Chicken Days (Or the End of Days)

 Butchering Chickens. Yes, that's what we spent the day doing in the sweltering heat which went well above 30 again today. Well not the whole day because of course we had church this morning. But we met with our chicken guy Tim at 3pm and he quickly got set up. 2 big tanks of cold water for cooling the finished birds, a burner and pot for heating water to dip the birds prior to plucking (it loosens the feathers), a plucker and his work table. He did a good job and was pleasant to hang out with.The finished birds are clean and bagged ready for the freezer. Here's some of the equipment he brought with him. 2 barrels which were very clean inside, for filling with cold water and placing the cleaned chickens in to cool quickly. I promise, there are no graphic pics to follow. All the chickens had a good life outdoors until moments before they died and are now resting comfortably.

 This nifty little device turns and the black rubber 'fingers' pluck the feathers out of a scalded chicken in a minute or so. A very great labour saving device and this one just plugs in to an electrical cord.

This is Tim being thoughtful.  Or taking a rest after doing all out chickens, we're not sure which.  It's hard work in such hot weather! His contact info is listed below, just say Elizabeth Faires sent you and that you were reading the blog.

 These are our 8-9 week old chickens

BEFORE.......

 And these are some chickens...3 roosters we culled,

    AFTER!

Here's My faithful assistants (aka. chicken wranglers) waiting for their turn to get to work, Pete our friend who is letting us use his yard and of course Stephen my husband in the blue shirt. The process is quite quick. The chicken is killed quickly and then left to bleed out for a minute or two. It's dunked into hot water to loosen the feathers and then plucked using the plucking machine.It could also be done by hand. After that it's cleaned and trimmed and put into a big barrel of cold water to cool down. Then it's bagged up and ready for the freezer! Easy! Well Tim makes it look easy. He charges $3.50 per bird and does all the work. He'll take care of all the killing we need from lambs, to cows and pigs at what we think are good prices. And he's conscientious. He keeps a clean work area (not that you can tell from the pics) and gave us some nice table ready chickens. I'll add his contact details later on as I know he'd appreciate the business. In the end we had 14 meat birds, 3 roosters, and  nice pile of feathers and left over bits for the compost pile.

 Chris was helping out with the bees in the early evening. Well, actually he was hanging out learning to tell the difference between grubs, workers and drones and he's brave, not at all afraid of bees. We had some of our comb collapse last week, I don't know if it's the heat or what. But Steve salvaged what he could and let the bees clean up most of the mess. However it looks like we'll be having a new queen as there are lots of queen cells all of a sudden so we wondered if she was a squashing victim when a comb collapsed. Either way, it looks like the bees are happily re-queening their hive. We took advantage of this and removed 4 frames of brood and honey to make our own nuc and start a new hive. The parent hive is building up nicely and with so many queen cells I'm sure they'll have a new queen up and running in no time, and removing this nuc should stop them getting any ideas about swarming too. Here's a beautiful piece of natural comb our bees made this week and it's already being filled with capped brood and honey. The beeshere in town certainly seem to be doing well and storing lots of honey while still increasing their numbers.
I'm hoping that is we get some rain this week the weeds and grass will all flower and we'll have some more happy bees. My friends Sarah, Russ and Gail said I can put a hive out at their lake side cottage so maybe that's a good place for this new hive. Steve better get building, or I'll make a Warre hive this week.

Here's the Info for butchering:

Tim's Mobile Butchering 902 765-4016

He serves a large part of the Annapolis Valley and does poultry, game and livestock. All you have to do is take your sides to your favourite butcher for cutting.

FYI, Chickens are $3.50 each complete and he'll charge $1 for cutting a whole chicken up into parts.Now that we have a much better idea what we're doing we might do our own butchering in the fall.

Uses for Old or Spoiled Hay

This time of year many farmers and horse lovers are faced with a dilemma. What to do with the old hay in their hay lofts. New hay is being cut and baled as we speak and they need the room for storing their good stuff so it's possible to get hay for free or very cheap ($1 per bale) and we recently got a whole load of unwanted bales for free that we simply had to load into the trailer and drive home. But what would you do with free hay? Well, here are a few ideas.


1. Build a hay or straw bale garden. The idea is this...you place a bale on it's side so the cut ends of the hay (or straw) are up and the strings are horizontal on the bale sides. Next you water it thoroughly for several days and possibly wait a few more days if the bale starts to heat up due to decomposition. Following this you either spread topsoil or potting mix on top of the bale in a layer a few inches thick and plant things like lettuce with shallow roots, or you pry apart the bale a few inches, fill the hole with your soil mix and plant larger plants such as tomatoes and peppers. Leafy crops are best, root crops will not work well unless the bale is watered daily and the bale is loosely packed. Don't be disuaded by people who say you cannot use straw bales. You can...they just sometimes sprout weeds which you can pick out as usual.


2. Use the bales like bricks to build a compost pile. Leave the string on for now, stack the bales to make either a 3 sided enclosure or a square one and build your compost pile as usual. The bales will act as insulating walls, increasing the heat retention of a large pile and thereby killing more weed seeds and pathogens and also absorbing a lot of the runoff from the compost. I wonder if this would be good for a humanure compost? After the last turning just water everything thoroughly including the bales, cover and let the compost mature. The bales will break down and whatever isn't composted will make a good base for the inside of the next pile you build.

