Becoming a Steward of Heritage Living

Welcome to The Birch Acres Blog

Where we will share our experiences, our trials and our errors in raising, breeding, and promoting our favourite heritage breeds of poultry and discuss our homesteading journey in Northern Ontario.

Growing up in a small farming community I knew from a very young age (8 years old) that I wanted to raise poultry, at the time it was mostly due to the fact that I could have my own eggs to collect. My husband born and raised in the big city knew not what he was getting into, but has remained supportive through both our poultry and homesteading journey and I believe has even become very fond of some of our ladies over the years with an admitted preference for our Belgian Malines.

When we first decided to take on the responsibility of raising poultry we knew that we wanted there to be a purpose behind our efforts. Hatchery poultry was never an option on our list, I grew up with many siblings eating broiler birds and they can quickly fill a freezer, so no judgement toward anyone raising broiler birds, they serve their purpose well. We instead built our breed list based on Heritage breeds and how much time we could commit to raising and promoting the breeds that truly spoke to us with our goal being a stewardship over the coming years to preserve them for the next generation.

Taking into account our overnight winter temps reaching -40C and that we wanted to be able to sustain our growing family from our own land and be less dependent on the big box stores and hatcheries we needed a breed that would keep us in egg production and be able to fill our freezer each year. For this breed we chose the White Chantecler which is Canada's only heritage breed and was at the time listed on the Livestock Conservancy list as "threatened" , the breed has now moved to a "watch" status with a very big thank you to the dedication of breeders working together to preserve Canada's only heritage chicken breed. There is still much work to be done before this breed is restored to its former glory but it is slowly regaining popularity.

After spending a couple seasons breeding and growing our White Chanteclers we decided to add in the Partridge variety and now breed both varieties. Soon after that we had committed ourselves to raising more heritage poultry breeds and collected breeds and lines from across North America and settled on 7 breeds total that we continue to dedicate our time and effort toward preserving for the future. (We will have a breed spotlight per breed in future posts)

Blue Copper Marans Hen

The Sweet "Simple" Things

Though I am open about my addiction to chickens our homestead is not all about poultry, it is a major part of what we do here but it takes many moving parts to make a homestead or small farm work and yield sustainable results. Each spring we start our crop from seed and maintain a 1200 square foot vegetable garden filled with raised beds. We like to grow herbs, veggies and fruit and preserve our harvest annually to feed our family. We are planning to break ground for a small roughly 2000 square foot permaculture orchard within the next 3 years as well.

We may not always enjoy long days spent in the kitchen preserving our harvest but are thankful at the end of the day for the ability to provide for and nourish our family in a way that provides not only food for physical nourishment but also opens a door for intergenerational connection between our forefathers and our children's own two hands, this is my opinion gives our kids a solid foundation from which to learn, develop and grow into the sustainable future of that distant tomorrow.

My role as a mother, a wife and breeder fill my days and allows me to delegate my time between homeschooling our kids, making home cooked meals and tending to our flock. My husbands role as father, husband and builder with swoon worthy building skills for all of my "out of this world" planning, and lets face it his role as the muscle makes our homestead function. We, just like every other homesteader and small farmer are making our way through this world one step at a time with an agenda and hope to preserve this style of life, a life in which both the earth and soul are nourished.

We are just getting started with our blog journey, we hope to fill many moments with worthwhile reading in our up and coming posts. With my final note of the morning being that I can not promise you chickens will solve all of your problems, I can attest that they will certainly make you smile while you figure them all out.

Until next time,

The Birch Acres Family