Pure Poultry

Living Well with Heritage Chickens, Turkeys and Ducks

Victoria Miller

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780865717534
• eBook ISBN: 9781550925463
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Hatching a sustainable life with heritage poultry

Houdan. Nankin. Indian Runner. Narragansett. These may sound like exotic place names or unusual varieties of produce, but each actually refers to one of the many hundreds of lesser-known poultry breeds which tempt the livestock owner who's prepared to venture into less familiar territory. Providing an alternative to commercial breeds and hybrids, heritage breeds each boast their own unique characteristics and personality traits, and are a valuable (and entertaining) addition to a sustainable food system.

Pure Poultry is the first book in nearly a hundred years to focus specifically on heritage breeds of chickens, turkeys and ducks and their role in a self-reliant lifestyle. This timely, beautifully illustrated resource includes:

• Detailed guidelines on everything from housing, breeding and day-to-day care, to processing, cooking and preserving
• Much-needed information on using heritage breeds for egg and meat production
• Tips, inspiration, recommended reading, and additional resources
• A unique planning worksheet that simplifies the process of starting out with poultry.

Brimming with quiet humor, Pure Poultry is an immensely readable "how-to and why-to" based entirely on personal experience-including plenty of lessons learned the hard way. Pure Poultry shows how heritage-breed poultry can enhance and deepen anyone's quality of life, whether you have a farm, a small backyard, or a neighbor with space to share.

CHAPTER 1

When Good People Get Poultry

“WAKE UP,” my husband David said softly. It was early on a Saturday morning in late May. “It’s Chicken Day.”

We had been working hard to get ready for the arrival of our first chickens, and the day had come, too quickly and not quickly enough.

I don’t remember much of what I did all day, although I’m sure I was fidgeting with the innocent anticipation of a little kid on Christmas Eve. The week before, we had met some people a few miles down the hill from us. They were in the process of moving, downsizing actually. Since there was no room for chickens at their new place, the birds had to go.

The chickens turned out to be Buff Orpingtons. Great! I thought. The Orpington was on my short list of preferred breeds, those that met all my criteria (more about this later).

I realized — too late — that I had failed to pay adequate attention when the birds’ owner mentioned an incident of the rooster rushing at him, quite aggressively, for no apparent reason. This bird was large, with a permanently peevish expression. I assumed (blush) that if we were just “nice” to the chickens, the rooster would mellow out.

Not knowing any better, in spite of all my research, we also took at face value the man’s claim as to the birds’ age. “A year and four months,” he confidently stated. Much later, we concluded that if those numbers had been reversed, it would have been closer to the mark. The following spring, when our second-generation roosters grew spurs that were maybe an inch long by their first birthdays, we wondered. Papa Cock’s spurs must have been a good four inches long, not that we ever got close enough to measure. At least, not while he was alive.

Anyway, it was Chicken Day. We expected delivery of the birds and their coop late that afternoon. Although it was a bit pricey, we had decided to buy the coop from the owners because it had good storage space for feed and equipment. It also had nest boxes and roost space for more than four times the number of birds we were starting with. Plus, they would deliver it for a small fee.

I was nervous and excited and impatient by the time they drove up. The chickens were in waxed cardboard Chiquita banana boxes, which David and I transferred to the back of our car while the guys were maneuvering the trailer to put the coop in place. Finally, it was done, and the truck drove off as dusk began to deepen over the Olympic foothills.

Although it was a little early, we decided that it would be best to just put the birds into the roost for the night and let them settle down. So we took them, one by one, from their banana boxes and gently placed them into the roost through the side door, talking quietly to them. I was entranced by their soft clucking and cooing as they moved around the roost area. They were just beautiful. This was good.

After they were all tucked in and the coop doors secured, we walked back to the house. Actually I think I floated; it felt like Christmas, at the moment when you look at the pile of paper and ribbons and bows and realize the last gift has been opened. The anticipation of earlier that day had given way to a mixture of feelings: excitement at the start of something new; satisfaction (and relief) that we’d gotten through this part of the process; and even yet a little nervousness, on my part anyway. Had I learned enough? Would we be good caretakers of these beautiful creatures? Would they like it here? Would they be attacked and killed by a swarm of mutant killer bees their first day on our farm?

As we settled in for the night, David said, “Don’t be disappointed if the hens don’t lay eggs right away. They’ll probably be upset by the move; they need a little transition time.”

Okay, I thought sleepily. As I dozed off, it occurred to me to wonder how he would know that. Must ask him in the morning.

