So I don't recall when I last wrote anything on here.
Dude and I went to Rochester on Saturday, and met my sister at my BFF's house. ( rochester, museum of play, Port Court, etc )
Then![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unicornduke came over and we harvested a bit over half of my field of flax. ( wittering on about flax )
So today was a chicken processing day, and all was on pace to go normally-- down two workers, we thought we'd be a bit slow, but it was a light load; this group of chickens had some mortality in the brooder and then had a terrible run-in with a pair of owls their first night out on pasture, and so there were significantly fewer of them than there ought to have been. (Usually a batch is 150-180; this group was 135.)
After catching the chickens, a few crew members paused to finish morning chores, running feed and water out to the various animals on pasture, and while they were tending to the egg hens, one of the young men discovered a great blue heron tangled in the hen's electro-mesh fence. He gently unwound it, and put it into a feed bucket with an egg basket upside-down on top so it couldn't get away; he could see that it had an injury on its leg, he said from a fish-hook-- I'm not sure if he saw the hook and removed it, or what, because we couldn't spot an injury, later. ( A heron, you say? I told you there was a heron. )
I didn't get a photo but my sister did, it's on her Instagram.
We flew (ha) through the chicken processing anyway, even short-handed, and had finished by 10:30. One of the helpers really wanted us to just move on to doing the packaging, and so at her urging we just went ahead and kept going. Which was good; we got through the majority of it before lunch, and then at lunch the post office called, we had a box of chicks there even though they were supposed to arrive tomorrow, and so my sister went and had to clean out a brooder to prepare for that, so we didn't have her help packaging after lunch. Fortunately, we only had eight chickens left to do whole. There was a lot more cutting up to do, but I don't usually help with that. So instead I let everyone else go off and do other jobs, and I did all the cleanup, slowly, by myself, and so by the time I was done, they were done cutting up the rest of the chickens, and so I could keep going and get all the cleaning done and the room set back up for egg-washing, which is what it is the rest of the time.
I was pretty sore by the end of all that, but I got my sister to come back and do the heavy lifting parts of cleanup (I literally just mean lifting the heavy things that everyone but me can do alone and I can only do with help). And then it was done, and the other more qualified farm types had all gone on to do other important constructive things.
The veg manager's main important constructive thing (in my view anyway) was that he discovered that the melons are beginning to come ripe-- he brought in a canteloupe that's just reached the first blush of perfection and we devoured it for dinner. (along with the traditional chicken day pizza, of course.)
I should get off my ass and go pull more flax but I think I'll be in bed with the lights out before it's actually dark out. Sorry, flax. Maybe tomorrow.
Dude and I went to Rochester on Saturday, and met my sister at my BFF's house. ( rochester, museum of play, Port Court, etc )
Then
unicornduke came over and we harvested a bit over half of my field of flax. ( wittering on about flax )So today was a chicken processing day, and all was on pace to go normally-- down two workers, we thought we'd be a bit slow, but it was a light load; this group of chickens had some mortality in the brooder and then had a terrible run-in with a pair of owls their first night out on pasture, and so there were significantly fewer of them than there ought to have been. (Usually a batch is 150-180; this group was 135.)
After catching the chickens, a few crew members paused to finish morning chores, running feed and water out to the various animals on pasture, and while they were tending to the egg hens, one of the young men discovered a great blue heron tangled in the hen's electro-mesh fence. He gently unwound it, and put it into a feed bucket with an egg basket upside-down on top so it couldn't get away; he could see that it had an injury on its leg, he said from a fish-hook-- I'm not sure if he saw the hook and removed it, or what, because we couldn't spot an injury, later. ( A heron, you say? I told you there was a heron. )
I didn't get a photo but my sister did, it's on her Instagram.
We flew (ha) through the chicken processing anyway, even short-handed, and had finished by 10:30. One of the helpers really wanted us to just move on to doing the packaging, and so at her urging we just went ahead and kept going. Which was good; we got through the majority of it before lunch, and then at lunch the post office called, we had a box of chicks there even though they were supposed to arrive tomorrow, and so my sister went and had to clean out a brooder to prepare for that, so we didn't have her help packaging after lunch. Fortunately, we only had eight chickens left to do whole. There was a lot more cutting up to do, but I don't usually help with that. So instead I let everyone else go off and do other jobs, and I did all the cleanup, slowly, by myself, and so by the time I was done, they were done cutting up the rest of the chickens, and so I could keep going and get all the cleaning done and the room set back up for egg-washing, which is what it is the rest of the time.
I was pretty sore by the end of all that, but I got my sister to come back and do the heavy lifting parts of cleanup (I literally just mean lifting the heavy things that everyone but me can do alone and I can only do with help). And then it was done, and the other more qualified farm types had all gone on to do other important constructive things.
The veg manager's main important constructive thing (in my view anyway) was that he discovered that the melons are beginning to come ripe-- he brought in a canteloupe that's just reached the first blush of perfection and we devoured it for dinner. (along with the traditional chicken day pizza, of course.)
I should get off my ass and go pull more flax but I think I'll be in bed with the lights out before it's actually dark out. Sorry, flax. Maybe tomorrow.
