Dropstone Farms

I was at the market last weekend hawking chickens, which is always fun, but there are still plenty left. Order now and spread the word to family and friends!

Details here: http://www.dropstonefarms.com/2010/08/chickens-round-3-pickup-august-21-23

Order here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-3

Skip the deposit, since the mail probably wouldn’t get to us in time.

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Subj: NEED MORE CHICKEN!!!

[We] are in ecstasy over here, post roast chicken. Do you have any more we could purchase? Also, could we sign up to order more now? How many can we reserve? We LOVE your chicken!!!

On being told the 48-hour deadline has passed so we can’t legally give them any more:

The chicken was *INCREDIBLE*. We had it last night.

And

And seriously the guy we ate last night was amazing. We roasted w/ 2 lemons (Marcella Hazan recipe) — nothing else — and it knocked it out of the park. We’re converted!!

Aw, thanks! (And thanks, chickens!)

I assume they’re using this recipe, Chicken with Lemons from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. It looks wonderfully simple, which I find to be my favorite method of cooking these chickens, who have plenty of flavor of their own. (My current obsession with HF-W’s barbecue sauce notwithstanding. [I can't find the recipe online but it consists of garlic, salt, ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, and brown sugar, and a smidge of apple cider vinegar.])

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Heritage chickens. They have great foraging instincts and they love to explore. It’s great and it’s the reason that we raise only these breeds. It’s wonderful to raise an animal that acts like an animal.

Additionally, we raise our birds outdoors from the day we get them. They are on grass and dirt (and straw. and under a heat lamp) from the day they show up at our long-suffering post office. We think that a heritage breed on soil and grass is unmatched from an animal welfare and a taste perspective.

However, there is a downside.

They get out.

All. The. Time.

You know 1″ poultry mesh? So do they. They like to go through it. My theory is that the squeeziness is reassuring to them. Temple Grandin is with me on that one.

Excuse me, I need to collect a chick.

Lest you think that’s a rhetorical device, I assure you that I just stepped away from my computer to collected a panicked, five-day-old chick. What does this look like? Let me show you.

Yep, it's a hat full of five-day-old chicks.

This is not, I confess, the chicken I just went to collect. She was only a single escaped chicken and the ones in the photo and my hat are the chickens that escaped when I was at our other farm, dealing with our other chickens.

Lauren’s dog is, in general, an amazing animal possessed of a tremendous amount of mothering instincts. Seriously. I’d sooner trust her with a newborn than an electric mesh fence. She has been a tremendous asset in identifying and locating escaped chicks this year. She’ll hear a distress peep long before we do and zero in on the poor little peeper in the way that only a critter with ears that big can do. Good girl.

But she’s bored with it by now.

What? This is a hat full of chicks. Seriously?

I’d like to have a really awesome punchline right now… Something that just drives this whole anecdote home… But I don’t, so I’ll leave you with the thought that I’m currently wearing a hat full of baby chicken poop.

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Our second batch of chickens for this year went smoothly last weekend. It was a small batch and we had some enthusiastic helpers. I even had enough energy to go to the show (the New Pornographers) that I had tickets to in Seattle that same night!

Two things that may or may not have happened:

• A bag of chicken kidneys was set aside for one of our more adventurous helpers. This may have been handed out to a customer instead of a bag of giblets! Our giblets baggies include heart, liver, and gizzard, and not usually kidneys. In any case it isn’t meant to be just kidneys. Apologies if you received this! Please feel free to enjoy them or bring them back to me (probably put them in the freezer at this point) and you can get extra giblets next time.
• I thought I counted three birds with limbs damaged in processing — one broken wing and two broken legs. We put them in to chill with the others, intending to mark the packaging to indicate that they were damaged. After the birds were all packaged up, though, we found only one broken wing and one broken leg indicated on the bagged birds. But I might have counted wrong and there may not have been 2 broken legs. So, there may or may not have been a chicken with a broken leg that was distributed like a whole one. If you got this broken chicken unknowingly, let us know and we’ll hook you up with a discount next time.

We’re getting some good feedback, which is really gratifying — thanks to all our customers! We love to hear from you and we’d like to hear the constructive criticism as well as the “OMG nom”s and the delicious recipes.

We’ll be at market at least once for this next batch of chickens, as well as taking signups online as usual (form’s not ready yet, but it’ll be soon). We may also have a signup sheet at the farm stand on Day Road. Stay tuned for more info.

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Our first batch of chickens this year went pretty well. We didn’t lose very many of them, and they had a good and uneventful life. Processing went smoothly too, once we resolved three different electrical issues (wrong extension cord = another trip to Lumberman’s; tankless hot water heater not working = trip home for a bucket with a spigot; fuses blowing at the house = trips back and forth to flip the breakers).

