Fall Meat Bird Grow out Stats

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

In Sept 25 White Rock Meat Chicks ordered from Frey’s Hatchery here in Ontario though our local coop arrived on the farm and were cuddled by Miss R an coo’d over indeed.

Dec 10th 24 healthy White Rock Meat Chicks (with a loss of one at a very young age) were delivered to be processed about 20 minutes down the road and then into the freezer they went the next day after they were picked up and brought home

That made them 77 days old or 11 weeks old. I had tried to book them in at the tenth week but i got the 11th, so be it

Per Frey’s Site “Produces a table bird in just 12 weeks. Females will be 5-6 lbs and males 7-8 lbs live weight” I am have the data to break it down per bird from my records given back to me, but I am going to average it out as i did a mix sex run on the chicks, so i had a mix of males and females

Here is a photo of some of them in mid november, another month to go and they are eating and growing!

Other then the loss of the one, they never gave me a moment of trouble, active, healthy, bright birds that grew well, and on the day they went in, the gentleman that came back out with the paperwork, said they were VERY nice birds, great job! i mean i knew that but nice to hear it none the less.

They averaged out at 7.3 pounds per bird for a total of 175 pounds of finished, ready for the freezer dressed weight..

It cost us $23 dollars per bird to buy, shelter/feed/bed and butcher them, this did not include our time or gas to pick them up or take them for butcher. Nor the barn itself, it came with the farm, its been used since.

On the flip side, it also does not account for the compost that they produced that will be used in gardens and not bought next year.

This works out to $3.15 a pound, now these were raised on locally grown produced feed, locally grown straw from down the road, and i know their care since they arrived as day old’s so i really do not like to compare them to store birds in terms of prices.

So lets break it down two ways, locally family raised chicken, pasture raised runs between $5 to $8 per pound, now because i am way into bio at the moment, all my chickens are inside with windows and screens and the garden/bugs and greens comes to them, so they are not truly “pasture raised” but try and find price on a local family that does not market pasture but indoor but treated like pasture otherwise is hard to come by

Now we can look at the store, family pack of legs is 4.99 per pound, Chicken breasts can run between 9 to 11 per pound, other parts range in the 5 to 9 pound per pound..

So i am going to go with the $8 per pound, that means I saved $4.85 per pound or more raising them myself compared to trying to buy something equally raised. We could have saved even more if we had butchered ourselves but for us it was worth sending them out to be done.

If we had done them ourselves here on the farm, they would have come in cost wise at $16 a bird or $2.19 per pound, it would have most likely been closed to 2.25 as i would have needed to buy my own freezer bags and that would have added just a touch more.

We will be getting meat chicks in the spring and we will be enjoying these though the winter/spring. Did you raise meat birds this year? The cost of chicken is going up, up and up at the stores, and to be fair so did the cost of raising these from last time but compared, its still far cheaper to raise our own!

Posted in Chickens, Real Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dough Maker Review

Posted on March 7, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

I do not make nearly as much bread as i did, as bread is quite limited for Dear Hubby at this point, However as the household grew by one, bread needs have grown again. The price of bread and the ability to control what goes in my bread matters to me.

However it turns out that standing and properly kneading bread currently both for smaller and for sure bigger batches is proven challenging combined with my health issues. While Miss R makes a amazing loaf of bread, i like to continue to make my breads, doughs an even pasta

I didn’t need a bread maker as i want very much to control my bread shapes and bake, but i said to hubby, i sure could use a dough maker and that is just what i got, its big enough to do three standard loafs and it makes dough and proofs it, that’s it!

The rest is still all hands on for me.. While there is a learning curve, its been a easy one for me and i am loving it. There is a very slow rise for sourdough, there is the faster rise times for regular yeast doughs and there is no proof/heat for cold doughs.

I have been using it for a month now, and have made a number of doughs with it, and so far i am giving it a solid 4.5 out of 5

It only gets .5 off because i would like to be able to have more choice on the heat used for the ferment/rise timing. Its very minor indeed and of course the other downside is that it does take power to use, so there is that added cost.

I am thinking of it as a mobility aid and if i need to choose between using a aid to make sure we can control what we eat, how things are made, well worth doing so.