3. Mulch your garden. Hay isn't usually used for mulch for two reasons....it's better used as animal food and it's full of grass seeds so it can sprout into weeds. But here is an idea we're going to try with our free hay. At our new place there's a good site for a greenhouse with one major drawback, the soil is gravel and sand so while it's well drained, there's no topsoil or humus to hold nutrients and moisture needed for plant growth. Even the hardiest of weeds can barely grow there. Obviously we have a couple of options with this land. Use it for something not requiring good soil such as a storage shed or greenhouse for starters grown in shallow pots on benches. Or we could mulch the heck out of it and gradually build up a good soil base over time through composting. It's easy for us because we have enough other arable land to not worry about the occasional patch of gravel but for other people who could really use more garden space I think amending the soil is the way to go. Lay a thick layer of hay mulch on the ground, several feet thick, tamp it down a bit and water it. It'll compost and rot in place. Just continue to add new layers periodically of other soil, grass clippings etc just like regular compost pile, water or leave open to the rain and it'll rot down. If weeds sprout then just cut them down with a scythe and consider them green manure or cover the pile with plastic, newspaper or weed blocker and kill them that way. This process takes time but can be really worth it and I know of people who have planted potatoes into such a pile and had really great crops.

4. Use the bales as seats for an outdoor event such as Calgary Stampede, a country wedding, picnic or BBQ.

5. Use them to weigh down tarps or the plastic on your greenhouse and when they rot they will release heat into your greenhouse and can be dug in to the soil at a later date.

6. Build a hot water heater using hose or water pipe inside a compost pile or hay bales that are decomposing. Lots of videos on YouTube from the good people at Permies.com and here's a Mother Earth News article from the early 80's about compost heaters.

7. Use bales as the walls of a cold frame and place the plastic or glass over the top of them.

8. A wall of round bales can both act as a wind break and help a small garden retain heat.

9. You could make a rectangular low wall of bales, put some hoops or pipe into them and put a plastic greenhouse over top, using the bales as low walls for growing plants or raising chickens.

See, even a waste product like old hay can still be good for something, you just have to be creative and think about your individual needs. That's how successful homesteading takes place...we innovate with what we've got and consider everything as potentially useful. We try out new ideas and keep doing what works while chalking the failures up to experience.

Sunny Weather and uses for pallets

It looks like we're in for a hot week to come. Sunny, breezy and temps nearing the 30's. I'm going to give the garden a really good soaking today and this evening and after I've straightened out my house a little I will go and see about getting a couple more rows of peas and beans in the ground too.

My poor husband and sons are in for it this weekend...I've got quite a list of chores for them. Namely, getting the plastic top on my greenhouse, fencing my veggie plot to keep out the chickens, and taking the Pedersen's enormous grass clipping and compost pile and moving it beside the garden. The problem with the pile where it is now is that it's too huge to use. Maybe 5 feet high, 8 feet wide and 10 feet long. It's too big to mix so it's not composting properly. I'm going to take all the loose and partially decomposed materials and put them in a big wooden pallet series of bins so that it's easy to turn, keep moist, and use the finished compost in the garden. I'm also secretly hoping that near the bottom of this pile I'll find a few yards of compost I can use in the greenhouse. I may be getting a late start to the season but I intend to extend it as much as possible so getting the greenhouse up and running is a priority.

Here are some easy plans for making a pallet compost bin. It shows one with a door though we usually have a series of 3 bins side by side with open fronts. I also recommend using chicken wire inside if you have extra. It lets in air and keeps the particles together a bit better. we've always left the bottoms open to the ground but you can use a plastic sloped bottom to collect the compost tea if you want to. Frankly, I've never bothered. We do try to layer things brown-green-brown etc but find that it all composts eventually. We load up the first bin until it's 3/4 full or getting pretty tall, then we fork it over into the next bin. The forking aerates everything and mixes it up a bit. You may find it's pretty hot stuff and that's a good sign. We water it occasionally to keep it moist and I appreciate anyone who pees on it for me. It's tricky for a girl...so thanks to all the guys who help add nitrogen and water to my pile :) After about 3 weeks we fork it out again into the final bin. I screen out any large chucks and add then to the first bin and leave the almost completed compost to sit for another week or two. Temperature and time of year affect the speed of decomposition so this process takes a lot longer in the fall. By having this constant rotation it means we have 3 bins. The first of fresh trimmings and grass, the second of actively composting compost all nicely mixed together and starting to shrink in volume, and the final bin of nearly completed compost. The final bin has a smaller volume of compost than the first bin so you can in fact leave several batches in there at once to wait until you're ready to use them. There you go, another use for pallets. They're good for more than just stacking your firewood pile on :) While it may not win any beauty contests, it's useful and a good way to recycle pallets. Of course you could use lumber and build a beautiful one too :)

My friend Jennie is likely having her baby today so I'm trying to get all my stuff done here at the house and garden early in case I am called away. So far the day is zipping by too quickly. I apologize for making this such a short entry but will write more tomorrow. It's hard to write about gardening and raising livestock when you're busy doing it :)