CHAPTER 2

Another Beautiful Day in Paradise

CANYON CREEK FARMS wasn’t always a farm. David’s Portuguese grandparents bought the land in 1936 after the previous owner defaulted on his property taxes. At the time, David’s mother, Lorelei, the youngest of the three Moniz sisters, was about nine years old. The five of them settled into the tiny old wooden house that was already there, at the top of a ridge overlooking a grassy meadow to the east and natural peat bog beyond.

The property had been clear-cut back in the 1920s. When the Moniz family arrived, there were not many trees here. Now, more than eighty years later, there are so many trees that it’s difficult to imagine the farm without them. Something like thirty-three of our forty acres are wooded, with a mix of several kinds of fir, red alder, cedar, cottonwood, maple and even a few madrone trees. I didn’t realize how much of our property — about a third — is down in a canyon until I saw an aerial photo. On the west side of the road, the land drops off, steeply in places, down three hundred feet to Canyon Creek. Since the runoff from both of our ponds goes downhill to the creek, we realized that there is excellent potential for hydroelectric power.

Speaking of power, our farm has none. Our property is two miles off the electrical grid; that is, we don’t have full-time electricity. Our house is about two miles up the hill from our nearest neighbor and the end of the utility grid. Frankly, even if we had the money (approximately $100,000; this is not a misprint) to connect to the grid, we would still choose to keep things as they are. As I write this, we are almost finished installing the direct-current (DC) part of our new solar electric system, everything, that is to say, except for the actual house wiring. This system is designed to provide all the power we need for the house, a fully equipped power tool shop and eventually a guest house. For now, though, the house runs on propane and is quite comfortable. We have hot water, a gas refrigerator/freezer, a gas stove and oven and gas lamps on the walls. Two wood stoves provide our heat about eight months of the year. And I love the fact that we have three guest rooms.

In fact, this house, which David’s grandfather built in the late 1940s, is larger than the one we lived in in Seattle before we moved here in 2006. It’s a wonderful house, built to be fire-resistant (we’re surrounded by many, many acres of woods in a fairly dry climate) as well as to withstand mountain weather, including the windstorms and snowfall that pummel us each winter. Naturally we have an abundant supply of wood for fuel; the fir and alder especially make beautiful firewood. Considering the size of the house (about 2,300 square feet), it’s amazing how well the two wood stoves heat it. Of course, we may not always be as excited as we are now to be cutting, hauling, splitting and stacking so many cords of firewood every year. It’s a lot of work. But we love this place.

Our first year here, 2006, was spent mainly in transition. How I came to hate that word, along with the phrase, “It’s only temporary.” The sale of our house in Seattle wasn’t due to close until early November that year, so we spread out the moving process somewhat. Also, the house we were moving into needed lots of work to make it livable, once the longtime tenant moved out. Junk had to be hauled out and disposed of. New appliances and wood stoves had to be researched, bought, shipped and installed. One room at a time, I emptied, cleaned and repainted the house. I bought and installed shades and insulating curtains. Chose new handles for the kitchen cupboards (they previously had none). I even located an authentic Hoosier cabinet, something I’d dreamed of but nearly gave up on finding in this part of the country. Over the next few months, as we went back and forth from Seattle, our new home became truly ours.

One of the big projects that first summer was replacing the old propane tank, a 400-gallon above-ground eyesore. Mostly for safety reasons, David wanted an underground tank, so we bought a 1,000-gallon model. We had decided on the location, on a west-facing slope about 50 feet away from the southwest corner of the house. Call us nutty, but we decided from the get-go to dig the hole ourselves, by hand. Uh-huh. You heard right. Not with a backhoe, not hiring anyone. By hand, with mattocks and shovels. This hole, by the way, needed to be 17 feet long, 6 feet deep and 6 feet wide. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, it wasn’t really, but we did encounter a couple of challenges. (We were also motivated by being told that it was impossible to dig such a hole by hand.)

First of all, we began digging this hole in August, and the weather was, predictably, hot and dry. The ground was correspondingly dry and hard. In addition, the first couple of feet down from the surface were a tangled mass of roots: salal, Oregon grape, thimbleberries, young fir and maple trees, and probably a few others. I noticed a funny thing: David somehow found he needed to be in Seattle frequently during the early part of the excavation, leaving me to dig most of this difficult top layer. Coincidence? Probably not, but no matter. The workout was great, and I discovered that I really liked using the mattock.

As the digging progressed, and the hole got deeper, we found we worked well in tandem, trading off every few minutes. I would descend with mattock in hand, and for a few minutes I’d whack away, busting up the hard rocky soil. Then I’d take a breather and get some water (it was hot) while David went in with a shovel and heaved out the loosened dirt. The deeper we went, the harder it was to fling the dirt out of the hole, so I was happy to have David do that part. Somehow it seemed easier for me to swing the mattock, perhaps because I wasn’t as strong in the upper body.