Posted in Baking | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Do you have Sheep on your farm? Ontario Sheep Support

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

If you live in Ontario and have sheep on your farm, then i do hope you have joined your local sub zone group of the province wide system. I didn’t for the first 10 years i had sheep and boy what a amazing difference to access to information after i did.

While i am currently for the first time in over 20 years without sheep here on the farm till i can get the small pasture fencing redone sooner then later, my x-sheep are living within easy drive distance at a girlfriends farm and i saw them all fat and happy this winter, and will head over in the spring for a few things and see them again in April, i am hoping to get back offspring or grand offspring at some point to bring back to the farm in very small personal milking sheep numbers.

Still i have kept my membership up as its has that much value in terms of the email updates, the farm visits, the annual meetings and the training days and camps.

The newest newsletter arrived in the mail and with it came the most amazing book! It will be flipped over into my garden book for 2025 and my chick/ducking breeding, hatching and raising records. It is so well designed and filled with resources for big livestock farmers, small farmers and small holders.

In these times of trial, it is wonderful to see such a useful in hand filled with positivity! If local, reach out, you will not be disappointed. If you are from other provinces in canada, what is yours like?

And if you are outside Canada, does your county have programs, your state, do you have regular day long experts come in for seminars, hands on sheering days, farm visits to see how other do things?

Posted in farm journel, sheep | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

March coming in like a lion 2025

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

The boxes of peach tree seedlings continue to do well, the average is now 6 inches plus with a few top growers reaching 10 inches already, they will be good size when sale day and pickups happen in may

Today is the first of march and weather wise, the snow storm started last night and has been coming down since, we got three inches of new fresh snow last week and it looks like another three or four or more is coming in. Thankfully the warming snap helped melt off the roofs so they are not carrying a crazy amount of weight.

Others have not been so lucky and have needed to shovel off their roofs in many parts of ontario due to very crazy snow loaded. Clearly this should have been done sooner but still, WOW! In keeping with the snow load, so many folks have been showing their photos of car ports down but none worse then what happened in our capital city this past week..

For whatever reason they decided to pile all the snow off the top of the car parking build onto a single corner and they kept doing so though record breaking snow falls in a very short order.. the weight was to much and it dropped a corner of a four story parking garage onto itself. Thankfully no one was hurt but over 50 folks are without their vehicles due to this.

Today is Dear Hubby’s 53rd Birthday and i expect at least some of it will be spent shoveling snow, yet again!

I was excited to pick up some green onion bulbs to get into the pots this weekend to get them under the grow lights, given the snow pack, i am not in a hurry to get things started, i will be giving some things a bit of a extra week or two before planting the seeds.

I have time to do one more box for winter sowing as the seeds have been in the fridge getting a head start on things and my farm porch greenhouse just had the winds do a bit of damage so will need some new plastic and some shifting of wood, in winter that area gets filled with dry and aged firewood as it allows us to refill the indoor without having to go truly outside, however what is left will need to be shift this month so that space/shelfs and so on will prepped and ready for cool/cold season seed starting and then for lots of in and out warmer seed starting and hardening off etc.

Have you started your early seedlings, or do you live in a zone where you are in full seedling start mode, being in Garden Zone 5a, while spring forward with time change is next weekend and its officially only 20 days till spring, it will be much longer till our last spring frost date.

May you fill your weekend with things that bring you peace and help you connect with the hear and now in the best way possible!

Posted in At the kitchen table | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Blueberry Bush Pruning Setting the Stage for years to come

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

What amazing set of pruning with writing that i came across, its just wonderfully clear and so easy to understand.

This could be a self-grown crane cutting, or a bought plug or even a potted plant you got from the garden center, even if bigger, it should be treated the same, never allowed to fruit the year you bought it, if it has fruit on it, take it off when you get it home!

Now is the winter to figure out if you planted it in the right spot, did you have good growth, did it get enough sun, did it get wind burned or did it get planted to close to something that rapidly outgrew it? If you do need to adjust, this is the year to do it.. If not, its a basic clean up and shaping time and if it loved where was at and grew really well, you can even get some fruit.

After three years, you are set to go with your low bush or high bush blueberry for the next 15 to 20 years, these are productive long lived fruit producers.

