2018 - The Year of the Rooster

2018 may have been technically the year of the Dog, but on this homestead and neighbouring ones, it really seemed to be the year of the rooster.

We hatched out 5 of our own chicks, bought 7 Swedish Flowers and 12 Easter Egger day olds. In the end, we lost one chick, 14 ended up being roosters, leaving 9 as hens. Other farms in the area were seeing a 2 to 1 ratio of roosters to hens, crazy year for roosters it seems.

What to do with all these roosters? Usually we only have 1 or 2, as we do small hatches, so I usually give those guys away to local farms that are looking to add a boy to their coop. This year I decided that we would put them in our freezer, as a) practice for our meat birds this summer and b) because they should make great soup.

This is how the process worked out in my head/on our homestead:

Step 1, We purchased a plucker from Amazon, and it arrived right before Christmas. The YardBird Plucker has wonderful reviews and is quite well built. It was super quick to assemble and very well packaged. Have you seen the video of them testing their package - they definitely pack them well: https://www.facebook.com/yardbirdchicken/videos/225486131159766/.

Step 2, Wait for the cold weather to dissipate. This took a couple of weeks. During that time we lost our oldest girl, Ticklish, as she was trampled by the roosters trying to mate with her one day. Poor girl, she was our favourite one. Once she was gone, they soon redirected their attention to another smaller hen. Can't wait for that warm weather to come to rectify this situation.

Step 3, Celebrate that the warm weather returned (above 0c), so that we could run the water outside for the plucker, etc. Our first weekend we took out 5 of the meanest roosters, calm started to return to the coop. This whole process took a few hours, getting used to the processing method and getting quicker each time. The plucker worked like a dream, followed everything to the T (look at that beauty below). It was so satisfying putting those first 5 roosters in the freezer after letting them chill in the fridge for 2 days.

Step 4, As the warm day quickly was replaced with below 0c temperatures again, we had to wait another 7 days. This time we did 10 roosters (9 of the remaining "newbs" and 1 of our older boys). Our day was so chopped up with running errands, running out of propane for the scalder, making lunch, making supper, etc that it took longer than expected to start the processing portion and the bodies became very stiff. Stiff bodies vs. scalding and a plucker do not mix. I highly suggest you strictly set aside the time to do everything from start to finish with minimal interruptions. This took a total of 6 hrs 45 mins when adding together all the different tasks that took much longer than they normally would -- ie: too hot of scalding water which ruined the skin for plucking, the ones that were scalded properly didn't lose half of the feathers due to the rigidness of their bodies, etc. Stick to the rules when doing chickens, make sure you get those critters into the scalder immediately after butcher time, that way they will be nice and limp for the plucker.

Step 5, Sit back and enjoy that there are 10 more roosters in the fridge, chilling... waiting to nourish the family. Off to the freezer for 9 of them 2 days later. The 10th went right into the Instant Pot, which I will write up a post on later -- all I can say is yum, as I slurp up the rest of the soup while typing out this post.

Step 6, Rethink the plans for meat birds this spring -- a) don't need as many as originally planned due to the Roosters making it in the freezer and b) plan an appropriate amount of processing days and take into account not to do too many each day.

Homesteading in Beautiful Alberta

When I first started "blogging"... wait, who am I kidding, blogging means to consistently produce content. Having only 6 posts over an almost 11 year period does not fit this. I always wanted to share my journey, but life is crazy busy when you have 2 amazing kids (between school and events), move houses, setup an acreage, work from home, so on and so on. Somedays I wonder how my sanity is still somewhat here, but then I walk outside, observe my children running around and playing with the animals and bam, there it is, my sanity. Nature, it does wonderful things for us and I wish more people could spend time outside enjoying it.

We purchased our acreage in Southern Alberta during the fall of 2015. We live in a lovely coulee and our yard is very prairie like, mostly just flat ground and grass with very limited trees. The area is supposed to be around a Zone 3B, but I can now declare that we get much colder down here than that based on what we have seen over three years. When we first toured this property, I would get lost in my dreams of everything we could and would do here. The house we knew would require a lot of work (little did we know that our inspector missed a ton of stuff, but it is still worth it). Our neighbours are amazing. It is truly like a little community here, reminds me of when I grew up on a farm before moving to town.

My goal with this blog is to create a running memory for myself of what we have done with our yard and homesteading trials and what the successes/learnings are each year. If this is something that interests you, please feel to follow along. If not, thank you for the time for reading to this point :)

Talk to you later,
Zone 3B Dreamer in Southern Alberta