What Became of the 35 Roosters

Here is what became of the 35 roosters that we butchered:  

In addition to this lovely collagen rich bone broth and all those other soups, we put 70 chicken breasts and 70 chicken thighs in the freezer. 

I froze all the entrails and heads in gallon ziploc bags to give to the dogs a little at a time over the course of a couple weeks.  It is excellent for their dental health to eat bones and feathers. Raw meat is what dogs were made to eat.  They need a couple days fasting between each meaty meal though, so their body can digest it properly. 

Nothing goes to waste with all these mouths to feed. 

We started a new unit of Meet the Masters art classes. We are doing the class at our friends' house now instead of here at our house. One week we did a unit on Van Gogh:

Another week we did a unit on Mary Cassatt:

This crazy cat tries to get in the house every chance he gets.  Sometimes he succeeds without us noticing him come in.  And then we find him in all kinds of funny and not so funny places. 

Someone had left the dryer door open and there he was enjoying a nice nap. I had to rewash the whole load of clothes. 

Things are going well out in the garden.  I harvested some of the couve tronchuda (soft Portugese kale) that overwintered in our front garden.  We ate it in a Korean beef and greens dish for dinner this evening. 

I transplanted a big patch of strawberry runners that grew outside the bounds of the already large patch in our fenced garden.  They will be acting as ground cover in one of my permaculture beds in the orchard. That bed is a triangle with a larger fruit tree (a persimmon, an apple, and a pear, I think) at each point and a group of aronia berry bushes around the center.  

My Nanking bush cherry looks like it should have a lot of fruit this year. Yum!

Our espalier apple is just about to blossom -- glad it's holding off because we're going to have freezing temperatures for the next few days.

My espaliered peach tree is already blossoming.  I hope that its southern exposure will help keep it warm enough in the upcoming frosts. 

The one grow bag full of carrots that I did not move to the high tunnel survived temperatures in the teens just fine!  It's growing carrots full speed again. 

This is part of my little French Sorrel patch.  It's a delicious perennial lettuce.  Unfortunately, the chickens seem to love it also. I need to do a better job barricading the garden fence. 

Our laundry room update is finally complete with these beautiful canvas prints of our livestock! My dad (Clockworks Photography) took these pictures of our poultry while he was here taking care of the livestock. 

These are some of the perks of being homeschooled -- working on schoolwork outside when the weather is fine. 

Welcome to the Zoo!

It has been a busy week of all kinds of animal happenings.  Last Sunday a "wild" turkey just showed up in our yard.  We asked the neighbors and no one knows where he came from. 

He's big and handsome, but probably not wild.  He lets us come up to him and is happy to eat the food that we put out for the poultry. 

Mr. Turkey seems to like hanging out with the guinea fowl and picking on the chickens.  He is at least a year old based on his whiskers. And he is a loud gobbler!  We think that maybe someone tried to release him into the woods or something?  As soon as we saw him perching on the deck railing at night we knew that he was not wild.  He has been here a week so far -- totally free ranging and just hanging out. The kids want to find him a Jenny (female) to be his buddy. 

Our friends at church had to go out town and asked us to come exercise their German Shepherd for an hour every day.  The kids love Kirche.  She is a beautiful old bloodline German Shepherd. 

She loves to fetch and chase balls of all shapes and sizes.  Or she will also chase a frisbee, though she is not as good at catching those as balls.  It's a major novelty for the kids since our dogs absolutely do not fetch things. 

She likes to ride in cars too.  If it wasn't for our dogs, the kids wanted to take her home with us every afternoon. 

I intended to butcher these 6 extra drakes when we did the rooster butchering day, but we ran out of time.  It was hard to motivate myself to make time for another round of butchering with so many other farm chores calling my name. I finally decided to just put them up for sale on Craiglist and see whether anyone wanted them.  They sold in less than 24 hours and went off to their new home. 

Brother M rescued a fledgling woodpecker from the cat.  His wing seemed slightly injured.  We have tried unsuccessfully to take care of injured fledglings before...  I convinced Brother M that the best plan was to let him hide under our big log pile and hope for the best. 

We had a big family weeding day on Friday. 

Everyone helps and then we treat ourselves to a special meal - Cafe Rio, in this case. 

They were so happy to go play with Kirche every day. 

The big kids all spent most of the day Saturday at the Pinewood Derby. They did not win any of the prizes this year, but still seemed in pretty good spirits.

Bruster's Ice Cream shop also had their "Pajama Day" Saturday.  We had ice cream for dinner :) We each got a free regular size waffle cone and Baby A had a small sugar cone.  He ate it all up!

We had to eat our ice cream in the car since it was very chilly outside -- around 40 F. 

 

Family Fun: Pie and Pasta

This week got off to a good start with pie for breakfast - 1 rhubarb and 1 mince.  I added frozen elderberries to both for an immune system boost.

Baby loves noodles. Fresh or cooked. 

He did his best to help make this batch for our Monday Pasta Night. 

Brother S took Miss L's snap beads and made himself a rain man costume. 

We finished off the week by sending the 35 extra roosters off to freezer camp.  A great group of teens came to learn and help with the processing.  I was so impressed with their willingness to get their hands dirty. Very dirty.  It was their idea to show some guts in this picture... 

They were a wonderful crew.  They worked hard all morning and encouraged each other through the difficult moments. They are now armed with a serious survival skill and a better appreciation for where their food comes from.  I always say, if you are going to eat meat, you should process it at least once.  You stop taking it for granted when you have experienced taking a life to get it.