Well, Huxley and I have been back for about five days from our adventure out west. Yes, I feel spoiled and many thanks go to those who helped hold the farm together while we were gone. We have already started to get our hands dirty. Spent the first couple days enjoying muggy weather, the rain, pulling weeds, and visiting with friends and family. This morning, however, we jumped right back into the farm life again. We started butchering the chickens...yes, the dear little chicks we left in May have grown into beautiful free range poultry. This was the maiden voyage of the plucker and we are happy to report that it was amazing! It really can pluck two chickens in about 30 seconds. We are hoping to schedule a butchering day for all the locals so that everyone who wants to can see what a wonder this thing really is. We butchered twenty-four today and hope to keep a stream up of about 20 or so a week until all 180 are in the freezer. We have learned a lot during this chicken adventure and I must say that while helping with the processing today I couldn't help but look around me and think about how and where these chickens have been raised...we have a lot to be thankful for. We did bake one today for lunch and the flavor was wonderful. The birds are ranging between 4 and 7 pounds right now which means that we will be eating chicken all week-one bird goes a long way- which is a good thing.
Hoping to spend this week attacking the weeds in the garden and putting tomato cages in. The wet weather has been hard to work with so we are a bit behind in getting everything in that we wanted to- the staples are in though which hopefully means that I will be canning a lot in a few short months. Good to be back...
No comments:
Post a Comment