Cutting Up The Chicken

In yesterday's post we showed you how we butcher the chickens.  We left you when the birds were butchered with the birds chilling on ice.  Our goal is to let them chill and have them in the freezer in 8 hours after butchering. 

We had a late start in butchering.  Although we set up the chicken butchering stations the night before, when we got everything ready to go, I realized the regulator on my propane burner was faulty, not allowing a blue, pressured flame, but a weak flame.  I would never be able to get scalding water like that.  I made a quick dash to the hardware store and purchased a new one.  We started butchering at 9:55 am and finished at 12:15pm.  We ate lunch and had an afternoon cup of coffee and then at 6 pm, began cutting the chickens up.  Prior to putting them in the freezer, we like to cut them up in the classic 8 piece cut-up - 9 pieces, if you count the neck/backbone portion we use for making chicken broth.

In THIS POST FROM A LIFETIME AGO IN 2014 we go into detail about how we cut them up.  Since then, we have changed a few things, but it is essentially the same.  We do cut the breast in half now.  One of the most important things about the cut-up is this: HAVE A SHARP KNIFE!

"Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln

This is no less true with chicken butchering.  We use Chicago Cutlery knives and I use whetstones, honing oil, and a sharpening steel repeatedly before and during the process.  It is SO much easier with a sharp knife.

So here is our bird ready to be cut up.  Tricia weighs each bird prior to cutting, writing the weight on the outside of a zip loc bag as well as in a notebook for our records.  We'll share that in a few minutes.  For now, let's cut to the chase...

We were rushing so as not to run out of sunlight.  We started at 6 pm and finished at 7:45 pm.  It was a long day, and we're not getting any younger!  While rushing, we were very careful so as not to cut ourselves.  No sense in bagging up my thumb in a ziploc bag.  In about a minute and a half we can transition a whole bird into this nice arrangement you see below:

All bagged up and on ice, we put the bags in the freezer 15 at a time at 1 hour intervals to allow the freezer to work at a good pace instead of overwhelming it with 47 birds to freeze at one time.

We keep them bagged and on ice and then bring the next 15 bags inside to be frozen.

We stack them in the freezer with rags between each layer of four.  We learned the hard way that if you stack them one on top of the other, they'll freeze into one block of chicken/ice.  I had to use a crowbar and hammer to separate them each time we wanted chicken for supper.  Not fun!  We try to learn from our mistakes though.

We have one final installment on chickens on Thursday Night.  We'll break down the costs and look at the economics of raising your own chickens for slaughter, comparing the numbers with prior years.  I always find it informative.  See ya Thursday!

Feathers 'A Flyin' (Chicken Butchering Day 2019)

At 8 weeks old the meat birds, on average, had met our target weight for them of 6 pounds.  A 6 pound bird yields a 4 pound carcass.  These birds will grow more than double this weight, but this is the size that we think produces the tenderest, tastiest bird that is sized right for our family.

In this post we'll show you how we process the birds.  "Process the birds" is a nice euphemism for slaughtering them.   This post has blood & guts, so if that makes you queezy, check in with us on another day.  This is reality, though.  This is how meat gets to your table.  Here goes:

Russ took a trip to Talladaga Motor Speedway for the weekend, so it was just Benjamin, Tricia, and I.  We worked hard and got all 47 birds butchered.  Benjamin is always the killer.  He places the birds in upside down traffic cones.  The rubber cones hold the birds tight.  They are positioned over buckets to catch the blood.  This goes into the garden.  No need to buy Blood Meal.  There is quite a dichotomy going on between the sweet smelling Confederate Jasmine blooming in the background and the 'not-so-sweet' task going on in the foreground.

Benjamin has a very sharp knife and he slits their throat.  The chickens' hearts pump out all the blood and they "go to sleep."  All the blood is removed from the carcass in this process.  Not a pretty sight, but it is necessary.  These aren't pets.  They are food.

