…almost immediately upon their departure, Hubby and #2 began to set in motion for the activity of the day. First the scalding pot had to be heated up, and then the woven sack cones came out and were hung on the tree…knives were sharpened and then finally the fishing net came out of the barn.
For weeks now, several times a day #2 has been carrying buckets of wet layer mash out to five different portable tractors. By soaking the layer mash, the birds spend less energy digesting their food and more in processing it. They also get full faster and do not require as much food and less fillings of the water containers because they get their water from the mash.
Hubby says the area with the tractors looks like a chicken ghetto. I agree and with the crops all down from around the house, you can actually see the ghetto from the highway, over a half mile away!! These will be coming down this week! Or at least some of them. One of them was designed to do double duty as a spring green house and it might be used as brooder for the batch of layers that we plan to get in order to sell eggs at the farmers market next year. (But for today, we are not thinking about that!)
The weather is perfect this week for the long anticipated work of moving chickens from the tractors to a more permanent place in our food storage. Hubby and #2 have done the outside work. (#3 was going to help yesterday but felt so bad that she was told to go lay down.) The secret to having a good tender chicken is to make sure that they get cooled off overnight. So thirty one birds were put into plastic sacks and put into a couple of refrigerators. That meant that today they had to be removed for the next batch to be cooled off. Vacuum sealing is really the ticket for the freezer. It does make the overall cost more but in the long run it really makes a difference in how well they keep. We plan to sell some of this meat and have also decided to sell leg quarters and skinless breast. It does not take a lot of extra work and will make the product more profitable for us because some people just can’t use a whole chicken or don’t know what to do with one. When one of the older ladies at the market asked us about selling quarters and breasts we thought that was a simple solution to meeting the needs of potential customers.
I started to do this step of processing by myself but finally realized that I would NEVER get it done without help. So I told #3 that she was going to have to help even if she didn’t feel good. I needed someone to hold the bag while I stuffed the chicken in. And honestly, sometimes it really helps to have two people working the sealer. She came down and got the hang of what I was doing and was very helpful!! We did 31 birds today, some in the freezer, and some in canning jars. We will start over tomorrow.
On average we are quite pleased with this batch of birds they are weighing out at an average of about six and half pounds (dressed weight); that is a lot of meat and not bad for 12 weeks of work.