Happy Mother's Day

Proverbs 1:8-9

⁸ My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:

⁹ For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.

Today is the day that we celebrate and honor our mothers.  I've been very blessed to have a GREAT Mom!  She modeled servanthood, selflessness, love and lots of hard work to me and my siblings. Today we had an opportunity to spend a relaxing Sunday afternoon enjoying a tasty meal and conversation and serving my mom and also serving my wife.
 

Me & My Mom

I have also been blessed to have a GREAT wife and Mother of my children.  The Youth Group at church today wrote a song and sang it to their mothers and then presented them with a rose.  Here is Tricia with our kids after the service ended, as they surround her and show their love and appreciation for who she is and what she does.

Laura Lee, Tricia, Benjamin and Russ

Happy Mother's Day!  I love you Mom and I love you Tricia!

2016 Meat Birds at Ten Weeks Old

The Cornish Cross Meat birds have all been processed and are in the freezer.  We have Twenty-some odd birds left - the Red Rangers.  They generally take about four additional weeks to reach maturity. So let's check in and see how they are growing. Remember that 6 pounds is our goal.  Last week, for some strange reason, they didn't gain an ounce.  They look a bit bigger this week.

Red Ranger Rooster

I only had one bird to bring to the scale this week, so it went a little quicker locating the marked bird than in previous weeks.  Russ placed old Red up on the scale that we had set up in the back yard.

Big Red's Weigh-in

Last week this old boy weighed 2 pounds 15 ounces.  This week (WOW!) he weighed 4 pounds 5 ounces.  That is extraordinary.  He gained 1 pound and 6 ounces.  That is incredible!  All I can think is that the Red Rangers are taking advantage of not having all the competition from the Cornish Cross chickens to get to the feed in the feed trough.  As a result they are eating more and growing more.

4 pounds 5 ounces

I hope this means that we'll be able to butcher all of the Red Rangers in two weeks, but I'd like to butcher all of them rather than doing two separate batches like we did with the Cornish Cross birds. So that means that to get them ALL to the 6 pound level, most likely it will take three more weeks of growth.  We'll know better at next week's weigh in.

2016 Meat Bird Butchering Saturday (Part 2)

We’ll continue where we left off yesterday.  We’ve killed, scalded, plucked, de-headed, de-footed, and gutted the bird.  We flip the bird on its stomach and use a knife to remove the oil gland on the tail.  Now we spray the nice carcass off with water.

I had previously sterilized a big blue bucket with a bleach solution and filled it with cool water.  This water bath serves a dual purpose: First, it keeps pesky flies from coming and lighting on your birds.  Flies are attracted by all the blood & guts.  If you butcher later on as it gets hotter, fans are a necessity to keep the flies off of the butcher table.  Flies cannot get to a submerged bird.  Secondly, the water bath cools the birds off.  Live birds are warm-blooded, obviously, and when you scald them, you raise the temperature more.  The water serves to quickly cool down your chickens.

The Water Bath to Cool Down

When all the birds are in the tub, we begin ‘finessing.’  Most of the hard tasks are done, but the fine-tuning remains.  We’ll take out the hearts from the iced container, cut them in half and remove any clotted blood that may be inside.  We’ll freeze the hearts in a Zip Loc bag and they’ll be cooked in a nice gravy later.

The livers don’t require much work, except I forgot to mention an important step yesterday that I’ll mention now.  When you pull the organs from the cavity of the bird, there will be a dark green sac attached to the liver – that’s the gall bladder.  Using caution, slice the gall bladder away from the liver.  You don’t want to burst it.  If you do, quickly wipe up the green liquid so as not to contaminate your bird or the butcher table.  The livers will be sprayed off with water and packed in zip loc bags where we will fry them in butter, or make delicious pate, or wrap with bacon and broiled.  So good.  Good for you, too.

On to the next organ – the gizzard.  Chickens don’t have teeth, so they can’t chew their food like us.  The gizzard performs this role.  Chickens swallow oyster shells, rocks or other hard objects that reside in their gizzard to break down food helping digest it.  Gizzards require some cleaning.  First, pull the fat off of the outside of the gizzard and then cut the gizzard in half.

Cut the Gizzard in half

When you open it up, you’ll see that the gizzard of a pasture raised bird is filled with GRASS!  This is a very good thing.  Your bird will be healthy and by eating it – you will be too!

Pastured Poultry Proof!

Dump the grass/small rocks into your “gut bucket” and grab the yellow lining of the gizzard and pull off.  It has the texture of plastic and thus, is inedible.

It peels off easily.  That goes in the compost as well.

