Making up the Fall Work List

Every year about this time I start making up my fall work list.  These are the little must-do's before the really cool and wet season starts.  I'm lucky that we live so far into the south, so even my fall items don't have to really be completed until early to mid October.

So far the list reads something like this -

Pull all of last year's hay out of the barns, inspect, and restack. 

Clean poultry houses and put fresh hay in egg boxes, new shavings on the floor.

Clean out the llama barn and lay fresh straw.

Move all poultry to winter housing.

Fill woodshed.

Check gasket on wood stove.

De worm goats, donkeys and llamas.

Plant fall veggies.

Cover unused garden beds with manure.

Seems simple enough, but when you add in the extra projects (ongoing house renovations, building a new rabbit house, finishing up the outdoor runs on the turkey house), it really might take me another month or two!

Let's not forget that apple season is coming as well, and when that happens I will be up to my elbows in making applesauce, apple butter, pie fillings and canned apples.  Of course, I'll be drying apples too!  Sweet potatoes will be available by late fall also, and now that I've survived my first pressure canning attempt, I plan to put up some of those as well.

Somewhere in there I need to make time for another round of chicken butchering as well.  Hmm....

No matter the season, the farm life never stops!

Taking the Plunge into Pressure Canning

I started water bath canning a few years ago, and have enjoyed making my own salsas, pasta sauces, relishes, pickles, jams, jellies and syrups.  The itch to can more has always been there, but the fear of pressure canning has always held me back.

There are just so many things that can go wrong, from exploding canners to broken jars, and of course, the threat of botulism.  (Although I think if you've water bath canned for any length of time you've probably gotten over the fear of botulism.)

My mom, who is one of the best cooks I've ever known, does not pressure can.  She tried many years ago on some corn and after discovering all of her jars had exploded and ruined a good couple hours of work, she gave up.  I've kept this knowledge of exploding corn jars in my mind and quite honestly, I think it's really held me back.

Since we started butchering our own chicken, the idea has been building in my mind.  At the end of processing I always end up with a pretty healthy amount of cooked, pulled chicken that ends up vacuum sealed in the freezer.  Not terribly easy to use without some forethought or some defrosting in the microwave.  Then there is our journey into the prepper lifestyle, and a freezer, though wonderful now, just may not always have the electricity to run.

I'd purchased a Presto 23 quart pressure canner back in January.  It sat in the corner for months, nearly taunting me, until I broke it out in March to can some strawberry jam.  (The nice thing about a pressure canner is that most will easily double as a water bath and/or a pressure cooker.)  I wanted to try my hand at the pressure canning, but just wasn't ready.

Yesterday the day came.  I was finishing up the vacuum sealing process of Thursday's butchering session, and just kept looking at the bowl of pulled chicken.  Finally I decided to just go for it.  I pulled out two quart jars and three pints, heated the chicken up, made up some extra broth (bouillon cubes), and began heating the water in the canner.

Not long after, the jars were filled and sitting in the canner, and this is where I started to get nervous.  I read the canning manual.  I reread it.  Then, I read it again.  Do or die time.  I put on the lid and adjusted the heat.  Watched for the steam.  After 10 minutes of steady steam I put on the pressure regulator.  After several minutes the canner was making noise but no movement on the gauge. 

Ummm...

A few minutes later, still no movement.  Uh oh.

So I removed the regulator and turned down the heat.  Google led me to a page that said that sometimes, on the first pressurized load, the dial doesn't immediately read.  Relieve pressure (done), then try again.

I'd put extra water in, so I did the 10 minutes of steam again.  Then added the regulator. 

And waited....

And a few minutes later, the dial began to move!  Success!  Well, at least to this far. 

At 10# I dialed the heat back to medium as most online sources suggest.  I should have dialed back sooner to get and keep 11# like I wanted, simply because I was canning on a smooth top range and they don't make temperature adjustments very quickly.  The pressure climbed to 12# though and stayed there, and my manual said that a difference of 1# to the high side isn't a problem.

Once pressure was achieved, I set the timer for 90 minutes and sat back to wait.  Honestly, I could probably have gone and done other things, but following the advice of the manual I didn't leave the kitchen.  I checked the pressure about every 2 minutes for the first half hour and then....

The power went out.

Ugh.  We live in the country and have more power fluctuations than anybody else we know.  At first I didn't know what to do.  Worst case, if the jars are okay, I'd just drain them and freeze the meat. 

