Farm Fresh Chicken

With the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker built and operational, it was time to start thinning the flock. Ultimately, we eliminated almost half our existing flock without decreasing overall winter egg production. Some of our oldest chickens, and thus the ones who laid the fewest eggs, were among the first to be captured.

These three hens have been tried and sentenced to death. They are awaiting execution in their shared cell. They know their time is short, and try to escape every time the executioner opens the cell door. However, only one successfully makes good on the attempt. The rest meet their fate and the executioner's axe.

Once beheaded, I hold the chickens over a bucket to collect the blood. Always good to drain them before moving on to the next step.

Here, you can see the entire set-up, including the chicken plucker off to the left side. Notice the guineas in the background serving as witnesses for the executions.

The deceased is submerged in water that has been heated to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for scalding, making the feathers much easier to remove. They are kept submerged for about forty-five seconds.

Then, into the chicken plucker they go, to spin at high speeds while the rubber fingers remove the softened feathers. Within thirty seconds, the chicken is naked and ready for butchering.

As you can see, the chicken plucker does an excellent job of removing the feathers. Just look at that chicken now.

Finally, dad dices and slices the chicken, removing the entrails, feet, and neck to leave us with a ready-to-cook whole chicken that we freeze. Since these chickens are nearing a year old, they are tougher than store bought chicken. Store bought chickens only reach their sixth week of life before they go through this process. Since we wanted the eggs, our chickens are older and tougher, therefore must be cooked either in a crock pot all day or put into soup.

Some of the hens still possess eggs that are in various stages of life. Most of our hens had approximately a dozen eggs in production. As you can see here, they are of varying sizes, from tiny little blips to fully formed eggs already shelled. This chicken would have laid an egg that day.

Whenever we butcher chickens, though, we end up with a bucket full of offal, unused chicken parts. Lovely, aren't they?

I've made a few of the chickens already. This was the first one, which I simmered in the crock pot for about ten hours with carrots, celery, and spices. It turned out quite well and wasn't tough at all. For better presentation, here it is on a plate.
Nice and tasty. Well, that is our chicken butchering process. Hopefully it didn't tax your digestive system too much and you were able to keep your dinner down. Until next time, stay green!

Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker

You've seen pics of the chickens scratching about in the yard in previous posts and I've mentioned the fresh eggs we receive daily. As the days grow shorter and the temperature colder, chickens lay fewer eggs. We went from an average of 15 eggs a day to two a day as summer turned to fall and fall to winter. Chickens also produce fewer eggs as they get older, with egg production dropping significantly after the first year. That means that we were feeding a flock of nearly 40 chickens every day and only receiving eggs from a few of them. They stopped being cost effective.

Thus, it was time to build a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker. In case you've never heard of a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker, here is a video clip of one in action.



Crazy isn't it? Definitely a redneck contraption, but also a very effective and efficient way to pluck a chicken in the shortest time possible. When you are butchering several dozen chickens, speedy plucking is a priority. I sat out the construction of the chicken plucker, but dad and a few friends spent two days building one.

First, they built the frame for the plucker out of a few 2x4s.

They had to drill holes in the industrial barrel and pull the rubber "fingers" through. Dad told me that this was the hardest part of the job as the holes had to be smaller than the fingers so that they would stay in place.

The bottom of the barrel was also covered with fingers, then attached to a circular piece of wood the same size of the barrel bottom. This would act as the moving component that would ensure the chickens would be plucked.

With the barrel in the frame, it was time to install the 3/4 hp electric motor and piece together the gears.

Completed, it looks much like the one in the video at top. We covered the motor with an old cat litter bucket so that it wouldn't get wet and screwed a cover on the switch to keep water out of the switch box too.

As this post is already quite long, I'll save the pics of the butchering and plucking process for the next post. Until then, stay green!

Picking Up Our Story...

