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.

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask everyone who ordered chicken at the farmers’ market two weekends ago if they’d also like to sign up for our mailing list. I need to update the form to put a little “add me to the list” checkbox, I guess. But in the meantime, if you did not receive an email from me at about 9:45pm on August 9, you are NOT on our mailing list. If you would like to become so, please sign up here! And note that this is not the same thing as reserving a chicken! Please do that here for August 21-23 chickens.

This batch is NOT antibiotic-free!! Scroll down for more info.

These chickens will be ready on August 21. They are pastured at Day Road/Suyematsu Farm, home of Laughing Crow Farm, the Bainbridge Island Winery, and more. For now, we will take reservations for 65 birds out of a flock of approximately 75.

For your reference when ordering, we will have at least one more batch of 100 birds after this one, scheduled to be ready on about October 2. So you can expect to be able to order more in about a month, to pick up in ~7 weeks. The last batch of chickens averaged about 4.5 pounds, and we expect this batch to be about the same.

The cost will be $5 per pound total, with a $5 deposit per bird, to be paid when you reserve them, to offset 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 (BC and Alberta mostly), 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 about 75 chickens, so we’ll take orders for 65 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! We may also have pet-food-only-grade chicken; let us know also if you are interested in these.

Important note! This flock received a six-day course of an antibiotic, sulfamethazine, for a suspected coccidiosis infection, with medication ending 40+ days before processing. The instructions say not to consume the critter within 10 days of medicating, so I think we are safely beyond that.
However, if you are worried or strongly opposed to antibiotics in your food, probably best to wait for the next batch in early October.

More info about our chickens and the ordering process is available here: http://www.dropstonefarms.com/about-us-faq/about-our-colored-range-chickens/

Your order will not be considered finalized until we receive a deposit from you! You can send a check for $5 per bird to:

Dropstone Farms
5454 Rose Ave NE
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110

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/chickens2010-3

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

Lauren & Garth
Email: farmers@dropstonefarms.com
Phone: 206-855-5493

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.])

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.

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.

We moved the sheep & goats from our yard to the neighbor’s pasture. The sheep don’t much like walking on a lead and the shy little Soay REALLY do not like it — to the extent that it’s easier just to carry them.

Our shiny new cultivator!

We took a day “off” this weekend (Visited farmer’s markets and farms around Chimacum. And shopped for hay.) and headed up to Port Townsend. We perused an antique store and found a perfectly functional corn planter and a brightly painted Planet Junior-type wheel hoe. We’d been eyeing these tools for years but could never justify the price for a new one. However, our valuable antique cultivator was priced at about a third the cost of a new one. A bargain!

The antique dealer, however, seemed a mite confused that we were evaluating his antique with an eye toward using it in our garden. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his antique was, in point of fact, a thrifty and useful tool.

It wasn’t as awkward as the time Lauren had the following conversation about an antique egg scale:

“So how can it accurately weigh eggs with this sticker missing?”

“Well, you are just going to use it for decoration.”

“No, I need it to grade eggs for sale.”

“…”

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!

These shy little guys (who won’t move out from behind the crate so I can take a good picture) are Soay sheep, a not-very-domesticated breed from Scotland. They are small, and their tails are short so they don’t need to be docked, and they don’t need to be sheared to gather their wool, as they rub it off or you can just pull it off with your fingers. And, they’ll eat scrub and weeds, including Scotch broom and blackberries, like goats will, but most domestic sheep won’t.

We brought them home from Puyallup last night in the dog crate in the back of truck. It was late and dark when we got home so we left them in the crate, on the front porch, for the night, then woke up early this morning to let them out to learn about the electric fence and get some delicious grass. They munched all day and spent a lot of time running and jumping when we opened the back door and startled them into touching the electric fence accidentally. (They don’t learn as fast as dogs!)

They come with the names Biscuit and Muskrat* (the one with horns, in front above). They are wethers, which means they are fixed males who have been removed from circulation, so to speak, for whatever genetic reason. In this case they will ultimately be removed into our freezer and thence to our tummies for the winter. If it goes well, we may see about a breeding and/or wool flock in the future.

All of a sudden, where I used to see overgrown grass and weeds, I now see delicious pasture. Who knew I’d have this side effect? So we’re trying to figure out how best to confine them to specific small parts of our yard so they can safely trim the lawn without eating the cabbage and kale and lettuce, or eat the Scotch broom and blackberry without getting into the street. Harness? Collar? More electric fence?

If you have experience with sheep, please do chime in! We are winging it here … so far they seem to want to eat some grass and not be near us. On Sunday we will pick up a couple of domestic-breed mutt-ish wethers (Romney and whatever), also for meat, who we will try to integrate with these guys. Any and all advice/ideas are welcome!

* Despite the America (orig. Captain and Tennille, I think) song, I keep thinking it’s Biscuit and Buckwheat. So Muskrat may become Buckwheat. Or else Buttermilk, for thematic-ness.)

Three quarts of pickled asparagus, one with extra spicy.

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.

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.

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!

She was determined to set but we don’t have a rooster, so we bought her some fertile eggs to sit on. They are hatching! She is so happy!

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.

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 …