Got a bush that loves your area and that you adore the fruit on, remember you can keep some of your best trimmings and use them to start new bushes at a fraction of the cost for yourself or to be sold at the end of the farmgate or at the local community garden plant sale or gifted to someone to help build your local community food shed

Posted in Food Forest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lent 2025

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

Well, i normally do give up something in honor of lent, something small but regular that makes me pause and think a little more deeply on life and how it should be lived, on what i am giving back to my community.

Tomato soup with cheese

However Miss R kindly shared that she will be going meatless for lent, and i am not even sure she is going to allow fish, which with my upbringing was allowed. This is going to be a challenge for me as the main household cook.

40 days of making sure there is a shelf filled with pre-cooked/prepared high quality vegetarian protein sources, thankfully she is open to our farm fresh eggs (and we have 6 new ready to lay hens arriving to increase our flock size, as our older hens are coming three this year) arriving in mid march. The duck hens will start laying in march as the daylight hours get longer!

There is no way that Dear Hubby will go meatless, so i am trying to figure out rules yet, can i make her soups with bone broths or does the bits of meat that comes in them count and no and if not, i will need to make veggie only soup broths.

I have a full grasp on all the amazing ways to add protein to her diet menu, rice and beans, cheese/yogurts, spinach greens, Potato’s and so much more.

My plan at the moment is to create her a shelf in the fridge filled with different things that can be restocked, some homemade and some store gotten, a big salad style bar will be a very good thing indeed.

I do have a few cookbooks but not many that are meatless and i will dig them out, then i just need to decide if i am going to do some larger batch cooking with meat for hubby to make a choice on and or if it makes sense that i batch cook a roast, chicken breasts and so on a heat and add on can easily be done at the main meals.

I am sure the time will pass quickly and yet coming into it 40 days seems like a lot while its staring me in the face as i try and sort things out. With the respect given to this amazing young adult, i will show her my support by making these changes in our household menus.

Got a favorite meatless dish, you just adore? I am open to hearing about it! share the link to your own blogs site, or to a favorite cooking site or recommend a cookbook i just have to get, i am all ears, got a book on lent an meal plans???

Posted in At the kitchen table | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Hedgerow Snow Capture

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

Just as my own double hedge rows work in the summer for both food production and shelter, they act as a living snow fence in winter, there is a swale on the far side of them that drops down a solid three feet, excellent for keeping water in place and allowing it to soaking the gardens around it but also means that before the snow can come up and though. The winter winds get cut by the spruce trees, and then trapped again by the hedge in front before coming at the house itself.

Don’t let this photo fool you, you can just make out the pathway in the middle and if my Miss Fancy was using that path you would not even see here, that snow is a solid three feet deep on this side, and a solid five foot plus on the other side. This area is a haven for the small birds like sparrow’s, chickadee’s and junco’s

I remember the first year we moved here being surprised to see so many farmers left these stripes of corn standing but as the snows came i went ah.. then i saw them plant corn sections even when the rest of the fields were in different and went huh.. turns out they are paid to do so if their fields are by the right roads.

“Plant a snow fence

The City encourages landowners who plant corn to participate in the Alternative Snow Fencing Program.

In late summer, participating landowners leave six to 12 rows of standing corn parallel to the road and 20 metres from the road’s right-of-way property line. In December, landowners are paid an amount based on the market value per tonne of the unharvested corn, the yield of tonnes per acre, the actual acres standing and for spring clean-up work

In non-agricultural areas, landowners can plant trees 20 metres from the right-of-way property line.”

Ottawa City

I was very pleased to see that they are expanding the tree shelter belt program to three new areas, so great for land owners!

We have been working on planting hedge rows on the road side frontage, its more tricky on the farm sides as there are legal rights to the farmer due to tree roots and footage required as the land around us is tiled. So we had to do our side hedgerows into further back to keep to the footage required,

When we built our fences, i set them back for a bit of a spray zone protections, but when we redo them for what will be the final time in our lifetime, i am taking that two feet back for a few reasons including full fenced to the property line.

I am still not sure what to do with the large stripe between the cedar hedgerow and the farmers field , i keep thinking it would be lovely in wild flowers or a combo sunflower triple row and then wild flowers. we will see.. we will see.

Do they have living snow fencing in your neck of the woods, do they pay you to put in hedgerows and to keep them year after year.. do you live in a country where hedgerows are normal and expected, do you live in a spot where there are no hedgerows at all.