While still in the throws of panic....

The lights came back on. 

Fabulous!  Just a short blip.  It had only been a few minutes and pressure hadn't even dropped, so I reset the timer and continued.

Thirty minutes later....  the power went out AGAIN!

This time I wasn't bothered.  I checked the pressure - still 12#.  A few minutes later, the power came back on.  No harm, no foul.  Reset the timer.

Thirty minutes later.... you guessed it.... power's out!!!  Argh!  Seriously?  This was turning into the canning attempt from Hades.  I didn't worry too much though.  As long as pressure is being maintained, so is temperature. 

I figured the power would come back on in a few minutes.  But it didn't.  When fifteen minutes had gone by, I started to worry.  The pressure had dropped to 11#. 

And that's when it came back on.  Thankfully we were still okay.  We finished out our remaining time with no more troubles.  When time was up I turned off the heat.  When the dial read "0" I removed the regulator and per the manual let the canner rest for another 10 minutes.  Then I removed the lid, and moved the jars to a cooling rack.  Within moments I heard the sweet popping noise of success!  All of my five jars sealed correctly!

Despite the fear and anxiety, I am ready to try again.  In our area sweet corn is hitting the stores and I'm thinking I may take a stab at canning some. 

Wish me luck!

An Experiment in Home Heating

I think it's fair to say that we all have extra junk mail laying around.  If you are like us, you probably feel awful just throwing it away, and burning it doesn't make you feel much better.  Sure, you avoid putting it in the trash, but it's just as wasteful to burn it out back.

Watching "Doomsday Preppers" we saw a family making firebricks out of shredded paper using a pvc pipe mold.  Looked interesting.  So we looked it up and realized there is a small culture of paper brick users out there! 

Now, let me start by saying that we realize you can't heat with JUST paper bricks.  They burn toi fast and you would need tons of them even to heat in the South.  Our intention with this project is to take something unusable and recycle into something that is.  If nothing else, these firebricks should be great fire starters and help extend our wood pile.

So the very first thing you should do is acquire a mold.  According to sites I found online, some hardware stores carry these.  They don't around here, but they are plentiful online.  You can get a single brick maker, or the one that makes four at a time like we did.  I found it on Amazon for about $40.  We thought the time and wear and tear savings made this a better model, as most of the single brick makers started about $25.

The next step is to prepare your paper.  We ripped ours into strips before soaking in water.  For us, we found the paper ripping stage to take almost longer than make the actual bricks, and for this reason I think we may invest in a economical paper shredder.  Anyway, just shred your paper and dump it in a clean container, then cover with water.  Let it set for at least overnight.  A new 32 gallon trashcan is cheap, clean and a great place to store your shredded paper between brick making sessions.

So the next day, grab your brick maker and find a spot to press bricks.  You'll get a lot of water and a lot of ink run off (depending on your paper), so find a spot that will be easy to rinse clean.  Also, expect some paper pulp to press out as well.

Once you've found a good place, scoop up some wet paper and start filling your mold.  My husband found that 3/4 of the way full worked best for him, but experiment and see what works for you. 

Depending on your model, once the mold is full you'll put on the pressing plate.

Next, cross the handles.

And SQUEEZE!  The excess water will run out through the sides and bottom.

Don't be afraid to really put some weight into it.  The more water you get out now, the faster your bricks will dry. 

Furthermore, the tighter the bricks the longer they will burn.

Once you've pressed out as much water as you can, remove the pressing plate.

Remove your bricks and put them somewhere to dry.  Again, getting them out will vary depending on your mold model.  My husband has a great time with these odd DIY projects!



A row of completed bricks!  We'll definitely try using a paper shredder next time, and see if we can't make a much tighter brick.  These will take quite awhile to dry through, so we'll have to keep them somewhere with good air flow.

Our first brick making attempt was a success and yielded 15 bricks in 30 minutes.  If they last as long as mentioned on the Internet, (burn rate of 15 minutes per brick), that's over 3 hours of heating!  Of course, we'll update our blog once we've had a chance to use them.  This far south that may not be until October!  :-)

Why Every Homesteading Kitchen Should Own a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer

If there was one gadget in my kitchen I just couldn't live without, it would have to be my KitchenAid Stand Mixer.  It has to be one of the most diverse instruments in my entire kitchen.

Now, just the mixer itself is an incredible piece of machinery.  Out of the box it will whip, mix, and knead to your little heart's contentment.  Add some accessories and the sky is the limit!