When we last left off in August, dad and I were starting a three sided shed to store building materials. We had gotten the uprights in place and poured the footings, but I had not yet downloaded the pics before the folks took the camera with them to Texas.

Here you can see that we had begun nailing the siding supports and roofing beams in place.

The siding supports and roof beams are all in place. The ends were then sawed off so that the siding would be more or less flush.

If you look closely, you can see the siding we used. But first, we had to extract it from the overgrowth and clean it off.

There were years of mud and dirt caked on most sheets of the siding, but it was in excellent condition considering how many years it had been buried. In the background, you can see my grandfather, who helped dad and I extract the sheets.

Now we are faced with several weeks of work which were not documented photographically, as the camera stayed with my mom in Texas. So I'm afraid that the next pics jump to the finished product taken at the end of October.

The finished shed from the north east. Yes, the side panels do not meet up exactly, but we are getting better. At this point, I had already begun filling the building and stacking materials that wouldn't fit inside along the exterior walls. Sadly, that was the third time I had to move that stack of bricks.

And the view of the open side. When I started moving material into the shed, I didn't think the fencing would take up so much room, but it ended up taking about half the interior space. The fence posts thankfully took up much less room.

This project was important as it freed up the necessary room for another autumn project that you will see in a post before long. Until then, stay green!

A New Year

It has been quite some time since the last update, nearly five months. As many of you are probably aware of, my brother was severely injured in an accident at the end of August last year. He remained in a coma for about six weeks before being moved into a rehabilitation center. After a few weeks there, he progressed to a residential rehabilitation clinic for long term care. His progress has been remarkable, but he still has a long way to go. I have been down to Texas several times over the last five months to visit him while taking the final classes I needed for my teaching certification. Classes are finally over, but now I have begun student teaching, which will consume even more of my time.

However, despite all the turmoil since summer, we have managed to get a few projects completed on the "farm" that were either already in progress or needed doing before winter set in. Not everything was accomplished as we simply ran out of time, but I will add a few posts as to what we actually did. Happy new year everyone!

What? More projects?!

I've kept busy this week, painting the garden shed a hideous color and starting work on building a three-sided storage shed down near where the goat barn will be built. The weather cooperated better than the last few, with highs near 90 instead of 100. Next week will be even better, but I start classes again Monday, so that will cut into my outdoor time.

The garden shed was originally white, if you recall earlier photos. I scraped off as much of the old paint as I could, then used an old broom to clean the walls before painting. My folks had gone out and bought some mistinted paint, it being the cheapest you can find. They had two gallons of a dark gray/black color, so that was what I used. After a few hours, the initial painting was done, although I still need to do the finish work and trim, resulting in what you see below.


I also painted the compost bin green to blend in with its background (and so the neighbors wouldn't complain since it is sitting only a few feet from the property line).

The three sided shed will be built in "pole barn" style and covered with tin panels. Fortunately, our neighbor has a post hole digger attachment for his tractor, so drilling the 2-foot deep holes for the posts were easy. They are placed 6-feet apart, so the building measures 6-feet by 12-feet.

Staked out for drilling

2-foot deep holes

For the corner poles, we used some scrap lumber that had been left by the previous owners. These 8x8's weighed a ton and were much longer than we needed, so I used the mower to drag them over to the shed site and a chainsaw to cut them the right height - 6-feet in the back and 7-feet in the front. The open wall will be on the west side, facing into the goat yard.


After the poles were in place, we used 7-foot long 2x4's to stake them out level, then poured concrete mix into the holes followed by water. Since the concrete serves just to hold the poles in place rather than a structural component, the concrete doesn't have to be mixed before it is added.


Once they dry, the 2x4's will be removed and used as the wall frame. We have a 12-foot long timber to link the front poles and serve as a brace for the roof. When finished, the shed will house all the miscellaneous building materials we have piled up around it.

Hopefully, all this will fit in the new three-sided shed because the cob goat barn will be built on this site. Stay green!

What to do with all that @#$%?

