Whew! We made it through Christmas without going into debt.
That in itself is an accomplishment. Actually it does not feel too much like
winter here in our part of Texas. It is 75◦ F at 8:00 in the morning. We had a
few tornadoes a couple of hours away from the house last night and are on high
alert for more today as a cold front tries to push its way on in.
As we now have a week between Christmas and
the New Year, our thoughts turn toward making plans for the upcoming year. Part
of our plan making is how to feed our family. When we think about how to feed
our family, we are not talking about how cheap and how we can stretch it all
barely keeping our family fed. Instead, we want our family to eat nutritious
abundant meals that will benefit us in maintaining our health, keeping illness
at bay, and giving us strength to do our best at work and school. Of course
when we plan our meals by doing our own fruit and vegetable gardening and
raising our own animals to slaughter and butcher for meat we do know we are
providing good and healthy foods for our family because we know how we grow and
raise them.
Today we are planning our meat for
our family. Our first order of business is our chickens. Currently, we have 9
hens and 2 roosters. The only reason we have 2 roosters is because one of them
is faster than lightening and we can’t get him cornered, but our goal is to eat
our extra roosters. Hopefully when the hens get a bit broody in spring we will
have some chicks and can have more roosters to eat. The 9 hens are providing us
with about 3 dozen eggs a week. Usually they don’t supply us with this amount
of eggs in winter, but it has been unusually warm this year. We’ve been putting
the eggs to good use with all of the holiday baking and using them to feed all
of our holiday guests.
In the spring we expect even more eggs. Our
plan is to sell our abundant eggs for $3 a dozen. In Texas a person can sell
backyard eggs if they sell only eggs that are produced by their own flock. A
person needs a license to sell at a farmer’s market. We usually sell to friends
and neighbors, but might put a sign up in front of the farm next to the street
and see if we get any takers. It would be nice to increase our farm income or
at the very least break even so that the eggs our family eats is at least free
to us. We order egg cartons on line and print
up some labels to add to the carton. There are many places to order egg
cartons. We personally use www.eggboxes.com.
On the labels we have to have our name and address and add that the eggs are
non-graded, which means that the eggs have not been determined by grade nor
size. Of course after gathering the eggs we follow clean sanitation procedures
and store the eggs in our refrigerator.
Of all the farm animals we have,
chickens are the easiest to take care of especially if they are allowed to
wonder about the backyard supplementing their own diet with fresh insects. They
tend to be happier and produce more eggs to feed our family when given a bit of
freedom.
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