Tag Archives: freezer camp

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Good morning everyone! It’s almost spring time! One of my favorite/least favorite seasons. I love it because everything is new and shiny. We can get seeds in the ground, baby animals born, and the farm really starts churning. However, I have the absolute worst allergies. So if I miss even one day of Zyrtec D, that ruins me for over a week. It’s crazy!

So on to the good stuff, we have a new litter of baby rabbits! Plus two more pregnant does due this month and next. So many things to look forward too! Im hoping we just had our last cold front, and this litter survived the cold, so we are smooth sailing.

Our broiler chickens officially went to freezer camp this weekend. We had an average live weight of 8lbs and ended up with over 70lbs of meat after processing and sealing. I’m not going to lie, processing chickens is harder than processing rabbits. By the end of the day, my back was killing me and I was over it. We started at 3pm and finished everything around 9 that night. I’m sure it took us way longer since it was our first time. The next batch I want to cut that time down by alot!

We sealed 6 whole broilers and then cut the rest up for individual meals. We ended up with one bag of tenders, two bags of wings, seven bags of boneless skinless breasts, and four bags of leg quarters. All of those have enough meat to feed us for a night plus leftovers for Dwayne’s lunch the next day. Financially, if you look at the price of chicken right now, we came out on top over $200!

As for our review on the Cornish Cross broilers, we are more than satisfied with them. They were easy to raise, had a ton of meat on them, and the grass where the chicken tractor was has never looked better! We have an order of fifty coming in May. I’m not looking forward to that processing day!

I will see you all back next week with some cute baby bunny pictures! I didn’t want to uncover them with this cold front here.

God Bless,

Grace Revival Homestead

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Tuesday Homestead Update

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Reader beware! Pictures of rabbit dispatch day ahead. If you don’t like to see dead and gutted animals, turn back now.

Well. I plan to always be real and upfront with this blog about homesteading and life in general. So there is sad news for this week’s post. We lost all 10 new kits to the cold one night and my favorite hen got out of the coop and a predator got her. It was a sad couple days. There is always that possibility when you take on the responsibility of animals.

However, on the good side of the homestead, we sold another rabbit. That covers the feed cost for two months. We are all about paying for the homestead by the homestead.

This week we also taught the kids how to dispatch, skin, and gut rabbits. It was a great anatomy and life skills lesson. Plus the rabbits this go around weighed two pounds more than our last batch. The selective breeding we implemented is beginning to pay off.

We have meat in our freezer and a new doe added to our breeding program. All is well again in the rabbitry. Our meat chickens are coming along nicely. We’ve had to move them from inside, to a chicken tractor outside, to the porch in a dog crate (thanks random rapid flooding) and back into the chicken tractor. And we are only half way through their life cycle! I will definitely wait until the spring to get another order of them. No more winter chicks, unless we have an indoor brooder setup.

That is all for now, that I can remember at least! I’ll be back next week!

With all of God’s blessings

Grace Revival Homestead