Saturday was a farm day! Warning a Y rating for Yucky!

Every Saturday we usually have something to do on the farm but this Saturday was all day long.  First thing in the morning, we started butchering our meat chickens.   In the Spring we bought 25 fluffy yellow chickens, 15 of them were classified as meat chickens - raised only for their being butchered.  The other 10 were egg chickens.

The time has come to butcher the chickens and put them in the freezer.  I took some pictures but I think my ISB cable is bad as they won't upload from the camera.  I am in the process of getting a new cable.  First, Glenn and Nathan dispatched the chickens, beheaded them and then hung them up to bleed.  It is necessary for them to bleed before you start cleaning them. 

Mandy's job was too watch the hanging chickens while Glenn went and got another one and match sure the cats or other animals didn't have a easy dinner.  She also had the hose and enjoyed spraying the fence.  She also helped me pluck the chickens.

 

Next, we had boiling water and they were dunked quickly into the water.  It loosens the feathers and they come off easily.  Then you finish the job by cutting off the feet, cleaning out the insides, washing them and then packaging them to be put in the freezer.  We now have 10 cleaned chickens in the freezer.  Next week, we will finish the last 4 (one died earlier) and we will be finished.  We will not repeat this process as it is not price/time efficient but it has been an experience.  We now know how to raise a chicken, gather her eggs and when the time comes to kill her and place her in the freezer. 

On to our next farm job - we are still trying to finish up the wood piles from Hurricane Ike.  After the 10 trees were cut down and piled up, it was too dry to burn and so we had to wait.  Then Spring baseball game and we didn't have any free weekends and so we are now trying to finish up all of this wood.  It is unbelievable to me how long it takes to burn a pile of wood.  We have this large tree that fell some time ago and has been standing for awhile and so we piled some of the wood close to it and tried to burn the whole thing.  After a week it is still smoking.  We think it is still hot inside and the tree is acting like a chimney.  I drove the tractor yesterday and Glenn went around and loaded more logs and we compiled a couple of stacks into one and will burn them again next week.  It was also very hot yesterday. 

Who would have thought several years ago that we would be killing chickens and driving tractors and building fences.  I will go back and add pictures when I get my new cable.