I woke up early to get everything ready for today. Here is the sun rising while I am doing this.
Here are the chickens in the weasel proof pen that I then put into cages or crates after removing their leg bands.
We loaded 4 of the turkeys into crates as well, moved everything into the back of the truck, and drove to Osprey Hill Butchery near Acme. Here they are with Tom there.
Here are the leg bands (one bird did not have a band).
When we returned home, I finished the animal chores and saw this.
I thought we had a dead sheep. He didn’t respond to me feeding the other sheep nor me yelling at him. I walked across the field to him and then he finally woke up. That was quite a relief.
Then, when we were doing other chores, Tom noticed Ryeleigh on the scary road in front of our house. He caught her and put her on the back porch. Here she is looking perfectly innocent.
She had dug a hole under the fence in the front of the orchard. Tom proceeded to fix that and added another hog panel there.
I picked up bread for the animals, did laundry, made myself dinner, went to get mask fit tested at work, went grocery shopping, got my flu and Covid shots, and went to a class at work while Tom picked up the processed birds. We have 16 chickens, mostly 3-4#, for ourselves to eat over the year and 4 turkeys, two of which I would like to sell. They range in size from 10 – 16#. They are $6 per pound if you are interested. (Sorry, one of the photos is out of focus.)
I returned home around 8:00 and put the animals away in the barn again. Here is the moon rising.
This was a long and somewhat difficult day.
How much more difficult if you had done it yourselves. I am glad to know there is a place that does that where you are. Very interesting.
The sheep was alive. One for the win column!!
We have done a few birds ourselves but this would be a lot. A friend is doing 35 meat birds themselves. Too much work for us. We are grateful to have both of our butchers. That sheep really scared me. Hopefully he doesn’t do that again!
It’s always hard to let what you’ve raised go, especially to slaughter but what wonderful meat birds for your freezer. I wish we had a place we could take ours to get done. I would definitely get my chickens again and raise turkeys.
It is hard but we will eat well. We are lucky to have this butcher available to us.
Just as I got to the last picture, I thought, to myself that that was really a long and tiring day for you! Then I saw your comment!
It really is nice that you can take your birds to be butchered. Otherwise, that would have been even longer and more tiring!
I lost track of how many birds you took to the butcher, but obviously it was quite a few.
Take good care of yourself.
It would have been much harder to do ourselves. It ended up only being 16 chickens and 4 turkeys. It was supposed to be 25 chickens. Glad it is done.