Chicken Harvest Time!

We were blessed with cooperative weather and an enthusiastic and quick learning crew of friends for our first annual spring chicken harvest at our new farm. We started the process at about 08:30 AM and were completed with all 49 birds just before noon.

One of our meatie roosters trying to seek cover from our catching crew....

The killing station

The scalding pot and plucker in the background, which we rented from a wonderful lady again this year from Rougemount, NC.

The eviscerating station....

Terry was our chief chicken catcher, an important job which keeps the overall flow of the process going. This keeps the eviscerating station supplied, but not over supplied with plucked chickens...he did have some occasional help...

Curtis is a friend from work who joined us and helped out pretty much at all stations of the process...

Ethan would help fetch one when he wasn't busy warding off predators with his "Airsoft' rifle!..

Terry developed a calmer, gentler way of transporting the chickens to the killing cones...

This is Andrew who quickly caught on to the killing station and did an awesome job, it is not for the faint of heart, though he had the patience of a saint all day, and even helped our seven year old son do the deed...

Aki, Andrew, and Curtis at the scalding station...

The plucker is perhaps the biggest neccessity for doing this many chickens as quickly as we did, it can pluck up to four chickens at a time in less then one minute!!!

Beautiful,..... no muss, no fuss!!

Karen, Tracy, and I worked the eviscerating table.

Our friend Tracy claims she never gutted a chicken before, we are not so sure, as she seemed all to effiicient at it for a rookie. With a little experience one can gut a chicken in about 5 minutes or so.

The following day Mike gave them all a quick final going over and rinse. We bagged them up in shrink wrap bags that gave them a nice compact professional look.



Next we will try turkeys, which we moved out to the land the following day. I was worried they were too young and might not be able to handle the night time temps, but so far so good! They are now just about 3 weeks old, but quite fiesty! Not sure how we will handle them in October when they weigh 20-30 pounds! But we have some time to figure that out.

Junk in the Trunk!

Just a quick reminder to folks with cats... if you leave your windows or trunk open and don't check for extra baggage, you might find out that you brought something along with you that you did not intend to.

This happened to us last weekend. James likes to take a nap in our car or trunk whenever the oportunity presents. In my tiredness at the end of a long day, I came home, opened the trunk, and who should appear....

The Green Mile

So if you ever saw the movie you would understand the meaning of the "Green Mile" In this case you can see the chicken tractor at the end of the trail which is advancing twenty feet closer to the execution site every day. This Saturday the meaties are going to be processed just in time to beat the impinging summer heat. They will head to the comforts of our cool deep freeze. They grew very well this year and are ready for harvest at 7.5 weeks. I honestly have to say I will be glad to see them go, as once again it meant two trips out to the land every day to feed, water, and move their tractor. Below you can see that their brief time on this earth was days of relaxing in the shade ... and eating and sleeping.

Our young layers are enjoying their lives of leisure foraging about the yard (when we are around) and hanging out in their deluxe accommodations.

Our turkeys are doing well, about 2.5 weeks old, we lost one to a STD (No, not ghonorrhea....sudden turkey death syndrome!) Fine one day, dead the next... the others seem to be quite vigorous and I hope to get them moved out to the land soon.

The house.. still putting along...supposedly we will be in by the end of the month. I will post some reveal pictures when it is done...don't hold you breath.