I grew up in alberta and for me, seeing hedgerows as a child the normal, due to the fact that they had millions and millions of trees and bushes planted into hedgerows after the dirty 30s as a huge province wide project for many years..

Sadly as new farmers came in, they took out the hedgerows and now are starting to see the results of those losses, they will learn they were there for a reason and will be need to be planted again.

Farm Buildings in Vermilion Valley, Alberta, [1920]. This photo shows the use of Caragana bushes as windbreaks around farmyards.
(photo credit: Library and Archives Canada / PA-101669)

What is your personal favorite hedgerow look? I loved Caragana as a child, those dense green big bushes with the pretty yellow flowers with the hint of sweetness and the birds loved the seeds so much.

It was never used as human feed that i remember but the chickens sure loved it and no doubt!

“The seed contains 12.4% of a fatty oil and up to 36% protein and it has been recommended as an emergency food for humans. More than just an emergency food, this species has the potential to become a staple crop in areas with continental climates. Young pods can be cooked and used as a vegetable.”

As a child that natural space under them provided shelter on a hot day and a good book reading spot! Many a game with friends was played under the hedgerows. One of the great things about these bushes is they are self filling and spreading due to the seed dropping and they are of a height that allows them to work under the power lines!

Do you have any on your property?

Posted in Friday Rambles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Snow and more Snow!

Posted on February 20, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

The work required to keep the driveway and pathways open has been massive on behalf of Dear Hubby in Combo with Miss R a touch.. While we do have a snow blower, Dear Hubby loves to do it by hand and shovel.. each of the storms meant 20, 000 plus on the fit bit with over a hundred plus active minutes each day and there were multiple days and layers of storms, the drifts were brutal. Do you see the little grey commute car, the drift was as high as the car and it had to be dug out including under it.

Because we have such massive amount of land, those banks do not look near as big as they should in this photo, they are not having it as easy in the towns and cities, where they are in major clean up mode as they are running out of room on where to place the snow.

Officially we got just over 70 cm in a matter of days from the back to back storms or 2 and half feet of snow, which means that we just got side swiped by the storm as other areas got double or even triple that over the same time frame. Having said that for our local area, that was the most snow in the same time frame in the past 20 plus years so it feels like a lot.

It was the wind and drifting that made it a issue.. take a look at the back six foot fence line in the small pasture.. about a foot of fence post on some spots and less then six inches on others! Those drifting waves cut into the snow. Thankfully there is nothing out there to draw the horses to want to cut into that kind of snow, they are to be found at the hay feeder, the barn lean to or in front of the big barn taking advantage of the solar heating and the wind break.

The big dog yard is not a safe play zone as they can walk up and hope over the fence like its not even there! The little dog uses the shoveled pathways as her zoom zoom lol. The cats are in the house much more over the past week and or greet the humans in the barn snoozing in the beds that get extra warmth from the cat heat lamp area.

The weather has been amazing for winterfest coming into its 47th year and the canal skating, over 400 000 thousand folks have been out to the different events, the ice sculptures are always worth a stop as are the snow ones!

Otherwise its been a stay in and stay safe and warm, we lost power for a touch but not for long, we stayed off the roads following the orders that unless it was a emergency, to stay home and stay off them, others did not listen and we have upward of 70 car piles ups, on my last drive on the way home from a medical appointment with the snow and the drifting in the days leading up to the big storm, i watched as we came up from clear bare good road to a area that has bad drifting and while i slowed right now, as i drove carefully though this tricky spot, there were five vehicles that had slide out and were in the ditch, everyone waved me on and showed their phones, which was good but still i could not have stopped if i wanted to or i would have just joined them.

Many people were told to come into work and then reported having to turn around and head back home when stopped by four to six foot drifts, the crews worked their hours till they were maxed out and townships had to put out notices that they were shutting down for 8 hours in the night for mandatory rest before starting again at 4am.

We had a number of folks that got sick in their homes due to the wind and snow drifting covering their furnace vents and so on, and they didn’t know they needed to keep them clear and so they had carbon monoxide poisoning, thankfully no one died but over a dozen households needed medical help and treatment.

If you were in the storms path, i hope you came out the other side warm and safe with no issues, still we had to have a little fun with all the fluffy snow coming down..

Game NIGHTs!!!

So if you got caught in the snow, did you bring out the cards! The board games or the D&D night!

