Foxhollow Poultry Farm

Eggs everywhere!!! The birds are in high production with the increased natural daylight. Spring! Easter is coming and boy do we have eggs. There are eggs, and more eggs. Our new flock of Animal Welfare Approved laying hens has started producing their first eggs....finally. Seemed like forever until that first egg. They are now up to 5 eggs a day. Soon it will be 300+ per day.

Our older hens have started laying, the quail are laying, the geese are laying their huge white eggs (shown above compared to a chicken egg), and the blue slate turkeys are beginning. The emus on the other hand have stopped laying for the season. Wheew!  Quiche, custard, angel food cake or souflee, Anyone???

We have sent our Emus to the original flock where we bought them from in Cedar Falls. The person that we bought them from originally, had super bad luck with serious flooding in his field last year and lost 100 of 120 birds due to drowning. Perhaps we will get more chicks next year, but this year we are concentrating on smaller birds. The emus are awesome, but as we age they become a little hard to handle. They are spooky, flighty and run up to 35 miles an hour. Hubby and I cannot run at all right now. He is still recovering from a serious ankle break and I from knee surgery. The emus can be intimidating when they get spooked. We still have some emu products for sale, but cannot say what the future will bring.

Our new incubator is working overtime. Immediately upon it's arrival I set a large batch of quail eggs. I candled them yesterday and see that they are coming along according to schedule. They are growing quickly in their quiet darkness inside the shells. They only take 18 days to hatch. Can't wait for them to pip their shells on the 30th. These will be our replacement layers. They are so tiny when they hatch--just a little bit bigger than a quarter. Adorable fuzzy little things.

We also have another batch of chicks to be picked up next Thursday. These are chicks that we will grow in our pastures for meat. They are not cornish rocks, but a French breed of chicken that does better on pasture, loves to forage and has great flavor and crispy skin with less fat. They are also beautiful birds. It will truly be a pleasure working with them and watching them move around the grass.

Some wild stray dogs killed our ducks last week. What a disaster! Somehow they got into a 6 foot high fenced paddock. The fencing is in good repair. They killed every last one of them. I feel so bad about it. The worst part of the dogs killing the ducks is that they just do it for sport. They didn't eat them, just killed them all. I will order more ducks and  electric poultry netting and am still looking for a livestock guard dog. No duck eggs this year.  :(

Gotta let the birds out. The rain has subsided for the day at least.

Eat more pastured Animal Welfare Approved eggs!

Tai

We finally started working on our website. It was an easy process although it is not finished. The main problem I have is trying to get google to index it and list it. I have submitted the Url for their perusal and made sure that it was search engine optimized, etc, but as of yet (1 week later) it is not listed on a search. Any suggestions?? How long do they normally take to index a site? I am impatient I guess.  http;//www.foxhollowpoultryfarm.com.

We started cleaning out coops again and building some "rooms" or dividers in the broiler house this weekend. Some progress has been made, but never as much as we schedule. Things seem to take twice as long as we think they will.

Daylight savings time has caused some upset for us, but not for the chickens. They know when the sun comes up and exactly what time it is no matter what the clock says.

I made a batch of pickled quail eggs last week and my husband decided to share them with some friends at work. Our friend requested this recipe, so here it is. This will work with hard-boiled chicken eggs as well. These are a dilled pickled egg. Quail eggs have soft outer shells with tough inner membranes. They can be peeled like a chicken egg, but it is easier to soak them in vinegar overnight rendering the shells rubbery. They are super easy to peel this way.  

Pickling Ingredients:

36 boiled quail eggs, 1 1/2 cup vinegar, 2 cups vinegar for soaking. 1 cup water, 1 teaspoon dried dill, 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, 3 teaspoons salt, 1/4 teaspoon mustard seed, 2Tbl. minced onion, 1 clove minced garlic. For spicy pickled quail eggs add 1/2 teaspoon of dried red pepper or any liquid Hot Sauce. For extra spicy flavor add more red pepper, a  chopped habanero pepper, or hot sauce.

 Spring is toying with us. Our weather has been anywhere from 7 degrees to the high 50's. The reality of spring will HOPEFULLY be here soon. This time of year is quite frustrating due to the wait for nice weather and wait and wait and wait. Our first planting in trays has been done indoors again this year. We didn't get  our hoop house up last fall so we will build it this August to extend our winter season. Greens, herbs, and radishes in November! What a treat.

We bought a large, used, Humidaire incubator this weekend. It was an unbelievable find! A gentleman in Fort Dodge was going out of business and wanted to sell most of his poultry gear.  This incubator will help us increase our flock this year with about 400 chicken eggs per setting, or a couple thousand quail eggs. After the tornado that went through here last year our flock was pretty low in numbers. We need to increase our flock size and conformation after that destruction. Our plan is to be able to sell some chicks to other farms next year (2010). Thanks for understanding to those of you who have inquired for chicks this year. We just don't have enough to go around yet. 

Our table poultry production schedule has been bumped up considerably from last year. We are adding two new types of ducklings to our roster this year. The French Grimaud,  a large type of Long Island Duckling is one of them. The other is a Barbary/Muscovy duck that has little fat, lots of meat, lots of eggs, doesn't quack but does fly. This should be interesting! We may need hardhats in the duck yard now.

Our heritage layer flock should start producing eggs within the month. Looking for those first eggs is more fun than an Easter egg hunt as I have been raising the chickens for almost 6 months. I ask them daily "where are the eggs?" No reply and no eggs....yet.

We will also be breeding and selling Red Golden Pheasant this year. They are a beautiful bird --Males are bright red, yellow, orange, and blue.

So far they are settling in to their new environment with the Peafowl, and Slate Turkeys. Everyone is getting along together pretty well.

All in all things are pretty much on schedule at present. The only problem I have is a list 5 pages long of things that have to be done when the weather warms up. Until then we are waiting!