Here's the list of accessories that I think are the best deal going:

The Fruit and Vegetable Strainer and Grinder -  This is my go-to, must-have item for making fruit syrups, jellies and homemade ketchup.  It's quick, easy, and is much easier to clean up than a traditional hand mill.

Roto Slicer/Shredder - Makes shredding potatoes for homemade hash browns a breeze!  Also good for quick grating of carrots for cakes or dehydrating.  If you buy hard cheeses by the brick and want to shred your own this works great for this also. 

Food Grinder -  This has two different size plates and is what I use to make ground chicken or ground turkey.  If you hunt and process your own deer, your could easily make your own deer burger with this also.

Pasta Plates - These little plastic darlings fit in the food grinder in place of the metal disc and food knife and can make angel hair, spaghetti, and lasagna noodles in a breeze. 

Ice Cream Bowl - Okay, this one might be just for fun, but nothing in this world will taste as good as making your own homemade ice cream.  Vanilla is fabulous, but add some home grown strawberries and you have the makings of an epic dessert.  Our nephew stayed with us last summer and thought we made the best ice cream ever.

Something new that I'm considering:

KitchenAid just came out with a grain mill that also works for the stand mixer.  The reviews look promising but the price is still in the $150 catergory.  If the price comes down a bit I might give it a try, but it looks a bit high at the moment.

There are a few things that I still want to get, and one of them is an extra bowl!  Especially around Christmas time when I make a lot of different kinds of cookies that require chilled dough, I would love to be able to just pop the bowl in the fridge without having to empty it into another container (since I need the mixing bowl for another batch).  Also, some bowl lids would be helpful and would avoid all the wasted plastic wrap.

Anyhow, if you don't have one already, I would really recommend checking it out.  

What To Do With All That Chicken!?!

So yesterday I blogged that we butchered out 17 birds.  Because we choose to raise the slower growing dual purpose breeds, that also means that we don't get the big breasts and such that you find on the Cornish cross birds.  The reason for not growing the Cornish is simple to us; if a bird cannot survive long enough to reproduce itself it's unnatural. 

For those that don't understand that, the Cornish cross is a hybrid bird that is bred specifically for fast growth and meaty frames.  These birds do not live past 12 weeks at best, as their frames are incapable of handling the fast growth and massive weights.  IF you could grow one to sexual maturity it would still not be able to reproduce due to it's large breast size.  To raise Cornish cross for meat you must buy the birds each time you raise them.  To us, this is not a sustainable enterprise.

Hatching our own birds gives us plenty of pullets to grow for replacement hens, and the roosters make excellent meat birds.

I hear all the time about how roosters used as meat are tough or gamey, but I have yet to find that to be true.  I often think that people confuse gamey with tasting like actual chicken!  On the few occasions that we've butchered a hen (egg eating, poor performance, broken leg, etc), we haven't noticed a difference in taste at all.  Certainly a bird butchered after a year old is bound to be tougher than a youngster, but you just need to know how to prepare them.  When it comes to cooking chicken, I have always been the Queen of the Crockpot, so age doesn't really bother me.

For this group of birds I had several grand plans.  The first part involved cutting off the legs for BBQ Drumsticks.  The second required removing wings to make crockpotted buffalo wings.  Next I removed as much meat as possible to grind up for sausage and burgers, and lastly the carcasses got boiled to loosen any left over meat to be stripped and frozen for pulled BBQ Chicken sandwiches, dumplings and soups.

It's a long process, and it took all day.  Tomorrow the two smaller birds that I left intact, as well as all the parts will be divided up into meals, vacuum sealed and frozen.  Burgers and sausage patties will be formed, frozen, packed and vacuum sealed to go back into the freezer. 

Nobody said that working towards self sufficiency was easy, but boy is it rewarding!

Chicken Butchering Day

A couple of times each year the husband and I gather up our butchering supplies and thin the flock (usually just roosters).  Today was one of those days.

Usually I hatch my own chicks from eggs laid by our flocks.  We raise them up until 4 or 5 months old, and then the pullets get either added to our flocks or sold.  The roosters, however, head to the freezer.  For the first time I bought a large group of pullets from Mt. Healthy Hatchery and received 25 additional free roosters that we intended to butcher.  Unfortunately we lost the whole group at 6 weeks old to a weasel, and I had to start over.  Since our spring was so busy with home renovations, I ended up getting some month old rooster chicks from a local man for just the cost of feed.  They didn't grow as well as my usual birds and had to be raised up longer, but in the end they did just fine.

