Monday, June 15, 2009

Community Garden Broilers

For the last two years I've raised broiler chickens in my community garden plot. This year I'm doing it as a cooperative project with 3 other people. We're growing 20 Cornish Cross together in the community garden. They are 7 weeks old and when I weighed one today. It weighed 7.25 lbs. We won't be processing them for 2 more weeks. Too bad because they are plenty big enough right now. We may have to change the slaughter date.

4 comments:

  1. How interesting--so they are just out there in the community garden?

    What do you do with the chickens after processing? Do you have a big deep freeze?

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  2. yes they are just "out there". They are locked in a predator proof coop at night and fenced in during the day. This batch is 20 chickens for 4 people so 5 each to store, but yes I do have a large freezer, but if you split chickens in half you can fit more in a freezer. I'll try and post more on this project

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  3. That is definitely plenty big :) How are you planning to do the processing?

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  4. Nice birds!

    You need to be careful when the Cornish Cross reach this size. They tend to overheat (and die) very easily. I have had this happen before with nice otherwise healthy birds. I usually butcher mine at between 4 1/2 and 5 pounds. I also like to raise my birds later in the year so I can finish a few roasting birds to almost full size, usually in October. I had one bird of this kind that weighed 10 pounds dressed weight!

    If you need instructions on how to process the birds there are step by step instructions at http://www.ubuilderplans.com in their Poultry 101 section.

    Good luck!

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