How to Get a Turkey for Your Family
Our birds are typically 12-20 lbs with an average weight of about 16 lbs. We only raise a limited number of turkeys and we must pre-sell them all. Therefore, we cannot guarantee a specific weight for your family. Instead we distribute them first come first serve on each pickup day. As we approach Thanksgiving and most of the orders are in you will receive an e-mail from us assigning you one of the pickup dates. If you would like to specify one of the dates now please let us know in the notes section on the Paypal order page or if you need to change to a different day then we assigned you please let us know ASAP so that we can ensure that we are processing the correct number of birds on each day.
You will be picking your bird up fresh at the farm. It will be fully cleaned, defeathered, ready to cook. The birds will be packaged loose in a high quality plastic bag with our label on it. The turkey can be frozen in these bags for a short amount of time, but they are not ideal bags for long term storage because they do not shrink around the bird. If you intend to freeze your bird for a long time, such as for Christmas, let us know in advance and we will arrange to package your bird in a shrink bag. Additionally, the bags do sometimes leak, so we recommend that you bring a cooler or tote to transport them home if you want to ensure that you keep your car clean. Our ice machine does not keep up with this event and we actually end up purchasing additional ice to get through. So, if you have a long distance to travel we recommend that you bring some ice with you so that we can preserve our supply.
If you have any additional questions don’t hesitate to give a call or shoot an e-mail. This will be our fifth year raising these birds for Thanksgiving and it is a project that we really enjoy doing so we thank you for your support and look forward to seeing you at Thanksgiving this year.
How We Raise Our Birds
We currently raise one batch of turkeys per season for fresh distribution at Thanksgiving. We purchase our birds as day old poults and start them off in our “brooder house,” which is a ventilated hoophouse designed to keep our birds warm and dry on deep bedding under a heat source.
After about a month they go outside into pasture pens that are moved through pasture or spent garden beds so that they can have their fill of forage, bugs, fresh air and sunshine as a supplement to their grain. These pasture pens keep them safe from aerial predation by owls, which is a problem we’ve had in the past. Once the birds are big enough to fend off the owls at about ten or twelve weeks of age they live out the remainder of their lives totally free range inside a moveable, protective, electric netting. This allows us to rotate their paddocks onto new pasture regularly to maintain health and ensure their access to high quality forage and bugs.
We feed them a ration of corn, soybean meal, and Fertrell Poultry Nutribalancer (a high quality mineral mix boasting kelp as one of its first ingredients). This feed is custom milled to our specifications. It is clean and vegetarian with no added hormones or antibiotics. The grain is not Certified Organic or Certified Non-GMO at present because of our inability to access and store such ingredients.
Balsam Gardens 