Wow! Chickens are going fast!

We are thrilled to say that our chickens are have been very well received again this year, and the preorders for the August chickens ( and a neighborhood fox) have pretty much taken care of all the chickens. We had hoped to have a few extra to bring to the Farmer's Markets and sell off the farm, but I don't think we will .

I placed the order for our next batch of chicks last week, and they are due to arrive here on August 5th. Since it take 9 or 10 weeks for them to grow, and then we need to allow time for them to be processed I think we are looking at them being ready for pickup October 9 or October 16. We already have folks getting on the list, and we really don't want to run out. Well, I guess we do want to run out....we sure don't want to have too many. But we don't want too few. See our predicament? We're a pretty small potatoes operation. Chickens take up a lot of freezer space , and the last thing we want is to have 150 too many birds. So we try to really pace our production to what we are pretty darn sure we can sell in a reasonable period of time.

Anyway, I guess if we were to get a zillion preorders in the next couple weeks, we'd still have time to get another batch of chicks started. The weather window for pasture chicken raising in Embarrass, MN is pretty short. You may have heard how cold we get around here. Last year,we brought our last batch to the butcher November 2nd, and we are hoping to finish up chickens a little earlier this year.

I guess what I am trying to say is ....we welcome you to pre-order some chickens. After these fall birds go...there are no more until June/July of 2010. Wow....that just blows me away. It sounds soooo far away. That's the cool part of farming, though.  There is always more to learn and ways to improve.

And there's always next year to try again.

Next summer we'll have to raise more.