Dropstone Farms

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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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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Turkeys exploring on their first day out in the world, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

They have been in the tractor for like 7 weeks at this point, and while they have fresh grass in there, this is the first time they have been out under the sky.

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Baby turkeys are here!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

They are smaller than I thought they would be!

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