That batch of 75 birds all got claimed by existing customers, blog readers, or via word-of-mouth, so that was nice too — less work for us to market them!

Coming up soon here we have another smaller batch. These guys are the ones that the raccoons got into when they were still at home, so the flock is small. We will take reservations for about 35 chickens, then a waiting list beyond that. Eight are already claimed, so get your name in soon if you want chickens! They will be ready on July 31.

Sign up for this batch here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-2. Don’t forget that the WSDA requires you to pick them up from us within 48 hours of processing — so you’ll need to be around on the 31st or Aug 1-2 for pickup.

Unless we sell out more quickly than I expect, I’ll be down at the farmers’ market next week (the 24th) taking reservations and meeting new customers. You can bring deposits to me there, if you like.

As always, thanks for your support!

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PEEEEEEEEEP!

This is what a baby robin looks like.

Note the more-than-superficial resemblance to a baby chicken, like one of the three that used to be able to get out of the coop.

Now, imagine that Oscar (Note to readers: Oscar is my dog) finds such a baby bird, partially feathered out, behind the coop. Imagine how concerned both you and Oscar might be that such a critter has escaped both its housing and my notice. Terrifying.

And I had no idea what species the poor bird was. Turkey? Chicken? How old? Which of the seven flocks does this critter belong to? Very stressful.

Until, of course, after much chasing through blackberries, I manage to pick up the critter. At that point, the mouth gaping behavior presented a clue that this might not be a domesticated bird. The second, and more definitive, clue was when at least two robins began tripping their shit and dive-bombing me while emitting emergency bird distress calls.

I took their point and set the chick down and wished them all the best.

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It’s our third year with poultry, and the raccoons have finally found us.

We are down to one laying duck (from four) — they took one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. So the hens and remaining survivor duck are all staying inside the coop until we can figure out another solution. It’s a bummer; I like seeing them free-ranging around the yard and I definitely like the tasty rich orange yolks they lay because of eating so much grass and weeds.
Also, while the hens slow down their laying in the winter, the ducks are champs and keep laying an egg a day each, pretty much all winter. So we’re looking for some more Khaki Campbell ducks on Craigslist and such. Let us know if you know of any that are available.

Then on Monday night, the dogs woke us up at about 1:30 and we ran out to see a couple big raccoons around the brooders that hold the turkeys (4 weeks old), batch 2 of our broilers (also 4 weeks old), and batch 3 of the broilers (like 5 days old).
We think there should have been 23 turkeys; there are 15 left. There should have been about 58 broilers from batch 2; there are 45 now (though to be fair, we couldn’t count them before and they escaped a lot when they were small, and we might’ve lost some before). The small broilers seem to have been undisturbed.

Raccoon carnage is particularly icky to clean up after, as they often don’t eat the whole bird or carry it away, and in fact if they can reach through the chicken wire and grab a bird, they’ll just gnaw on it through the wire and leave the rest of the body inside the brooder for you to find in the morning.

We have put up electric fence around the brooders and the greenhouse too, where the 30 turkey poults that arrived today are brooding.

Tuesday night we were woken up at about the same time, and the dogs barked a bit then quieted down and seemed confused. The brooders were untouched. I hopefully infer that the dogs were barking at the sound of raccoons learning about electric fence, and subsequently taking off in the other direction.

This affects our turkey availability, obviously, though I’m not quite sure yet how we’ll work it out. Due to some procrastination on our part combined with a really bad experience with Privett Hatchery, we are taking a gamble that the poults that arrived today will be big enough in time for Thanksgiving. We may have only smallish (8-10 pounds) turkeys. If they are really small, we may only sell the fifteen that are left from the first batch for Thanksgiving — they will be a month older — and do today’s 30 for Christmas. Or I guess we could do whoever’s big at Thanksgiving, and give the rest another month to keep growing.

In any case, I’m not sure yet how to take orders for turkeys. I know people will want to secure their turkeys early, so I hope we don’t have to wait too late; I’d be sad if folks waited for us and didn’t order from others, and then we couldn’t deliver and they had to use a storebought bird.

To that end, please put your name and email address if you want to be on the non-binding list of interested people: http://tinyurl.com/turkeyinterestlist. We’ll go down the list first-come first-served, and contact folks as we have birds, and if you have found another source, we’ll just move on to the next person.

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** UPDATE! 7/22 **
While most of the details here are still correct, this batch of chickens is long gone. We’re now accepting orders for the second batch. Sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-2.
This batch will be ready July 31. The rest of the logistics as described below still apply.

We are now accepting reservations for our first batch of chickens! Sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-1.

