbled by the food that will feed us throughout the winter.