Although I'm not going to show you pictures of the actual process, I warn you that if you are uncomfortable with the idea of killing your own food you may want to avoid the rest of this post.  The pictures below are of our setup.

We start the process the morning before when I take all the food out of the pen.  Of course, I leave them plenty of water.

The day of the big event, we get up and feed and water all the other critters, since we are usually exhausted by the end of the day.

Butchering and processing happen on the concreted area of our driveway.  This makes it easy to clean up and is far enough away from the rest of the flock to prevent stressing them. 

This first photo shows stations #1 and #2.  We bring a cage of five birds down and set them beside the table.  Each bird is taken out, the legs are tied together and then a noose is placed on the birds neck.  At the other end of the noose is a loop that is placed on a nail on the table.  Holding the bird by the legs it is then stretched out and the head is removed by a very sharp cleaver.  The headless bird is then placed into the bucket, carried over to the rack at station #2, and hung to bleed out.  Heads are discarded into the white bucket.

 After five birds have been done, the first killed birds are taken to station #3, which is a pot of water filled 2/3 of the way full and  heated to 180 degrees.  The birds are dunked and swished for 15 seconds, pulled out, and dunked again.  At that time they go to station #4.

Station #4 is where all the rest of the process happens.  Birds are plucked, gutted and rinsed before going inside for a final rinse and refrigeration.

You may notice that we do not have a mechanical plucker.  There are three reasons for this.  One is that we never do so many birds at one time that we can't handle the plucking ourselves.  The other reasons are that we don't want to have to store a big drum plucker, and the small drill run pluckers are extremely messy.  Really, once you get good at it, hand plucking only takes a few minutes per bird.

This morning we got started setting up about 8am.  By 9am we were ready to start our first set.  It always takes us much longer to get set up than it does to tear down, mostly because we have to remember where we put everything from last time!

Each set took just over an hour from catching to refrigerating.  We took a small break between each set, and still managed to process 17 birds and clean up by 2:30pm.  And that's even with the 15 or so minutes it took us to catch the rooster that got out of the pen and hid in the grass!

There are several good sites that show the actual butchering process in detail.  I'd be happy to share the two that I learned from if anyone is interested.

Thoughts on the Midwest Drought

It's no secret that the center of the country is in trouble.  Every night on the news is another shot of crops dying in the fields and rivers drying up to nothing.  With all of that comes higher feed costs for us, and for the homesteaders out there, our critters.

Living in the south we saw what the Texas wild fires did to hay prices last year.  We were amazed and then appalled by the number of animals going for cheap or free because even in our state, hay prices had doubled in some areas, if you could find some at all.  We were lucky that we bought early and from a guy that we've been buying from for years.  I shudder to think what we might have had to fork out if not for a very kind and honest hay producer.

The last two trips to the feed store have seen an increase.  From April, feed at our local feed mill is up over 15% and will continue to climb for the foreseeable future.  With three goats, two donkeys, two dozen turkeys, a dozen ducks, 60 chickens and seven llamas, I am concerned.  Not to mention the two humans, a cat and a dog that also live here.  And yes, be ready, because the pet food industry has said that it's foods are getting ready to increase as well. 

As a homesteader, our answer on the poultry front is to downsize, and for us that means butchering. 18 of our chickens are roosters that were already marked for the freezer, but with feed prices what they are, my older hens will be next when the pullets start laying in October. 

Being a prepper means that I've been able to spread out the increases, but with no end in sight I have to be careful about cutting into our reserves.  I am adding two more trash cans for feed, and increasing the amount that we have on hand.  The drought today means that even if things turn around next year, we won't see a return to lower prices until next fall at harvest time at best.  And I wouldn't count on that. 

On the human front, we have enough stored to weather the drought until next year when we can grow and put up more of our own. 

With one in six people in our country now on food stamps however, I am worried that a long term drought is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.  As the prices continue to increase it's going to be harder and harder to stretch those government assistance dollars.  Frustrations spill over, and the desperate.... well, they do desperate things.

If you don't have some food put away, please do yourself and your family a favor and start.  Things like this are what we preppers have been preaching for awhile.  The world doesn't have to be coming to an end to make what we do pay off.  It's the hard times that are the bigger threat.

Just some food for thought.