sunday

[dragonlady7]

animal slaughter, tiny house, bearselkie lyfe

via https://ift.tt/3aJi64G

Sunday was busy.

I got up and packed up all my things, dressing in a relatively filthable outfit and leaving a clean outfit set out to change into to drive home.

Then I went out, in a billed cap and waterproof jacket, in the very light rain, and picked rocks.

The flower garden has pretty gravelly soil, which is why it got given over to flowers– flowers don’t mind harsh conditions. Vegetables were never super successful over here. This is genuinely what the garden bed looks like, after 20 years of effort to improve it:

[img desc: a metal pail in the foreground full of rocks, set on a background of very gravelly soil.]

I had left the garden cart set up with the 5gal bucket, the 3gal pail, and two milk crates, and I took the metal pail and a milk crate down the rows of the flower garden, and threw the big rocks that had been tossed into the pathways into the milk crate, and then picked little gravel out of the garden beds into the pail, trying to work my way down and back so that I’d wind up with the heavy nearly-full containers back at the cart. Then I dumped the 3gal pail into the drywall bucket, so I wouldn’t be lugging that around, and made another trip out. I’m not sure of the dimensions of either pail, because I managed to empty the 3gal pail into the 5gal bucket twice. It’s not an exact science, though, and I did toss some of the largest stones into the milk crate to make room.

[img desc: a wooden garden cart with several containers full of rocks in it.] Doesn’t look so bad, does it? Well I’d wager it weighed more than me, and I haven’t weighed myself in a minute but I gotta be at least 220.

Once the cart was full, I could barely move it so it’s good i hadn’t gone to find another 5gal bucket, which I had considered. I went and dumped the contents of the cart into the building site, and then came back and repeated the feat.

[img desc: a building site, with woods in the background; down the center of the photo, clean rocks are visible at the edge of the excavated area, which has mostly been backfilled with sandy gravel.] It really really doesn’t look like much, though to be fair that’s not all of it; much I dumped in the drainage trench off the edge of the site. But I put a couple hundred pounds of rocks down the very edge of the excavation and it just looks like nothing. Ha!

That took me a couple of hours all told, and then I was really, really tired. So I went inside, and had meant to sit down but wound up standing instead, leaning over the counter.

BIL talked to me a bit then about how to do a particularly tricky feat for the tiny house. (The base platform of it, you have to construct by screwing plywood to the underside. So you have to have it upside-down to do that. Then you have to flip it over. A 16x24 platform sheathed in plywood is going to weigh at least a thousand pounds. How does one do this? The easy how-to guide that says you’ll need no more than basic carpentry skills absolutely does not elaborate on this.)

Then I got a text from Assistant Livestock Manager. He has his own pigs, the kunekune pigs that are tiny and fuzzy, and he processes one for personal eating every month, and then uses the lard to make the soap he sells for one of his side hustles. I’d said I’d help out with that, since it was his first time using our slaughterhouse for it. (This is not an Approved Use of the slaughterhouse but it’s an allowable multi-use– we just can’t sell any quadrupeds we process in there, but he’s not trying to anyway.) Since I’m the one who always cleans and sets up, I figured I’d be able to give him a hand. He texted that he was on his way over and was going to get started.

So I scarfed down an early lunch and went out to help with that. He scalds his pigs, to get the hair off, and that requires setting up his scald tank, and I cannot help but look at such a thing and think that a setup just like this could really work for a woodsy hot tub. He’s got a metal stock tank on two turkey fryer-style propane bases, and just fires that up. if I got a larger metal stock tank and put it on a support, not directly on top of the burner… It’s mostly idle hilarity, but below is a photo of the setup in use for a two-year-old kunekune barrow (castrated boar) who he weighed just before starting and determined to be 117 pounds once dead but not in any other way processed.

You can’t see the pig in this photo, so it’s not gory. And before you laugh at how absurdly small that stock tank is, no it isn’t– ALM is just six feet eight inches tall, which is why he’s perfectly comfortable handling a 117-pound carcass on his own. (ALM is approximately the dimensions of a standard exterior door, if anyone was wondering– 80″x36″, give or take. This occasionally causes hilarity when the dog is lying in the doorway and he can’t open it the whole way through, and makes much of having to squeeze.)

I’d still buy the larger size of stock tank but you can see where I’m kinda coming from here, LOL.

Anyhow I helped with the processing, but mostly what I did was sharpen knives. ALM’s knives were in a sorry state, and he admitted he didn’t do great in that class at culinary school. But we have, for the slaughterhouse, one of those belt-sander-style knife sharpeners with the automatic attachments that hold them at the right angle, and I spent a good long while fixing those knives up.

He took the whole critter apart into rough cuts in his usual procedure– kept the hind legs intact as hoof-on hams, took the racks of ribs out, took off the head entire, parceled out the leaf lard and back lard, pulled out the tenderloins, cut the sides out for bacon in slabs and then left the shoulders whole to debone at home. Kept the spine in one piece, tail on, to boil down for stock. It was interesting to watch, and really the cutting took him maybe an hour. At the end he got the apprentice who’d assisted to use a little lard and fry up a little cut of the tenderloin (I think it was actually the bit that on a deer would be the backstraps, I’ve had deer hunters do this same thing) and we all ate that, and then I ran inside and got changed and hopped in the car and drove for five hours.

Dude had said he’d have dinner waiting, but he was meal-prepping and hadn’t decided which one to finish, so I got home at 6:45pm and only then did he put the lasagna into the oven. But I survived, and we ate lasagna at almost 8pm.

And I pretty much went straight to bed.

Am at work today, doing my 6:30-2:30 schedule, trying to crank through a backlog of stuff left for me to do before my

🎉 SECOND VACCINE SHOT 🎉

this afternoon at like 3:30. Which means i”m taking tomorrow off, I’ve already decided to be a huge wuss about it. Plus I beat the shit out of myself on Saturday and Sunday partly because I knew this was coming– if I’m going to have muscle aches, why not fucking deserve them? So I already have muscle aches, LOL, and i’m hydrating all day and plan to spend like half the day in the bathroom. I’m ready.

Tomorrow I hope to feel well enough to at least throw a load of laundry in, because I of course had no time to do any of that last night.

So we’ll see.

So this week I’m here, but then next week I’m back to the farm again because they tacked another chicken processing day onto the front of the season– we’re doing to process the two- and three-year-old laying hens, who are steadily dropping dead from old age anyway. (Yes, most chickens live longer than that, but no, the hybrid high-production hens live fast and die young, and many of them are flitting around looking like bedraggled ghosts this spring, poor things; their genetics make them a) insane and b) extremely short-lived. This is part of the rationale behind switching to the heritage Barred Rocks; they’re productive enough, and have steadier temperaments and more robust health. Those girls are out there looking fine at about a year old, they’re such handsome chickens! We’ll see how those same ones look this time next year.)

FS contemplated selling the old laying hens alive, which they’ve done in the past, but she felt she couldn’t in good conscience, as they keep dropping dead of age. But processed and packaged, there’s pretty high demand for soup hens, especially with the way people have gone nuts for local food since the pandemic started. Might as well ease the new staff into chicken processing with the admittedly much more difficult (for the eviscerators, everything else is about the same) task of processing laying hens into food. So that’s tacked onto the beginning of the season, so that’s the new deadline for me getting the slaughterhouse banged back into shape.

This week’s to-do is to square away the finances for the tiny house with Dude, who is also in the midst of negotiating to get our regular house-house a new roof, so there’s a lot to consider there. Doable, but needs contemplation and scheduling. (Your picture was not posted)