I'm Back & Tasty Meat Birds

Wow. It's been a while. I was off on military duties for a while and have been catching up since I got back. I'll write about it sometime.

I'm currently canning 12 qts of tomatoes, nightime's the time to do it because today was really hot. As in record breaking hot. We broke the 100 degree mark for the first time this year. Ft. Smith, in the river valley south of the mountains, hit 107 today. And that's not even factoring in the oppressive humidity!


The weather's been so hot, even our cast iron meat birds, the Freedom Rangers, haven't been able to cope, and we've lost a few to the heat. Carla noticed today that it's too hot for them to get up and get to the waterer, and we've got them parked in the forest. Luckily, I'll take the last half of the flock to the processor on Thursday morning. We took just under 50 birds last monday to be cut up, and we've got around 50 more left that will be left whole as roasters. We're really impressed with the birds. Minus the current heat wave, we had 1 bird out of a hundred die, and the little hen had always been sickly & a runt. At 11 weeks, the average wt. was around 4.75 lbs, and the meat was still tender even cooked on the grill as you can see by the deliciousness below!T
Tomorrow, I'll put more waterers in with the chickens, and I'm filling one up with some loose ice we have. Hopefully it'll be enough. We're definitely not used to this heat up in the mountains.