Wash the gizzards off and these can be placed in a Zip Loc bag for freezing.  If you don’t cook them right, gizzards can be like chewing on a piece of a rubber tire, but Tricia makes a dish, Gizzards & Rice that we enjoy. 

While the chickens continue to soak and cool down, we begin putting away the pots and burner and killing cones and cleaning up.  I dig a trench between the rows in the garden and dump the feathers into the trench.

Composting Feathers

I also dump the guts into the trench as well.  This will decompose in the garden soil, enriching it and grow good vegetables for us.  It is the same concept basically that the Indians taught the settlers of America in burying fish alongside their corn.  As I think about this, there are the guts of hundreds of birds in the garden.

Composting the Guts

Once everything is cleaned up, we’ll relax for a while.  Then I’ll pull out my whetstones, honing oil, and sharpening steel and I’ll re-sharpen the knives.  Cutting up chicken requires a sharp knife!

Sharpening the knives again 

One by one, I’ll pull the whole birds out of the water bath and cut them up into 9 pieces: 2 wings, 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 breasts, and a neck/backbone piece.

Cutting up the birds

We like to keep good records.  I’ll report average weights and other statistics later, but we weigh each bird and mark the weight and date in a journal and on the outside of a gallon-sized Zip Loc bag.  Each bird goes in its own bag.

Bagged, cut up chicken 

We’ll then place the bags into an ice chest surrounded by ice and we’ll allow them to ‘age’ for 8 hours before transferring them to their icy tomb in our deep freeze.

Aging the birds on ice for 8 hours

In past years, we butchered about 75 birds for us to eat throughout the year.  Now that we have two in college, we only butcher about 50 birds for our consumption throughout the year.  We work hard on a Saturday (or three) and then we enjoy the fruits of our labors all throughout the year. 

It's all worth it! 

A nice, homegrown bird is a good thing.   “A Chicken in Every Pot & and Every Man a King".

2016 Meat Bird Butchering Saturday (Part 1)

We raised 26 Cornish Cross Meat Birds this year as well as 23 Red Rangers Meat Birds.  We aim for the birds to reach a weight of 6 pounds live weight as that yields a 3.5 pound carcass.  In our opinion that is the perfect size.  Our Cornish Cross Meat Birds matured at different rates this year, with 13 of them reaching the desired weight in 8 weeks and the remaining 13 hitting six pounds at 9 weeks.  The Red Rangers will continue growing for another 3-4 weeks until they hit the 6 pound mark.

Over the course of the past two Saturdays, we processed the Cornish Cross birds and put them in the freezer.  In this post, we’ll explain and show how we did it.  On the Friday night prior to processing, we didn’t feed the birds scheduled for the knife the next morning.  This makes butchering cleaner since most of the food will have worked its way through their digestive systems.  We moved the birds to be butchered out of the chicken tractor and into the cattle trailer with water for them to drink.  Then we set up all the stations for Butchering and we got things underway Saturday Morning once normal chores were complete.  I also used a whet stone and sharpening steel to get the knives razor sharp.  That is a very important step.  You must have sharp knives.  

Station 1: The Killing Cones Station

We have some traffic cones with the tops cut out that are mounted to some 2 x 4s facing downward with buckets under each one to catch the blood. 

Killing Cones

Then we place the birds in the cones, pulling the neck downward and applying a quick slice to the artery on the neck.  The chicken’s heart pumps all of the blood out of the body and the chicken quickly and humanely dies.  It is not pretty, but it is pretty darn difficult to eat a live chicken.

Bird bleeding out

Station 2: The Scalding Station

I have my propane-powered crawfish boiling pot set up and I fill up the pot about ¾ of the way full and turn on the fire.  I add a drop or three of Dawn dish washing liquid to the water as that aids the feather removal process.  I have a thermometer in the water and closely monitor the temperature.  I am aiming for exactly 145 degrees.  That is the perfect temperature to scald the bird and not cook him.  The person at this station must keep a very close eye on the temp.

145 degrees F

Once the ideal temp is reached, the birds are carried from the killing cones, grabbed by the feet and dunked repeatedly for about 2 minutes.

Into the scalding water...

The bird is submerged all the way to the feet and then pulled all the way out and then repeated.

And back out of the scalding water (rinse, wash, repeat)...

Station 3: The Plucking Station

You can tell that the bird is ready for plucking when the long feathers easily pull off of the wings.  Then the plucking begins.  Due to the small amount of the birds processed, we didn’t use the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker to remove the feathers.  We did it the old fashioned way – by hand!  We simply pull all the feathers off, saving the feathers in big tubs.  We generally make pillows once we’re done.  (Just joking of course, I compost all the blood, guts, and feathers!)

