it's bloody, messy....and done!

We were only going to do a few chickens yesterday, but the weather was decent and days of decent temperatures ahead are very few, so the great chicken massacre of 2013 commenced.  After picking and plucking on the first chicken forever, we realized that we were going to be butchering forever at that pace, so we decided to just skin the suckers and get it over with.  Once we started doing that, things really got rolling.  Angel #4 tried really hard to book her day with away from home tasks, she volunteered at a brat fry, but her timing sucked and she got home about half an hour before we started chopping heads, so she got put on the chicken assembly line along with me, hubs and WE.  Between the 4 of us, we butchered up 24 chickens, the whole broiler flock. I'm so happy that chore is done with, though it was completely exhausting.  We started around 1:30pm and I was finally scrubbing chicken gore off the kitchen floor around 8:30.  We don't eat the heart, liver and gizzards, but our friend who is paying us for half the chickens, does, so I had to clean that stuff up as well.  Once clean, I put them on cookie sheets and individually froze them that way so I could just bag the whole mess up in one bag.  WE didn't think it was hilarious that I sang Jar of Hearts as I was carrying a bowl of chicken hearts around the kitchen.  I swear, teenagers have absolutely NO sense of humor.

It's nice to have one more pre-winter project over with.  Hubs sealed up the basement doors and windows today, so that's done as well.  I've just got Brussels sprouts to get out of the garden yet and that'll be cleaned out.  I've still got to clean out the chicken coops, both the newly emptied one and the one where the layer hens live, and put that mess out on the garden so it's all nice and composted for next spring.  The corn was pretty sickly looking this year, a good dose of chicken crap will do wonders for it next year.  Slowly, we're getting ready for old man winter.  It would have been nice to have a garage to park my van in this winter, but that didn't happen.  We've still got a few chunks of the blown away garage lying in the back yard in the burn pile.  There just isn't enough time or money to get everything done before the snow flies.  Sometimes I wonder why we moved away from Hawaii.