Routine
How does McLovin know not to try to make babies with the new ones once they are older?
I let the two flocks intermingle last weekend, and at the end of the day McLovin tried to mount one of the 7-week-old Ameraucanas, the pervert. I let them mix again yesterday, because the young ones are bigger now, and he attacked one of the Don Kings with his spurs (that did NOT jingle-jangle-jingle). She limped for a while, but seems okay today.
If he keeps up these shenanigans, or hurts one of the chicks due to be born this week (I candled today, and there are 5 that should hatch in the middle of the week. We also had a second buff go broody, so I stuck several eggs under her, too, and they’ve got another 10 days or so), McLovin will become dinner. We have plenty of replacement roosters in the garage.
How are you going to know which are dinner chickens and which are keeping chickens? Are you going to keep them sequestered or put bands on them or what?
They’ll probably be kept separate, and will definitely be killed while they’re still smaller than the big ones. If you’ve seen a “fryer” chicken in the grocery store, that’s probably about the size they’ll be when we process them. Maybe a little bigger.
…are the new chicks mongrols? And if so, do that affect what you plan to raise them for???
Yep, they’re mutts. Cute, but mutts (most of them look like one parent or the other, though). I don’t expect their muttness to affect their flavor. 
I cant remember but were the pigs the same size when you go them? One looks much bigger than the other one and I wondered why?
The big pig started out a little bigger, but once he figured out he could bully the smaller one their size grew more disparate. For a few weeks, he would plop his fat ass in the trough length-wise and lay there eating until all the food was gone, keeping the little one from getting much.
On the occasions I found him doing this, it gave me great pleasure to whack him on the ass with a stick to make him move.
Finally, I had a pretty good idea: I lowered one side of the trough so they could get to the food easier, then slid the trough back under the electric fence so porky couldn’t get into it any more. The little one is growing a lot faster now, but he’s still smaller.
Speaking of the electric fence, I finally got zapped by it last week. I’d touched it plenty of times, but since my shoes have rubber soles all I ever felt was a little pulse. This time, however, I was leaned over the field fence and had a good ground contact in my armpit. Suffice it to say that I now know why the pigs yelp when they touch the fence.
Life’s become something of a routine recently: get up, tend to the animals, go to work, tend to the animals, tend to the garden, watch TV, go to bed. We’re deploying a huge new software thingy at work, so the days have been long. There’s nothing particularly new or notable going on (except our 50+ year old septic system is history, and should be replaced sometime this week), so I thought I’d share a bunch of pictures from Crooked Acres.
The garden:
The blackeyed peas finally came up (left), and along with the navy beans they should fill their little fenced area right up:
The green beans continue to be happy:
I spent last Sunday making 54 (!) tomato cages out of a 330′ roll of 47″ field fence. Making my own was cheaper than trying to buy pre-mades, and mine are made out of woven wire instead of flimsy welded stuff. I should be able to use these for years and years:
The cages are connected to each other and to t-posts running the length of the rows. I defy anything short of a tornado to knock them over:
The squash plants (of which we have about 30) are starting to look like squash plants:
The silver queen corn is looking nice. I never did shoot a crow — no more showed up after I fired my single shot out the back door. The yellow corn (not pictured) is about 3 inches tall.
The potatoes are blooming now:
The teenagers are starting to look like chickens now.
The pigs:
About the pigs.
Earlier this week, I was reading a “need help butchering a pig” thread on a forum I visit, and someone recommended this video from “Ask the Meat Man.” The video shows a man turning a side of hog into its various meat cuts.
Holy shit, is it complicated.
I thought you just, like, cut off the front leg and called it the shoulder; cut off the back leg and called it the ham; cut off the belly and called it bacon, and so on. It’s not like that at all.
He was all, “Find the flanxilingus bone with your thumb, then slide the blade under it and carve it just like this. Then, separate the unctilious superior muscle from the venous clavicular and insert your finger into the space so you can use it to leverage the knife into…”
Yadda yadda yadda. Having never carved up an animal, I didn’t realize getting it into parts was that complex, with finding specific bones and such. Granted, he was making professional cuts, but still. It looked like a huge pain in the ass.
