Thanksgiving Turkeys

MAN - sweater weather just can't get here fast enough! I can't STAND the 100degF days of summer. It's hard on me, it's hard on my animals and I worry about everything. Are my animals spoiled? Yes, indeed. They have barns and structures for shade, fresh, clean water available, and they have made it through.

But this lady likes pumpkin spice. YES, I am a basic, white woman. I like sweaters, I like pumpkin spice, I like pumpkin pie, I like pumpkin butter and apple butter and snuggling into warm blankets, snuggling up to a fluffy dog (I have a few) and having the days get shorter so I can get more sleep.

But with the onset of fall, and the cooling of the days - comes the fall harvest. Yes, we may be canning the fruits of our garden (I see a ton of tomatillo salsa in my future). And yes, we harvest the apples from my front tree - even though half are wormy, and I feed them to the sheep (who love them!) Part of our harvest is reducing our headcount coming into winter. We don't want to feed animals that don't provide a benefit for that extra feed cost. So we say goodbye to the extra roosters I hatched in the spring, the extra drakes that will be trouble in the spring, the extra male quails. We also send off our lambs to be processed, hopefully our pigs as well. And by winter, we will be down to just Shannon's Hereford cow and her calf through winter.

The big harvest we have in the fall is our turkeys for Thanksgiving! I had a really great hatch this year, and tripled our turkey flock with new hatches. We'll have more turkeys than we did last year, and I am starting off reservations with 60 turkeys. As we get closer and I see some of the new hatches getting to appropriate size, I'll increase that. I currently have counted 120 turkeys and I'd like to keep 40 hens and 2 toms, plus the very smallest, youngest birds that are just not old enough to process. I'll likely keep 3 toms, as I want one Bourbon Red, and one Black Spanish and one Royal Palm. Shannon is in charge of the birds we keep.

I am looking forward to this weekend, although because of the Rocky Mountain Farmer's Union Convention, I will miss the Saturday processing and butcher day. Shannon and Larry can manage it, and hopefully we'll get a good crew of volunteers to help.

Speaking of help - if you want to volunteer that weekend - it's a great way to learn about processing poultry, and getting up and close to your own food. AND if you volunteer for at least a few hours, you'll get 25% off everything you buy that weekend!

But what you are really here for is to reserve your turkey. Don't miss out - we sell out every year. Sometimes we do have extras (usually on Sunday, as we wrap up processing and we start to truly see what we have that we are carrying over for my breeding stock) But don't count on that!

So there's your link! And we will see you in November!