You know, I've often felt a person could make a pretty lucrative living just by driving around the country nowadays and doing that very thing...just killing chickens for folks who have never done it or don't want to learn or even helping those who wish to learn.
Lots of people getting into chickens nowadays and they really love the bird and the eggs, but the other part seems to be the sticking point. It's sort of like having a baby...the sex is great, pregnancy is often without too much pain or strife but the delivery is more likely to be a bad experience, but once you do it the first time you realize that it was all worth it to have that little baby. And you can enjoy that little child no matter how horrible the delivery might have been and so you do it again...and then again...and, if you are like my folks, you do it 9 times!
I think, if once you tasted your own chickens, you'd realize they taste just like...chicken. No emotions can really change the taste of the chicken, no more than a hard delivery can steal the joy of a newborn baby, that I have found. No matter how attached I am to a certain bird, they all still taste pretty much like chicken to me.
Sometimes I even imagine the really great birds have a particularly great flavor...but that's all in my imagination. They still just taste like chicken.
We've been able to deter them from the flower beds by laying down deer netting and planting into and through it. They don't like to scratch that stuff, so just anchor it down good and they start to avoid those places. Now we don't have any deer netting down and they leave the flower beds alone. That might be different if we didn't have so much space and other areas for them to forage, so a smaller setup might want to just leave the deer netting in place.
What a beautiful view!!!I've been rotating my chickens around the gardens and tossing all my compost right in with them. Sure beats having to shovel it up and haul it to the desired spot. They do all the turning for me too.(This pic is of last year's garden, btw. This year's was a mess of weeds.)
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Processing the old hens is always just a little bit harder for me than the cockerels or CX for meat. We've got 8 EE hens to do as soon as they hit moult. They've been great layers, laid some really nice blue/green eggs.
We bought 6 Bourbon Red turkey poults last month to try our hand at for the first time and I have been surprised that turkeys are really hard to keep alive! I have 2 remaining which are strong and growing well. The others just dropped off randomly like flies. These were supposed to be next Easter's dinner, but I was hoping to have a couple of hens to keep for breeding and buy a new, unrelated tom. I'm afraid I'll get attached to them now after rooting so fervently for them to live.
Lovely
I have been hand picking them off of my roses and letting the girls eat the from my hand. I NEVER would have touched them before I had chickens. After the damage they've done this year to my roses though I happily pick them and feed them to the girls!Mine will get them if they find them low enough and they will eat them like Pez if I empty the traps out on the ground for them...crunch, crunch, crunch...makes my spine crawl, that sound.
I learned a pretty hard lesson that day and said a lot of cuss words and wished that I had a cuss word fishing net to catch them with.
I'm just coming around to the idea. I don't know if I'd actually be able to do it. I just got a rooster this week and he has been feisty. I would definitely need to have an experienced person to help me. I'm not sure I'm tough enough to actually go through with the dispatch and processing.
