2012 Duck and Turkey shares now for sale!

Duck Share:

Back in October Daniel and I purchased 1 mother and 20 ducklings. We, with the help of the mother duck of course, have been raising them with the intent of keeping them as a breeding flock. We are thrilled with how healthy they are and how fast they are sizing up. Once the ducklings are mature and laying eggs, we will leave those eggs under the new mothers. With a little bit of luck and lots of care, we will have a new batch of ducklings! These are the ones that we will then raise for our 2012 shares. (Christmas dinner, anyone?)

Our ducks are being raised in a compassionate way. They have lots of space. This includes plenty of outdoor space during the summer and winter-they really like scooping up mouth-fulls of snow in the winter. They also have enough space inside their cozy coop for the days when they feel lazy. We also inspect them daily to ensure that they are healthy and happy.

As you know, we manage our farm with the CSA system, meaning we will be pre-selling "shares" of meat for the year 2012.

If you would like to secure yourself a duck, (or two, or three) please contact us and we will put you on our list.

Here are the details:
You can email us to be put on our waiting list now.
We will sell the duck shares as they hatch. So, as soon as they are hatching (early spring) we will email you first and you will pay a deposit of $15 dollars, which secures you your very own duck. We will then proceed to raise these ducklings. Once they are finished, and have been butchered and frozen (at a provincially inspected facility), we will bring them to a pre-determined delivery point. Upon delivery you will pay $3.75 a pound. We will be able to deliver anytime in the fall- perhaps in time for thanksgiving and or Christmas 2012.

Turkey Share:

The turkey shares will function similarly, except we will not be able to hatch our own in the spring. Instead, we will be taking your names on our waiting list now and then purchasing as many poults (baby turkeys) as we need in the spring from a hatchery (. We will then raise these turkeys and sell them in the exact same fashion as the ducks. So, email us now to be put on our list. Then we will be accepting the $20 deposit in March 2012 when we are ordering the turkeys. We will then proceed to raise these turkeys, and they will be ready in time for thanksgiving- or Christmas 2012 (your choice! the Christmas turkeys will end up being slightly heavier).

All our meats (ducks, turkeys and chickens) will always be butchered at a provincially inspected facility. They will also be butchered close to the delivery date to ensure freshness.

Frosty Days...

Well it's been an intense year for us, so much so that we hardly found any time at all to blog about the farming for the past 3 months. We've had some really fantastic crops, some good crops, and a few that never even germinated...and overall it was a really good year for growing herbs despite the cold, wet spring we had. We couldn't even harvest all the wonderful basil before it flowered on us.

Unfortunately, it all has to come to an end for the year sometime, and it seems like now is getting pretty much there. And now come the frosts. We've had two in the past three nights I think, which means that our tender annuals like baby dill and our wonderful gourds have been damaged or killed, and our perennials are telling us to stop harvesting them so they can store the rest of their energy until they emerge again next year. So except for a few very cold tolerant species, we'll be calling it the end of the season for our culinary herbs.

It's actually a bit of a blessing, because we still have a lot of other work to get done before the snow flies, and we could use the breathing room to be sure. We still have 4 more weeks of deliveries to make for John's summer CSA before the end, so we still have that but we also need to start preparing the perennial herbs for the long winter ahead, which means applying wood mulch around all the plants so that the temperature in the ground stays a bit warmer and more stable. We'll also be adding extra straw mulch to some of our more tender perennials like sage to help them get through to the spring. A couple more really tender perennials like rosemary and lemon verbena will have to be dug from the ground and stored in a cold frame or stoarge shed in order to make it through.

We also still have our seed and grain crops to harvest and bring in from the fields. Our wheat and oats are still a little bit greener than we like, and some of our herb seeds like dill and fennel aren't quite ready yet. With the slow start we had for the year, it's going to be a tough one to get all the grain and seed we were hoping for, but there is still some time yet.

I'll be sure to put some pictures of our finished crops up later to show how everyuthing's looking...

New Mother!

A couple of months ago, one of our hens decided to go broody. When we say that a hen 'goes broody', we mean that she decides that it's time to sit on some eggs and try to hatch them. The only problem was that she wasn't actually sitting on any eggs, but sometimes it can be pretty hard to get a hen to quit when she's decided it's time to have some babies. Luckily, we had some extra fertilized eggs that didn't fit in the incubator, so we tucked a few eggs under her to see if she would hatch them out.

It can't be easy to have the patience to wait out a chick before it hatches. We have these fancy incubators with controlled heat and humitidy and machines inside that turn the eggs side to side six times a day, and I still had trouble finding the patience to let the rest of nature take it's course. A hen, on the other hand, does nothing but sit on those eggs and turn them around once in a while for three whole weeks. That's a lot of time staring at the same coop wall day after day.

And like clockwork, three weeks after recieving her surrogate eggs, she had become the proud new mother of six beautiful baby chicks.

It turns out that natural brooding is also way more successful than incubating eggs. The only eggs under our hen that didn't hatch turned out to be infertile to begin with, basically giving her a 100% success rate for hatching this year. Even the best, most practiced chicken breeders with the most advanced incubators only get somewhere around 80%, and our own incubating experiment this year wasn't anywhere near that successful.

I think maybe we'll just let the hens do what they do best in the future, and let them do all our incubating from now on...

2011 Grain Shares NOW available!!

Starting in October/November 2011, we will be delivering the first shares of our grain CSA program to Calgary, Red Deer, Olds and area.

By signing up for our grain CSA for 2011-2012, you will be signing up to recieve a delivery of freshly milled or flaked grains every other week. We will be supplying you for an entire year.  At each delivery, you will receive a 1kg bag of either whole wheat flour made from heritage wheat or flaked oats. They are being grown absolutley free of synthetic chemics, so you are receiving a fresh, nutritious and naturally grown product. 

We are now beginning to take names on our waiting list for the grain share. We intend to offer 50 shares for our first year and slowly increasing the size as it makes sense for us. Unfortunately, we won't know how much of a yield we expect to have until September or October, as the growing season can vary depending on the year we have, so we won't start taking payments or confirming anything until then.

This is what you do to be first in line for your very own share in our grain harvest!

1. Email us at countrythymefarm@gmail.com or visit our website
2. You will be entered onto our waiting list
3. In the first week of october we will contact you and confirm your membership and begin accepting payments
4. You will be meeting us every other week at the designated delivery points in Red Deer, Calgary, and Olds and receive your fresh oats or flour!
5. That's it!

Some details pending... you can visit our website for more information. If you have any questions at all, please email us and we will be happy to talk with you.

Chick Video

Here's a little 1 minute video of some of our chicks running around in their brooding coop. No narration, just three week old chicks running around.

Since we took this little video, we've had two more batches of chicks arrive on the farm. We now have a toatl of 174 little chicks running around on the farm and growing, and more are on the way. 

Hope you enjoy it.