We worked on that project off and on for roughly two weeks. David especially liked bringing out the boom box and playing Broadway music: the soundtrack to Oklahoma! and the wonderful Cole Porter music of Anything Goes were our favorites to dig by. At last, the day came to install the tank. Terry, the very nice man who came to install it, stood at the edge of the hole and gazed at it a while, shaking his head gently. Finally he turned to us and said kindly, “You guys are crazy.”

Terry later asked me to e-mail him a photo of the hole; apparently his colleagues didn’t believe it when he told them about us digging the hole by hand.

Nonetheless, the job was done. Flush with confidence and a sense of well-being after the two-week marathon workout, I felt ready to start digging a root cellar. However, the reality of the approaching fall and cold weather prevailed. The house was mostly in good shape by that time, so we turned our attention to getting in a supply of firewood for the winter.

It’s beautiful here, peaceful and quiet. Since our property is at the end of the road, and our house is about half a mile in from the gate, we have no traffic anywhere near us. Occasionally a bright orange Coast Guard helicopter (David calls them the Coasties) or some other aircraft flies over, but more often the only thing flying overhead is a wild bird. From every window, we see trees and grass and sky. It’s lovely to walk down the road to open the gate, with the sun streaming through acres of trees. If you stop and listen, you’ll hear the chatter of Canyon Creek far below. Or was that the wind in the trees? It doesn’t matter. It’s an amazing place, whether you call it a farm or something else. We own it, we love it, and every day when we get up, it’s another beautiful day in paradise.

CHAPTER 3

Daydreams

I’D ALWAYS WANTED TO LIVE ON A FARM. I never understood this, since I grew up in Seattle; you’d think I would be a confirmed city girl. My twin sister and I were born in Champaign, Illinois, a university town in the heart of corn country. When we were about three months old, my father, who had just received another post-graduate degree from the University of Illinois (go Illini!), got a job as a computer engineer at Boeing, so we moved to Seattle. And although I lived there all my life until David and I moved to our farm, I had always felt more at home in small towns. Even when traveling, I tended to gravitate toward country settings. My mother grew up just north of Chicago, and used to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: (Heritage) Chickens and Turkeys and Ducks: Oh, My!
• 1. When Good People Get Poultry
• 2. Another Beautiful Day in Paradise
• 3. Daydreams
• 4. A Slippery Slope: Which Comes First, the Chickens or the Homework?
• 5. A Rooster Called Charlemagne
• 6. Poultry from Scratch
• 7. Turkeys Are People Too — but They’re Not Chickens
• 8. Everybody Look Busy — Here Come the Ducks!
• 9. Violet, Bumptious and Hampty
• 10. Heritage Turkeys and Chickens Are More Sustainable, and They Have More Fun
• 11. “The Mind of a Turkey”
• 12. Chicken Tractors and Slug Slurpers
• 13. Hunt and Peck: Putting Natural Foraging Behavior to Work
• 14. Turkeys and Chickens as Guard Animals?
• 15. Weasels Are Smaller Than You Think
• 16. Bobcats with Chicken Breath, and Other Bedtime Stories
• 17. Keeping the Ducks Safe at Night
• 18. Turkeys in the Canyon
• 19. Equal Rights for Unhatched Chicks
• 20. Keeping Poultry with Other Farmyard (and Backyard) Animals
• 21. Small Farm New Math: If (Chicken Tractor), Then (Pig Plow)
• 22. Farm-fresh Eggs: What’s the Big Deal?
• 23. Duck Eggs Are Delicious, and Great for Baking
• 24. Slaughtering and Processing Poultry
• 25. The Best Laid Schemes…
• 26. How to Cook Your Heritage Turkey
• 27. Tastes Like Chicken: Making a Case for Heritage Chickens as Meat Birds
• 28. Pot Pies and Preservation
• 29. Egg Money
• 30. The Bigger Picture: Poultry in the Community
• 31. Chicken Coop for the Winter-hardy Soul
• 32. Back to Standard Time, Which the Birds Never Left
• 33. Warmth
• 34. Pure Poultry Premise #1: Purebred Birds Are More Sustainable
• 35. Pure Poultry Premise #2: Shorten the Food Chain
• 36. Pure Poultry Premise #3: Challenge the “Get Big or Get Out” Adage
• 37. Pure Poultry Premise #4: Have Fun!
• 38. Abundance and Gratitude
• 39. On Being Unplugged
• 40. Nesting
• 41. Tomorrow
• Appendix A: Poultry from Scratch Worksheet
• Appendix B: Resources
• Index
• About the Author