My chicken catalogs have arrived!

Thats me moving my chickens this last year.

It finally came in my handy dandy chicken catalog with chick prices. I am in badly need of more chickens! But wait do I really want to do this anymore? I used to make a delivery to San Antonio every other week but it gets harder and harder to sell the eggs. Don't get me wrong I love having chickens and I will always continue having chickens but not sure I want to get that many and try again getting new customers.

There is 2 much competition out there & they don't care about the food safety rules that I had followed. If they say its from the farm people believe them even if they are locked in a coop all day long. All the people see is CHEAP and FARM. I saw some the other day and the eggs were so dirty they had poo from the chickens still on it which could be really dangerous if not properly cleaned & chickens get infection. Sooner or later someone is going to get the swine flu or something bad & all the people that sell eggs will be getting a bad rep because of someone that was lazy.

I don't force my chickens to lay having light on all night. As soon as they go into molt I don't kill them or give them away. I have some chickens out there as old as 5 yrs. My chickens are old they lay when they feel it's time to lay. I clean my eggs with warm/water/vinagar. Only a very small handful appreciate the "Pasture raised method" it's good for our field as well as the chickens.

Right now with just the small amount of eggs I am getting I sell to a few loyal customers and anything extra I give to the milk farmer down the road in exchange for raw milk. It suits me fine. I would love to sell at the farmers market because I love the idea of meeting new & old customers. I looked into it once. You have to get a license, have the rug torn out from the back of my van to sell from it. Get a background check & pay the farmers fee. So would it be worth it in the long run? Not sure. I would lose my Saturdays too

Anyways I am still excited about getting more chickens I just need to rethink how I want to run this business or just keep to providing for my home only. I am also thinking of raising broilers just for my family & maybe a few to trade?

Traditions

I love and live for traditions, I was lucky enough to marry a wonderful man that loves to cook and took the time to study and learn from my mother before she passed away. This is our third year of making tamales without my mother. He did an awesome job of cooking the meat and preparing the masa for it. I was kind of worried that no one would show up from my family most of them want to buy those awful store bought tamales, "They taste ok" they tell me. Who are they fooling? Yuck.

In the end we had a whole table full of volunteers plus always someone comes new to want to learn which is fine with us we could use the help. We buy Mexican pastry's the coffee and hot chocolate flows freely. Us older adults have some wine coolers maybe, we talk, we joke, we make fun of someone who is not spreading the masa on correctly.

Its a good time and we ended up with 75 dozen tamales for the year that we divided up among the volunteers the ones we didn't eat yet :) I hope my family continues wanting to do this some of them gripe each year because its at the end of Christmas & every one's tired. I wonder what would happen if my husband decided not to do this for a few yrs would they get used to those store bought tamales? Would they forget about the fun times as we meet up as a family? This is a tradition I hope we never stop.