We are aiming for these chickens to be ready the second weekend of July, the 10th-11th. They are pastured this year at Day Road/Suyematsu Farm, home of Laughing Crow Farm, the Bainbridge Island Winery, and more. For now, we will take reservations for approximately 60 birds out of a flock of 75. We opened signups to our notification list subscribers first, so there are about 25 left unclaimed. (Subscribe here for priority notification next time!)

For your reference when ordering, we will have at least two more batches of 60-75 birds, approximately 4 weeks apart. So you can expect to be able to order more in about a month.

The cost will be $5 per pound total, with a $5 deposit per bird, to be paid when you reserve them, to cover initial feed costs. This deposit will be deducted from your total when you pick them up.

Most of the details are the same as last year:

• We are raising a breed of chickens that is developed from French and Amish heritage breeds: “Freedom Rangers” from JM Hatchery.
• The chickens are fed Certified Organic grains grown in Canada, and the pasture is untreated.
• The WSDA permit that applies to farms of our size requires that the end consumer (you) pick up the birds on farm within 48 hours of processing. If you can’t make it in person, you can have someone else pick them up for you.
• Orders will be allocated first-come, first-served. We will take reservations for fewer chickens than we have in each batch, in case of flock loss. This batch consists of 75 chickens, so we’ll take orders for 55 to start with, and keep a waiting list after that. Folks on the waiting list are likely to be able to get chickens.
• In the unfortunate, and (we hope) unlikely case of significant flock loss, the last to sign up will be the first to have their deposits refunded and their orders canceled, and our sincere apologies — and priority ordering on the next batch.
• We will also likely have “factory seconds” available for less — as a result of errors in processing, these may have broken wings or legs, or need to be skinned, or otherwise be cosmetically damaged but perfectly safe and delicious. Please let us know if you would like to be on the list for these!

More info about our chickens and the ordering process is available on our About our Freedom Ranger Chickens (formerly called Colored Range chickens) page.

New this year: Your order will not be considered finalized until we receive a deposit from you! You can send a check for $5 per bird to the address listed on the signup form. If you prefer to pay with cash, or in person, or via trade, or some other alternative arrangement, let us know and we can work it out.

Reserve your chickens here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-1

Please feel free to let interested friends & family know. And as always, please contact us with any questions, comments, concerns, or ideas, or just to say hi — we love to hear from you!

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We moved the chicks to pasture on Sunday during a slight break in the rain. They’d been on grass in their brooder, at home, but it’s been so cool and rainy that we kept them at home longer than would be ideal, and the grass at home was mostly gone — eaten, dug up, pooped on. So when we moved them, they were SO excited! They immediately started running around, digging holes in which to take a dust bath (that’s why there’s a chicken on its side in the foreground, with its foot on its neighbor — that is imminent dustbathification), and going crazy eating grass and bugs and whatnot (like the first two in the front).

Looking for tasty morsels of grass and bug. In the next 3 minutes I witnessed 2 games of keep away, once with a small slug and once with a worm.

We moved their chicken tractor on Monday evening and then again today, Wednesday — we were both busy out of town all day on Tuesday, and they are so small yet that the grass can take a bit of fluctuation in their schedule — and they have already gotten it down: when someone smacks on the back of the tractor, run a couple feet away from that, and then when fresh new grass appears ahead of you as the tractor moves, run towards THAT and eat it!! Moving them is now easily a one-person job — no need for a noisemaker behind as well as a tractor-pulling person in front.

Stay tuned for processed poultry orders to open very soon. If you haven’t signed up for the official email list, please do so!! The official list will get the, well, official notice when we are accepting reservations for chickens and turkeys. Sign up here: Subscribe to our poultry notification list.

And, as always, you can read more about our preferred breed of chicken, Colored Range/Freedom Rangers, and why we like them so much, here. I recently learned via Facebook (!) that Polyface Farms farmer Joel Salatin (the farmer in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, featured in the movie Food, Inc., and an all-around totally insane fantastic farmer) is trying some Freedom Rangers this year, and seems pretty pleased so far. I’m excited to see these healthy, happy, delicious birds getting some attention.

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First the good news! We’ve been getting back in to the swing of things gradually (or abruptly in some cases — when the baby chicks show up at the post office, you’d better be ready!). We’ve gotten rehabituated to the morning routine of opening the greenhouse, watering seedlings, and gathering eggs, and I’m doing better this year about staying on top of upgrading seedlings to larger pots or planting them out. The tomatoes we started from seed in March are planted out under plastic and are starting to flower already. The squash plants are still in pots, but are huge and the pattypans are already forming tiny tiny little fruits, so little that they are still fuzzy — I’ll transplant them this weekend and try to avoid damaging the teensy squashes.

