Foxhollow Poultry Farm

With a week's worth of elbow grease and 12 hour days we have finally created a space clean enough to call our hatchery. The walls are white, floor is epoxy painted, vented heater, lots of lights, incubators, hatcher,new work counter and eggs!    The space began as a dirty dusty, cob webby, collect all storage space that hadn't been used or cleaned in several years. The difference now is nothing short of amazing.                                  

                                                        

This weekend we will move in a desk, books, and file cabinet to be able to keep records of all of our hatches. This new room will finally supply a great place to do paperwork for our poultry business as well.

 We set over 100 heritage turkey eggs and 300 chicken eggs for a sample run. It is so difficult to wait for the 3 weeks (chickens) and 4 weeks (turkeys) to go by. I feel like a kid at Christmas...waiting. Waiting for the eggs to hatch. I've been told I am worse than a mother hen. Okay, I can live with that...probably pretty close to the truth anyway.

Our hatchery has a capacity of up to 1200 eggs total in a full batch, depending on what type and size of eggs are set. Needless to say we will have chicks and poults for sale to local area customers this year. All of our poultry will be born and raised right here. We will no longer have to drive hours and endless miles to pick them up. We should have no bad surprises opening the boxes upon our return home. No need to order in chicks and create stress for them. They will go directly from the hatcher into the brooder with food and water available immediately. From the brooder they will go onto grass and hoop houses. Less stress for everyone...myself included. As my friend Ken said "Time to get cracking!"

 

 

This week  and next will be the grand finale of baby poultry started for the year on our farm. We will have 300 poulet rouge chicks hatching this week and 600 ducklings next week. The movable hoop housing on grass with electric netting has worked exceptionally well with a few tweaks. We were moving the houses every day or two, but the inside of the houses became too dirty even with the chickens in there just overnight. With the addition of straw bedding and moving twice weekly the process worked much better. Less work and better for the chickens! That combination isn't often true.  Day ranging is where it's at for us! Here are some new pictures of some of the three day old baby chicks. So cute!

Happy New Year to all! Hope everyone had a beautiful holiday season.

The start of a new year brings the promise of a new beginning. I can imagine abundant crops blooming, chicks hatching, ducklings digging in the mud, and turkey poults following their parents around the yard. In reality the gray cold dreariness outside has got me to sit down and get the ordering of seeds and livestock done for this year. I must admit it has also given way to helping me daydream a little bit about the garden plan for this season. I can imagine the dark earth, the smell of it as it heats up. I can imagine the seeds having been planted weeks before, starting to grow and flower. Notice I didn't say I was thinking about all of the work that went into the garden in this daydream. All of the gardens I plant start as a daydream sometime in January when I know I must order seeds for the next year. I must admit that the gardens in my mind are exceptionally perfect and fine. Not a curled leaf, bug bite or bug is found. You would never see a garden so perfect anywhere, not even in a seed catalogue. The daydreams do not include the real life adventures like we had in 2008, of torrential rains, consequent flooding of corn fields and shallow roots on all plants which became weak and spoiled for water, late frost, later freeze, blight on tomatoes, potato bugs, cabbage loopers, caterpillars and even a small but very destructive tornado that went through our farm and garden. The tornado removed part of our chicken house roof this year and killed quite a few of our layer flock. Then our processor closed before we could get our chickens inspected to sell to customers. Boy it was a tough year at the farm. We like to call it a year of character building. Do we have enough character yet??? As I order the seeds and create the farm plan for 2009 I see none of this. I simply see the hope that lies in every seed and every egg to be hatched for a bumper crop year. My husband calls me Mrs. Sunshine.  We have to have a sunny disposition to do what we do.

 I have finished our order for seeds for crops to be grown for the next season. The list is long after considering everything that has been requested by our customers. We have added some new and some slightly experimental things as well. We have also added a couple of acres into production so we can provide more volume to our customers. We will be offering State Inspected quail for sale in late June or early July. Poulet Rouge chickens will be harvested about mid June. We will be starting ducklings in the spring for fall orders and we have added a lot more heritage and standard turkeys for Thanksgiving due to the large demand we had in 2008. Hopefully we can fill all requests for turkeys this year. If you are interested in a turkey you might drop us an email asap so we can put you on the list.Our new flock of Animal Welfare Approved layers is scheduled to start laying again in the spring so we will again have those beautiful, tasty eggs that you all say you miss so much. We should have pullet eggs (the tiny ones) starting about April. The quail are still going strong with egg production now. Thanks to all of our customers for their support and praise for 2008! Here's to a fresh new start, promise and hope of a new year, and to the gardens in our imaginations. We wish you all the best that the new year can bring.