2026 Meat Birds - Week Two

Our birds experienced a few changes this week, namely growth.  They are getting bigger and as a result, I've expanded out the size of the brooder.  It is now double the circumference that it was last week.  The chicks are eating more and as a result, they are pooping more.  They quickly foul the ground and I don't want them standing in that mess, so I push the chicken tractor and move them to fresh grass twice a day.

I still feed them morning, noon and night.  I've added a third feed trough so they can all get around it and eat.  I also added a second gallon-sized waterer.  Although the coolest night we have so far has been 69 degrees, I turn the heat lamp on at night.  The light attracts mosquitoes and bugs and you can hear the chicks' beaks tapping against the sides of the brooder as they catch and eat bugs.  Good!

On Wednesdays, we call it weigh-in Wednesday.  I indiscriminately pick one bird out of the 50 that are there and bring him or her into the garage where I have our kitchen scale temporarily sitting on my workbench.  As you can see, more feathers are coming in and the only real peach fuzz remaining is on the bird's head and neck.

The fat little bird doesn't quite know what to think about this, but he behaved himself and didn't hop off or poop on Tricia's scale.

So let's see what the scale shows us:

At the end of week two, the bird weighed 1 pound 4 ounces or 20 oz.  Last week the birds weighed 8 ounces.  That's a weight gain of 12 oz in 7 days.

At the end of week two last year, the bird weighed 1 pound 2 ounces or 18 oz.  So we're ahead of last year's birds by two ounces.

Next Wednesday, we'll convene again for the Wednesday weigh-in.

Rotating the Onions

You know, it's about time to make our order with Dixondale Farms to order onion sets for the 2027 Onion crop.  I'm planning on getting the Short Day Sampler and Yellow Granex.  Once we get them in, we'll plant in January.  For the past several years, we've had bumper crops and Tricia has asked me to scale down my orders from 3 bunches to 2 bunches.  One bunch has a minimum of 48 onions in it.

Once we harvest and cure the onions inside, we eat a lot of them.  Lately we've enjoyed hamburger steaks smothered in onions, mushrooms and brown gravy!  Even as hot as it was today, we enjoyed a French Onion soup.  We chopped up gallons and gallons of them and froze them to cook with later.  We also slice them up and dehydrate them and then vacuum seal them in jars.

Getting toward the end of the 2026 onion crop

Here are some sliced onions that were dehydrated and then vacuum packed in jars.  We'll use the fresh and frozen ones first, but when we're out of those, we just rehydrate these.  They keep well.

Here are some dehydrated onions from 2021.  They're still sealed tightly.  It's always a good idea, I think, to rotate out your stock.  Our rule is to eat fresh first, then frozen, and then canned.  Our problem, if you want to call it that, is that we generally have so much coming in fresh, that we never get around to eating the canned.  So recently, we've made a concerted effort to rotate out the canned stuff.

It just so happens that Tricia was out of onion powder in her spice cabinet.  Well, not any longer.  She opened the vacuum-sealed jar and poured the dehydrated onions into the food processor and ran it until it was ground into a powder.

We'll go through all this at about the same time we get the onion sets in to plant in the garden.  Then we'll start the whole thing over again.

The Roof Needs Some Work

The live oak branches produce a canopy over parts of the house, keeping things shady and (hopefully) reducing our electricity bills somewhat.  Our hot, humid weather causes mold, mildew and algae to grow on the roof in those shady spots.  I was thinking about getting up on a ladder and use my garden sprayer to spray some bleach up there to try to kill it and restore the roof to it's normal color.

Tricia talked me out of that Saturday morning and we headed to the local hardware store to see if there was a product made to kill the mold, mildew and algae that grows on roofs.  Turns out, there is.  It is a product called Spray & Forget.  It's a little pricey at $44 per gallon, but if it works, that is reasonable.  You mix it 1 part S&F to 9 parts water into a garden sprayer and spray it on the roof in the offending areas.

Green algae on the roof

You leave it on the roof.  Green stains are supposed to disappear in 1-3 days and black stains over 3-6 months.  I shifted my ladder over as I went around the entire house spraying.  The worst areas were the east side, north side and west side.  The south side has mostly sunshine covering the roof most of the time, so mold & mildew is not a problem in the direct sunlight.

I patiently moved around getting good coverage of the chemical on the green areas.  When I finished, I still had half a gallon of the chemical left.  I guess I'll save it and will use it again, if needed, to get areas where it didn't wipe out the mold.

So far, we're 24 hours post initial application.  Although the product says that the green stains disappear after 1-3 days.  So far, I'm not seeing any reaction.  The stains are still there.  It's early yet.  I'll give it more time and report back with how this product works!

Getting a Trim

The neighbors have a flock of chickens that are in a chicken run.  Most of them are, anyway.  There are a few hens that like to fly up over the fence and meander over into our yard .  They make a beeline for the flower beds where they like to scratch all the mulch out of the bedding in search of worms.  We love our neighbors, but we don't love the hens scratching in the beds.  They also like to scratch the mulch out from around the citrus trees.

At some point we'll have over a half dozen chickens visiting in our yard.  Over the past several months, I've made it a challenge to catch each of the offending hens with a net, clip their wings and send them back to the chicken run where they won't be able to run to our yard ever again.  I've caught all but two of them.  Today, I saw one in the yard, so I got the net and clippers and ran her down until I cornered her where I could catch her.  She made a lot of racket!  She was not a happy bird.  Her freedom ended, but she should count her blessings.  She lived to see another day.

I used some tin snips to cut the feathers back on both wings.  Really, cutting them off of only one wing does the trick, but I wanted to make doubly sure she was grounded.  Feathers were flying and she was squawking.  All the noise riled up the rooster and the guineas in their yard.  They were empathizing their caught comrade.

