Our weekend projects began on Friday when Sue and Dustin spent all morning processing, then cleaning up the aftermath. Even though it’s a morning job, the day was extremely hot and it always seems to take longer than it does. It’s a very, very long day and Sue was pooped. Thankfully, this is our last batch of the summer. Can you call that a harvest? I’m going to call it that since we are almost into the harvest season.
When they were finished for the day, all that remained to do was complete the final chicken cleaning and vacuum pack them. So, I started working on them in the morning. The thing with the summer chickens is that they are so hot all of the time, their feathers don’t always grow out. That means, when we process, the plucker cannot get at these undeveloped feathers and we need to work at them in post (so to speak). I know I’ve talked about this before, but it is difficult to explain, so I took a photo yesterday; before and after.
As you can see from the photo above, the feathers that have not come through almost look like blackheads. To get rid of them, I just kind of pop them out the same way one does when you extract pimples during a deep cleansing facial. It does take rather a long time. Sue butchered 13 chickens on Friday; if I estimate, I think it took about 7 hours to do the final cleaning. Here is what they look like after the cleaning is finished.
As you can see, they clean up rather nicely. 🙂 They were all good little chickens, mean weight was 4.879 lbs. this batch is mostly for us, so we can have chickens to eat through the year. Feels good to be able to provide for yourselves. That take us to our other harvest.
We had a rather productive day today, even though it was Sunday – our rest day. We watered the nursery pots, the gardens and many of trees since it was a hot few days and we have a hot few days ahead of us, planted a nice verbena that Dustin and Alexis gave Sue for the passing of Bob.. We finished bleaching out the coolers, scalder, and washing all the rags used on processing day. Had yummy pumpkin pancakes for breakfast. Then we did a few hours of church. After all that, I started in to freezing summer squash to use over the year. We didn’t have the most successful garden ever, but our summer squash is producing like gangbusters.
We had about 8 squash on the counter, so I wanted to begin freezing them for use through the winter. We ended up with three bags of vacuum sealed veggies. 2 Cups, 4 Cups and 6 Cups of summer squash, with a tad bit of zucchini. Nice! Summer Bread anyone? The last bit of harvesting was done with about 10 rather ripe acorn squash. They also were on the counter, ripening over weeks until it was time to roast them. Roast them we did and ended up with about 6 cups of squash, perhaps to use for a first course soup for a farm supper when friends come visiting in October. Hmm, have to think on that.
I suppose there’s one more harvest that took place today… I harvested Sue’s hair and gave it to the birds to warm their nest for the winter. Her hair looks nice and short once again. 🙂 Tomorrow is a holiday so not sure what is in store: we might be plant a few things in the morning, I just worry when things are so hot. Whatever we do over the next few days, we’ll share it with you sometime. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!
Wing and a Prayer 