Sometimes, I tend to not think things all the way through before I decide to do them. Like announce that I’m going to kill and process a pig myself.
I called the processor that’s about 10 miles from my house, and they charge .45 per pound (hanging weight) to turn a living pig into small frozen packages wrapped in paper. It looks like I could get a full-sized pig done for about $100, maybe a little less.
One of the reasons I wanted to process the pig myself was because I feel like if I’m willing to eat an animal, I should be willing to kill it. As obnoxious as the pigs are becoming (see story about big pig above) (plus, they try to take a bite of EVERYTHING [including me], not because they’re aggressive, but because they think it might be food), I have no issues at all with the thought of killing them. Hell, some days I’d probably enjoy it.
I haven’t decided to take it to a professional, but I’m leaning that way. My friend, who grew up on a farm and was going to show me how to do the processing, is perfectly willing to go to the processor too. He said it’s a lot of work to process a pig, especially when someone else will do it so cheaply.
I have to dither about it for six months before I make a final decision.
Until recently, I worried about stressing the pigs out by putting them in a trailer and taking them to slaughter. Then I watched this video from the same guy that shows the slaughter of a pig. There’s a second pig in the pen, and when he shoots the first one and cuts its throat, the second one looks up briefly from the grass it’s eating, then resumes eating. I figure if that doesn’t stress a pig, a little ride in a trailer can’t be all that bad.
The babies continue to be exceedingly cute. Of the 22 that hatched, the only death we had was one of the ones that I helped hatch. It would have died anyway, so all I did was prolong the inevitable. We had a little bit of a scare last Saturday when one of the chicks appeared to start exhibiting symptoms of avian encephalomyelitis (stumbling, resting on hocks, wings limp). I separated him and waited for the others to start showing signs. I figured that all my washing everything with bleach had been for nought, that there was still AE virus all over the brooder.
Then, on Sunday, he appeared to be perfectly normal again. I guess he was just weak, or something. So far the remaining 21 look healthy.
Interesting trivia for you: when you mate a Rhode Island Red rooster with a Barred Rock pullet (or hen), you can tell the sex of their offspring just by looking at them. The females look like a normal Barred Rock, but the males (like the one below, and above) have a white spot on their head. Genetics is cool stuff. Note this guy is already getting a comb and some tailfeathers:
Last week when I was cutting the grass, I found something cool in the backyard: two tomato plants. What made it so cool is that they were growing in the semi-bare spot that was underneath where the chicken coop used to be.
Which, of course, means they’re CHICKEN POOP TOMATOES, from seeds that were shat out of a chicken.
All those maters in the garden, and the only one with flowers is a poop tomato that sprang up in the yard.
This is how you know I’m gay.
Awww Fred…. we already knew.
(kidding)
Those babies are too cute!
Eating Silver Queen Corn is like eating sunshine.
Fred, check around for a “Mobile Butcher” They’ll come right to the house and do the deed for you, skin and gut them (chickens love the guts) and then slice them in half, load them up in the refrigerated truck, and call you the next week to get your cutting instructions
The garden looks amazing! Thanks for sharing all the pictures.
Fred, would you ever consider posting a diagram of your garden? I know you’ve given us tons of pictures, and I could probably motivate my lazy ass into stitching a representation together (not!), but it’s SO much easier just to ask the Master Gardener! Something like (SQ)for Silver Queen, (T) for Tomato, (N) for Navy Bean, (G) for Green Beans, etc. And amounts, kinda like:
SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ (3 rows of 20 plants each; 2ft between rows, plants 6 inches apart)
N N N N N N N N N N G G G G G G G G G G (1 row of beans, 10 navy, 10 green)
CT CT CT CT CT CT CT CT BB BB BB BB BB BB BB (12 cherry tomato, 12 big boy tomato)
Something along those lines? I am very envious of your garden and wish I had the courage to plow up part of my backyard and try to live off the land a bit. The fact that I have 2 dogs that would eat everything (like they eat the blackberries, blueberries, peaches, figs and grapes - husband tends his “orchard”,) and that I can’t even keep a houseplant alive, probably add to my wariness. But if I saw how you have your garden laid out, maybe I can attempt something on a smaller scale.
