dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
So I borrowed a lens from work to take pictures to enter into a photo contest run by the lens manufacturer every year.
I mostly just needed an excuse to make me use my camera; I hadn't, really, in months. Actually I'd forgotten my camera bag in the yurt on my last trip home, so it was just sitting in there, unused.

So, I just put that lens on the camera and wandered around and documented things, as I used to in my early days on the farm.

Most of the photos aren't any great shakes. This one shows my car parked next to the yurt, and the beds in the garden devoted to flowers, and the bright green square closest to the car is my flax patch.

DSC_8362

Some are nice, though, like this one, posed, of my sister and her daughter.
DSC_8467

Oh, mild tw for the photos behind the cut: I took a few of them during chicken processing, and while there's no gory subjects, there might be gore or meat or something uncomfortable to the uninitiated that didn't particularly register with me, so-- mostly it's farm scenery but a bunch of it is indoors because we were slaughtering, so take care if that squicks you. Descriptions are above photos, so you can look at those before you scroll down. I did take gory photos but opted not to even put any up in the photostream; I generally don't. It always seems like a good idea at the time, and then as I'm editing, I'm like, nope, nobody needs to see that! But, meat doesn't register as gore to me, and background blood I just don't even really see, so-- do take care.

Expandmore photos. i should whittle it down and ask which ones to use for the contest! )
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
So we decided to do the hens first, because they were going to be much more difficult.
We had a huge crew-- everyone was present, including the entire Overqualified Moms crew.
I guess I should go into some detail about the Overqualified Mom Squad because they are possibly the most charming part of Chicken Days.
Expandit's not that they're overqualified to be moms, there's just a lot of advanced degrees and some bloodlust and it makes for a great poultry crew )
After dinner Farmkid was running around being a weirdo, and I noticed that Veg Manager was just... walking around outside, no shoes on, glass of wine in his hand, looking at stuff in the picking garden. I thought for a bit that he was weeding, or planning, but after a while I looked out and he was just sitting in one of the pathways, petting Reno the cat, looking at the garden as the sun moved toward setting, in its lovely golden hour. I went out and took some pictures of the cat, the plants, and he was happy enough to chat with me, but I almost felt like I was intruding; he'd clearly just been enjoying the evening, enjoying the garden that's largely the work of his hands-- I mean, my sister's done a ton of it, and the other workers on the farm have done a lot of the actual planting and such, but probably if you measured out the hours, a slim majority would be the work of his hands and his planning, and just a little ways up the hill it slides over into being over 90% his labor and 100% his planning. He ought to enjoy it, and it's wonderful that he does. He's just such a good dude, I like him so much.

I was on my way out to the yurt when Dude's mom called me with a computer question. She was under the impression that I was home and could pop over to look at it, but I was not. I gave her advice anyway, and then walked out to the yurt even though it was still quite early. I saw the cattle on the hillside-- there are five young steers, I think they are, and I tried to go look at them with Farmkid but they have such a big pasture area it's hard to tell where they are. But there they were, in the sunset, grazing happily.
I swung past my flax patch and weeded a bit by hand, since the weather was nice and the mosquitoes not so bad. I'm exhausted and my whole body hurts but like... weeding sucks and since I already hurt I might as well just do it? IDK, it felt like the thing to do. I've done like, a third of one of the five rows, so it's better than nothing.
Supposed to be 49 tonight, but not stormy, or windy, so I'll take it. I'm so tired I just want to sleep.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
Chicken processing day.
Last night was a wild night-- heavy winds, gusts, downpours of rain; I was convinced I didn't sleep a wink but I'm alive so I must have done, I do recall waking up several times and so I must have been asleep in the first place. I could tell you an approximate summary of the path of last night's storm-- windy, then rainy, then gusty, then calm for a bit, then-- so I know I was awake enough to be aware, but. I know I got some sleep.
And then the fucking boar-- well, he has this habit he's adopted of banging on the wall of the barn to amuse himself, and he does it for a while and then he stops, and he freaked me out with it the first night I was here, it's so loud, but now I'm over it.
And when it was calm this morning at 5:30 he woke me up doing it.
I found out yesterday he has a birth certificate, by the way-- he's pedigree, apparently, and so we know he was born July 7th of 2015 and his legal name is Gunnar 5 Polly, son of Gunnar 4 and Polly. Very creative.
I tried to convince Willa we need to make him a birthday cake the way we made one for Chita last month, but I don't know if she was convinced. Like, not a cake for him to eat, because as she pointed out he'd gleefully eat pig food and mud, but a cake for us to eat, with him as an excuse. So. Anyway. I put the seed of an idea into her mind, we'll see if it gets us anywhere. (Her mother makes a fantastic chocolate cake, and it's quite easy, and we just need a reason for her to bother, see.)

I'm being a little bit lazy, I should be running out to the barn to make sure everything is ready, but listen, I did that yesterday, the last five slaughter days in a row I've gone out and made everything ready and then stood around for an hour waiting for everone else. People show up to catch the chickens at 7, and there's 100 extra hens already pre-caught in coops for them, and I can go outside then and start my work and that's fine.

Mom and Dad are on vacation and so Farmkid is, and this is a new thing, going to a friend's house, who will take her to school (last day! ever! at this school! for both of them, they're both going to the public school down the road next year, though her friend will be in 1st grade already so she'll have to make new friends-- the new across the street neighbor will be in kindergarten with her though!) and then keep her the rest of the day and come over at the end of the day. This is fantastic, as it's normally a huge hassle and drama to figure out what to do with her if Mom and Dad aren't available, but this particular friend has become super important. (They were close before, but the family moved and now lives right down the street, quite close, so-- fantastic.)

