Homestead

I was shopping for a new scythe blade when I found this beautiful and incredibly long competition scythe blades.

In the video, they seem to be judged not just on time but also on how well the area is mowed. I find this fascinating.

Source: https://onescytherevolution.com/1/post/2011/07/competition-scythe-blades.html

My wife made potato salad to bring to dinner at friends' house last night. It's about half hard boiled duck eggs by volume.

Delicious!

For two or three weeks each spring and fall it gets very noisy on the homestead.

My wife has a large dehydrator. She had to fly to Vancouver suddenly a week and a half ago and left me with a huge box of fresh peppers from the garden. She asked me to dehydrate them so I spent an hour chopping them up last night while my son made dinner. Then, I put the diced peppers in the dehydrator and left it running overnight. These two 250ml canning jars were the result. Apparently she can add these to things during the winter and the rehydrate up nicely and no one can even tell.

They smell pretty good, too.

I would prefer not to drive. I've been walking about a ¼ mile to release them. Is that far enough?

My wife had to run off to the other end of the country very suddenly yesterday. She had planned to process two boxes of late season tomatoes. It fell to me to get it done. I diced them up and put them in the freezer so that she can make sauce when she gets back.

The big guy thinks that any time I'm at the butcher block in the morning I must be slicing ham. He loves ham. I told him I was working on tomatoes but he was quite persistent about making sure that I wasn't slicing ham. I even showed him a chunk of tomato and he went away but he came back 5 minutes later to see if I was still not slicing ham.

Chicken treats = happy chickens and more eggs.

The chickens love the trimmings and rejects. They were very excited when I let them out this morning and they found a bunch of tomatoes in their yard.

A wire broke off the ignitor element in our Harman unit. I have ordered a replacement and it looks simple enough to fix myself. But before sourcing the part I had called about 5 different fireplace companies in the area, and it seems everyone has dropped all support for pellet stoves in recent years! Not only does no one sell them any more (other than Canadian Tire), but they all outright refused to even consider sending a repairperson to help.

It's a bit infuriating. I am calling them, literally saying "please come take my money at your standard hourly rate". One would think "struggling businesses" would be more willing to take on what should be profitable work.

Is it such a liability issue for them that they're actually afraid to take on the work?

What if something bigger fails someday on my pellet stove? Why is no one on the island now willing to work on one?

If you know of someone who does still service wood pellet stoves on the island (Courtenay/Comox), please reply here or DM me. Thanks.

EDIT: formatting

French fries and homemade roasted turkey gravy topped with our own roasted Bronze Orlopp turkey, homemade bread dressing, and fried eggs from our backyard chickens.

Thanksgiving poutine!

Yum!

He said yes.

So today he mixed seventeen 30 Kg bags of concrete mix two at a time in a wheelbarrow with a mortar hoe by himself.

We set this foundation slab for a wheelchair lift I bought used and am working on installing for my father.

I think the teachers at his Catholic high school will be ok with this absence.

I just posted a note about a post that I made and marked with the four letter acronym flag. The second post included the four letter acronym. If you have that four letter acronym blocked you won't see either post. If you want to see what is all about remove the filters temporarily so that you can.

The first post is not suitable for vegans or those of delicate constitution.

I just posted a few pictures of the chicken disassembly process. In deference to the vegans and those of delicate constitution I followed the community rules (which I wrote) and marked the post NSFW.

If you have NSFW posts blocked you will not see it. If you want to see it, remove your filter temporarily.

We are a small, homestead farm. We aim for zero waste processing and have achieved it with our chicken processing. Here's how we do it.

We started with 42 Cornish x White Rock cockerels. They finished between 3 and 7 pounds (mostly toward the high end.)

Today we processed them down to dressed carcasses (what you would buy as a whole chicken in the grocery store.)

The first thing I do is remove the feet. They go into the feet bag. Some of them will go to Asian customers who want to eat them, some will go to pet owners for pet food.

Next I remove the skin from the top half of the neck then loosen and remove the glands and crop. These go in the gut bucket.

The necks go into the broth bag.

Next I open the cavity, carefully cut around the vent, and remove the organs.

The cavity fat goes in the schmaltz bag to be rendered into schmaltz.

The hearts go to one of our customers who will eat them.

The gizzards go to one of our customers who will eat them.

The livers go to one of our customers who will make pate from them.

The other organs and the contents of the gizzards go in the gut bucket.

That leaves us with clean carcasses.

I have two 5 gallon buckets (the gut bucket and a bucket of blood and heads). The feathers fill the tops of both buckets. These get buried in the muck pile to be composted. Within a few weeks they will be reduced to worm castings.

Tomorrow, I will part most of the chickens. I will make wing parts, boneless skinless breasts, boneless skinless thighs, and legs.

