This is a very belated post that I started in October! I have no idea where the last two months went. I thought about scrapping it and moving on to current events but I decided since it was half done I would post it anyway as a catch up from fall.

Fall is a time when the garden is harvested but it is also time for the spring chickens to be processed.

Every year I hatch chicks with a local school. This year we kept 14 of the 26 chicks that hatched. Usually I only keep a few or I sell them but this year I kept almost half of them. Unfortunately 10 of them were roosters. What do you do with 10 extra roosters in a coop full of laying hens?

This year we also experimented with ducks. We were able to successfully hatch out 11 ducklings from 20 eggs. Unfortunately there were two little ones that were the last to hatch and we helped them along with the hatching process a little. It proved to be a reminder for me that although I want to help them, in the end it didn’t really help them at all. One died a few weeks later and the other after a few months. Out of the 9 surviving ducks 7 of them were drakes. Again what do you do with a surplus of drakes?

It was time to thin the flock. We borrowed my Uncle Loni’s chicken plucker and set the date which turned out to be very cold. As we butchered 9 roosters (we kept one, he is too pretty to eat) and 4 ducks I discovered a few differences in butchering chickens and ducks.

Ducks are not the same to butcher as chickens:

1. Using the chicken plucker did not work well for ducks. The feathers did not come off easily.
2. Dunking them in boiling water did not make the feathers easy to remove.
3. They have a lot more fat than chickens.
4. Their physical structure made cleaning them a little trickier.

Overall butchering ducks is not an experiment I will be repeating. We kept two hens and two drakes and I am looking forward to eggs in the spring. If they are able to hatch out any ducklings they will be for sale in the spring because I will not be butchering anymore ducks.

Goodbye to extra roosters and ducks.

Hello to kittens.

Our house kitty managed to escape into the great outdoors before we were able to spay her so we have kittens. The kids are loving them. Trying to keep Fiona, who is two now, from loving them too much is a bit of a challenge.