turkeys – Peacock Orchard

Last I wrote I liked the pigs a fair amount. You might even say I rather loved them. That hasn’t really changed. Some things have though. It’s warm out. Everyone is coming out of the barn and exploring the run now. The pigs are exploring the fences now. I was confident the fence would with stand the pigs. We built it for our dogs and they’re worse than pigs as they can jump 5′ easy. Like a gazelle, our great pyr is.

The fence is livestock fence fortified on the top and bottom with 2×4’s. They’re digging around it but haven’t made any holes I’m worried about as of yet.

The digging is quite impressive though. They have some massive spots getting tilled.

Our weak spot is the gate. We’ve had two escapes. Both on the same day. The first I was going out to do the morning feed with the kids in tow. I opened the gate and the pigs just bowled me over. I started chasing them in a panic but then common sense returned and I started rattling the feed bucket. They returned and we went about our business.

The second escape happened while the kids were outside chasing bunnies. The pigs come to the sound of our voices and scream like crazy demanding food. This particular day they must have been emboldened by earlier freedom as they started on the gate until it popped open for them. Wrangling them this time required the horse whip and a fair bit of running about.

Now we have the “tomb of the pigs”. The spool must be rolled aside to get access to the gate. I’ve seen plenty of testing of our new fortress but as of yet, no escapes.

It looks trashy at the gate now as everything that was once nicely stored in the barn is now outside the gate as the pigs were DESTROYING EVERYTHING!

To keep from getting bowled over at the gate I throw the scraps over the fence away from the gate before opening it and heading inside.

The duck pond extension fence isn’t quite as well fortified. Since i want them to gley the duck pond I’m letting them have run of the lot but….they’re pushing the corner out of it. I’ve stacked some rip rap around the base now and they haven’t escaped…yet. We’ll see.

If all else fails the electric fence is always available for routing around the base of the fence.

Now on to a few other animals.

The turkey is like this the ENTIRE time he sees me. He’s a real pain in my neck.

The ducks are glorious. I’m a real fan of ducks. I just think they’re adorable.

The pigs are good with the kids. Not great since personal boundaries aren’t their thing and they’ll bowl them over. However, the kids are smart and they wait until the pigs have been fed before going in to collect eggs (the pigs are fed near the nest boxes). They can pet them no problems. No biting problems. Hopefully this continues but if they start biting the kids will be sad as they do love their pig pets.

I like that the pigs can be trusted with all of the birds as well. Not a single incident aside from the day we brought the turkeys home. The male turkey made so much fuss that the pigs were chasing him about just for fun.

I’m unsure the exact number of birds we have processed at this point. We’ve done 2 large batches of turkey slaughters (10+) and killed a lot of chickens. Thanksgiving dinner was to be killed by us again this year. We weren’t particularly sad about our turkeys demise either. They liked to bite and annoyed me most of the time with their “in your face, try to eat your fingers and eyeballs” attitude. These two turkeys were quite unique. The last turkeys we had weren’t nearly as brave as these two. Anyway, so we secluded our 2 turkeys and 10 of our adult chickens. Our chickens are eating their eggs so I had decided they must all go. My sister-in-law brought over her 9 giant white turkeys and help. Help is necessary when doing a large quantity of turkeys, in our experience. It takes about 3 people to do a large turkey processing because of the size and strength of the birds. Our last turkey slaughter required 2 men to scald a single 62 pound bird because of the weight of the wet feathers.

Moving on though, we improved our equipment this year. Husband made 2 turkey sized kill cones and he also insulated the scald pot.

The scald pot is a real issue for us. It doesn’t hold the temp very well and we’ve had under and over scalded birds on the regular. A usual processing required large pots on the stove, simmering to help with the scald pot. Not so this year. We finally have the ideal method!

Our scald pot is a large tamale pot. We heat it with this bucket heater. We keep the tamale pot off of the ground with a few cinder blocks. The tamale pot is a great size for doing large turkeys. The largest we’ve ever done was 60lbs live. So the tamale pot has now been insulated. Husband wrapped insulation and tinfoil around the outside and cut big foam blocks to put on the top and bottom. It worked a dream.

We’ve used quite a few thermometers from your basic meat thermometer to a pocket dial thermometer and have finally settled on Thisthermometer as the most accurate and sturdy, at least so far.

It was cold out so the people outside were all wearing gloves. This made scalding difficult as the gloves would get wet and then be useless. We were happy to have the Gator Gloves we discussed in earlier posts for keeping leather gloves dry.

The kill cones were made out of sheet metal and hung in our lean-to. The turkeys fit in them just fine. To modify them for chickens we took a milk jug and cut the top and bottom off. The jug could be inserted into the kill cones to hold the chickens.

Husband will do a guest post explaining the dimensions and process he used for making these kill cones at a later date.

The plucker we have got clogged up once with feathers but otherwise worked a dream plucking all the birds.

The plastic tub and buckets were used to put water into the plucker as it was too cold for running water.

Rope was hung from the rafters in our garage to store birds while they awaited evisceration. There were 3 men doing the killing and 2 people inside doing the eviscerating. With the kill cones the men were able to kill the birds far faster than we could eviscerate them. This method of holding them over worked just fine as it was cold enough outside it acted as sufficient icing of the birds.

We bought a knife kit from Wal-Mart and it’s worked just fine for the most part. A few pieces just broke and I really only used a single knife from the set. We’ve since advanced and I use This knife to do everything. It’s been great so far. We’ve also started using a bone saw this year. It’s done a great job at sawing off heads, usually the hardest part, at least when you’re doing the eviscerating on your kitchen counter and can’t go at it with a hatchet.

We’ve bought shrink bags before and I do recommend them. They work really great. However, this years turkeys simply went in garbage bags, as they’ll be eaten quickly. The chickens went in regular old gallon freezer bags. That’s working just fine so far as well. I’d say the shrink bags were easier in a way. We did wrap the turkeys in plastic wrap before putting them in the garbage bags. The shrink bags eliminate that step, but they do ad others. I think I’ll place a mass order of shrink bags for future processing, however. As far as where to get those, that’s a toughie. I’ve only ever found them sold by bloggers.

To weigh the carcasses we put them in a grocery bag and then use this Scale.

Lucky chicken and turkey foot recipient!

As far as our preferred cooking method goes, we like to dry brine before we wrap them up, fresh as can be. Turn them twice a day and keep them in the fridge until Thanksgiving. Then we use Gordon Ramsey’s citrus cooking method. It’s AMAZING!

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Tag: turkeys

The joys of pigs

Improved poultry processing equipment