Hey Fred. I have friend who has chickens who does not let the rooster in with the hens, she says they lay better w/out the rooster. (and their rooster was being too aggressive.)
For pest control, my parents plant marigolds with their tomato plants; bugs don’t like marigolds.
I think it’s smart to send the pigs out to get iced. You guys do enough DIY!
I would hire the professionals just to NOT have to clean up the mess. You have enough other stuff to keep you busy!
Ah, chickens… makes me think of my childhood when my little brother brought home a chick from the countryside to our home in the city. I remember he kept it in a cardboard box and named it after a neighborhood girl named Marcia. Well Marcia grew up to be a rooster. He’d ride around on our dog Freckles back, believe it or not. The neighbors would call us up complaining at the crack of dawn when Marcia would start crowing. We’d have to chase Marcia around the yard, grab him, and put a wash tub over him to stifle him. One time he got in our house when somebody left the screen door open and jumped up on my dad’s kick-back chair and then proceeded to shit all along the backside of it.
Ah, chickens…
Roosters can be (literally) a real pain in the arse. We had a dozen pullet chicks from the feed store, all with names (Henrietta, Fowler, Egglantine, Delicieuse, and Fricassee are the only
ones I remember). Henrietta turned out to be Henry, and all was well for a while, until he began protecting the hens by flying up at us and delivering vicious pecks to whatever he could reach.
We got rid of him because there were many children on our block and we were afraid that one day Henry might peck a child — and he could fly up to a small child’s eye-level. Your chicken coop looks much less escape-prone than ours was, but still … if McLovin starts being aggressive, watch out. Those nasty beaks of theirs can peck out human eyes. It’s been known to happen.
I think your willingness to kill the pigs so you can justify eating them should be good enough without doing it yourself. I mean you are still planning on killing the chickens right and I’ll bet that cleaning them etc is a lot less complicated than the pigs so you’ve proven your manliness to all of us!
BTW in case I missed it what happened with the dogs that were running over your property?
I would definitely deliver the piggies to the processor. Just thinking about the smell alone. YUCK! Plus you’ll be able to recognize the cuts of meat.
Killing chickens would be far less messy and complicated I would think…..
Have you seen This American Life on Showtime? Part of the last episode of season 1 was shot at a farm in Iowa and is about pigs and raising them. One of the film crew was turned off of meat altogether at the time by the whole process. I just watched it this evening and it made me think of you!
As far as slaughtering one yourself…I keep thinking that Mother Abigail made it seem a little too easy!
I’m not against killing animals for food… and I agree, if you eat it, you should be willing to kill it. However, they squeal like baby children and if you don’t kill them right the first time, you will have to live with listening to that for the rest of your life. I’d send it to a processor…. and let him deal with it. Definitely worth the hundred bucks I’d say.
I’m definitely a city girl, and prefer all my meat come in Styrofoam trays covered with Saran Wrap. BUT - I have a friend who raises cows for his freezer. He speaks from experience: If you have a butcher process your meat, go with the pigs and oversee the process. Otherwise you may end up with some or all of somebody else’s pig.
My friend spends a lot of money to corn feed his beef. He wants to make sure that the white paper packages are actually HIS cows. He’s been told by a butcher with a lot of experience that the ONLY way to make sure you end up with YOUR piggies in the paper packages is to supervise the processing.
You aren’t going to eat the fluffy headed chicken, are you?
HG, I think the easiest solution is to choose a reputable butcher!
No butcher does the processing right away — generally they hang the carcasses for several weeks before they do the actual cutting up and packaging.
We’ve used the same small family outfit for over 15 years and have never had a problem.
I’m seriously thinking of becoming a vegetarian!
Considering you take pleasure in whacking them on the ass to make them move and may even enjoy killing one eventually, I wouldn’t think a little pig screaming would be a problem.