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this mornings project at my friends house

L

larry@stinescorner

Well-known Member
my friends children had arooster and 7 laying hens the hens were old and not laying many eggs anymore, so they asked me to show them how to get them ready for soup . Some may not like the idea of it ,but I think it is a good lesson for people to learn where their food comes from.His chidren raised the chicks, sold what egss they didnt use ,and now they will get more chicks in the spring and start again, I give them a lot of credit, they do all of the work themselves. I was very happy to be able to help them, it was an honor.
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That looks like a lot of fun.... NOT!

I can remember my mother doing that every fall. We used to buy "sexed" day old chicks, and they did a very good job, but missed a few. By fall the roosters were right for guests at Sunday dinner. I can clean and skin deer and other animals, but fowl were just that - foul!
 
A very good lesson that most of the world will never learn. "From the pen to the plate" Good for you Larry.
 
my friends lovely wife and his mom are serving chicken and dumplings tonight! His wife makes everything homemade,and makes the best cookies,and cheesecake you could ever imagine!
 
That is a good lesson for any young person. Altho it is too much work for me, we take ours to the butcher and let him do all the work for $2 a bird.
 
there is no places around our are here that do that, your lucky there is a place near you, I guess there used to be places around but there is not too many people who raise their own chickens in our are here in central NJ
 
A good object lesson. When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother was winding down her butter, cream, milk and egg route. We used to deliver all over the city of Annapolis, MD. Grandmom would drive, and we would deliver a variety of farm produce on Fridays. We later drove her around, in the 67 Valient. At one point in time, she had 2-3,000 chickens, and I remember scalding, and picking chickens, both by hand and mechanically, with a rubber fingered chicken picker. Also remember shoveling chicken sh!t, too. Would've rather forgot that...
 
See those triangular sections on the tail end of those birds? Grandma, called them the "pope's nose" and insisted we remove them Said they held glands that secreted fats and oils for grooming, etc. I doo see my homing pigeons wiping their beaks in that area for grooming.
I do see them on commercially processed birds, but I take em off anyways. Anyone else know about this?
 
Nice work Larry, good on the kids for stepping up to help/learn too. You taught them a valuable lesson.

Funny thing, it's been 25 or 30 years since I cleaned a chicken, but I instantly could smell hot wet feathers when I saw that third picture.

We have people wanting us to pasture some meat birds in the spring. They'll be going to Hudson, MI for processing. It's not worth me stinking up my hands if they'll do it for $2/hd. Might be the same place D.B was talking about.

Tim
 
We usually do 25 to 50 at a time. We made a drum plucker,but a friend has tub plucker that you can pluck two birds at once. I'll be changing mine to a tub before we butcher again.

It's usually week before the thought of eating chicken comes to mind.
 
Thats the only way I knew chicken when I was a kid.You learned real fast which animals could be pets and which ones were dinner.I still get my chickens like that every fall wouldn't have it any other way.My wife is a city kid took her awhile to get used to it but she laughs at the chickens you see in the grocery store.With the two of us,we usually put up fifty chickens.I bought a commercial vacuum sealer it works great a chicken one year old has no freezer burn at all.Great pictures and topic Larry. Tony
 
I do 50 or 60 like that every Fall. Buy them as day-old chicks in May, butcher 'em in August.

By the time my laying hens get old enough to not lay any more, they'd be tougher than a baked owl anyway, so I just let 'em "retire" on my dime.
 
That's always been my practice. As soon as the wife gets done plucking, off come the feet, wingtips and what we call the Parson's Nose.
 
That $2 would take all the profit out of it for me.
I don't mind the work, SWMBO and I have been doing
it long enough that we have a system developed, and
we can take 4 birds an hour from yard to freezer,
including cutting and wrapping.
 
thanks for the pics larry. brings back memories of doing that w/ my grandparents. i just put 2 young roosters in the freezer a couple weeks back my self, i had to do them on a day when my wife was at work as she wants them to be pets not food, i saved 1 whole and the other i cut up, the whole 1 she probably won't eat but the cut up 1 she won't know the difference. all of our excess layers either retire on our dime if they were well liked if not i sell them to my wifes employees for $3/bird live, they're mostly jamacians and spanish, they are always asking for them. the jamacians will make jerk chicken or some type of stew w/ them, i figured it would be very tough as they're pastured birds, but they know how to cook them well, i got some jerk from them 1 day as a thanks for the birds and it was real tasty.
 
What kind of chicks are you buying? I don't know how you can feed a chicken for 14 weeks for less than $4.50 at a minimum. I buy 50 quality fryers and finish them in 8 weeks, or when that last bag of food is empty. They get turned out at about 5 weeks during the day to forage. I still usually have a tad over 2.50 per bird in food costs.
 
Purpose-bred meat birds. I think they said they're some sort of Leghorn cross.

And yup, I figgered out I've been feeding them a bit longer than is cost effective. They're advertised as 12 week birds. My butchering schedule has more to do with finding the time than when they're ready.
 
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