Chicken Processing Day Meets Hurricane Irene

The last two days have been pret­ty excit­ing. Yes­ter­day we processed our 75 meat chick­ens, which would have been a daunt­ing enough job with­out the threat of Irene bar­ing down on us.

Fri­day, Mom and I har­vest­ed as many toma­toes from the gar­den as we could in antic­i­pa­tion of the storm and sort­ed them out to store in the garage. We also rushed to stake down and secure the gar­den. Mean­while, Dave set up every­thing nec­es­sary for pro­cess­ing day. Our last pro­cess­ing day went pret­ty well (see here for details), but it took about 16 hours and there were clear­ly improve­ments to be made. Also, this time we were pro­cess­ing 75 birds instead of 36. We want­ed to make sure that we were com­plete­ly pre­pared for so many birds and so we made sure that every­thing was in order before we went to sleep Fri­day night. Very thank­ful­ly, our bravest friend Mar­ka Kiley came out of Boston to help us for the week­end. Sat­ur­day, we all woke up extra ear­ly and Dave and I went out in the dark to catch the chick­ens. We got off to a good start, start­ed the pro­cess­ing at about 6:30 AM and were done by 1 PM. Thanks to Marka’s help, as well as sev­er­al oth­ers, we were able to qual­i­ty con­trol and pack­age the birds as we went, so the sec­ond half of the day went quick­ly and we were com­plete­ly cleaned up by 5. Moth­er nature helped us clean by pro­vid­ing some drench­ing after­noon rains. It was a long day, but sat­is­fy­ing. Pro­cess­ing chick­ens is nev­er fun, but we did the best job we could. We made sure that the chick­ens went to their deaths with min­i­mum dis­com­fort and that their meat was treat­ed with the respect it deserves. All of Dav­e’s work plan­ning and prepar­ing real­ly paid off.

Mean­while, Dav­e’s mom Tam­my had four pots of our toma­toes bub­bling on the stove all day and into the night, work­ing hard to can, freeze and oth­er­wise pre­serve as much of our crop as pos­si­ble. Between her hard work, and my mom’s efforts to secure us some big restau­rant sales, it looks like none of our toma­toes are going to go to waste.

This morn­ing we got 4 inch­es of rain, but luck­i­ly, the hur­ri­cane was tamer than we had feared it would be and, oth­er than a few blown down toma­to trel­lis­es and (pos­si­bly) the loss of our corn crop, it looks like the gar­den is going to be okay. The chick­ens are safe­ly in the refrig­er­a­tor and freez­er (we did­n’t even lose pow­er!) and we can relax — and blog.

Our toma­to boun­ty and Mom’s new vespa

Sort­ing cher­ry tomatoes

Before (tune in tomor­row for After pics)

Art­sy Pic: to remem­ber them by in case they were all blown over

Kill Cones

Scalder

Pluck­er

Our bravest friend Marka

Lyn­da, anoth­er brave friend

Hur­ri­cane Irene