Once the birds' hearts stop beating and they are pronounced dead, Benjamin lays them on the ground next to the propane Crawfish Boiling pot that we use as a Scalder.  I add some dishwashing liquid to the water to assist in cleaning the birds and allowing the feathers to come off easier in the next step.  I dunk the chickens in the scalding water for about two minutes, up and down, up and down.  When a tail feather or wing feather is able to be pulled out easy, they are ready for plucking.

One more thing.  It is critically important to have a thermometer in your pot.  You want to keep the water at a temperature of 145-148 degrees Fahrenheit.  Any cooler and the birds won't scald and the feathers won't come out during plucking very easy.  Any hotter and you cook the birds.  You don't want to cook them now. 

The next step is plucking.  We made a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker.  It is electrically powered and has a washing machine motor that turns a plate on the bottom that spins the chicken quickly around, hitting rubber fingers that grab feathers during rotation and pull them off without damaging the bird.  I spray the birds with water during plucking.

It doesn't take very long at all - maybe a minute and most all the feathers are removed.  You don't want to spin the birds for much longer than that or you'll risk breaking the legs of the bird.  You want to keep your chicken intact.  Look how nice and clean the birds are when they emerge from the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker!

I then cut off the feet and pull the heads off.  Heads are pulled off versus cut off because cutting causes sharp bones that will cut your zip loc storage bags and increase the potential of freezer burn.

I begin lining the birds up on the table for Tricia.  She is the eviscerator.  That's a fancy way of saying she guts and dresses the chicken.  To further prepare for that, I cut the oil gland off of each bird's tail.  This gland is said to give an "off" flavor to the meat.  Then I cut the bird's neck and loosen the crop and pull the windpipe out.  Then I cut open a slit right above the vent to expose the entrails.

Tricia pulls the entrails out and cuts around the vent to remove.  She cuts the gall bladder off of the liver, and removes the heart and gizzard.  She pulls the lungs out of the backbone and tosses.

The liver, heart and gizzard are all separated out.  They'll be cleaned and cut later and processed and frozen.

One final washing is done to remove any remaining blood and guts.

Once clean, the birds are submerged in a tub of cool water.  This begins a cooling process, bringing the bird's body temperature down.  It also serves a second purpose.  Beneath the water, flies can't land on them.  After a couple of hours, we pour out the water as it will be warm from the birds' body heat.  We quickly replace with fresh cool water and then we add ice and allow the birds to chill for 8 hours.  During this time the birds go through rigor mortis.

While we wait for the next step, we accumulate all the feathers, guts, and blood and bury them in the garden.

Tomorrow, we'll show you the process of cutting up the birds and storage.  We may also go over the numbers to show the details like, total pounds of meat harvested, total expenses, cost per pound, how much feed each bird consumed, etc.  It is always an interesting exercise.  Spoiler Alert: If you think that it is cheaper to produce birds yourself, you would be wrong.  It is much cheaper to buy them at the store.  If you remember studying Economies of Scale in Economics class, Tyson certainly has that advantage in their favor.  However, there are other reasons to do this rather than price.  We may discuss those tomorrow.

The First Batch of Spring Kids Arrive!

We have been expecting Oreo, our La Mancha goat, to go into labor and deliver her first kids.  On Tuesday, things started happening.  But it was slow.  Too Slow.  Tricia was worried that she was in trouble, so she called our veterinarian.  He was in surgery but told Tricia to bring Oreo in.  She and Benjamin loaded Oreo up and made the one mile trip to the vet.  Tricia left Oreo there.

A little while later, the office called Tricia and told her she could go pick "them" up.  Oreo had delivered two little doelings.  It was a good thing that Tricia brought her in as she had trouble delivering the second one.  The second doeling had her head turned backwards and Dr. Jody had to turn her head around in order for her to be able to kid.

They mentioned that there was a little problem.  Since Oreo was a little early, they theorized, her hormones weren't quite right and she had no interest in her little kids.  Uh oh!  Tricia had the appropriate shirt on for the occasion!:

You've Goat to be Kidding Me is right!  Oreo is not being motherly to her twins.  So now WE are tasked with being the twins' mother!  We put Oreo in the stanchion and got the twins to begin nursing.  It is so important that the little ones get colostrum.  It took some work.  They would suck for a little while and then lose it.

