The nice thing is that a crop of garlic looks so bountiful. It would be so easy to grow enough garlic for a year’s worth of cooking!Last week I had some new neighbours. There is a lot of grassy space around my little house so Terry put the milking cows onto that piece. Then I had cows eating grass in my front lawn and walking by my window! It seemed so idyllic (besides the cow pies).
Well, last Wednesday (July 15th) was my 21st birthday and it turned out to be a memorable one because it was the first day this summer that we butchered chickens (and it was definitely time because some of the roosters were starting to crow). I was a little worried because I wasn’t sure about having to kill an animal, plus it was on my birthday and wasn’t necessarily going to be very enjoyable. It turned out not too bad. I didn’t have to kill any chickens and actually did a lot of watching. I did help with bringing the chickens inside to put in a big fridge to cool after they were dead and cleaned and I did a little bit of feather plucking as well. Since then we have butchered three more times and each time I help a little bit more. I am still taking the birds in to put them in the cooler and I also do a lot of plucking and moving the plucked birds to the eviscerating table. Perhaps I should elaborate a bit more on the process of chicken butchering. If you don’t want to know about this, feel free to skip this part. First we load up chickens either onto the trailer or into chicken crates and take them back to the barnyard. We butcher them in groups of eight so the first eight will go into the killing cones, which are metal cones (shaped kind of like an ice cream cone) with a hole at the point. They go in head down and the cone keeps them from flapping about too much and keeps them somewhat calm. Then Terry cuts their throats and we wait for them to bleed out and die. Once this is over they are dunked into hot water (about 180 degrees Fahrenheit) for a minute or so (a process called scalding), which loosens the feathers making it easier for them to be plucked. After that they go into the plucker, which is a machine with a round basin that has a rotating base panel. The whole basin has rubber fingers on the inside, which catch on the wet feathers of the bird and pull them out. It is much faster than doing it by hand at this scale because we can put three or four birds into the plucker at a time. Once they have been plucked by the machine, there are always a few feathers and bits of feathers stuck in the skin that the plucker couldn’t get and so we pluck those out by hand. After that, the birds go to the eviscerating table where Terry cuts off the head, a gland on the bum, and the feet. He also separates the windpipe and the esophagus from the neck muscle to make evisceration easier. Then he cuts a couple slits in the belly of the bird and scoops out all the organs on the inside (this is evisceration). We keep the heart and the liver and occasionally the gizzard (a hard muscle that is used by the chicken to grind up anything it eats) if there is an order for it. All the rest goes into a bucket and along with the feathers is composted. Then the birds are ready to go into the cooler to cool down and we start again (well, Terry kills the next batch before the evisceration of the first batch so that when he is done eviscerating, the other birds are ready to be scalded and plucked). That is basically what happens during a chicken butchering.
I was pretty worried about butchering but it is not something I dread anymore. I don’t think it will ever be my favourite thing to do on the farm but that is ok. We will be doing some butchering every week now until I leave so it is something that I will get more and more used to. At some point I am going to learn to eviscerate and Terry also wants to give me a chicken to pluck by hand so that I can see what it involves. They did it by hand for the first couple years when they were just raising chickens for themselves. Terry said that I don’t have to do the killing if I don’t want to and I don’t think it will be one of the things that I want to do regularly but I do feel that I have to kill one myself at some point while I am here. For me, it is part of how I feel I need to take responsibility for the food that I eat and the death that it causes. One thing that I am trying to get into my mindset (and this is something that Terry has discussed with me a bit) is that it is a harvest just like a harvest of corn, grain, tomatoes, or other garden produce. We just don’t really think of picking a tomato or digging potatoes as taking life in the same way as we do of chickens or pigs but it is, just a different kind of life.
On the day before we butchered for the first time, we got a new batch of chicks. They were, of course, cute little balls of yellow fluff and I was thinking that it is kind of weird that these cute little animals grow into the huge chickens that we butchered later that day. In many ways they seem so different but I have noticed that they already have the same behaviors as chicks as when they grow up. Eventually we will be butchering the batch of chickens that I saw arrive here as chicks.
On a different note, another exciting thing here on the farm is that the cats are all having kittens (well, three of them have kittens that we know of right now). Unfortunately most of the cats are pretty wild, as I have maybe said before, and so they hide their kittens away and we don’t see them until they are old enough to be scared of us and run away. But there is one cat, and perhaps she is a teenage mom, who kept her kitten in the barn at first in a place where I could go so I got to see it when it was still so little that its eyes were still closed! But then she figured out her mistake and moved it to somewhere I couldn’t find. Then one day I saw her sitting in the sun outside the barn and she had her kitten with her. Its eyes were finally open and it was very cute. I petted it and picked it up a few times (although she acted very nervous when I did) and she stayed there for a couple days (I’m not completely sure why; it seemed a little out in the open for taking care of a kitten) and then she moved again and I haven’t seen the kitten since. I hope that it is a bit tamer once it is older.
In the last couple of weeks the blueberries have started to ripen! I don’t know if I have mentioned this before but they have blueberries growing along their lane between the cedars, as well as a small field of blueberries. This last week I have had to walk down the lane to get to one of the henhouses during chores and it has been really nice because I can stop for a quick break and eat a few blueberries. They are so good! The hardest part is stopping so that I can get on with my chores.
Well, this has gotten long again but I hope that you enjoyed it!
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