I was so tired yesterday, and achy, and I didn't do anything that strenuous I thought, but I'm just beat down. I hope today goes a little better, because it's slaughter day so it's not like there's any part of it we can just--- not do.

We're processing the last 100 hens from last year's laying flock, to sell as stew hens. We did just a couple last time and my test batch of stock was uh amazing. So. I highly recommend finding spent hens or laying hens or stew hens or whatever they're called where you are, and throwing one with a bunch of vegetable scraps into a pressure cooker for like half an hour and then straining the stock and then picking the carcass, you will have the most intensely flavored chicken stock ever and it's just-- it's dark, it's rich, the fat's bright yellow, it's such a noble end for a noble bird. We made ramen with some of it and froze the rest, and it was like-- restaurant ramen. Fantastic.
So we're going to sell those alongside the broilers, two to a pack, frozen, and see what kind of market there winds up being. We've been selling these birds one-off for a bit over a year now, to various specialty customers-- largely, Filipino and Chinese people looking to find chicken that tastes like chicken to them, as American broiler chickens, even pasture-raised ones, are bland meat blobs in the mouths of people used to eating animals that have enough muscle tone to walk.
So we'll see if Americans will buy them, and failing that, we'll call up the nice Filipino guy who was so concerned at his children's taste buds not developing properly.

All right. it's seven. Gotta get out there.

it's goin'

May. 29th, 2019 06:33 am
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
First Chicken Processing Day of the season was yesterday. (Now's when the trigger warnings I posted about eons ago in my pinned post come into effect: the farm raises chickens and pigs for meat, and has its own poultry slaughterhouse on premises, so. TW animal slaughter discussion.)
(Has it been long enough since I wrote up the explanation of how it works on Tumblr like two years ago? Probably, enough of you are different-- should I do a new version for Dreamwidth? What actually happens in a small NYS section 5a slaughterhouse, and how it works? Maybe I'll just write it new from scratch and then go see my old version, it's always interesting to compare how time and use erode Truths into new forms. Not like it's that complicated, but every time I explain it to someone new I feel like i'm seeing it differently.)

Anyway, all warnings aside, there's nothing particularly graphic here, I didn't take pictures or anything, but we wind up sort of casual about various gross bodily things in this line of work and it's hard to remember what normal people might find upsetting.
Expandmostly dirt )

OK I got a lot of work to do today. But, the excitement: a chicken for lunch, at last. (We've been sold out so long that most of us haven't had chicken in months, by now.)
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
We have had two sunny days in a row now. it rained last night a bit, but not a lot, and it had been sunny all day.

i am so beat. the dishwasher here is busted and i have just been doing dishes and dishes and dishes and dishes.
Expandassorted farm items and the opposite of a to-do list )

Photo

Dec. 10th, 2018 01:04 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
screenshot of a post with a photo of a deer; OP is asking "How can you eat these beautiful creatures?" and responder is saying "uh are you asking for recipes?"via https://ift.tt/2ROzLfM

(Your picture was not posted)
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via http://ift.tt/1N2ZRRp:
I am back home and Chita has decided my lap is a suitable port in a storm. (Normally, she won’t bother with my lap, only Dude’s, but he was napping on the couch so his lap wasn’t available.) 

I took the picture with my laptop’s webcam though so she was not amused by me waving a literal computer at her, hence the stinky-face. 

My right shoulder is fucked up from repetitive motion; turkeys are fucking heavy and you really have to go at them pretty violently with the delunging wand. Mostly I had to pry out kidneys and what I eventually realized was their reproductive system– it’s adhered really tenaciously to the spine, and is either a pair of tiny kidney-bean-sized white things that are testicles, or a little clump of tiny white spheres that are eggs in their earliest stage, all wrapped up in connective tissue and sort of.. I dunno, ducts or things. It took for-goddamn ever to get out, was always left behind by the eviscerators, and hurt my hands something fierce. 

I mean, they call it delunging for a reason; I had to pry out a lot of left-over scraps of lungs too. They cling on pretty tenaciously to the ribs. But it wasn’t until toward the end of the day that I started having issues with there being a lot of lungs left. Every third bird or so, I had to switch hands; I was absently holding the birds with my left and going in with my right, using the wand and then my hand, and I kept having there be a big chunk of the right lung left that I couldn’t get my fingers under unless i went in with my left hand. I said, “I think one of the right-handed eviscerators is getting lazy.” There were three eviscerators: Jen is left-handed, and was using her right hand to go in, leaving her left to handle the knife and manipulate the bird. Aaron is right-handed, but uses his left hand to go into the bird because that hand is marginally smaller, he thinks maybe, or for some reason anyway it lets him get the gizzard out in one pull on chickens, where his right he can’t get all his fingers in. (On turkeys that doesn’t matter, but those of us who work with poultry a lot generally handle a lot more chickens than turkeys.)

That leaves Annie, my sister, who cheerfully answered, “Well, I’m being lazy because I want to give you something to do.”

Which explains why it was the right lung, and every third bird, because she’s right-handed and pulls with her right hand.

Anyway, it was amusing that she was doing it deliberately.

Turns out turkeys are really sharp on the inside. Never thought about it, but this is true of chickens too— their ribs really stick out a lot on the inside, as do vertebrae; there’s no padding once you pry out the viscera, of course. I beat the shit out of my hands. Turkeys are just so much bigger than chickens, so much harder to handle.

Anyway. The income from the turkeys is basically what sustains my sister’s little family through until vegetables start being harvested again, so— important work.

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