Chicken raising- part 2

After my last posting I was left wondering about our choice in Chickens for meat.I don't like the whole idea of Cornish Cross Chickens; they have been bred to grow quickly and deformed in the end,as our friend Jen says "They are Franken-Chickens." We don't want Franken-food on our table why promote Cornish's, the whole point behind the breeding of these birds goes against every thing we are trying to accomplish here.Why stick with them?

Why? Well it goes back to what we already knew,my Dad always raised Cornish's,they were easy and reliable. But like lots of other areas in our life we are and need to rethink the old ideas we are still holding onto. We got rid of our BIG gas hog truck and down sized as a way to follow our "new" way of thinking now it is time to address the meat chickens as well.

Jen whom I mentioned above sent me an email after reading my last posting with an inquire about raising a larger number of Chickens for meat together. It was a bit of a ponder because they live 3 hours east of us on many acres of land outside of Sister's Oregon.Could we do it? After a phone call we decided it could be done.

Our plan is to share an order for a dual purpose chicken like the Buff Orpington's which will live at their house until butchering time.We will split the costs of both the chicks and the feed.

Jen and her family's chicken coop is a better set up too,their coop is the size of our garage and the run area is the size of most of my front yard.Lots of room,no worries about the neighbors complaining about a large number of birds and oh darn we will have to spend an weekend at their house visiting folks who are part of our family,swim in the creek,cuddle their little ones and drink coffee to die for.It will be hard so very hard but you won't have to twist our arms to do it.We love it over there and coming home is always hard because we rather stay...forever.

We still won't be raising 104 chickens,our estimate for a years worth of chicken dinners. We will still raise a few meat birds here but will most likely rethink the rotation to fit around the birds out east butchering.

Tinker, tinker, tinker, we are always tinkering what we are doing here.We try and take what we know of farm life and skills and apply them to the Suburbs.We have no map,book or school to show or teach us the way,we are writing our own story here.
Rois