Reds vs Rocks

We are coming to the end of our first experiment with raising broilers. All in all, its been good. We've had fun being chased by the Rocks (Cornish Rock Cross) and hearing our adolescent rooster learn how to crow. This morning when he crowed at 5:00 a.m. I made the appointment with the lady down the street to process the batch. I will be dropping them off tomorrow morning.

My original plan was to do it myself. My first flock was small, 6 chicks, that were supposed to be ready last weekend. I would take Saturday to process them and have two weeks before the larger flock of nine were ready. But then the first flock turned about to be a slower growing chicken (Reds) and all 15 were going to be ready at the same time. As the deadline approached, the weekend before was taken up with a homeschool conference, and we were planning to leave early Monday morning to visit family for a week, I began to realize that there was not a lot of margin in case anything went wrong, or it took a lot more time than I had planned.