Showing posts with label chooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chooks. Show all posts

Thursday 23 May 2019

Silkie chicken hatch

We bred silkie chickens in the past.  They are a lovely breed of chicken.  When we moved to acreage we decided to get a larger dual purpose breed so got rid of our silkies and breed plymouth rocks.  I loved the rocks, they are an amazing breed that is perfect for acreage.

Now we are back in town the plymouth rocks are too large, so we have barnevelders for eggs.  They aren't pets though, the kids aren't allowed to pat them, so we decided to also get a smaller breed for the kids to cuddle.  A friend gave us a few bantams to see if we could make it work.  The kids love them, so we decided to get a few more for the kids to have as pets.

Silkies are perfect cuddle chickens, and I love silkies, so we decided to get silkies again.  Depending on how they were raised they can be adorable bundles of fluff who love cuddles, or they can be moody things that sulk over there and wish you weren't anywhere near them.  As they were intended to be cuddle chickens we decided to hatch eggs and raise them with the kids rather than buy point of lay.

We bought some silkie chicken eggs and did a hatch.  We got a handful of different colours which was fun.  One thing I love about silkie chickens is how cute they are when they are tiny!

Silkie chicken hatchlings






The silkie chickens grew fast, and before we knew it they were living outside in a cage and no longer under heat.  We put a ramp into their house as they took a while to learn how to use the ladder.  They aren't the brightest breed of chicken, but that doesn't make them any less lovable.







It wasn't long until the silkies were too big for their cage and were allowed to free range during the day.  We also have a silkie rooster and a few other bantam chickens, so we had them in different houses at night but mingling in the yard together during the day.  At the start they kept completely separate from each other.







We already had a lovely blue silkie rooster, so decided to separate the boys from the girls before there was any trouble.  I love the colours of some of the boys, too bad they weren't girls as I would have kept the splash silkie, the buff one, and the red one.  The splash rooster was the friendliest and most loving I have ever seen.





The girls kept free ranging with the rooster and the other bantams, they became one flock pretty easily as they had plenty of space to get away from one another.

Unlike many other breeds, silkies are not too hard on the lawn.  If the grass got too long they stay away from it!  Silkies aren't the best at reducing insect numbers under the fruit trees, but they are better than nothing.




The boys lived in a different cage out the front yard, it took a few months before they explored far enough to possibly mingle, then we put up a little fence.  They don't fly, and aren't smart enough to work out how to get through the large gaps in the fence, so our problem was solved.

Even though silkie chickens are not very effective foragers compared to many other chicken breeds, having the boys in the front yard meant slightly less mowing for me.  We have raised vegetable gardens, the boys foraged between them and helped lower the number of insects.  This is good and bad, as they do not discriminate between pests and beneficial arthropods.







I really loved the splash rooster and the red one, they were friendly and every day when I got home from work they would run over for a cuddle.  Being extra roosters they were eventually heading to the freezer, and I was worried that I was far too attached to them.  I started to try and think of a way I could keep them as they were so docile and lovely but really couldn't think of anything.

I am happy to say that someone bought those two and is planning to breed from them!  What a great outcome.  I hope they love their new homes.

If you would like a silkie rooster and can pick him up let me know using the contact form on the right hand side of this page.  I still have some white, grey, buff, and blue silkie roosters.  Any that don't get homes soon will end up as my dinner.

Saturday 8 July 2017

How to Cook Chinese Silkie Chicken

Chinese silkie chicken is a healthy meat that is often consumed in Asia.  It has very little fat, is high in B vitamins and extraordinarily high in carnosine.  The only real down sides are the small size and difficulty in obtaining a dead bird.  To that end, you may have to obtain a live bird and dispatch it yourself.

We faced great difficulty in finding details of how to cook silkie chicken and did not want to do it wrong.  To help other people in a similar situation I have composed this simple step by step procedure with pictures for you to follow.  If you don't eat meat or don't want to know about it please stop reading here.

Chinese Silkie in the pot with herbs and garlic

How to cook a Chinese Silkie Chicken in seven easy steps

Step 1  You will need to obtain a silkie chicken.  You could start with an egg and either incubate it or get a chicken to incubate it, but who has that kind of time these days?  We suggest starting with a cute little guy like this.  The colour of the down or feathers is not important.  It should be as cute as a button and fit nicely into the palm of your hand.  At this age they need heat and lots of cuddles.

Step 2  Treat the chicken well, let it live a good calm life.  Give it clean water, good food and a lot of time free ranging somewhere safe with some other chickens.  Your chicken will need a nice name, children are good at naming animals, this one's name was "Boo".  You can tell by the picture that Boo was a nice calm chicken who lived a happy life.

