September 30, 2022 ~ At the beginning of this month Katie had a chicken butchering class. We butchered 23 big fat round chickens. The smallest hanging weight was 4 pounds and the rest were around 6 pounds.  We planned on butchering the remaining 8 turkeys but it was getting late, so we decided to postpone it a few days.  In the meantime, Katie emptied the freezer of last year’s chickens and venison.  She cooked down the meat of each, which took days, then canned it all.  Now we have room in the freezer for the turkeys.

When we processed the 8 turkeys later that week, we were amazed at their sizes. The hens were from 13 to 20 pounds. The gobblers were 27 to 32 pounds, after they were processed!  We sold some, gave away some, pieced out some and kept some whole. They almost didn’t fit in the freezers.  Then, Katie cooked the chicken and turkey giblets in the crock pot and canned it to add to the dog’s food.  She then cooked the chicken and turkey feet for days making an incredible stock – very good and very good for ya.

While the meat was cooking, we cut up all the peppers we’ve been harvesting and processed them into 3 1/2 gallon mason jars, added onions, garlic and water.  They will sit on the counter to ferment for a few weeks.  We opened last year’s jar and, oh my goodness!, it was incredibly good with a lot of heat.

It looks like the garden is still producing so harvesting and processing is not done yet. We’ve picked several baskets of tomatoes which we are dehydrating. The green beans that were on the trellis are growing well, but they do not taste good. We think the heat in July gave them an off taste. Katie picks the beans and feeds them to the chickens.

We are excited that the rawhide domes are almost done. John has been moving them into the guest bedroom in the house as he completed them.  This gave us a little more environmental control and gave John more room in the garage to work.

Our church youth group had their annual Italian dinner fundraiser. As usual, it included a desert auction and John was asked to emcee and be the auctioneer again. He absolutely loved it, and the dinner was a huge success. He also had the chance to empty some of the boxed decorations he used in the previous dinners and hand them off to the next youth leader. It was a time of mixed emotions. We are glad to pass the baton, but he hopes to keep helping in the future.

Damien is getting big. He Is a very smart puppy with a desire to please. Training him has been a lot easier than we thought it was going to be. The most difficult thing has been to get him to stop jumping but he is a happy hyper puppy who just wants to play.

We harvested the rest of our apples and found out the puppy likes apples. Our persimmon tree is starting to drop the fruit but that generally takes a week or so for all the fruit to drop.  Unfortunately, the puppy likes persimmons also. I hope he doesn’t like our tomatoes! Some guardian dog.

This year’s apple harvest was not particularly large, but it was the first year our trees produced. We juiced the apples and the flavor was really good, it was not too tart or sweet. The bulk of the apples were from the Newtown Pippin which is a 250 year old heirloom variety developed in the original American colonies and is one of the preferred varieties for apple cider. We can see why. After juicing, we put the apple remnants into a 3 gallon bucket, added some sugar, water and the mother from our previous apple cider vinegar. Over the next couple weeks we should have more apple cider vinegar. Just have to remember to stir the bucket every day.