With feathers clipped, I walked the perpetrator back over next door.

I dropped her over the fence and she scampered away.  Her pride was hurt, but she'll be okay tomorrow.

Now there's one more to catch and clip.  She's a smart bird, though.  Rather than allowing herself to get cornered like the others, she runs toward the neighbor's fence and with a running start, flies right over.  I'll have to think up another plan to try to outsmart the smart bird.  It's sort of like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner!

2026 Meat Birds - Week One

Each Wednesday for the next 8 weeks, we'll bring you along as we watch our Cornish Cross meat birds mature until it is time for slaughter.  Last Wednesday we got 51 birds in and put them out in our makeshift brooder under a heat lamp.  We only turn it on at night as it is in the mid-90s during the day - no heat lamp needed.  

This week we lost one bird unexpectantly.  A rare rain came through in the afternoon and the heat lamp was off.  Some rain (not much) and thunder and lightning must have got them wet and scared and they piled up in a pile.  It didn't take me long to check on them, but one was laying dead at the bottom of the pile.  That was our lagniappe bird.  We ordered 50 and got 51.  Any others that die are on us!

After one week, I've expanded the circumference of the brooder as they are growing and need more space.  We're still feeding the Game Bird 24% protein feed, morning, noon and night.  I also swapped out the three quart sized waterers for a gallon-sized one.  They are drinking a lot of water, and it is easier to fill one than three.  We're still adding 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar per gallon of water.

Each year we have a little process we do on Wednesday night.  I reach down and scoop up one average sized bird and inspect it.  Although only a week old, you can see the white feathers coming in on the wingtips.  The rest of the body still has the yellow "peach fuzz."  That will be changing soon.

So each Wednesday night I'll get the kitchen scale out and put a sheet of paper on it.  I don't want the chick pooping on the scale.  The chick will be positioned on the scale and we'll do weekly weigh-ins to see how they are growing.  Here's the first chick on the first week's weigh in:

After one week the average chick weighs 8 ounces.  I looked in records from last year and at the one week time frame, it weighed in at 6 1/2 ounces.  So far we're a little bit ahead.  Remember our goal at week 8 is to have an 8 pound bird that will yield a 6 pound carcass.

See ya back next Wednesday night for the Week 2 Weigh-in!

Making Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

Cinnamon rolls are a real treat around our house.  I'm sure you love them too - hot out of the oven with a cup of coffee!  There was a very kind lady who attended our church whose specialty was baking homemade cinnamon rolls.  She has passed away, but we still fondly remember when she would come to our house and knock on our door with a pan full of fresh, homemade cinnamon rolls still hot from the oven in her hands.  They wouldn't last long, that's for sure.

Tricia makes sourdough weekly.  She makes loaves of bread, hamburger buns, hot dog/poboy buns, dinner rolls, and all sorts of other goodies - all sourdough.  Sunday morning she was making sourdough cinnamon rolls and I thought I would capture the process for you.  She makes her sourdough the normal way and then sweetens the dough.  A cinnamon/sugar/butter combination is whipped up and put on top of the dough once rolled out into a rectangle.

The cinnamon concoction is spread evenly over the dough and then chopped pecans are sprinkled on top.

The dough is a little sticky, so you have to be careful with this step, lifting the edge with a tool and beginning to roll (hence the name cinnamon roll) the dough up into a big "log."

Almost done.  You can see how that tool is helpful in getting the dough 'un-stuck' from the counter.

And here we are.  Ready to start cutting into individual cinnamon rolls.

The tool is used to cut the log into individual rolls.  The left side (as you're looking at it) is done.  The ones on the right have to be cut one more time.

The rolls are arranged in a pan and baked.  We did have another pan with four of them that I didn't show in the photo.

A glaze is whipped up and poured over the top while still a little warm.

Now comes the best part - eating them!  I took a big bite out of this one.  Delicious!

Whether someone drops off a pan of these at your house or if you make a pan of them yourself, you can't go wrong with homemade sourdough cinnamon rolls.

A Test for Betsy

It's time to test Besty, our new Jersey calf, to see if she's A2/A2.  This is a genetic test that is done to determine if she'll produce milk with only the A2 beta-casein protein.  Lots of milk customers seek out milk that is A2/A2 - meaning it lacks the A1 protein as A2/A2 milk is more easily digestible.

Clarabelle was A2/A2.  Elsie is A2/A2, however, up to this point in time, we haven't been able to get Elsie pregnant.  LuLu, Besty's mom, is NOT A2/A2, but there is a chance that Nicky, the bull (Betsy's father)is and that would mean that there is a chance that Betsy is A2/A2 afterall.

It's a simple enough test to perform.  We caught Betsy.  She is wild as a March hare.  I'm going to start working on halter breaking her.  Once we caught her, we put a rope halter on her.  Stroking her neck, we were able to get her calmed down a bit.  She's a healthy, strong little thing.  We checked her head from when we de-horned her and no horn buds are growing.  It appears to be a good, clean job and she'll have no horns or scurs.

The test involves brushing out her tail hairs so that they are clean.

Then you pull out some hairs from her tail head, ensuring you get the root follicle with the hair.  Generally, you try to pull two or three at a time.  You must send in 20 hairs with the follicle.

Once you have a bundle of 20 hairs with the roots all facing the same direction, you twist the bundle and tape it down to the test paper and mail it off to the lab.

We should hear back from the American Jersey Cattle Association somewhere between 17 and 30 days.  Even if Betsy's A1/A2, she'll provide us with good Jersey milk, high in butterfat.  If she's A2/A2, that will be an added benefit.  We'll let you know if she "passes" her test.