Step 3  Boo will need to have a quick and honorable death.  The faster and more pain free the better.  It is important that Boo does not get to watch other chickens die as she will find this stressful.  There is no need to make this any more stressful on the animal than it already is.  I generally took chickens behind the shed where no one and nothing could see.  I dislike this step so did not take a picture.  Instead, here is a picture that one of my kids made for me on the wood pile.
This has nothing to do with cooking silkies, but it makes me happy
Step 4  Feathers and entrails will need to be removed.  It is important not to waste anything so entrails could be saved and cooked, or fed to the dog, or dug into the vegetable garden to increase soil fertility and increase soil life.  The feathers can go in the compost or get dug into the vegetable garden to nourish next season's vegetables.  Even white silkies will have blue/black skin, meat and bones.  Once entrails and feathers have been removed the silkie chicken will look similar to this.
Chinese Silkie ready to cook
 Step 5  Cook Boo in some way, raw chicken is not overly good for you.  We followed a recipe from here.

Chinese silkie chicken cooked and ready to serve
Step 6  Eat the cooked meal, we ended up with a meal that looked like this.

Chinese silkie meat
Step 7  Once you have finished the meal you will have bones left over.  Discard the carcase in some sensible way, the bones will mostly be black.  You could make a soup or broth from the bones, or you could bury them in the vegetable garden, either way there is no need to waste them.  Please ensure that dogs do not eat cooked chicken bones.

Carcase of silkie chicken, the colour went odd in the picture

Saturday 16 June 2012

Meat chickens


I killed our first Plymouth Rock rooster 16 June 2012. 

He hatched out 15 November 2011 and was so much smaller than the others that I expected him to die in the first few weeks.  He did not get feathers until very late in his life, weeks after the girls got feathers.  His brother is larger but it is raining hard so I plan to do him another day (or sell him as he is pure bred and a stunning looking bird). 

It is difficult killing something I hatched out, fed, watered, and looked after.  He was a beautiful looking animal with a calm temperament, had I entered him he could easily have won medals in poultry shows.  He lived a calm and happy life, and died an honourable quick death, not at all like the terrible and painful life and death of a commercial meat chicken.

At the age of 7 months he weighed 3.71kg live, when he was ready to go in the freezer he weighed 2.50kg.  That is a dressing percentage of just over 67%, not too bad for the first rooster I have processed in such a long long time.

Unfortunately I did not keep records on the food he ate to reach this size.  If I were to guestimate based on the feed that he has been consuming over the past few weeks I would say it cost about $19 to get this far (which works out to about $7.30 per kg of chicken).  The actual cost must be lower than that as he certainly did not eat this much when he was a week old.  Next time I plan to keep stats and keep the young chickens feed completely separate from all other poultry feed so I can work out accurately how much it costs to feed a chicken from hatching to eating size.


Plymouth rock egg stats over a year


I was meticulously recording egg statistics (among other things) for our hens every day.

On average our plymouth rocks laid 221 eggs per hen per year.  That works out to an average of just over 4 eggs per hen per week.

This average over the year includes each hen moulting twice (they do not lay through a moult), some hens going off the lay as they were injured, each hen going broody and not laying an average of 0.3 times each (they were not allowed to hatch so stopped being broody after 2 weeks or so). 

Average number of eggs per hen per month:
April            23
May             21
June             19
July              20
August         16
September   18
October       15
November   17
December   18
January       17
February     18
March         19

These hens were free ranged through the orchard and not provided any extra light or heat.  They foraged for between a third and two thirds of their diet depending on the season.  Feed costs should be very low on acreage as they can forage for most of their feed.

We had one hen who lays a different looking egg, she laid far more than the others, her eggs were not counted so that we have a more accurate average number of eggs for my old strain of plymouth rocks.  I also did not include eggs that were laid while we were away as they were collected by our neighbours and I did not want to impose that they also count eggs as well as feed and water them.

Saturday 12 November 2011

Chicks


We have our first little baby chickens. Such a cute little things. We didn't have great success with our first attempts at an incubator. Only 6 chicks hatched a handful others were very close, I am sure I even heard some of them piping but the temperature changes were just too great for the poor little things. But we still have 6 little cuties to play with.

The breed is Plymouth rock. They are a large breed. Good layers and good for meat too.



Friday 28 October 2011

Ducklings

Our first ducklings. Isn't this one a cutie.

We decided we would do a bit of an experiment with this broody duck. Since we have chooks who do not go broody and we have ducks who are broody all the time. We popped some chook eggs under the mummy duck then a couple of duck eggs later on. All went well till right at the when every baby chick died in shell. They were fully formed and grown but something went wrong. After a bit of research we think that since the mummy duck got wet then sat on the eggs a bacteria got in and eventually killed the little chicks.

We did though get two very cute ducklings from her. She was not a vey good mum though. Wouldn't call the babies in at night or get them out of the rain. Will try an avoid brooding with her again.