How Chicken Plucking was done before the Industrial Revolution

Station 4: The Head & Feet Removal Station

Once plucked clean, the birds are moved to a bench near the evisceration station where their heads will be pulled off for composting and their feet will be cut off for eating.  The heads are pulled off rather than cut off so as not to have a sharp bone on the neck that could puncture the freezer bag, causing freezer burn. 

All lined up

Station 5: The Evisceration Station

With no head and feet the birds are ready to be gutted.  A small slit is made at the neck area and the crop and windpipe is loosened.  Then another slit is made right above the vent (chicken butt) and enlarged so that you can put your hand into the carcass, reaching way up until you can feel the heart.  Grabbing the heart and pulling downward, the crop, windpipe, heart, liver, gizzard and intestines will all come out attached in one handful.

Blood & Guts

At that point you simply cut around the vent to remove the entire digestive tract with intact organs, putting the gizzard, heart and livers in separate iced containers.  You can reach back into the carcass along the backbone between the ribcage and pull out the chicken’s lungs.

Lungs

You can reach back into the cavity and (if the bird was a boy) remove the parts, well, that made him a boy.

The Family Jewels

At this painful juncture we’ll pause and pick up Part II of this macabre journal in a day or two where we'll continue the activities on Butchering Saturday until the birds go into the freezer.

You Can’t Eat the Whole Bucket of Beans in One Sitting

A long time ago when I was a young boy, if I put too much on my plate but couldn’t finish it all, my parents or grandparents would turn to me and say, “Your eyes were too big for your stomach, huh?” When the green bean harvest is coming in strong, there’s no way to eat them as fast as you pick ‘em.  And you don’t want to do that anyway.  If you do it right, you can enjoy the best of both worlds – you can enjoy ‘just-picked’ green beans right out of the garden AND you can do like a squirrel and sock some away for later months when it is either too hot or too cold to grow them.

But you want to store them right.  Mushy dark green beans aren’t very appetizing.  We blanch our beans and then when we pull them out of the freezer, it is really hard to tell by color, taste, or texture that they are not fresh.  Here’s how we do it:

First we wash them and snap off both ends of the bean.  We don’t snap them into smaller segments.  We leave them whole, but that’s just our preference.

Let's Blanch Some Green Beans...

While I’m washing and snapping, I get a big pot of water boiling.  Once it reaches a rolling boil, I drop in the first batch of beans.  I try to guesstimate about the amount that will fit in a quart-sized freezer bag.  The water will stop boiling and I continue to watch it closely.  As soon as it reaches a boil again, I set the kitchen timer for three (3) minutes.

Set the timer for 3 minutes

During that three minute period, I wash the sink down, fill it halfway with cold water and add ice.  When the alarm goes off, telling me that the beans have boiled for three minutes, I QUICKLY pull them out of the water and dunk them in the icy-cold water.  The point of the exercise is to immediately halt the cooking process.

Cool them down quickly!

Then, of course I start another batch blanching.  Blanching inactivates the enzymes that are present in vegetables that mature the vegetable or fruit.  Blanching will allow you to freeze the green beans while maintaining their color, texture, and flavor.  The color of the beans are just beautiful.

Beautifully colored

I drain them and them pack them tightly into quart-sized freezer bags, label them with crop and date and then arrange them in the freezer.  In January when the sky is grey and temperatures are frigid, we can walk to the deep-freeze and pull out a bag of ‘fresh-picked’ green beans to enjoy. 

4 quarts of fresh green beans ready for the deep freeze

One gallon frozen and (hopefully) many more to go.  I’m thinking about pickling some green beans and also canning a few as well.

Pickin’ a Mess of Green Beans – April 2016

The month of April was as perfect as perfect can be for growing green beans.  Perfect temperatures.  Perfect rainfall.  Just perfect.  The first variety I planted was our old standby – Contender Green Beans.  We’ve found these to be solid producers, consistent, tender, and best of all – good eatin’!  I planted them (two seeds wide – 6 inches apart) back on February 20^th on a row 18” wide and 24’ long.  The young leaves are Kelly green, while the older leaves are almost blue, letting you know that they are enjoying the composted chicken manure that was amended into the garden soil prior to planting.  At the flowering stage, I top-dressed with a sprinkling of the same.