This year we cleaned out the greenhouse, which is 10×20′, and moved all the seedstarting tables to one side in order to build a raised bed in the other half. So we now have a 4×20′ bed across the whole length of the south side of the greenhouse. For the summer, it is holding eggplant, hot peppers, cucumbers, a French melon, my Moon & Stars watermelon, and two luffa (loofah) plants that I am not sure will thrive, but I’m going to try. If they fruit, I’ll try eating them once maybe but mostly I want scrubbers. In the fall we’ll turn the bed over to winter leeks, lettuce, radishes, etc.

The disappointing news! Although we didn’t anticipate the demand for meat chickens from our usual hatchery — we left it too late and weren’t able to get our preferred chickens for the dates we wanted — we were able to place an order for some slow-growing red broilers from a different hatchery, with which we’ve had good luck for laying hens and turkeys. I was really excited to let everyone know about this first batch of chickens, which arrived about a month ago. It quickly became apparent, though, that the hatchery had sent us not the slow-growing red broilers we ordered, but some white chickens … after several phone calls, we established that there was apparently no way for them to say with confidence whether they were their slow-growing white broiler, or their fast-grower — which is literally (truly literally) the same type chicken you get at the grocery store, and the type we emphatically do not want to raise. So we sold them to Pheasant Fields Farm for the cost of feed, got credit from the hatchery, and sighed and wrote off Batch 1. So there’ll be no chickens in mid-June, as we’d planned.

Back to the good news section! Batch 2 of chicks has arrived and are about a week and a half old, and ~60 of them are scheduled to be ready for sale in early July. Batch 3 (fifty chicks, probably taking reservations for 35-40) will be here in a couple of weeks, and the turkeys are coming soon too!

The chicks are JM Hatchery’s Freedom Rangers — the same chicks as last year, although they used to be called Colored Range Chicks. The turkeys will be 10 Broad-breasted Bronzes and 40 Narraganssetts. Turkeys are more fragile than chickens, especially as babies, so we’ll take orders for 30 turkeys and keep a waiting list for the rest. We may also have a wide range of weights, so we’ll try to fairly allocate big turkeys to people with big Thanksgiving dinners, and smaller turkeys to those with smaller parties.

Overall, in addition to the turkeys, we hope to have four batches of 50-75 chickens at a time, ready in July, August, September, and October. If we time it well, we might have a fifth batch in late October.

You can sign up to be on our notification list for poultry news — that’s how we’ll get in touch when we are taking orders for both chickens and turkeys. Everything will be first-come, first-served.

More news soon, as I add “write blog posts” to my list of regular and semi-regular farm chores …

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A couple of weeks back we got two truckloads of fresh compost, and we dumped it in various piles about the garden area to be spread when we were done unloading. The chickens got in in the meantime and helped us with the spreading part by scratching up the fresh piles.

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For some reason I got all het up to make some sour cream this week. I followed this recipe, because I didn’t realize Mother Earth News had one too. But they are pretty much the same.

So once I had this sour cream, I froze 3/4 of it but we still needed to use up a half-pint of it that I kept fresh in the fridge. We also have a LOT of eggs (want eggs? email me!!) and Garth loves black beans almost as much as he loves ketchup. So: huevos rancheros, only mostly following the recipe (as usual).

• Black beans from Alvarez Farm (150+ miles, but just barely), simmered for a long time with pre-fried Skagit River Ranch bacon and Laughing Crow Farm onions, and a bay leaf from our farmers’ market.
• Fresh tortillas from the awesome tortilla-maker machine at Central Market! (Now that we have lard we might be making our own tortillas soon!)
• Salsa: onion from Laughing Crow, organic storebought :( tomatoes, homegrown jalapeños, Laughing Crow hot peppers that we dried at home last summer (not sure what variety, but I thought they looked a lot like Bulgarian Carrot peppers). Obviously did not use cilantro, as it is, you know, February.
• Homegrown eggs! as always. Fried in my happy cast iron pan with leftover tasty bacon fat.
• Homemade sour cream with cream from Fresh Breeze dairy, also as always. I used Nancy’s organic full-fat plain yogurt as the starter.

Verdict: YUM. Will definitely be making this again. I usually order this when out for breakfast because I don’t eat meat whose origins are not intimately known to me, and it’s often one of the only vegetarian meals on a breakfast menu. But the addition of the little bit of bacon in the beans is fantastic and adds a nice depth to the whole thing. I also cooked the salsa for a good long while, which made it caramelizey, and neutralized the acids a bit, mellowing it out — though it still had some good heat from the peppers.

Homegrown: eggs, jalapeños
Island-grown: onions, hot peppers, garlic
Local (150 miles): cream for sour cream; bacon; bay leaf
Local (Washington): beans!
Locally-made from unknown ingredients: tortillas!
Unknown, organic: tomatoes :(

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