homestead

My wife made potato salad to bring to dinner at friends’ house last night. It’s about half hard boiled duck eggs by volume....

My wife has a large dehydrator. She had to fly to Vancouver suddenly a week and a half ago and left me with a huge box of fresh peppers from the garden. She asked me to dehydrate them so I spent an hour chopping them up last night while my son made dinner. Then, I put the diced peppers in the dehydrator and left it running...

For two or three weeks each spring and fall it gets very noisy on the homestead.

I would prefer not to drive. I’ve been walking about a ¼ mile to release them. Is that far enough?

My wife had to run off to the other end of the country very suddenly yesterday. She had planned to process two boxes of late season tomatoes. It fell to me to get it done. I diced them up and put them in the freezer so that she can make sauce when she gets back....

A wire broke off the ignitor element in our Harman unit. I have ordered a replacement and it looks simple enough to fix myself. But before sourcing the part I had called about 5 different fireplace companies in the area, and it seems everyone has dropped all support for pellet stoves in recent years! Not only does no one sell...

French fries and homemade roasted turkey gravy topped with our own roasted Bronze Orlopp turkey, homemade bread dressing, and fried eggs from our backyard chickens....

He said yes....

I just posted a few pictures of the chicken disassembly process. In deference to the vegans and those of delicate constitution I followed the community rules (which I wrote) and marked the post NSFW....

We are a small, homestead farm. We aim for zero waste processing and have achieved it with our chicken processing. Here’s how we do it....

I just posted a note about a post that I made and marked with the four letter acronym flag. The second post included the four letter acronym. If you have that four letter acronym blocked you won’t see either post. If you want to see what is all about remove the filters temporarily so that you can....

It took us 6 hours to harvest and process 42 chickens. They are in the fridge with bags of ice between them to make sure they cool down. Tomorrow I will part most of them. We are keeping these ones for ourselves for the winter. We would normally sell half of the fall batch but the summer was crazy and our plans changed so...

We are harvesting 44 white rocks today. I mount three cones on my tractor bucket. I have cut them down to widen the mouths. I put the tractor between the chicken house and processing area....

A few weeks ago we got 40 (45) broilers. They’re almost done....

A comment on another post reminded me…...

These are Bronze Orlopps and Mini Whites. They are 242 days old as of today. They have lived a good life with all day access to outdoors, good, high quality, local drug-free feed, and clean water. They are friendly and very calm. I like turkeys far more than I like chickens....

This goose has adopted my parents, and is attempting to establish residency in their cabin. We suspect it is domestic and escaped from its coop. It’s a seasonal cabin and they’re planning to close up soon. What should they do? Central Ontario. Near Bracebridge....

I don’t if they know any songs. The squirrel baffle keeps the hens from getting in the top of the feeder and keeps them from pooping into it from above.

These Cornish X meat birds arrived on our farm on August 3. That makes them 30 days old today. We ordered 40 and got 45 (the hatcheries always give you extra in case there are any losses during or immediately after transport.) We have lost only one so there are 44 out there now....

We had a few hens taken by raccoons early in the season. They were taken outside but when you tighten up security the raccoons tend to get more aggressive so I built a stronger summer door from the main house.

We’ve had these same nesting boxes for about 10 years. They are holding up very well. These 8 boxes nicely serve our flock of between 40 and 50 hens (between you and me I actually have no idea how many are out there.)...

Turkey day is September 22. These guys are coming along nicely. We have a mix of straight run Bronze Orlopps and Mini Whites. The turkeys are you big for my picket and most of them are sold so they are going to the abattoir.