The wing tips, bones, skin and fat, and carcasses go into a roasting pan and my wife roasts them. When they are nice and brown she fills the roasting pans with water, onions, peppercorns, and vegetables and puts them in the oven overnight. In the morning she picks all the meat from the carcasses, This picked meat will become chicken salad, chicken quesadillas, or other dishes that require pulled chicken. Anything we don't use right away gets frozen to be used later.

What little is left of the carcasses goes into the muck piled to be composted.

Nothing goes to waste.

It took us 6 hours to harvest and process 42 chickens. They are in the fridge with bags of ice between them to make sure they cool down. Tomorrow I will part most of them. We are keeping these ones for ourselves for the winter. We would normally sell half of the fall batch but the summer was crazy and our plans changed so we're keeping these ones.

This is one of those things that I never imagined that I would be good at as a kid growing up in the city.

We are harvesting 44 white rocks today. I mount three cones on my tractor bucket. I have cut them down to widen the mouths. I put the tractor between the chicken house and processing area.

On the left, a homemade scalder. It's an electric water tank cut in half with the thermostat replaced with a commercial thermostat (the temperature can be set higher than a residential one) and a replacement element (110V versus 220V.)

In the center is our homemade plucker. It has a spray bar around the top and a solenoid valve that turns the water on when the plucker is turned on.

We process the birds through to ready for the freezer 9 at a time.

I can post detail pictures of the plucker or a video of anyone is interested.

A few weeks ago we got 40 (45) broilers. They're almost done.

We had to change our delivery date because I was going to be in Atlanta and my wife was going to be in Toronto. We had to switch hatcheries to get an earlier delivery date but the abattoir couldn't accommodate the change so I'm going to end up processing them myself on the homestead. These ones are for our own freezer. We're not allowed to sell them if they aren't processed at the abattoir where they can be government inspected.

I've got a note out to a local woman who wanted to come to learn how to do it herself. My wife's friend's son also wants to come learn.

It's a valuable skill to have if you're going to raise chickens for meat. It's especially important if the poop hits the fan and you can't get them processed at the abattoir because there's a zombie apocalypse or something.

A comment on another post reminded me...

Eggs. I really like eggs.

This is a picture of a bowl of hard boiled quail eggs with pinch bowls of salt, pepper, and paprika. I set them out at a party. They were a big hit.

We had a breeding trio of turkeys a few years ago so we had turkey eggs. I made turkey egg salad. It was delicious.

We always have ducks and I've eaten duck egg salad as well.

I can't find the picture of the big bowl of goose egg salad. If I do I'll post it.

These are Bronze Orlopps and Mini Whites. They are 242 days old as of today. They have lived a good life with all day access to outdoors, good, high quality, local drug-free feed, and clean water. They are friendly and very calm. I like turkeys far more than I like chickens.

These guys go to the spa next Friday, September 22.

This goose has adopted my parents, and is attempting to establish residency in their cabin. We suspect it is domestic and escaped from its coop. It's a seasonal cabin and they're planning to close up soon. What should they do? Central Ontario. Near Bracebridge.

UPDATE: A neighbor of theirs is set up for chickens, so could accommodate a goose. And shortly after making that arrangement an ad appeared in the community message board. So the goose is going home.

These Cornish X meat birds arrived on our farm on August 3. That makes them 30 days old today. We ordered 40 and got 45 (the hatcheries always give you extra in case there are any losses during or immediately after transport.) We have lost only one so there are 44 out there now.

My wife has Chicken Day on the calendar as September 30. They will be 59 days old at that point and should average between 6 and 7 pounds dressed.

We had a confluence of events that resulted in our cancelling our original order for 60 birds with one hatchery and ordering 40 birds from another hatchery for delivery a week earlier. That means that we lost our slot at the abattoir. We normally have half of the birds done at an abattoir and do half ourselves. We can't sell the birds we do ourselves so we eat those ones. With the situation this summer we decided not to grow any birds for anyone else this fall and will do all 40 of the birds here on the farm for ourselves.

Butchering day is NOT my favorite day of the year but it is part of farming livestock and it has to be done. We're likely going to offer a workshop for anyone local who wants to learn how to process chickens on their own property.

I gave their bedding a toss this morning.

Our meaties always have access to outdoors from the time they're about 3 weeks old. They will continue to go outside right up until the day before they are processed.

I don't if they know any songs. The squirrel baffle keeps the hens from getting in the top of the feeder and keeps them from pooping into it from above.

We've had these same nesting boxes for about 10 years. They are holding up very well. These 8 boxes nicely serve our flock of between 40 and 50 hens (between you and me I actually have no idea how many are out there.)

EDIT: 45 hens and 3 roosters. I counted this morning.

We had a few hens taken by raccoons early in the season. They were taken outside but when you tighten up security the raccoons tend to get more aggressive so I built a stronger summer door from the main house.