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October Rose Farm and our Chicken Sensei - One Girl’s Rant
Bottom’s up at the water cooler. Now that the summer is indisputably over and we’ve a mere month to partake in the bounty and friendship that is the Farmer’sMarket, The Husband and I did what we’ve promised ourselves we would do for a long time: we visited our favorite chicken farmstead people in all of Upstate New York: Susan and Brian Underwood of October Rose Farm. One Lucky Rooster. Some people venture into farming with well-defined master plans, others with an inherited knack (and/or land) from familial roots. Susan and Brian Underwood of October Rose accidentally stumbled into chicken-raising when their teenage son reared a flock of egg-layers to pay for a trip to the Boy Scout Jamboree and, upon his return, surrendered custody of his 25 hens to Mom and Dad. Since then, Susan and Brian have painstakingly gathered knowledge and know-how to expand their farmstead into a beautiful, orderly, and sustainable spread at the tip of Skaneateles Lake. Evening chores. Rotation method. Since product quality is necessarily tied to quality of life, and October Rose chicken and eggs are delicious, we were not at all surprised when we visited Susan and Brian to find hundreds of beautiful meat …