Lazy Days of Winter

Well, the winter days of not having (relatively) much to do around the homestead are coming to an end. After five weeks of being gone on temporary assignment for the Air Force, I came back to the first inklings of spring. No, it wasn't a change in the weather although it has been unusually warm this week. It was the early work that is light, but nevertheless, a harbinger of spring.

I spent all day Tuesday tilling the garden beds with our "new to us" tiller. I paid for that the next morning with very sore forearms and back. DW planted the first of our plants. I don't know everything that went into the ground but it included strawberries, blackberries, and peas. She has also started a myriad of seedlings indoors.

We also received our shipment of 25 meat chickens (Jumbo Cornish X Rocks, to be specific), plus one rare chick we haven't identified yet. We set them up in the brooder in my shop. This time we ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery because we lost almost 25% of our last batch to leg problems. I can already tell these are much more lively than the chicks we got from the other unnamed hatchery. I think Murray McMurray is popular because they just have better breeding stock.

I was also excited to take home my first chicken plucker, the "Fabio 2000". (No, Sean didn't paint that. That's my artistic ability in a nutshell) It was built by my father-in-law, and named after our head rooster Fabio. Apparently he developed quite a bad reputation with my father-in-law while I was gone by attacking him at every opportunity. I'm the only person around here he doesn't attack. My FIL returned to his shop with new fevor after that weekend, and finished the chicken plucker. He has expressed a desire to be there to watch it strip the feathers off that devil bird. It looks funny, but should work. It's got a motor that turns the PVC cap, and the rubber fingers strip the feathers right off a scalded chicken.

I'm also slowly working on a tub-style chicken plucker that you just dump the birds in and it plucks up to four chickens in 15 seconds! That beats the 45 minutes per bird it takes me to hand pluck. It will also make plucking turkeys much easier.