I Know, I Know...

It's been a LONG time since I've posted. I have good reasons, I assure you. I've been in a bit of a slump, which according to Dr. Seuss is not a nice place to be. And I'll vouch for that. Sad things have happened and I just really don't even want to discuss them. For the first time I've experienced how a farm blog could be a negative thing, when you just really don't feel like sharing bad things that happen on your farm. Every other farmer I know of is not obligated to regurgitate the sad and heartbreaking things that happen on his farm to his customers and friends. So, I'm deciding here and now to go on like none of it ever happened and go back to reporting things as normal.

Does this blog look a little plain to you? Well, to give you a perfect example of how wonderfully crappy my last few weeks have been, I dropped our digital camera into a BLOODY SWAMP. So, no more pictures until tax rebate time when we can buy another one. Which I hopefully will not drop into another BLOODY SWAMP next time. Speaking of which, since when do digital cameras bounce?! Thats what I want to know!

On a happier note, I have 10 brand new chicks in my guest room and at least a few more on the way. I started a new batch of eggs in the incubator 24 days ago, and only 10 have hatched in the last 36 hours. First of all, they're only supposed to take 21 days. So, even though I bought an automatic egg turner and they were all developing beautifully and I was looking forward to a successful hatch rate this time, something has gone a bit awry toward the end and everything's all screwy. I keep forcing myself to concentrate on the healthy happy chicks I have and not dwelling on the 25 other eggs in there that mostly seem to be doing nothing. Reading over this paragraph I'm noticing that maybe this is not much of a happier note afterall. Perhaps I was not ready to post a new blog afterall.

Let me try again: On a truly happy note, the chicks from the last batch are doing wonderfully. I built them an outside miniature chicken tractor (which of course I took many informative and attractive pictures of, only to be lost at the bottom of a BLOODY SWAMP) and they are now outside on grass as God intended. They are HUGE. At six weeks old, I'm already looking for clever ways of integrating them into my existing flock. Especially now that I have at least a *few* new chicks that I would love not to have to build another home for.

Speaking of my flock of chickens, we're down from 16 to a mere 15. Ironically, this is not one of the "bad" happenings, but we did it on purpose. How, you ask? WE ATE THE BAD ROOSTER! My husband's cousin, Jesse, was spending the weekend and woke up early Saturday morning with murder in his eyes and determined to dispatch the bad rooster for me, something I'd been trying to get somebody to do for months. He never outgrew his adolescent hostile antics (the rooster, not Jesse...), and daily pursued his mission to terrorize my 3 year old. Wanna know a good way to get eaten on a farm? Pick on the farmer's baby. Roar! So, we caught him before he left the coop that morning and locked him in a dog crate while we headed off to Wal-mart to get a sharp fillet knife for my part of the proceedings, the lovely eviscerating and what-have-you. Jesse and Dustin sequestered themselves in the chicken coop and quietly and (supposedly) humanely broke his neck like my homesteading book said to do. This is supposed to instantly kill them. So Jesse did it that way. Five times, for good measure. Believing him to be sleeping with the fishes, we took him out to a tree where we had rigged up some twine with a slip knot to hang him from while we plucked him and he bled out. The biggest mistake of this whole fiasco was that we did not have a hatchet, so Jesse spent the next 10 minutes trying to hack his head off with a machete, to little avail. There was a lot of flapping, and we're going to go ahead and believe that was just the nerves firing. I mean, how can a chicken survive being dispatched five times? Needless to say, next time we WILL have a sharp hatchet and a stump and remove the head from the body in one quick go, no question as to how long the suffering went on. Every single blog I've read about people's first time butchering a chicken is a horrible bloody gruesome experience, and ours did not disappoint. We dipped him in boiling water for a few seconds and then proceeded to pluck him, which was the easiest part of the whole thing. He never did bleed out properly, though, probably because the neck was so mangled from Jesse's attempts to remove the head. During the "cleaning," I followed the directions from my homesteading book step by step and that was probably the best executed part of the whole ordeal. We roasted him with Greek potatoes, and the meat was stringy, leathery, and overall quite a challenge to chew properly. I made chicken stock out of what was left and the next day we had a rather yummy meal out of it with home-made egg noodles and carrots. Yummm! I was very surprised to find that butchering a chicken was not nearly as traumatic and horrible as I thought it would be. So I'm thinking that next time with a better means of dispatching, it should be a piece of cake! And yes, we took lots of pictures every step of the way intended for one mother of a blog post, but alas... they too sleep with the fishes.