Here they are.  One is light tan and white.  The other is black with white patches.  The tan colored one is strange in that neither the mom, Oreo, or the Dad, Buckwheat has any tan coloration.  I guess there is a recessive gene somewhere.

Tricia wanted to weigh them, so we brought the kitchen scale out to the barn.  The black one weighed 3 pounds 15 ounces, and the tan-colored one weighed 3 pounds 7 ounces.

The kids' father is a Nubian goat.  They have long, floppy ears.  The mother, of course, is Oreo, and she is a La Mancha.  La Manchas have strange little "elf ears."  The kids have traits from each one.  The little doeling has long Nubian ears like Buckwheat.

While the little tan doeling inherited the trait of having little La Mancha "elf ears" from Oreo, the momma.

We are several days into this adventure and Oreo hasn't shown much motherly instinct.  She will let them nurse, but she's not really interested in them at all.  Tricia noticed that Oreo must not be making a whole lot of milk since they nurse and nurse and when finished, they still cry like they are still hungry.

Fortunately, we have plenty of cow milk, so Tricia has been making up two baby bottles full of cow's milk that she supplements Oreo's milk with 3 times a day.

We're hoping this will end pretty soon.  Especially because we have more baby goats on the way.  Annie, our Nubian goat, is very pregnant.  She is as wide as the barn door and should kid any day.  As big as she is, we're thinking triplets...

The 2019 Carrot Harvest

We planted 3 rows of carrots this year.  One half of a row was some Seeds of Change Carrot Medley.  One half of the row was Danvers Orange and Berlicum Carrots.  Then we had one row of Cosmic Purple Carrots and one row of Atomic Red Carrots.  I like a lot of color on my plate!  Here are the rows of carrots with our 'clean-up crew' waiting for carrot greens to be tossed over the fence.

Here is a nice sampling of the Carrot medley.  There are orange carrots, yellow carrots, white carrots, red carrots and purple carrots.  All fat and healthy.

Some of the carrots have odd shapes, but many are just perfect.  I was a little concerned about them due to all the rain, but all of them did exceptional except for the orange carrots.  About half of them were rotten because I waited too long to pick them.

Here is a mixture of Cosmic Purple and Atomic Red Carrots just after being hosed down.  Their colors really pop after being sprayed off.  Once done, I take the topsoil-laden water and go pour it back in the garden.

Many of the carrots will be eaten raw, roasted in the oven, shredded in cole slaw and for making homemade egg rolls.  The rest will be blanched and frozen.  We decided to blanch some of the Seeds of Change "Rainbow" Carrots since they are so pretty.  Look at the different colors:

We chop them up so they'll blanch evenly.  We have one of those handy chopper things that does a nice job in chopping things up.  It's one of those "As Seen on TV" things that actually works.  Just glancing at the colors, you wouldn't think that these are carrots, but they are.

We blanch them, chill them and bag them up.

We'll put these in the freezer and eat on throughout the year.  In all, we put up 18 quart-sized freezer bags of carrots.

When the Electric Fence No Longer Pops

It's about that time of year where I begin separating our 3 acre pasture into paddocks.  The paddocks are separated by step in posts and temporary poly wire electrified by a solar charger.  From time to time, however, I'm greeted by a cow who isn't where she is supposed to be.  They've all been popped by the electric fence (and so have I), and so they (and I) respect it.

When a cow or all of them are beyond the electric fence, I know that the fence is no longer "hot."  I have a little trouble shooting routine that I go through to find and fix the problem.  Most of the time a branch has fallen across the perimeter wire and is grounding it.  So to find that I walk the perimeter fence to locate where the grounding out is occurring.