Posted in At the kitchen table | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Taking Stock and Counting it twice!

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

While the 50+ peach babies have been moved up into their gallon pots and and even more lines of grow lights have been hung and fan is set up and ready for extra air movement, along with winter sowed seeds, we are still off by a solid four to six weeks before we want to start more for the garden.

Which means that i am in late winter cleaning, sorting mode. The big storage closet and the secondary dry storage Pantry on the main floor of the house needed a full deep clean, sort, check on levels of supplies, lists for re-stocking made.

As folks know i have been struggling with some health issues and while i am working hard to gain back strength, i had started having issues lifting some of the stacked heavier items on the top shelfs so we shift a number of them into the closet shelfs for better height pull out and carry, and put the big light weight Tupperware tubs filled with dried herbs an more up top till they are needed again in the big push in gardening season.

While i knew that with me making meals out of the pantry, canning cellar and freezers for the past five months without proper restocking happening as i have been dealing with illness, keeping the fresh food to standard fresh fruits we keep in the house, the salad and salad fixings and soup veggies, meant that we were using up layer after layer of the storage goods.

Still color me surprised that after this weekends sort and clean, all those tubs on the third shelf were empty, all have been washed, dried and placed waiting to be refilled and put back into the use. Each shelf is always two layers deep, that is a lot of empty tubs that are normally filled!

While the working pantry in the kitchen still has some of the items that are normally in the tubs on the third shelf it means there is no fill up back up in stock..

On one hand this is a total win! The whole point of a deep pantry is that you can go not just days or weeks but MONTHS making meals and there are in fact still many months of meals to be made from the staples in the house.

On the other hand, i need to do some stocking up, i will be feeling the price increases, a lot of these items gotten when they cost a lot less and came in bigger amounts. I will be feeling the inflations that is for sure!

Other things will have to wait till the gardens in full swing for me to prepare and dry the food or blends for future meals in 2026 and beyond.

Onward this week, i will tackle the front working pantry in the kitchen itself, at which point i will have a full handle on the shopping list for re-stocking for the dry goods. Then onward to the freezers (for a fast recap as i know what is in all of them but one) and then we need to do a final count of the canning pantry which will be a good thing for the rest of the garden planning!

How are you doing coming into the depth of winter? How is your deep pantry holding up? Having you ever needed to eat out of your pantry for weeks to months due to anything really, job loss, new baby, health related issues?

How did your pantry hold up? what was something you ran out of faster then you were expecting? Its been hard to find bulk 2 pound bags of my favorite dried soup blend of rice/peas/beans/barley in the store for the past while so i am fully out.

I am giving though to making my own blend of it, as it a favorite for sure.

Posted in dry pantry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Snow Day!

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

It’s a snow day here locally, while we have gotten four inches overnight and its still coming down heavy, with drifts we are seeing 10 plus inches, they got it far worse in other parts of the province for sure.

Still the whole area has had school closed, buses cancelled and highways and roads closed, county offices and so on closed down as well as a official statement that this is a travel only when needed due to weather event.

A few fun things to do on snow days, of course there is ..

Number one : Make a snowman, its old fashion and it has staying power because its so simple, roll the body and then make it your own! But don’t be limited to just snowmen, you can have some fun with different kinds of snow builds.

Number Two Make Snow Ice-cream!

Number 3 (for the gardeners) Move that snow for snow pack

Now is the time where we can if in good health move some of the snow to where we would like a slower melt out in the gardens, perhaps there is a micro zone that you don’t like to warm up as fast, perhaps there is a fruit tree that find tends to bloom a touch early, perhaps you have a favorite plant that is a little tender to freeze/melts, now is the time to shift that snow to your advantage.

Number 4 – It is mild out, which is is here, its snowing but its also very mild, compared to the bitter cold we have been having, consider taking your horse out for a walk on cleared road, almost no traffic, good footing and a fun little together time.. Don’t have a horse, take the dog! Don’t have a dog, take yourself LOL

Snow Storm, between the Black Bear Coat and Beard, True North Strong

Number 5 – Get the Camera out! This is the perfect time to get some wild bird photography at feeders, they will all be coming in for a snack, get those pink cheeked photos of your little ones make their snow man or your puppy romping in the snow.

Posted in At the kitchen table | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment