What the books do not tell you about killing chickens.

by t!

When you raise chickens for meat, the logical endpoint of the raising is, of course, the slaughtering and butchering. And you have two choices about how this will be done: (A) by you, or (B) by someone else. We have decided to kill our chickens ourselves, and the several books we own which describe raising chickens all assume that this is what the reader will be doing. So far, so good.

However, the authors of these books have been raising chickens for quite some time. They enjoy it, they are good at it, and their books are designed to make chicken raising seem both fun and easy enough for anyone to do. The same goes for the slaughtering. It is easy enough, but there are a handful of tiny things that came up which I think deserve a mention, and these books did not quite warn us about.

- We use the broomstick method. What this is, is you lay the head of the chicken on a flat rock, place a broom handle across the back of its skull, place your feet on the handle, one on each side of the head, and yank up on the chicken’s legs. This breaks the chicken’s neck instantly, killing it. If you do it right. If you don’t, you will just damage the chicken horribly, probably paralysing it, but it will still be alive and frightened. Then you will have to pick up the injured terrified animal and kill it a second time. The key word here is to be *decisive.* Kill the chicken, with certainty, on the first try. This isn’t cruel; in fact *failing* is cruel.

- Also, some indication of how hard you should pull on the legs would be nice. If you pull too hard, the head stays behind.

- If you can keep the chicken’s head on when you kill it, afterward while you’re butchering you don’t have to worry about the gizzard spilling its contents out the top of the neck.

- You’ve heard that chickens flap around after they’re dead; everybody hears this. But it needs to be stressed: Chickens really *really* flap around. A lot. Enough such that we were glad the legs were tied so the corpse couldn’t run off down the road.

- The books play down how difficult it is for a caring human being to kill a chicken. One expects that the authors have become used to it, or that they don’t want the readers to think they can’t do it, which is all fair enough. But there should be some warning about the eyes. Once the chicken is dead, do *not* dwell on its eyes.

- Also the books do not warn you about the *feel* of that first chicken. You catch him, pick him up, and hold him steady, ready for the end. Since you rarely get this close to a chicken, you look him over. You’ve done well as a homesteader; he’s a good-looking animal. His chest is warm. You can feel it moving in and out as he breathes. He feels just like a kitty. You want to stroke his belly. Hang on – this is *not* the proper mood for poultricide! You’ll need a few sharp moments to rearrange your perspective and remember that this creature is food. It’s not too difficult to do, but I would have preferred it if I’d been prepared for that moment.

- If you read about killing chickens, you will be told that holding a chicken upside-down by its legs will cause the blood to rush to the chicken’s head, knocking it unconscious and making things easier on you and the chicken. Everybody agrees this will happen. Nobody will tell you how much time it takes for this marvelous passing out to occur. We’ve suspended the chicken and waited patiently; out of 11 chickens not one has ever passed out. But each of us has had a chicken try to escape by bending itself upward and pecking our hands.

- When you are cutting the legs off a chicken, the blade presses into its tendons. This causes the toes to curl. Therefore, when you cut into a chicken’s leg, the dead claws will grab your finger. This is rather startling the first time it happens. The second time, it’s still pretty creepy. I don’t know about the third time. I’ve changed the way I hold the leg.

- You hang chickens upside-down with their carotids cut (or heads missing, depending on how you killed them), to allow the blood to drain out of their bodies. This is better for the meat, and means less mess during innards removal and other butchering. The books all recommend you hang the chicken upside-down for a half hour, but they don’t tell you how much blood should drain out. We had one chicken that looked like it had clotted after two minutes, there was so little blood. But it did not bleed during the butchering. Our last chicken dumped a lot of blood into the pail for its half hour, and then bled some more in our garage, and then bled all over the counter during the butchering. Maybe the books don’t tell you how much blood is normal because it always varies? Perhaps this last chicken bled so much because it was one-third heavier than most of our others. Or maybe it had been taking Aspirin.

- With practice, one gets better at catching chickens. However, it does not get easier. The first ones you catch are the small and slow ones – the losers. The later ones are faster and more clever, plus there are fewer bodies remaining to get in their way when you chase after them. We were down to our last three roosters: The alpha, the second biggest, and the smallest. We decided, naturally, that the smallest should be killed, so that should anything happen to the alpha his replacement would still be a large bird. Well, it turned out the smallest one was also the fastest ever. After five minutes – a very long time when you’re trying to catch one specific chicken and all around you the other dozen are running flapping and shrieking – we gave up on him, and nabbed the second largest. He was *much* slower. Darwin has spoken; the one best able to avoid predators (or farmers) has prevailed.

We call him Speedy.

A silver thimble and a treadle sewing machine

The theme for my birthday this year seems to have been “Everything Old is New Again.” My mother, knowing my new passion for sewing and quilting, gave me this lovely antique silver thimble:

It is made of Chester silver and dates from 1923. My mother bought it this summer when we were in England for my sister’s wedding and she visited Chester with my sister’s new in-laws.

On Saturday, t! and I went to our local flea market to look for a few things, and found this gorgeous treadle sewing machine for $75. It is a “New Williams” machine, built by the Williams Manufacturing Co., in Montreal, sometime around 1906. The factory building it was made in is still standing on the corner of Bourget & St. Jacques streets, in St. Henri.

It is in absolutely excellent condition, it looks for all the world like it was well used, and then taken out of someone’s grandmother’s front room one day in the mid 1950s, carried up to a dry attic, and left there undisturbed for 50 years.

The amazing thing about it, though, and one of the big reasons I bought it, is that in the cabinet drawers were all the original attachments (in the box they came in), a glass vial containing 6 original needles, an old plastic pill bottle containing needles and pins, and two original bobbins (the scrap of cloth they are sitting on was pinned to the arm of the machine to serve as a pincushion):

and the original instruction manual (which I plan to scan to digital format so that I can make a less fragile print-out to refer to as I’m learning):

Oh, and it also has its leather drive belt. All it needs is a thorough (careful) cleaning, and for me to read the manual to learn how to thread it, and then I’ll be able to start sewing with it!

A day in the life of a modern homesteader

Wake up, drink tea. Check email.

Take the dog for a 4.5k jog. My neighbors wave at us as they slow down to drive by on the gravel roads. It’s -0.5°C when we leave the house and +0.7°C when we get back.

Change into work clothes.

Put on a load of laundry.

Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.

Kill, hang, bleed, skin, eviscerate, wash, and chill two chickens.

(Get t! to hang the laundry out on the line while I am elbow deep in chicken guts).

Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.

Put on a batch of bread dough for tonight’s supper of home-made pizza and a loaf of bread.

Knit a couple of inches of the sock I’m working on.

Bring the laundry in. It’s sleeting out.

Close up the chicken coop for the night.

Mop/disinfect the kitchen floor (post chicken-butchering) while t! takes the dog out for his evening walk.

Make and eat pizza for supper. Yum. Put bread in for second rise.

Watch an episode of something on DVD (we don’t have TV reception or cable) while the bread bakes.

Post to blog.

Fall exhausted into bed.

Tomorrow: Farmer’s market for groceries, possibly flea market for tools & other things. Chores. Cleaning out and re-organizing the garage in preparation for stacking our winter firewood in it.

Knitting

I resisted for ages and ages and ages…

…a bunch of my friends took up knitting over the last couple of years, but I wanted to start quilting so I did that instead. But those darned knitters my lovely friends who knit finally sucked me in.

My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about 8 years old, and I knit scarves, hats, doll clothes, and mittens as a kid. When I was living in Ottawa in 1995-1997, I picked up knitting again and knit most of a sweater (more about this sweater in another post).

Between

spending a crafting weekend in the company of my knitting friends

who post regularly about their knitting and spinning and crocheting projects, and

the fact that my hand-quilting project has gotten large enough to be slightly unwieldy to take-along as often, and

the fact that I can get locally shorn and spun llama and alpaca wool at my farmer’s market

and the fact that I wear wool socks all winter…

…I’ve started knitting my first pair of socks. Slowly and painfully. I wish I had been interested in knitting socks back when my grandmother was teaching me. I’ve used DPNs before, but the memories of how to start knitting in the round on them came back in fits and starts as I ripped out and re-started the beginning of the first sock several times. But it’s going better now:

Oh, and I also caved and signed up on Ravelry.

Red in tooth and claw

We slaughtered, plucked, dressed and wrapped our first chicken today. It took 4.5 hours start-to-finish. There will be a photo essay once we have… ahem… refined the process somewhat. Important notes: 1. Starve the chickens for 24 hours prior to slaughter. 2. Cut the entire head off to make sure it bleeds out properly. 3. Get better at plucking and dressing.

After the chicken was wrapped for the freezer and I had thoroughly cleaned all the tools & work-surfaces, I desperately wanted to order pizza for dinner. Am having a hand-made-by-a-local-and-bought-at-the-farmer’s-market Jamaican patty instead, and will follow it up with the lentil-beef soup I made for the crafting weekend. And a whiskey.

The crafting weekend was fabulous. There will be a full post about it tomorrow.

Also, I need to change my banner photo to an Autumn-theemed one.

Woodstove

Reg the installation guy stopped by today to double check the dimensions of our fireplace to ensure that we could indeed replace our (came with the house) current propane fireplace insert with a wood-burning fireplace insert.

Why are we spending a heck of a lot of money replacing a propane-burning insert with a wood-burning one? Because Charlie who lives around the corner from us doesn’t chop propane. He does, however, chop & sell wood. And heating with wood is going to cost us a lot less than heating with oil (or propane – the propane insert was probably the previous owner’s emergency heating plan). By my math, the new insert will have paid for itself in three years, and after that, we’ll be heating this place for about half of what it cost us last winter, heating with oil alone. We’ll still be using the oil furnace some of the time, the fireplace insert may not always hold a fire overnight, and on really cold nights, the oil furnace will kick in to keep the house from getting too cold.

Oh, and it’s more environmentally friendly, too. Wood being a local, renewable resource. Unfortunately we can’t heat with (relatively) clean electricity the way we could when we lived in Montreal, because Ontario’s electricity is a) twice as expensive as Quebec’s and b) 45% nuclear, 34% hydroelectric and 22% fossil-fuel derived (as opposed to Quebec’s 97% hydroelectric, with the other 3% being a combination of wind, biomass, fossil-fuel, and nuclear).

Actual installation won’t be until the second or third week of October, as this is, unsurprisingly, the busy season for wood stove installers. That gives me plenty of time to talk to Charlie (whose little brother Ben is in my Karate class) about buying 4 or 5 cords of firewood from him.

Maybe one day, if I’m really lucky, we’ll have a wood cookstove as well.

Pesto

We had a frost out here on Sunday night, and so I picked the basil – the only thing in the garden that would be affected by frost and needed to come in right away. The frost killed off the squash, tomato plants, and potatoes as well, but there were no tomatoes to harvest, the potatoes can be dug in a day or two, as soon as it dries out from the rain we had this morning, and I’ll go out to get the squash tomorrow, or as soon as it hurts slightly less to move. I’m still in the grips of this very annoying cold.

The onions, carrots, parsnips, and leeks didn’t mind the frost at all. In fact the parsnips are likely to be better and sweeter for having been frosted.

I plant a lot of basil to make pesto. We eat a fair bit of pesto, often on tortellini or other kinds of pasta for a quick meal when we’re in a rush, I also add it to salad dressings and marinade for fish.

Like with just about everything else in the garden, this year’s harvest was pretty pitiful. Three 8-foot rows yielded just barely 2 cups (packed) of usable basil leaves after I had picked off all the ones with brown spots.

Still, it whipped up into a small but very yummy batch of pesto which we will use over the next month or so. I’ll make some fresh homemade pasta to eat it with sometime later this week.

This is my standard pesto recipe:

6 cups basil leaves, packed
1 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
1½ cups olive oil
⅔ cup pine nuts, chopped
3-4 large cloves garlic
Salt & pepper to taste

With only 2 cups of basic leaves, I cut everything down to one third. I make everything in a food processor, chopping the garlic, then adding the basil leaves a bit at a time and chopping on fairly low speed. The pine nuts and cheese go in next, whirring them just enough to mix, and then I added the olive oil 2 tablespoons at a time until I got to a consistency I was happy with. Commercial pesto tends to be swimming in oil, and I like a lower oil-to-basil ratio so that the flavour of the basil is more pronounced. I ended up using about 10 tablespoons of olive oil.

I managed to forget to add the salt and pepper, not a biggie since I can add it to whatever I’m cooking with basil. But I highlighted the “Salt, pepper” line in my handwritten recipe book so that I’m less likely to forget next time. The salt acts as a preservative, as well as a flavouring, so should really be included if you want the pesto to keep well in the fridge.

Harvest Fall Festival at the Glengarry Pioneer Museum

On Sunday, despite a being sick with a rotten cold, I went to the Glengarry Pioneer Museum for a few hours to check out their Harvest Fall Festival. I’m so glad I did, it was lots and lots of fun, interesting, and informative.

I watched a butter-making demonstration by this lady who had 4 milk cows and makes all her own butter, cheese, and yoghurt by hand. I got to help churn the cream into butter:

And we also got to taste the resulting product. Wow! It was like how a carrot pulled fresh from the garden tastes more “carroty” than the ones you buy from the grocery store, this butter was so very creamy and flavourful. I’ve never had butter that tasted anything like it.

When someone asked the lady doing the demonstration, “Do you sell butter?” she replied, “No, that would be illegal. But there’s a pile of my business cards with my contact information on the table there.” I love it out here!

As well as butter-making there were demonstrations by local craftspeople: a blacksmith using the museum’s forge, a harness-maker, a cobbler making shoes, a harness-maker, a tinsmith, a beekeeper, a canoe-maker, and others I’m forgetting.

There was a horse-power parade with horses pulling antique wagons, ridden by people in period costume.

There were a trio of re-enactors dressed in authentic Glengarry Highland Regiment uniforms, who had set up a period camp, complete with tents and a campfire, who explained what military life was like in the mid-1800s and demonstrated their muskets.

There was a petting zoo, and a quilting bee, and a town cryer, and a old-fashioned threshing machine threshing wheat, and lots of people (children included) wandering around in period costume, just for the fun of it.

Ontario’s oldest continually-licensed bar was open for business and selling beer, but due to the cold (and the fact that I’m still driving on a provisional license) I didn’t have one. Next year.

There was a native Mi’kmaq man and his wife, who were talking about and demonstrating many aspects of Native life both before and after the settlers arrived. I got part of my right arm painted with authentic Mi’kmak war paint: red and yellow ochre, and coal black, applied with bear grease. Despite having given the dog a bath last night, there’s still a red-tinged patch on my arm!

There was a sheep-to-sweater display, which included shearing, carding wool, spinning, and knitting. The shearer demonstrated the use of antique hand cranked clippers for a few minutes, before finishing the job with modern electric clippers. (Yes, that thing that looks like a big wooly sac is actually a live sheep.)

I got a quick drop-spindle lesson, as well as instructions on how to make one of this lady’s most ingeniously-designed drop-spindles for myself:

All-in-all a great day out, and next year I shall be sure to announce it well in advance so that folks can come out for it if they’d like.

Blocks, and more blocks, and yet more blocks

Quilt blocks, that is.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of quilting. Or more specifically, I’ve been making a lot of quilt blocks. Like many people enamoured with a new hobby, I got very enthusiastic and threw myself into a number of projects. In this case, many of the projects were quilt block swaps. A block swap is when a group of people each make a number (usually 12) of identical blocks, send them in to a central co-ordinating person, and then get 11 different blocks made by other swappers and one of their own blocks back.

In my enthusiasm, I not only signed up for a “Blue & Yellow Block” swap on my favourite quilting message board, but decided to make 2 different sets of 12 blocks, so that I would get 24 blocks back, enough (with sashing and borders) for a full-sized quilt (or duvet cover). Part of what was driving my enthusiasm for this particular swap was that I already had a few blue & yellow fabrics, almost enough for two sets of blocks!

The first set went together well. I used a block pattern that we had recently done as a Block of the Month at my quilt guild:

The blue-with-white-spirals-and-yellow-stars fabric was leftover from another project (though I fell so completely in love with it that I subsequently ordered two more yards of it for a future project), and the solid blue and solid yellow were some of the fabric used as table decoration at our wedding.

First set done – all 12 block together look pretty cool!

Then I started on the second set of blocks and had a set-back: I had a much lighter (baby-boy) blue fabric in my stash that I wanted to use for the second set of blocks, so I bought some yellow-and-white checked gingham fabric to go with it. Only I didn’t check the bolt-end carefully enough and I accidentally ended up with fabric that must have been at least 70% polyester – ICK! Usually I’m pretty good at telling fiber content by feel, but this stuff fooled me. The problem was that it didn’t sew well at all – the seams went all puckery on me, the blocks didn’t come out to the right size, it was a disaster. This was back when t! was still working in town, and so I didn’t have the car very often. So going shopping for more fabric wasn’t really an option.

The lovely people on the quilting message board came to my rescue and sent me replacement fabric so that I could still do a second set of blocks!

It took me a while to find a block pattern that I could adapt so that I could use all 5 fabrics in each block (most quilt blocks call for 2 or 3 colours, or 8 or more) – which I wanted to do in appreciation of everyone’s generosity. I came up with this one:

It’s based on a block called “Antique Tile” which is actually meant to be done in 3 colours/fabrics rather than five, but I really like the way it turned out. It was a fairly fast block to do, as well, and I think the blocks look really good together without any sashing, so I’m going to keep it in mind in case I ever want to do a quick quilt:

I also made a gift block for the lady running the swap, using some of the yellow fabric that’s in the above blocks, and some pretty blue batik fabric that I bought myself as a treat with the money I received for my essay in Out of the Broom Closet. It’s the same pattern as the “Antique Tile” blocks, but with only two colours this time:

So that’s 25 blocks made.

Then there’s another online group I belong to, that does a group quilt 4 times per year. The way this one works is that someone sends out 25 squares of (the same) fabric to 25 participants. Everyone makes a block using the fabric they were sent, and any other fabric they want to use. The blocks are all sent back to the co-ordinator, and a name is pulled out of a hat to choose the winner of the 25 blocks. The winner is then responsible for buying and sending out the fabric for the next round. I’ve participated in this group three times so far, but haven’t won the blocks yet!

This is the block I made. The red fabric was sent to us, and astute readers will see that the blue and yellow (it looks more loke off-white in this photo) is the same fabric from my previous set of blocks. I didn’t realise until I was photoshopping this picture down to size that I set four-patch in the bottom right corner wrong. Oh well, it’s in the mail already, there’s nothing I can do about it now!

So that’s 26 blocks made.

Then, there was a more traditional-style swap, again on the second online group. I probably shouldn’t have signed up for this one, and I mainly did because I already had all the fabric I would need for the blocks in my stash: green and yellow solids, again from our wedding decorations, cream-on-white leftover from the backing of Frank & Jess’ wedding quilt (which they have since told me is going to become a baby quilt!) and a purple floral fat quarter, which I bought when my local quilt shop was having a 10-fat-quarters-for-$5 sale.

For this swap, we’re all making “Victorian Tulip” blocks. They’re meant to look like this:

This one was made by one of the ladies organising the swap.

I was doing really well. I had all my fabric cut, all my half-square-triangles made, the first two rows of squares sewn together, and then, even though I was very carefully following the pattern and instructions…

I put the last “leaf” triangle in the wrong way around. On all 12 blocks. So now I have to re-do the bottom row 12 times. I’m not looking forward to it, and so when this happened last week, I decided to take a break from quilting for a bit, and paint the bedroom instead. Which is coming along beautifully.

Once I’ve fixed these tulip blocks and sent them off (the deadline for which is October 1st), I have to make 17 more of these for yet another swap:

This one swap I definitely should not have signed up for, but I got carried away in the organizer’s enthusiasm for the project and the swap. It’s a Dear Jane swap, in Christmas colours. I picked one of the easiest Jane blocks available, thank gods, so once I get myself organised to sit down and do it, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

I’ve also done 1/3 of the blocks for a quilt I’m making as a gift, but you don’t get to see pictures of that until after it’s been gifted.

And, because all this isn’t enough quilting, I’m also working on an English Paper-Piecing project, which is eventually going to be a case for my hoop drum:

I love this project because it’s done entirely by hand, so I can take it with me to appointments, parties, etc. I can also do the basting (the red thread, which comes out once everything is assembled) in front of the TV.

Right – that’s all the quilting I am / have been working on for the past month or so. I promise to make quilting updates more frequently from now on, so that they’re shorter!

Oh, and today is this blog’s birthday. In the past year I have apparently made 86 posts and had almost 3000 unique visits to the blog. Happy Birthday, blog!

Milestones

In a month’s time, I turn 40.

I’ve spent the last 9 years not paying too much attention to my age, nor doing very much to mark the passing years, but turning 40 seems significant, somehow.

I’ve got a vague inkling of an idea of something I might want to do to mark this birthday, but I’m still trying to decide if I actually do want to do something special, and if I do, to work out the details of what.

I will probably blog about it on and off for the next month.