BristolUK

Solar roof to chickens.

HGerchikov

In 7 posts, that has to be some kind of record.

Shard

and I suppose it's amazing that the chicken is even cheaper than cheese.

dbd33

Chickens are self supporting, even if you let them live out their lives after they stop laying they've more than paid for themselves even without allowing for the solar shingles on the coop roof. No one gets their money back on a Camembert.

dbd33

Still nothing to do with solar shingles but this advert made me laugh:

"Looking for someone to shear 1 Alpaca about mid May. The guy who does our sheep won't do Alpacas."

Well, of course not.

BristolUK

I had to look it up. Apparently they are more...uh...challenging.

Amazing what you learn from BE.

(not that I'll put the knowledge to practical use this time)

dbd33

Now on the rural adverts feed there's someone offering all the stuff needed for chickens (summer chickens anyway) for fifty bucks. If I were a potential chicken keeper I'd scurry over there.

HGerchikov

Unfortunately this potential chicken keeper is still 500km away and it's snowing - again.

Almost Canadian

IIRC we got 27 chicks for around $40, including postage.

I was informed that the egg provides enough nutrients to enable a chick to last for 3 days. They mail them out when they are a day old and urge you to pick them up as soon as possible.

The local post office here has a slick system (one assumes that lots in this rural community purchase chicks).

They called our house at 5:30 a.m. (just as I was leaving for work) and my wife had collected them by 6:00 a.m. Imagine a pizza box with 2 large pizzas in it. That was the size of the box and the chicks were kept apart by a collapsible cardboard grid.

All survived and I anticipate that we will be buying some more in the next month or so.

Almost Canadian

I was amazed at how much our food waste was reduced once we had chickens. The stuff they won't eat is also a good indication of what, perhaps, we shouldn't eat too.

As you know, we purchased layers, not meat birds. Have you ever eaten any of yours?

Shard

Cool! Makes sense if they can survive for a few days, and everyone knows it's "live" cargo.

5:30, that's a bit early. Is that to avoid traffic?

dbd33

Not recently but, in a past life, we had some meat birds and ate them. The first batch we had processed at a commercial facility which made the cost about the same as buying them at Costco. The second batch we processed ourselves which was gruesome but not awful; the tricky part was removing the feathers. In the end we hung them on a washing line and used a blow lamp on the last stubble (see attached). Note that the birds shown took all afternoon. Subsequently the farrier came over and said that she and her Mother had processed 300 birds that weekend; they'd done it before.

The awful part was that, although the meat birds were technically "free range" as the door was open, they couldn't actually move; their legs are not up to the weight of their bodies and they have to be killed for meat quickly before their hearts give out. I know we're used to eating genetically modified freak birds and I continue to buy and eat chickens but seeing them next to ordinary chickens was horrible.

HGerchikov

We are thinking about some of the breeds that can be used for both meat and eggs as the life of the modern meat bird is too horrible to contemplate. Even then i suspect I will be a vegetarian before the year is over.

dbd33

Our first batch were dual purpose birds. The snag with them being that we're used to the GM hormone packed water injected mutants they sell at the likes of Whole Foods so the dual purpose ones seem to have no meat on them.

Almost Canadian

I have no idea. She had to collect them. As you are likely aware, rural addresses simply have a post box. Ours is about 6 inches wide, 10 inches or so high and about the same deep. This means that nothing larger than an envelope ever gets delivered and pick up at the post office in High River is mandatory. However, for some reason, she had to collect them from Okotoks.