Question anbout chickens

[majorcatfish]

the only help I can give you is.
brine them for 24 hours
place in the smoker at 225 for 4 hours
use apple wood

yum smoked chicken

 

[MontyJ]

They are good spatchcocked too:

Anyway, the meaties will only be inside as long as necessary. Once they have enough feathers, out they go. I checked out your blog journey, very nice! I won't be using a tractor though. They are going into the run area. It will have a mesh cover to keep predators out and a makeshift house for nighttime safety.

 

[journey11]

Yum! I am drooling on my keyboard now.

 

[Jared77]

*looking for a napkin from the dool* those birds look great!

 

[Mickey328]

Oh my..that's a terrible thing to do to an old gal who hasn't eaten yet today...I need a drool bib, too. Those look gorgeous!

 

[catjac1975]

When the cornish X rocks are chicks we keep them with light for warmth, and food and water 24 hours a day. They grow very fast so you must keep an eye on their legs. They will get too big for their legs and they will begin to bow eventually leading to the death of a young bird. So we turn off the lights at night when they are big enough to go with out the extra warmth. This slows down the growth so the legs can get strong enough to bear their weight. Also they need to roost or their breasts with grow unevenly with one side much larger than the other. Our record size bird was 14 lbs. We tried to raise them for 7 or 8 lbs.

 

[HotPepperQueen]

I would never in a million years put Cornish X manure on my garden. The smell those birds makes my stomach turn and I don't even want to think of it near stuff i'm going to eat! But that's just me being a baby. Their poop also seems more acidic than an egg laying hen. I have a big pit in the woods that gets layered with poop and dirt and the occasional leaves and grass clippings. It's probably compost gold but my egg layers produce enough for my garden beds now. Oh and how much poop will they accumulate? 23 egg layers for me fill up a wheel barrel a week. But that's because it's freezing here in MN and they don't like the deep snow. You won't know for sure until you have the birds. Those CX are nasty little buggers but they sure do taste good after the fact!

 

[ducks4you]

Nice to know that we have a chicken butchering community here. MontyJ, you'll have to give us a report about how you like the birds you're getting, after you've had them awhile. Just wanted to comment that although my dressed birds aren't as plump, the taste is still tremendous. My oldest DD says she probably won't be buying store-bought chicken to eat after eating mine.
MontyJ, have you butchered before? BYC has a couple of stickies about butchering. I followed their advice and it really helped me. I don't use an axe bc I had trouble getting it sharp enough and I value my thumbs. I hang my birds from a tree in the back yard, super sharpen my knife, and I've gotten really good at bleeding them out. It takes about one minute.
My two dogs LOVE butchering day. I try to butcher at least 2 birds at a time. They eat the heads and the feet. I eviscerate in my kitchen. I keep the livers and necks, but the dogs and cats split the gizzards, hearts, kidneys and lungs, and eggs (from butchered hens), which, if you didn't know, have a hard shell right before they are laid. Some people like to put the intestines in a compost pile, but I prefer to throw them in my kitchen garbage.

 

[MontyJ]

I've butchered a lot of things including turkey and grouse, but never a chicken. I'll be using a killing cone set up. Of course, for the turkey and grouse I used the shotgun method

 

[JimWWhite]

We have 23 Black Sex Links (BSL's) and they put out a lot of poop. They have a 8x4x4 coop inside their run and I have to pull out the pine shavings and poop at least every other week. On Saturday mornings on the off week I take a hoe work it so that the litter gets fluffed back up and not matted down. Seems to keep the flies down in the summer when I do that. I go through a bale of pine shavings every two weeks. I've been taking it down to the orchard and shoveling it about three feet away from my apple trees and I let it rot in. So far the trees have been thriving on it. Some of it goes in the garden but not very much. Too hot. I've got a large compost pile that the excess goes onto and that's been growing steadily for the past three or four years. I need to get in there with my neighbor's front-loader and turn it over and start using what's on the bottom.