Our first birds are hatching — we’ve got ten Bresse chickens (and I learned that there’s both a dominant white gene and a recessive white gene. French flocks go for the recessive white because you’ll always get white birds. American Bresse have dominant white … which means you get a colored bird!)
We got a chicken plucker for processing birds this year — the metal on the base is really thin, the motor appears to have come pre-rusted, and they somehow consistently put one of the rubber sticks in upside down (although, after using it, we think this might be intentional and kind of “sweep” the feathers from underneath out the shoot).
We have been very hesitant to buy one of these — they are expensive. But it takes us so much time to butcher birds. I see videos on YouTube of people plucking a bird in five minutes. That’s not us. At first, I thought maybe it was a “get better with practice” sort of thing. Or that we weren’t scalding enough. Or that we were doing something else wrong. But it’s been years. We’re not getting much quicker, the scald is fine, and the only thing we might be doing wrong is being too picky about what constitutes “plucked”.
The biggest hurdle was that we couldn’t really see one work to determine if we’d be done defeathering in a minute or if we’d still be spending half an hour plucking feathers. There wasn’t a good way to find out, though. People post videos online, but they also post videos of themselves plucking a bird in a few minutes. So that’s not really trustworthy. We finally decided to just spend money and buy a plucker. They work! There may be a few big wing feathers to pull. There may be a few smaller feathers near the feet. But the bird was plucked within a few minutes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to butcher a bird, and Scott was able to get a bird to the “ready to be butchered” point in fifteen minutes (that includes walking across the yard twice). This is such a huge difference — we were able to process all of our turkeys in a single day. It wouldn’t be a short day, there’s a good hour or two to clean everything up once we’re done. But it’s done in a day. And the birds were plucked very well.
The tomato plants are starting to get big — still a few weeks before we can plant them outside, but we have plenty of healthy plants.
I had basically given up on the asparagus (they were older seeds), but I finally have five plants sprouted — this is part of my endeavor to get more plant once / harvest yearly stuff growing. 
And then there’s the chicken chow — this is Bocking 14 comfrey. It doesn’t go to seed, but provides a high-protein leafy food for chickens and turkeys.
We’re getting more fencing and, yet again, I find that different lengths have different price-per-foot (and not in the way I expected where longer rolls are more cost effective). Looks like we’ll be getting a bunch of 50′ rolls instead of a few 150′ rolls.
| Item | Length | Cost Per 1 | # Required | Total |
| GardenCraft | 50 | 16.99 | 12 | 203.88 |
| YardGard | 150 | 79.99 | 4 | 319.96 |
The chickens we hatched earlier this year have started laying their first eggs — our first chicken to lay an egg (Queenington) laid a large egg, and the rest of our egg layers followed with fairly normal chicken-egg sized eggs. I didn’t know that it was common for chickens to start off laying small eggs (called fairy eggs) until we got the Bresse hens. They’re not great for hatching (really tiny chick incubates and often cannot even get out of the egg), but the eggs are perfectly edible. I think we’ll be making pickled eggs with this year’s tiny eggs.
Started with 19 chicken eggs in the incubator — two didn’t develop and were removed. Three eggs haven’t hatched (three of those have pipped, but haven’t really gotten anywhere since). One little guy is really weak and still in the incubator so the other little ones don’t sit and lay on him. That means we’ve got a thirteen little chickens in the brooder. And, early next week, the ducks should start hatching.
We’ve got a bunch of new little ones hatching — Anya has four little ones in the brooder, and we have two more in the incubator.
The first chick hatched this evening — and three more followed throughout the night. We’ve got four little ones out of their eggs and a bunch of eggs (hopefully) to go.
Pipping!
Scott and Anya candled all of the eggs tonight — of the 41 eggs, there are three that might not be developing. But all of the eggs are still in the incubator because there weren’t any obviously undeveloped eggs. If all of these eggs hatch, we’re going to have an absolute swarm of baby birds!