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A frigidly cold week on ye old urban homestead. The temperature, with windchill, is -50C today. It might be warmer on Mars. The frigid cold does not stop us, however. With the miracle of natural gas, a high efficiency furnace, and a remote car starter, we just keep on going.
I started the January Cure with apartment therapy this weekend. I did it last last year, but had to quite half way through because I went to Kamloops to do a show. The assignment this weekend was to clean all the floors and buy flowers for your house. I skipped the flower buying because I still have a gorgeous poinsettia from the holidays that is totally thriving in my house. My house usually kills plants within a couple weeks (even those that claim to only need low, indirect light), but this poinsettia still looks great. I did get the floors done eventually. We had company this weekend, so I spent most of my time with them, but I was so anxious to get the floors done, I swept and mopped every nook and cranny of the kitchen at 10 p.m. on Saturday night. Will called me crazy, but it was nice to wake up and have sparkly clean floors in the morning.
I declared this to be the Winter of Soups, and so it has been. I made two more soups this week: Thai Coconut Pumpkin and Potato Leek. Both are fantastic. Luckily, I had picked up a soup chicken at the Farmers’ Market a couple weeks ago ($3! What a deal!), so I had plenty of bones to make lots of stock.
Speaking of stock, I have to confess something. You may have noticed a chicken missing from the photos lately. Liesl is gone. We butchered her back in October. I just couldn’t bring myself to write about it on the blog, partly because I know how people are going to react (you butchered your pet?!?), and partly out of respect for Liesl. So yes, I butchered “my pet.” Liesl was one of our original two. She was already three years old when we got her. She was a fantastic layer right up to the end. This would have been her sixth winter, and last year was really hard for her. She had respiratory problems, and (you’ll remember) she had recently been egg bound. We made the difficult decision to butcher her this fall as soon as she started to molt. I made stock out of her. It’s so hard to explain this if you don’t keep chickens. Yes, I love them, and yes, they have personalities and I get to know them, but they are also livestock, and it would have been wasteful just to throw her body away. She gave us the best years of her life, we cared for her the best we could, and we gave her a dignified death. I’m not sure what else a chicken could ask for. If I sound non-chalant about it, I don’t mean to. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It is not easy to take an animal’s life. Many more people would be vegetarians if they had to kill all the animals they eat.
In happier news, the new girls have started to lay! I think they both must be laying because we’re getting about four eggs a week right now, and it’s so bloody cold, I can’t imagine that one chicken is producing four eggs a week. Poor wee things.
Also in happier news, we have the foster baby room (mostly) set up. We pretty much have all we need to pass our final home safety inspection, then we just have to finish two more days of training at the end of January, and our home will FINALLY be open! We decided to go with a convertible crib since we have no idea what age of child will be placed with us. This crib can convert into a toddler bed or break down and become the headboard and foot board of a twin size bed, so it should serve us well. I’ll blog some more about the room after I’ve had some time to decorate. I’ll admit right now – I can’t stand baby theme bedding or colours. Also, brightly coloured plastic toys send me into a panic attack. I’m thinking navy blue and mustard yellow for the room. None of that pastel and cute animal crap.
That’s all the news from our little corner of the world. Hope you have a wonderful week!
Good for you! Love clean floors. We are also foster parents, so have fun with that, and we have chickens, that I love, but will also be enjoying the meat just as we enjoy the eggs. I love reading your blog…keep it coming!
Fantastic! We are so looking forward to being Foster parents 🙂 We’ll be raising some chickens just for meat this summer, and I’m sure they’ll be lovely chickens, as well as tasty chickens.
We adopted 4, but still foster others. We also grow meat birds, however they don’t have much charm to them. Good luck with fostering!
Ha ha! Well, I guess I’ll rely on my egg layers to provide the entertainment 🙂
My first winter with my chickens. They stopped laying about Christmas time. Is that normal? I keep a red heat lamp on in their coop from 6:30am till 8:30pm. Should i switch to a white lamp for more light? I’m also curious what method you used to dispatch your hen. Thanks for your blog.
To heat or not to heat, that is the question.
We don’t heat the coop at all. We are terrified of power outages and fires. But I do know some that heat their coop, usually only when it gets below -25c. If you started heating them, then you have to continue heating them. If you switch now, they’ll freeze to death. If you provide heat, they don’t grow the proper feathers to make it through the winter.
It is normal for chickens to slow down egg production in winter. They need 14 to 16 hours of light per day to make an egg, and I’ve read that’s it’s better to provide the extra light in the morning, so ours is on a timer from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. They will stop entirely when they molt, but should start back up again. We use a fluorescent light in the coop, some people use a normal incandescent bulb, but once again, I’m terrified of starting a fire. We only start providing artificial light once they’re done their molts (around the end of November). I think nature gives them an egg laying beak on purpose, so it’s good to let them rest during the winter.
So since you started with the heat lamp, keep it going for the rest of the winter. You can add another artificial light if you want to jump start egg production again. Otherwise, the girls will start laying again in the Spring. If you do add an artificial light, then also keep it going until spring. If you start then stop, you throw them into a molt (learned that one the hard way!). Check out this awesome new website Will found: http://www.fresh-eggs-daily.com. Lots of tips for winterizing the coop.
About the dispatch method, we used a killing cone (made from a plastic milk jug). I held her by the feet upside down until she was calm and a bit dozy. We put her head through the bottom of the cone, and Will slit her throat. She bled out into a garbage can underneath her. I wasn’t able to be there when he made the cut, but I came back and held her feet while she bled out. It was very quick, and mostly clean. I had a large pot of hot, soapy water ready to wash her off and release the feathers. We plucked her outside, then did the rest of the job in the kitchen. Now that we’ve done it once, I feel more comfortable raising some chickens for meat next summer.
If you have any other questions, or would like to see our winter coop set up, just let me know! I know it can be confusing because no two chicken keepers do it the same way.
I hope this doesn’t sound crude or callused, but kudos to you for honoring your chicken by allowing her to go full circle of life. I know what you mean about blogging about butchering and the fear that the folks will come out of the woodwork giving you grief. I used to worry and fear all the negative feedback. Finally when I started sharing the end of life and butchering it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. Like you I took the honor the life by not throwing her but using her for substance approach and the she had a much better life than anything laying in a pink trace at the grocery. Thanks for sharing and letting folks know about the happy and sad moments of life.
Well said!
Not crude or callous at all. Very well said, actually. We did have a couple negative reactions from friends, but most have been fairly positive. The negative reactors just couldn’t understand why we would butcher her and use her for stock when you can buy stock at the grocery store for so cheap. I said that cheap stock at the grocery store was exactly WHY we did it. We knew Liesl, we cared for her, and we honoured her, and she gave us so much. I have no connection to the stock from the grocery store. I don’t even know what country those poor chickens came from, but I’m pretty sure they had a miserable existence. CHEAP is not my main concern when it comes to the food I eat. I have different priorities.
absolutely! I love my birds, care for them in a way that I know the big chickens farms don’t, so know that my hen or roo is providing the best for my family…and
I appreciate it.
It has been SOOOO LONG since I’ve checked in on your corner of the world! Wow, fostering – that is amazing! You are going to give some little ones a wonderful, peaceful, adventurous home. You’re going to have to post more about this, you know (especially now that *I’m* back to reading!). 🙂
Great to hear from you! I’ve been following your adventures as you get ready for the baby. How exciting 🙂
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