The Dark Cornish chicken experiment

[Deberosa]

Results are ALMOST in but here is how the Dark Cornish turned out:

First - they arrived in June and went into the tractors until mid September once they were out of the new brooder we made. Here is an old post on that:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/forum/yabb/forum.pl?board=fau-livestock;action=display;num=1183300894

But they grew out of the tractors rather quickly and now free range the garden area. They turned into big, beautiful birds:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b340/deberosa/057.jpg


We put 10 of them in the freezer - the processing is very different. They have very thick skins and are difficult to skin as we did the ugly white chickens. So we scalded them and plucked them which was not too bad. You sure know if you missed anything with those dark feathers!

These chickens are very close to wild game birds - they are great for free ranging and next spring I will learn about the claim that they are good setters and mothers. I plan to fence off a wild area that is behind my wood shed for them in the spring and see what happens. A friend commented that they look like walking drumsticks and they do - plus they are much larger than they appear because there feathers are very close to their bodies unlike most other chickens.

So far this seems to be a much better way to go than the obscene cornish cross breed for meat production.

[AlchemyAcres]

Cool!!!

No doubt standard 'fast' cornish-rock cross are pathetic SICKLY birds!!!!

I'm anxious to try the 'slow' cornish offered by Privett and others....and hopefully a few Capons!

~Martin :)

[gardenfay]

yea, those cornish-rock chicks we raised could sure start dying on you quick if something went wrong. we had to butcher several one day when it got really still, hot and humid. after a little while we thought of putting a fan on them , the weather changed and it was okay then. but there were 2 things i really liked about them. one is how tender and juicy the breast meat is; i normally don't even like it; but that is great. but my favorite thing was that the neighbor lady saw them as day old chicks and then saw them at about 4-5 weeks and thought we had switched chickens on her. Phyllis is a sweetie; but she is savvy too and she sure thought we were tryin' to pull a fast one on her. hehe

[MadTripper]

Any further report on these birds? I just received the latest Murray catalog and thought they might be a nice addition for meat. Any additional information would be great.

Tripper

[Deberosa]

We just put 12 more of them in the freezer yesterday. *They are delicious, not as huge as those white birds of course but they roast up really nice. *Had company over twice for chicken dinners and they agree so it's not just us. ;-)

THey are not aggressive birds at all even though we now have put 22 in the freezer total and there are probably 8 more roosters out there to go! *No fighting, etc. *but they have a large area too.

THey are tougher to process! *You don't snap their necks like you can with white cornish and they are nearly impossible to skin like we did with white cornish. *They have thick yellow skin that is really stuck to them! *So we scald and pluck. *It took us most of the day to do 12 from start to finish.

For that reason we are rethinking what we want to do and may still do the dark cornish, just have to think about it. *The white ones are so nasty, but there are only so many hours in a day and alot of other stuff didn't get done on the one rainless day we've had in a month! *I am sure we will get over it after a while. ;-) *I was thinking of buying some local pasture grown from someone else and forgetting meat chickens, but they are $25 for a 4-5 pound bird!!! *Having 22 in the freezer adds up fast... *Of course they eat all the time too but if we time our harvesting to be more in the fall maybe that wouldn't be so bad either...

So I don't know. *Seems processing chickens is getting to be a big time sink when fences and gardens and buildings need attention right now. But I for sure don't want to end up eating store bought stuff these days.

One good thing is that Kurt is now even looking forward to the beef from T-Bone and some home grown pork of which he eats none currently! *He didn't think chicken was a good idea for supper last night. ;-) *And if we have the other sources of meat then we won't have to process so many chickens!

Here's a link to what I wrote about them on my blog a while back with some pictures:

http://deberosahomestead.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/dark-cornish-chickens/

[pcrowder]

http://deberosahomestead.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/dark-cornish-chickens/
« Last Edit: Today at 6:17pm by Deberosa » IP Logged

Your blog is GREAT! And I just loved the picture of the momma and baby turkeys. They are tooooo cute!

[MadTripper]

As far as size, do the breasts plump up decently? My current flock is a combination of crazy's and I'd like to find a good meat bird to get another flock going. These seem like a decent breed.

As far as your butchering goes, you mentioned neck snapping however I like the cone method. Also, I scalded my chicken over the weekend and that worked however I need to setup a better station. Do you pluck by hand? I figure I can build a whizbang style plucker with parts I have around so that is a project coming up soon. The plucking seemed to take the longest for me.

Tripper

[Deberosa]

We plucked by hand. I think the next project is to get a chicken plucker set up. I got one that supposedly works on a drill but that wasn't much good. The bathtub works great for a scalder and it also helps warm up the area on a cold day. We started to set up around 10:00 AM and finished clean up at 5 PM for 12 birds - that's not very efficient...


They have a decent sized breast - much larger than the other heavy breeds but much smaller than the cornish cross too. They have large legs. Friends refer to them as walking drumsticks. ;-)

[MadTripper]

I forgot to comment on the bathtub. We inherited one when we purchased that looks identical to that. I plan on setting it up for a watering trough fed by one of our springs. I do like the scalder idea however.

Tripper

[Deberosa]

You can never have too many bathtubs! I have an organic gardening friend who lined the back of her property with bathtubs. Then she painted a brick wall design across the fronts. In each one she put a different invasive kind of plant, mint, horseradish, bamboo, etc. And they don't have to be the metal kind for that!

It takes about two hours to get that bathtub heated up for scalding with a wood fire.