The weather is warming up quickly which means two things; one, our days of mushing the pups in the snow are numbered and two, it’s time to get the pens ready for new spring chicks!

The Muscovies are prolific breeders and we always get a nice hatch out of them twice a year with very little effort on our part.

If you haven’t had Muscovy duck yet, you are seriously missing out. It isn’t like any other duck I’ve ever eaten. It’s not at all greasy and their meat is like beef. It’s almost identical to eating London broil and is deeelicious!

We don’t keep roosters anymore so we order our chicks online or buy them from the local feed store. Last year we successfully raised and butchered a dozen Cornish Cross chickens for the first time so we’ll be ordering more of them this year; probably three times as many to put in the freezer.

They are the kind that grow super big, super fast and are now my absolute favorite meat bird we have. Well, next to the pheasant. Yummm.

They are cost effective since they grow so fast and I want to make them a staple in my diet this year. The difference in size between them and the older laying hens we’ve processed is impressive.

I’m not sure if we’ll be getting turkeys again this year. They are not so cost effective and while they are lovely to look at and funny to interact with, I wasn’t crazy about how gamey the meat tasted when we ate them at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Like the duck eggs, their eggs are really tasty but they just aren’t worth the expense. Although, one of the turkey eggs is the equivalent of about two of our chicken eggs! The ducks eggs are roughly one and a half chicken eggs:

We’ll probably have a litter of husky pups later in the fall, too, as we have a waiting list of people who want a puppy. We have two females and two males we can breed but we don’t do it too often.

The rest of the pack loves to play with the little guys when we do have a litter, though.

From a safe distance, of course!

🙂