Learning to butcher chickens
In
my opinion, chicken butchering is not something you want to learn out
of a book. We acquired the skill by helping out at a
couple of different chicken-processing days on friends' farms, picking
up lots of hands on information that we never would have found in
print. So when we read on Everett's blog that he'd had a hard time
with poultry processing on his new farm, we invited him to our next
kill day.
We thoroughly enjoyed
meeting one of our long-time readers in person, and hope that Everett
got something out the experience too. He certainly sped the
processing along, not only with his hands but with his fascinating
tales of his business endeavors (beginning with selling gum in grade
school, progressing through writing about surfing in Australia, and
culminating with his current SEO skills.)
We feel very lucky that
Everett ended up settling only two hours away, and we're looking
forward to meeting his wife. Maybe next time, Missy will come
along to paint our fence...um...er...kill our chickens.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Missy says you can come help us paint our fence (we actually have one to paint) but we're not quite as clever as that Tom Sawyer fella.
Thank YOU for giving me the opportunity to learn about processing chickens on the home farm, and for all the wonderful conversation, as well as the farm tour, my own chicken, T-shirts and automatic chicken waterer nipple.
I hope to see you over here on our place some time soon. You're always welcome.
Everett --- you might get more out of it if I helped you find locust trees to stake out for future fences...
Fostermamas --- yellow chicken legs are a sign of youth. When I was just getting into chickens, a friend set me up with some hens of various ages, and explained to me that I could tell which ones were the youngest by the yellow color of their legs. Once the color entirely fades, many people kill the old hens, but I have to admit that our oldest hens are still laying strong despite tan legs.