Chicken Treats

Halloween is over and Little Dude and I have been indulging the chickens by giving them the shells of the jack-o-lanterns as treats. I broke them up and put them in strategic places around the barnyard where the flock could find them. It’s fun to watch them run out in the morning and peck at them.

Yesterday, I included a Happy Hen Treats Mealworm & Peanut treat square.  I’m intending to make my own suet cakes to use as winter treats, so I wanted to see how they would react to one.

 

In general, they loved it.  It was gone by lunchtime.  🙂  I’m not sure if I’m going to use peanuts in the ones I make, but I’ve got scratch grain, wild bird seed and mealworms.  I’d love to know what you put in your suet cakes.

This morning, I tossed a couple of apples into the run.  They were apples from our trees, so they weren’t very big.  The girls pecked into them right away.  🙂

 

 

Apple Butter

I finished it up this morning. The recipe I used called for cooking 1 hour on high and 9-11 on low, in a crock pot. The double batch we made spent close to 16 hours on low in mom’s roaster pan. But it looks so good!!!!  And the kitchen smelled amazing over night.  🙂

Doesn’t that look good?

8 pints and 1 quart

The finished product 🙂

Apple Harvest

There are somewhere between 5 and 10 apple trees growing mostly wild on the farm, and this year they hall been laden with beautiful apples.

 

 

Mom, the kids and I picked these three bags full (from just one tree) last week.  We made apple cobbler for dessert one night, and then I made applesauce out of the rest of it.  Almost 18 quart jars in total, 6 of them with light cinnamon.

The same day I did these, mom canned several jars of whole tomatoes, and we also made pasta sauce one day.

 

 

A really bad picture of me doing the canning. I had on clothes I don’t care about getting dirty and my hair pulled back.

The finished product. 🙂

Last night Dad, DH and Little Dude picked four more bags. Those green bags hold about 27 lbs of apples. We’re using at least 1 bag of them to make apple butter. We’re using this recipe, which you can also find on my Pinterest page.

ETA: Okay, so it was closer to 3/4 of a bag of apples.  *g*  We doubled the recipe for 11 pounds of peeled, chopped apples.

Doesn’t that look good?

I’ve never made apple butter before,so I’ll have to report back on how it went… and how it tastes! 🙂

The chickens, of course, are loving all the harvestables we’ve been collecting.  They get the peels from the apples today!