…but at least we know how to make lemonade out of lemons! Err…something like that. 😀
Remember back when we ordered 15 Easter Egger chicks from an online hatchery? The same hatchery we had used three times before this? I was set on getting at least ONE hen that laid a friggin pink egg. My EEs all lay blue and yet my friend has some that lay pink. And so many little girls who come on farm tours want to see a pink egg, and well, I happen to love pink myself! So I thought if I ordered that many I’d have pretty good chances of getting some and I could sell the rest of the hens if I didn’t want a large amount of blue and green eggs.
A few days in Christine noticed that one little one was having trouble standing up. This isn’t that uncommon b/c they can get jostled around during shipping and so some physical therapy was in order. She worked with that chicken daily getting it’s leg stronger.
Picture is the chicken in a glass learning to push off on it’s leg in order to get stronger. Chicken rehab is a thing, ya’ll! Well a week later than chicken was fine. And then two and a half weeks later I convinced our friend who was taking a turkey from us to also take a chicken so that the turkey had a friend the same size. Well, also this chicken had randomly broken it’s leg, something mysterious that we couldn’t figure out the cause of considering the chicks were still in a brooder inside with nothing to really jump off of or fall from. She agreed to rehab the poor chicken with the help of her eager children. So at almost four weeks old we dropped the turkey and chicken off with her. She took the chicken in to the feed store to see if they had suggestions for fixing the leg. And that’s when I got a text from her.
“…the feed store employee thinks that this chicken is a meat chicken…”
My heart sank.
Suddenly the last four weeks flashed before my eyes. The broken legs, the molty look of the chickens, the fact that they were all the same color (EEs usually come in an assortment of colors), the fact that we didn’t bond a single drop to any of them, and well, how big they were compared to the turkeys…
Suddenly it all made sense. Were we so busy that we did not notice? Why didn’t we question what was going on? This to me is a major reminder: Always question things.
I assumed that b/c I always had luck with this hatchery that they sent what we ordered. I just blindly followed, believing what the packing slip told me.
Oh my gosh! I felt so stupid. Soooo stupid. I looked at my Frankenchickens and felt so upset that I was fooled for four weeks and also that OMG, we now had 15 chickens to butcher (they had put an extra in the box, so my friend taking one still meant we had 15 left) in just 4-6 weeks. Remember a few months ago when we butchered FOUR and cried like babies on the ground? FIFTEEN, ya’ll. Fifteen.
But you know what, we’ve done this before. We can do it again. Thank God we aren’t vegetarians. Thank God this didn’t happen to us our first year on the farm when we said we’d never kill any of our own animals.
If you’re wondering about my poor friend who took in that chicken with the broken leg, she had to dispatch it. I feel so much guilt about this after her kids were so excited to “fix” the chicken.
And if you’re curious about the hatchery, yes I called them. They asked for pictures. They confirmed we have Cornish Cross chickens, not EEs. They told me the guy who packaged our birds had already been fired for messing up orders (apparently he sent someone 50 Cornish chickens instead of the 50 turkeys they ordered…can you imagine???). They also said that we should not have received 4 turkeys; at most we should have gotten just 2 since we ordered only one. It was all a mistake. Yes, we confirmed our turkeys are turkeys LOL. They offered to mail us the 15 sexed EEs I had ordered and I said, in a nice way, no way, no way, no way.
Ya’ll, I’ve had enough chickens this year to last me a looooong while. Or at least til next Spring. 🙂
There’s a rainbow at the end of this storm. We have plenty of meat to eat. God is watching over us, no doubt about it. We even have enough to share and those went like hotcakes. Apparently people want local organically fed pasture raised birds that are Reiki’d and prayed over. Our chickens are not cheap. We will likely cry over them after we pray. But they are well cared for and treated with respect.
If you’re interested in buying meat from us we will have lamb and goat available next year. I’m not sure we’ll end up with pork at this point or not. We raise it for our family and if there is extra we will sell some. We do have a waitlist so let us know if you’d like to be added. It’s not cheap to support local farmers and homesteaders but you’re helping the planet, you’re supporting a family, and you have the peace of mind that your food had a great life. It’s likely more nutrient dense because of the way it was raised and the feed it was given. Peace and love, ya’ll.