On this particular day, I didn't have to walk very far.  The problem wasn't that a stick had grounded it out.  It is that the fence wasn't grounded at all.  The ground wire coming off of the solar charger had fallen off of the ground rod.  This is how I found it:

The culprit, as you might have guessed, was Astro, the bull.  The ground rod is in the "bull pen."  Astro is at that age that bulls get where they like rubbing their head on everything.  Feed buckets we put in the pen are pushed across the pasture.  Anything solid in the pasture he can find, he rubs his head against it.  If you aren't very careful, he'll break everything he can get his head next to.  Astro had rubbed his head on the ground rod and knocked the ground clip off of it, rendering the fence un-grounded and unable to carry current.

The solution, in this case was simple - shockingly simple.  (Ha ha)I simply pulled the ground rod out of the ground in the pasture and put it ON THE OTHER SIDE of the fence and put the ground clip back on the rod.

This photo clearly shows that he can't get his head on the other side of the fence to knock the clip off.

For the time being, all is well once again.  But that's the thing with livestock.  Just as soon as you fix one issue, another one arises.  One must always be vigilant, anticipating problems and then working quickly to find solutions.

He Is Risen!! Bought With A Price

I walked out to the barn this morning to milk the cows.  The weather was nice and cool on Resurrection Sunday Morning.  Maybe it is just me, but most Resurrection Sunday Mornings are gorgeous.  Blue skies, nice weather, green leaves on trees, flowers blooming.  It is as if God was putting an exclamation mark on the day we celebrate the empty tomb - the day that Christ rose from the dead to redeem us from our sins.

Milking cows is a peaceful task.  It is quiet, except for the clucking of the hens scratching for grain right outside the gate.  And the goats bleating.  And the calves mooing and the swish sound of of milk hitting the muslin cloth that covers the milking bucket.  This morning while milking the cows, I happened to have my phone with me.  For some reason I searched on YouTube for Paul Harvey.  I miss Paul Harvey.  We need journalists like him again!

While I milked, I turned up the volume on my phone and listened to a 4 minute message that Paul Harvey gave years ago that is poignant and well worth your time to listen to it:  (Click the arrow below)  Good Day!

He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  Matthew 28:6

2019 Meat Birds - Seven Weeks Old

Thursday night.  The routine continues.  I get home from work and fill a bucket with 6 scoops of Chick Grower 18% Protein crumbles.  I walk to the chicken tractor, put the wheels down and slowly push the tractor to fresh grass.  They scurry to the fresh grass and begin pecking at clover.  Being in the same spot all day, they've made a real mess on the ground.  They eat a lot and they poop a lot.

I fill the two gutters with feed and the chickens go CRAZY!  They peck at your legs and your arms... Tricia has little peck marks on her arm where they have pecked at her.  Imagine what has happened in the last seven weeks.  They have grown from little cute, yellow puff balls that weighed an ounce or so into grown up, mean, "monster-birds."

We'll find out in a minute how much they weigh.  I pick out three averaged sized ones.  Now that they are older, I pick out two roosters (since they are larger) and a hen (since they are smaller) to weigh.

We put the first chicken on the scale.  Appropriately, you can see the Lone Star feed behind him.  Those boogers are eating a lot of that stuff.

Holy Moly!  5 pounds 15 ounces!

And now we'll put the hen on the scale...

Bird 1: 5 pounds 10 ounces (rooster)
Bird 2: 5 pounds 15 ounces (rooster)
Bird 3: 5 pounds 2 ounces   (hen)

Drum roll please... 

At the end of seven weeks, the birds weight 5 pounds 9 ounces!  That shows a gain of 1 pound and 4 ounces over last week.  To look at previous years at this same time:

*Week 7 2018: 5 pounds 15 ounces
*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce 
*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces 
*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces

Our goal is a 6 pound bird at the end of 8 weeks.  We were running behind in comparison to previous years, but this last week, we made up a lot of ground.  The birds should be ready by next weekend.  It'll be butchering day next Saturday.

Not as Good as I Thought it Was

I'm not a horticulturalist.  While I do enjoy growing things, it's mainly because of the thrill I get watching a 'dead' seed transform into a live plant, especially one that yields great food to eat and enjoy.  But I can't tell you the genus, family, etc.  Some people, like my son Russ, can tell you everything you want to know about different plants.

