Would love to see what you put together with those pallets. If you can, please post your build on the thread Show Me Your Pallet Projects! where we all can enjoy your efforts. We love seeing how other people use pallets, reclaimed lumber, and other scavenged supplies to make something useful.
My first adventure into chickens was buying 50 meat chickens. Not too bad taking care of them for ~10 weeks before harvest time, but boy was it a lot of work to process 50 meat chickens by hand plucking! My plan now is to cull my laying hens before their third winter, reducing the winter flock to 8-10 younger hens. I bought a nice turkey fryer to heat up the scalding water. I think we can butcher 2 or 3 chickens at a time without much problem. 50 in one day was too much for us.
When I was a young kid, I raised meat rabbits for a number of years when I had a sheltered building for them in the winter. I really enjoyed raising rabbits when I had a nice place for them in the winter. I got married along the way and live in a different house now. I only tried raising rabbits for a short while in my new house, but it proved to be too difficult without winter shelter. Well, that and some other challenges.
Anyways, I hope you get a chance to raise some meat chickens and rabbits. It can be very rewarding.
FYI, Dear Wife did not want to eat my meat rabbits. They were too cute for her to eat. So that adventure came to a quick end. She has no problem eating our chickens, so that is what I have now.
Yeah, you and Dear Wife probably have the same attitude towards meat rabbits. Oh well. In Europe, where I lived in France and Italy for a few years, they eat rabbits as meat more than as pets. You can go to the local outdoor markets and pick out a live, or freshly butchered, meat rabbit just as you would a chicken, or duck.
Way back in the day, grandpa used to go out rabbit hunting in the winter months and bring back fresh rabbit meat. When nothing else was in season for hunting, rabbit was on the menu! He always said that you could hunt rabbits in any month that had an "R" in the name. But May, June, July, and August were times to let the rabbits repopulate and raise their young.
