We are STILL waiting for our "
meat chickens" to get big enough to process. I finally lugged a scale out back, and they are weighing in at around 3.5lbs. Ideally, we'd like them to be at least 5lbs before processing, but we may have to settle for 'cornish game hen' sized birds. They are certainly growing faster than the small group of Buff Orpington girls that are being raised with them, but not nearly fast enough for my taste.
In order to encourage them to grow up big and strong, I recently gave them a special treat...
That's a tub of cracked corn and whole oats soaked in the leftover whey from my last batch of goat cheese. I normally save this special treat for the ducks, but the young chickens loved the change of pace.
As a side note, I cannot get over how pretty these chickens turned out. We are contemplating keeping a couple of this batch as egg layers, but choosing our keepers is gonna be tough.
We also just hatched out another, smaller batch of chicks. We are hoping these guys will perform a little better since they were all fathered by our giant, super awesome rooster,
Fernando. You can see his strong genes in how many little white chicks we got this time.
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