i dont really think of my chickens as food but,

[mopinko]

i have had a rooster here and there. this year, tho, i raised a lot of chicks and so have quite a few "spare" cockerels. i also have several hens that have stopped laying.
i am going to have a good number of home grown chicken dinners this year.
that is a great feeling.

which is a good thing, because a lot of other crops have sucked this year.

[Sanity Claws]

1. You just increased my vocabulary

I'm sorry to hear that your crops did not have a good year but I just learned the word "cockerel." I had to look it up. Yes, I'm a city girl.

[mopinko]

2. some were good, but

tomatoes have been crappy. this truly bums me out.

glad you learned a new word.

[fasttense]

3. Yeah my tomatoes were bad this year too

I put them out late, then the aphids attacked. It was just a very tough year for our organic tomatoes.

There is a chemical farmer who sells at our farmer's market right next to me. He had the prettiest tomatoes. He had some older varieties like yellows and strippies. He dropped a box and I got to watch them bounce several times then roll under my table. When I handed them back to him they were still perfect, no bursting, no smashing. The few tomatoes I managed to grow would have been tomatoe soup if they had fallen like that.

He was selling them left and right. His tables were overflowing. I sometimes think I always have to do things the hard way. Organic farming isn't for the faint of heart.

By the way, I had to eventually slaughter some of my very old hens because they were eating most of the eggs. They were 2nd hand chickens I bought from an Amish farmer. They were 1 year old when I got them. They picked up the egg eating habit at his place, they just kept getting worse and worse. Out of 50 hens I was lucky to get 6 eggs because of their bad habits. So I slaughtered all the hens I knew were eating eggs. Oh my God, they made the best tasting chicken soup ever. The broth was rich and yellow. So enjoy the the surprise bounty.

[mopinko]

4. yeah, the taste of a stewing hen is etched in my memory.

coming from a big family with little money, stewing hens were a regular thing.
have been thinking about that flavor for 3 years now.

the roosters i have eaten were tough but tasty, when i managed to cook them right. made a batch of jambalaya that was one for the books.
these cockerels were nice and tender. not a whole lot of meat, but not that bad. made them pot roast style w carrots, beets and tomatoes from the garden.

been telling myself that it is best to make as many mistakes as possible now before i start to really depend on the farm for money or for food.

next year def stepping up my game. row covers and hot caps for me. this is the second freezing freaking spring in a row. last year i knew it was coming because i am close to lake michigan. when the lake froze all the way over, i knew i was in for it. this year it kinda caught me by surprise.
as in so many things, my tendency not to panic gets me into trouble. might be too old to learn about that bit, but.....