Healthy Contender Green Beans

To crowd out weeds, I mulched the young plants with a thick layer of chopped up live oak leaves and grass from the first mowing of the year.  This will rot over the course of the growing season and become organic matter.  It is also what I call my “earthworm magnet,” as the decomposing leaves attracts earthworms almost faster than a plate of rice & gravy does to Cajuns.   I grabbed a colander and bent over at the beginning of the row at the first plant.  There are green beans of all different stages on the plant.  That’s good news.  I use two hands to pull each bean so as to not damage the plant.  If you are in a rush and use only one hand, you run the risk of breaking off more than just the bean, but the entire fruiting stalk of the plant that contains other (unripe) beans.

Different Stages of Development

To show the full cycle, the picture below shows that while we are picking mature beans, there are plenty of immature beans as well as blooms.  This lets you know that there is a nice, steady stream of green bean inventory that will need to be checked and harvested every 2-3 days or so.  I like them to be young and tender, before the beans inside the pod have swollen.  Actually the one in the picture above was a little too big for my liking, but sometimes they are hiding in the foliage and you miss them the first time you pick.  No worries – they’re still good.

Blooms and pods

I filled up a nice bucket of beans on this day.  They were clean and bug free with little to no damage.  Sometimes the beans will be discolored or diseased from touching the ground, but these were all perfect.  The chickens clucking just across the fence are generally the recipients of any damaged beans.  They’ll eat anything that we won’t.

Bucket 'o Beans

I took the bucket of beans into the kitchen, washed them up and snapped off the ends of the beans.  People called these beans “string beans” because in the past, you’d snap off the ends and remove a long string from the pod.  The string was inedible.  Contender green beans don’t have this string, so you don’t have to worry about the step of ‘stringing’ them.  They are ready to eat.

Mountain 'o Beans

Speaking of ready to eat.  I’m ready to eat a nice ‘mess’ of beans – the first beans of the season.  I dug a few potatoes from the garden and we cooked the baby potatoes along with the green beans with a generous amount of butter.

A nice Mess of Beans (and baby potatoes)!

A mess of fresh picked green beans.  It don’t get much better than this!  Tomorrow we’ll show you another thing we do with them. 

Planting Trees

This past week I read a neat little story that was only 4,000 words long.  It was called, "The Man Who Planted Trees."  It was written by a French writer named Jean Giono and was published back in 1953.  I highly recommend reading it.  You can read the pdf version BY CLICKING HERE.

Image Credit

It is about a man in 1913 who is walking through the Alps and walks into an area that is dry, desolate and uninhabited.  There is no water.  The hiker finally finds a well, but it is dry.  He stumbles across a shepherd who saves him by taking him to a spring.  The hiker stays with the shepherd for a while and observes him collecting acorns, sorting them meticulously.

Image Credit

He curiously follows him and discovers that the widowed shepherd has taken it upon himself to restore the desolate valley by reforesting it - one tree at a time, even though the land does not belong to him.  He travels for miles, using his walking stick to press holes into the earth, dropping an acorn in the hole and then repeating time after time after time.  The hiker is impressed by the man's resolve and lofty goal.

The hiker leaves, fights in the first World War and returns seven years later to find thousands and thousands of saplings.  The valley is well on it's way to being restored.  Once dried streams are beginning to flow and the shepherd has gotten rid of his sheep and is now keeping bees to help pollinate the land.

The old man planted trees for 40 years!  Over the course of time this once barren landscape had become lush, vibrant, and alive.  People saw the beauty of the land and over 10,000 people moved in to populate the beautiful valley that the old man has singlehandedly transformed.

I had just read that story, when a gentleman came by the house the other day and began telling me about all the different beautiful birds he's been seeing at his house - birds like scarlet tanagers, Baltimore Orioles, and indigo buntings.  I told him I never see those birds and asked him how he gets those colorful birds to go to his house?

His answer?  He said, "I'll bring you the secret next week."  So this afternoon the gentleman drove up to the house and got out of his pickup truck with a Tupperware container and handed it to me.  It looked like it was filled with blackberries, but they weren't blackberries - they were mulberries.  He told me that those birds return to his house every year and eat the fruit from his mulberry trees.  He told me to go back in the woods behind the house and sprinkle the mulberries around.  If I'm patient, he said, I'll have mulberry trees bearing fruit in about 5 years attracting birds and making enough for us to eat as well.  I can remember that my grandmother and grandfather had a mulberry tree in the back of their house and have good memories of eating the fruit and staining my hands and mouth with the purple juice when I picked and ate them.

Image Credit

Will my mulberry trees transform the land the way the old shepherd did in the book I described earlier?  Perhaps not.  But in a little way, maybe I can be "the man who planted trees," and those trees will grow and bear fruit and bring a little more happiness to us (and some pretty songbirds as well).