Harvesting chickens

 Summer is winding down. I haven’t seen an oriole for awhile. Here are two of the last ones to leave.

Female orchard oriole

Baltimore oriole fledgling

The onions that were not taken over by purslane did very well in our hot dry weather. 

The onion harvest drying in the shade

The Walla Walla are particularly enormous. Too bad my dad is gone. He liked sweet onion and butter sandwiches. I’d be afraid of the time-release flavor capsules for the rest of the day.

A Walla Walla onion bigger than my hand

July 30 was butchering day for the meat hens. We could not get a date with the only butcher we know that does small-batch processing. “We’ll do it ourselves,” Terry said. “It will be easy.” He estimated 4 hours.

The night before, we rearranged the chickens. (I’ve mentioned this before, but chickens have no night vision and are easier to catch in the dark.) The chickens going to freezer heaven have to be without food for 8 to 12 hours so their crop will be empty. We took the 2-year-old hens out of the flock and put the pullets with the one-year-old hens, disrupting the pecking order only once. The pullets, having been with the non-roosting meat chickens their whole life, have not gotten the hang of going up to the perch at bedtime. No doubt they are also intimidated by the hens. They cowered in the corner when I put them in the coop and were still there in the morning. 

The pullets in the corner of Coop 2

I tossed them out of the coop. One of the Dominiques took of by herself, having an apparent abundance of adventurousness.

The boldest of the pullets walks by herself along the fence

Three of the pullets followed a couple of the Wyandotts around. For the most part, though, the pullets hang out with each other. We are still waiting for the integration.

Three pullets following two of the hens

Early Friday morning, Terry set up the stations on the patio, where we hoped to have our work done before the sun came around. I ordered the small Cone of Death (“restraining cone” in the catalog, “killing cone” on the sticker on the side), which Terry put in the large hole of the fileting table.

In theory, the chicken goes head first into the Cone of Death 

We put the meat chickens in the cages and moved them to the patio at 7:30 a.m.

The meat chickens "before"

I was not able to get an official poultry scalder because they were sold out. Who knew there would be a pandemic run on poultry processing equipment? After much wracking my brain, I remembered that Hilda had an electric canner that, praise be, had a thermostat. Eventually, I got the water stabilized at 165°F. Dipping the chickens in hot water loosens the feathers.

The scalding/plucking station

We learned right off the bat that our broilers were larger than the broilers for which the catalog recommended the small cone. Terry got a traffic cone he had on hand, which was also too long for the job, but easier to cut off than the metal Cone of Death.

Terry improvises a new Cone of Death

I will spare you the details, but here is a brief list of things I now know about harvesting chickens.

1. Don’t wear clothes you care about.

2. Four hours was an underestimate.

3. Grandpa was wrong about cutting off the head. This causes a total body neurological response that makes it harder to get the feathers out. Piercing the carotid artery is the recommended method. This was Terry’s job.

4. Chickens have a lot of feathers.

5. So many feathers!

6. The lungs of chickens are surprisingly small and an astonishing shade of hot pink.

As the day wore on, we got less picky about getting every single feather off the chicken. Even so, we put the last chicken in the heat-shrink freezer back at 8:00 p.m. It was a long day, but once we got started, it felt like just another job to me. I’m proud of myself for being honest about it. Chicken does not grow on a Styrofoam tray.

Meat chickens "after"