Chickens going and coming

I seem to be having a whole lot of trouble keeping up with the blog this summer.  I don't why my days seem much more full than last year.  Seems like most nights Mike and I are sitting down to dinner at 9 pm or later and the thought of starting a blog post at 10 pm when I have to get up at sunrise is not appealing at all.  Even today when the meat birds are all butchered and that chore is gone from the evening check list, here I sit at nearly 10 pm writing down my thoughts.  I have been finding it so helpful to be able to look back at last year though and see what the farm was doing when, so I do have to bite the bullet and "just do it" once in awhile.

This past weekend was EXTREMELY busy for me.  We had our first of two butchering "parties" scheduled for Sunday July 17th.  I figured I owed it to my guests to clean the house if only a little.  At least it needed to "look" presentable.  So Friday evening and Saturday afternoon/evening were devoted to housework.  Of course, I still had to take care of all the animals.  Saturday morning I moved 1/2 of the meat chickens (about 25 birds) from the pasture to the barn before I went to work.  I moved the second half right around sunset Saturday evening.  I have been in the middle of a project to build a bunch of wooden chicken crates since last year.  There is so much to do that the project has been pushed way down the list.  Normally I move the chickens from pasture to barn in an old wire dog cage, but the birds were older (read BIGGER) than normal due to scheduling conflicts on our originally scheduled butchering day.  They were actually 1 day shy of 10 weeks old.  Pretty dang old for a meat chicken.  This meant that I could only move about 6 birds at a time which would mean 8 trips back and forth between barn and pasture.  Not very efficient for sure.  So I came up with an idea to turn my little red wagon into a chicken mover and was able to move 12 chickens at a time.  Two trips Saturday morning and two trips Saturday evening was much better.  I do need to work on building the crates though.

So at sunset all 49 chickens were secure in the pen in the barn.  It's the same pen I use as a brooder pen to start the baby chicks before they get moved out to pasture.  I had left all the bedding in place from when they lived there 6 weeks earlier so the pen was ready and waiting for them Saturday night. 

By the time I got all the butchering equipment set up, finished cleaning the house and made a batch of blueberry muffins for the crew the next morning, well, I went to bed at 1am.  Then up at 6 am to finish getting ready for everyone scheduled to arrive Sunday morning at 8am.  Sure wish I could have talked everyone into 7 am since it was going to be so hot, but seems like people like to sleep in a bit on their only weekend day off.  We really didn't get started until 8:30am, but I have to give everyone a big round of applause as we were done butchering and everything cleaned up and beer flowing at 11 am.  The fridge plus an overflow cooler were packed full of chicken. 

I was able to recruit one of my camera shy friends who works in the kitchen doing final prep and packaging to take a picture of the fine looking rest of the crew.

After everyone left, it was time for lunch and a well needed nap.  Then in the afternoon I had to strip down the chicken pen where the meat birds spent Saturday night in order to get ready for batch number 2 of meat birds that were arriving on Monday.  Normally I have the hatchery ship my day old chicks to me via the US Postal Service, but this batch I order some turkeys in addition to meat chicks.  They used to ship them together, but several years ago changed their policy to ship chicks and turkey poults separate.  I would need to order 15 turkeys for them to ship and I only ordered 8 so I had to go pick them up.  I spent part of Monday morning wrapping and freezing some of the butchered birds and organizing the rest. (The largest birds were nearly 9 pounds dressed weight.  Holy chicken!)  Mid-morning I drove an hour south to pick up sprout packing containers for Mike and then headed 2 hours west to pick up the turkeys and chicks.  I got home at 4:30 pm and then had to put bedding in the brooder pen, hook up the heat lamp and get the food and water ready.  Then regular evening chores and it was another night of finishing up at 9 or 10 pm.  At the end of the day though, all the chicks and turkey poults were snuggled in the brooder pen.  I will raise them together until the chicks get moved out to pasture at 3-4 weeks of age and then they will be raised separate after that.

So Sunday saw 49 chickens leave the farm and on Monday, 52 day old chicks and 8 turkey poults arrived at the farm.  Chickens going and chickens coming. 

There's got to be a morning after

Most of the chickens on our farm work for a living, but there are 4 that have been elevated to "pet" status. I caught this picture of three of them taking a dust bath in the flower garden in front of the front porch. They seem content to leave the flowers alone so I don't care too much that they leave deep holes in their dusting area. Oh, I might tell them they are "bad chickens" as I walk on by, but that's about the extent of my trying to get them to cease and desist. It's really quite pointless to try anyway. They seem very content in their "petdom" and were quite happy the morning after 50 of their farm mates met up with the ax.

The first of our two butchering parties for the year is in the books. Someone was surprised that we call this a party and asked me if it was really all that fun? I cannot say the work is "fun" per se, but it is a gathering of friends and that is what is fun about the event. This was the first one we ever had where it rained almost the entire morning. While it was quite miserable in the rain and everyone was truly a mess, we all agreed that the rain was much nicer than the 90 degree temperatures we have been having. I will include a few pictures of the event so I guess I should put some kind of warning about graphic content. I won't put up any that are too graphic, but this not the ballet. It is chicken butchering.

I did not end up getting my chicken crates built for this event so we did it our old old way which was to use an old wire dog kennel to load up groups of 6-8 chickens and bring them from the pasture to our butchering area. Normally I would move all the older chickens from the pasture into the barn the night before, but I am overlapping batch one and batch two this year so the pen in the barn is filled with 50 5-day-old chicks. Thanks so much to Eric for making the 8 trips out and back to the pasture to get the chickens while the rest of us butchered. It was his first time helping us and remember it rained almost all morning. What a trooper!

Bill and Mike did the killing, scalding and plucking as usual. I don't know why Mike looks so much wetter than Bill does in this picture. I built this plucker with Bill's help several years back. It will pluck two chickens clean in about 30 seconds. An amazing piece of equipment. Thanks so much for Chris's daughter Zoe who did a great job overseeing the temperature and timing of the scalding. She was another first timer who jumped right in and helped without complaint.

I get to spend most of time at the evisceration table. I guess I got "chosen" for this job years ago because I am a veterinarian. Perhaps someone felt my skills as a surgeon could be used to remove internal organs from chickens. I suppose they were correct. I definitely have no problem with this job. We had our usual crew of me, Charlie and Paul. Chris who joined us for the first time last year was back as well and she brought along a friend, Christina, who helped us for her first time. Thank you so much Christina. You did a great job. That plucker does a great job too don't you think? And thanks Mike for bringing the pop-up tarp home for us to work under. It kept most of the table crew mostly dry.

Christine and Sue did their usual awesome job in the kitchen doing the final work making sure the chickens look real "purdy", bag them and get them into the refrigerator.

And that is our butchering morning in a nutshell. We were done and cleaned up by around 11:30am. Usually there is a little socializing afterwards, but everyone was so soaking wet and dirty that getting home and dry became a happy thought. So everyone took the number of chickens they wanted and headed home.

Today, my job was to take the 21 chickens that were left in my fridge and do something with them. 6 went to the local smokehouse to get marinated and smoked (mouth watering as I type). Not all of these are mine. The rest I either cut up or packaged whole and started the re-stocking of the freezer. It will be awhile before our freezer stock starts looking normal again.

As I was finishing my job under the glow of the mercury vapor light outside the barn, I could hear Mike still working the tractor out in the field. The near full moon was rising above the field across the road. A picture perfect end to a blessed day on the farm.