Well, I've managed to fill the bucket in the composting toilet for the first time, so needed a place to dump the humanure. I should have been prepared ahead of time, but with everything else going on, I just hadn't gotten around to it. Looking in The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins again, I reread the chapter on composting the humanure. I knew I needed to build a composting bin to ensure that the leachate wouldn't escape into the ground, so I went out this morning to build one.

I used four sheets of the 1-inch plywood the composting toilet was made from. Each measured 41.5-inches x 49.5 inches, so I decided to leave three of them at that size and cut the front wall from 49.5-inches down to 24-inches to be able to access the bin easier. I started by nailing the back and side walls together before nailing the shorter front wall onto the bin.

For strength, I took four pieces of a two-by-four and screwed them into the corners, securing both walls to each two-by-four. This will give the bin additional strength as the compost presses against the walls as the bin gets fuller. The screws will hold better than the nails. That's it, though. There really wasn't much to the construction of the bin, basically just a big wooden box with four walls and a dirt floor.


After the bin was finished, I needed coarse organic material to use on the compost pile. I decided to use grass clippings as I have almost 14-acres of grass that replenishes my supply every week. I used the bagger on the push mower long enough to fill our garden trailer twice. Before adding the humanure, you have to place an 18-inch thick base layer of the organic material in the bottom of the compost bin. This acts as a sponge to absorb the leachate. After the base layer is in place, you can empty the bucket of humanure directly onto the center of the pile. Cover the humanure with additional organic material until you cannot see or smell it.


The organic material doesn't have to be grass clippings. You can also use hay, stray, leaves, or weeds. Make sure that the top of the pile always remains fairly flat so that you can easily add another layer of humanure and cover material. You will not need to turn the pile regularly as with other composting methods, as long as you sufficiently cover the humanure after each deposit. If done properly, your pile will compost aerobically (at a higher heat) rather than anaerobically, meaning more rapid and complete destruction of any potential human pathogens.

If you have any questions about the composting toilet or compost bin, don't hesitate to send me an email at chad.stumph@gmail.com. I'm always happy to answer questions and reply to comments. Stay green!

A New Sign for the Shop

Over the last week, I've been up every morning shortly after 6am to work on the sidewalk project. The sod cutter didn't cut deep enough, so I'm having to use a maddox to finish the job. That means cutting another two to four inches deep down the entire length of the sidewalk. One more day and I should be finished with that phase of the project. We already have some lime down, which we will lay the pavers down on, but need a few more truckloads.


In anticipation of a large two-day auction across the road from us, I prepared a more permanent sign for our small country store that we operate on a part-time whenever-we-feel-like-it basis. I started with a 1-inch piece of scrap plywood left over from the composting toilet project. It was 11-inches x 30-inches. Using this as the base board, I took a seven-foot long two-by-four and made a 1-inch wide by 11-inches long cut in the middle using a Sabre saw and drill. I also used the circular saw to trim the bottom of the two-by-four into a point to make it easier to drive into the ground. I drove the base board through the cut in the two-by-four and viola, had a sign post.

Next, I cut four 5-inch x 20-inch boards from a sheet of 1/4-inch plywood. I used green spray paint as a base on all of the boards and the post. The next day, I used graph paper to make 2-inch x 4-inch stencils of the letters I would need. The missing sign in the photo below says RABBITS. Unfortunately, it was damaged in a wind storm before I took the photo. I used a very light green paint and a thin paintbrush to paint the letters I had traced onto the boards. Once dry, I screwed cup hooks into the tops of the boards and eye hooks into the bottoms to make interchangeable signs. I finished just in time for the auction over the weekend, so we were open both Saturday and Sunday all day, albeit with few sales.


Where the open sign is (which is just red paint on posterboard), I stenciled BLUE SPRUCE FARM, since that is what we call our place. I left enough room for a website to be added under the name, but didn't have time to paint the letters. I think it turned out fairly well. Stay green!