Processing Our Pastured Broilers

We wanted to share some photo's of processing day! We processed our first batch of broiler chickens on August 11th 2012 and it was such a great experience that we are already planning for next year. We will be posting a sign up sheet for anyone who is interested in purchasing whole broiler chickens starting next summer. Here are some photo's from our day...

Here our broiler chickens have reached the 8 week mark! They are looking really plump and healthy.  We are excited and hesitant at the same time...

None of us have ever raised an animal from baby to table. It is bound to be a day of learning and excitement.

We ended up with an okay day for the job, a little gray sky and drizzle for the morning and then warming up later on. We started out with 50 chicks and lost 2 during the 8 weeks of growth. We added 4 roosters that came with the laying hens for a total of 52 chickens to process that day.
Here is the chicken tractor with the roof pulled off and what's left of the broilers. We are about 3/4 of the way through in this photo.

Our three pretty Rhode Island Red boys awaiting their fate. The other rooster "George" (not pictured) was from the Kelley's house.

Our set up was pretty simple, the broilers went from the killing cones, to hot water, to defeatherer  to cold water tank, to the processing table. It was all hands on deck at the tables! 

An upclose shot of our borrowed plucking machine. This one worked great! So fast and clean!!

From the plucker the heads and feet are removed and then the broilers go straight to a cold water tank to cool them down. 

Another job after coming out of the plucker is to remove any feathers that did not come out. See those long tail feathers to the right. Those are the easy ones, it's the tiny little stray pin feathers that we needed the needle nose pliers for! I have excluded any photos of the evisceration process but there are tons on youtube if you really need to know :-)

And finally to the table! This was our first one and it tasted great! 

Thanks so much to everyone who helped that day!!! We could not have had such a great experience with the whole process without all of our helpers! A special thanks to our friend Dick who taught us all he knows!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Fall Harvest Time

Doing some much needed harvesting and cleaning up this weekend! We ended up picking the last of our carrots! 6 buckets full!! That leaves just the eggplant and peppers to be cleaned out of house #2.

We all worked together passing pumpkins and squash from one to the next and into house #2. Here they are all lined up and ready for dividing.

 This is the bounty that went to each family! A wheel barrow full of squash and pumpkins!!!

Extracting Honey

 

The new honey extractor is in and it did a great job of spinning some beautiful honey out for us! The guys had to hold on to it while it spun since we did not have it bolted to the floor yet.

A close up of the honey pouring out!

We ended up with lots of wax mixed with honey when removing the cappings on each frame. This photo is of the cappings going through the strainer.  We wanted to save the was to use for products like candles and lip balm.

We tried melting the honey/wax in this big pan in the oven. As soon as the honey was warm we would pour it through the strainer and then put the pan back into the oven to melt some more.

 After LOTS of melting and straining we ended up with this beautiful block of wax!

After a long day of honey madness we ended with a delicious taste of our hard work on some fluffy biscuits!

There is still some honey for sale, prices are on our For Sale page.

Comb Honey Is In!

Saturday was comb honey harvest day! The first step was for the beekeepers to switch out the comb honey frames with some empty frames. This was a two person job so the frames of honey could quickly be removed without the bees getting too mad!!!

The bees are gently brushed off each frame so we do not bring any into the house with us!

Once inside the comb needs to be carefully cut away from the wood frame. A cookie sheet and a cooling rack makes a good base for this.

Next the large piece of comb is cut into four smaller squares for packaging.

They are then weighed and recorded and the cover placed on. This is one of the heavier slices weighing in at almost 15oz.

If you would like to try any of our delicious comb honey you can check out our for sale page for more info.

Harvest and Canning Update

We are thrilled to be harvesting lots of veggies! Our cucumber plants are producing lots of delicious cukes for eating and pickling. We have made LOTS of jars of pickles so far as our goal is to provide all we will need for the whole year. It's looking like we even have more than we need and hope to have a stand out for selling soon.

Here are some dills almost ready to be sealed. Most of the recipes have been passed down through Joan's family. We can't wait to open one of these up and give them a try!

Beans have also been coming in by the basket full! We canned 18 jars the other night!!

We had some tomatoes with blossom end rot that we decided to pick off while still green and let the good ones continue to grow. Since it was hard for us to throw all those tomatoes away we turned them into Green Tomato Mincemeat!

Stay tuned for our recipes which we will be posting soon!