Take, for instance, the photo below that I took in my garden this weekend.  This plant comes up every year around St. Patrick's Day in my garden.

Aren't the lavender-colored flowers pretty?  Look at the big 'heart-shaped' leaves.  I always thought that these were in the clover family.  Clover sets nitrogen in the soil.  I've always let them grow in the garden for as long as I could so that they could 'fertilize' my soil for the spring crops like beans, squash, corn, and cucumbers.

The trouble with that is that I was wrong.  Dead wrong.  These are NOT clovers.  They are oxalis or wood sorrel.  Lots of people must get confused by the leaves, because it is also called false shamrock.  Many people grow these from bulbs and use them as ornamental houseplants.

While very pretty in the garden, they are invasive and spread all over.  When you try to dig them up, you discover many, little, copper-colored bulbs.  I over-looked the invasive nature of the plant as I thought it was setting nitrogen.  I thought wrong!  Not only is it not setting nitrogen, but it is using up my nitrogen!

I took another photo of the pretty (what I originally thought was) clover and then began to aggressively hoe it all up, tossing flowers, leaves, stems and bulbs over the fence to our goats and chickens who were all too happy to gobble them up.

I did read that the leaves and stem are edible by humans too, but that was after I had rid my garden of them.  They contain oxalis acid, so those with kidney stones or gout are warned to not overdo it, but in moderation it is fine.  It is said to have a tart, rhubarb-like flavor.  Next year no doubt, it will come up again.  Before tossing it all to the animals, I'll try a little bit.  "If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em!" I found this recipe that seems simple and interesting and I'll try it:

Below is an Oxalix Cooler recipe from Sunny Savage

Oxalis Cooler

1 quart water

1/2 cup Oxalis leaf/stem/flowers/seedpods

1 Tablespoon agave nectar or honey

dash of salt

Mix all ingredients in a blender. If possible, let sit overnight in refrigerator and enjoy!

Credit: EAT THE WEEDS

The Late Great Carrot Harvest

Ecclesiastes 11:4 King James Version (KJV)

4 He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.

How are you doing on your To Do List?  Getting things done is often a struggle.  Oh, we all get things done, but it's as they say, "the devil is in the details."  Many times numerous things need to get done - simultaneously.  You feel stretched in all directions!

Image Credit

In those times, it is always a good idea to prioritize.  Sometimes, however, everything feels like it is priority #1.  That's the way it's been with the garden this year.  Both in getting the spring garden in and harvesting the fall/winter garden.  Those are really not chores or dreaded things.  They are things I look forward to.  Unfortunately, it has worked out (or not worked out) that the days that I have an open schedule to garden, I have to work late, or I get stuck in traffic, or it rains.

I have one row of carrots to harvest and this weekend was the time that they must be dug!  Russ and Benjamin came out and helped me.  They've always liked harvesting root crops.  Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Peanuts, Carrots, etc.  It's something about discovering treasure under the soil that is exciting.

The first two rows were Cosmic Purple Carrots and Atomic Red Carrots.  This last row was Berlicum and Danvers Carrots - normal orange ones.  We began digging and almost immediately discovered some bad news!  Oh, it could have been worse, but it was a little discouraging.  As we began pulling the big, beautiful carrots out of the ground, only about 3/4's of them came up.  The rest was rotten!

The cows were happy to oblige in helping us ensure the over-ripe carrots did not go to waste.  Those girls ate so many carrots, we kind of figured the milk would be orange in the morning.

In the final analysis, we lost at least half of the row of carrots.  Not good.  But it could have been worse.  We collected perhaps 2/3's of a five gallon bucket of carrots that weren't rotten.

After washing them off, we found maybe another six carrots that were bad, but the rest we were able to save.

We are still blessed to have a bunch of carrots to eat fresh and to blanch and freeze for later.  Next year, we'll plan better, so as not to lose so many!

I'm in a hurry to get things done

Oh, I rush and rush until life's no fun

All I really got to do is live and die

But I'm in a hurry and don't know why

-Alabama