We are really sad to have to tell you that we will not have any turkeys available for sale this year. We had significant [...]]]> This email already went out to our list subscribers (sign up here) and our Facebook friends and Twitter followers may have seen it too, so apologies for duplicates …

We are really sad to have to tell you that we will not have any turkeys available for sale this year. We had significant predator losses in the last six weeks or so, and when we finally got a head count of who was left, and then looked at the list of turkeys we’d already committed in trade or to friends and family, we realized we had pretty much assigned all of them already.

At this time I know of only one other Bainbridge Island source for turkey: Heyday Farm. They have just a few left available, so contact them soon. There may be sources in Poulsbo, and it is almost certain that some of the Seattle farmers’ markets still have turkey. I’ll post here on the blog as I find new sources, in case you are still looking.

So this is the end of the season for us, anticlimactic and discouraging (emotionally and financially) though it may be. We greatly appreciate everyone’s support this year. When we started farming, we decided to give it three years and then regroup and decide if we want to keep going, and that three years is up, so we’ll be spending some time thinking hard this winter. We’ll keep you informed, whatever we end up doing.

In the meantime, however, we have lots of fresh chicken and duck eggs that you can pick up on the farm. Please get in touch if you’re interested.

Thanks again. Hope everyone’s snugly in place for autumn.

So, yeah. That’s this year. The end.

G: Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes. Less hurty.

L: Yikes!!

G: But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took [...]]]>

G:
Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes.
Less hurty.

L:
Yikes!!

G:
But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took mere seconds before the opportunity to photograph turkey-inflicted carnage presented itself.

The entirety of that email was the subject line “Large Turkey is Large” and the following photo.

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 [...]]]> 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.