Foxhollow Poultry Farm

Since it was perfect weather, we decided to move our replacement layer ducklings to their new outdoor summer quarters. We used a large dog kennel covered with tarps, straw bedding, put a heat lamp in, waterer, and feeder.... and the ducks. They are so funny to watch and just adorable even though they may be the messiest animals ever.

The breed khaki campbell duck is specifically used for eggs. They are abundant producers and can lay up to 300 eggs a year. The chef's in town are waiting impatiently for their eggs. They should begin to lay in late August. Seems like a long time from now to have to wait. Hurry up little ducks, the chef's are waiting for your delicious rich eggs!

This weekend we put up the portable poultry netting in the rain. It was a simple process that took a minimum amount of time and made our chickens really happy. They didn't even care if it was drizzling rain, they just roamed around all day and enjoyed their new grass. We will move the fencing as necessary to keep them all on fresh grass all season long. It is electrified to keep out the predators.  Here is a picture of the hens enjoying their new pasture.

Our quails are finally hatching. Here is a photo. Even though they only take about 18 days to hatch it still seems like a long time to wait. They are dark brown with yellow and black stripes down their backs kind of like a chipmunk's stripes. Adorable. If you think a baby chicken is cute then multiply that by 10 for the quail chick's tiny size. They are a little bit bigger than a quarter. They kind of match their egg shells in this picture, so look closely.

Quail chicks

More babies on the way this week... Chicks by Friday. I love spring!

Tai

I delivered some quail eggs to Mojo's yesterday, Mojo's is a super nice restaurant . I talked with the chef and he told me he was going to "antique" them. The process is simple, but produces a nice hardboiled or pickled quail egg for charcuterie, appetizers, or garnish that looks like it is truly antiqued.

Hardboil your eggs first and cool them.

Next steep some strong black tea.

Crack the shell on your hardboiled eggs by rolling them around on the counter.

Leave the cracked shell on the egg then soak in the tea for several hours.

Drain and peel the eggs.

He said that it makes them look like tiny dinosaur eggs. How interesting would that be for an Easter appetizer! I am definitely going to try it tomorrow for a lunch I am having.

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.

Check for cracked eggs. Use only uncracked eggs.

Wash eggs in warm water and drain.

Put eggs in a pot and cover with cold water. 

Bring water to a rolling boil.

Allow eggs to stand in hot water for 3 minutes.  

Drain water and cover eggs with white vinegar (at least 1" above the eggs). .

After 12 hours the shells should be partly dissolved in the vinegar leaving them rubbery.

Rinse the eggs thoroughly and peel them.  Make sure you get all of the inner membranes off of the peeled eggs.

Rinse again after peeling. Put peeled eggs in a 1 quart canning jar.

Place pickling ingredients in a pan and simmer for 5 minutes.

Pour the pickling liquid into the quart jar, completely covering the eggs.

When the eggs and mixture have cooled, cover and refrigerate for at least 24 hours before eating. The longer they marinate the better. Serve cold with sea salt.

 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!

 

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.

We have finally received our Animal Welfare Approved status. After several weeks of waiting, a farm auditor coming to our place, our processing plant being checked out, and approval by a committee of animal welfare advocates, veterinarians, and others; we have been approved. Our eggs will now proudly carry the AWA sticker so customers know they are getting their eggs from hens raised humanely, with the highest industry standards. It is a great organization that is soley focused on the natural habits, welfare, and conscientious care of farm animals. This also helps the customer know that their purchases are from family farms that raise heritage breeds to the highest standards of animal welfare.  Your buying AWA approved items is a vote for the small family farmer and a vote for humanely raised animals.