I’ve been giving all my yard weeds some water most everyday to get them started for the chickens to eat. So every day I go around and run about five of these rain birds for about a half hour or so. I set the sprinkler and then sit in a chair and watch or go do something else for a bit then turn one off and the other one on until they all get a shot of water.
Main project today
My main project today was to test out the burner I’m going to use to boil water to process the chickens. The burner hasn’t been used in years and is on that barrel there with the pot that goes with it.
Testing it out
I hooked up the propane tank to it and set it up to test it out to see if it still works or not.
It lit right up and looks like it’ll do the job.
Hot water for processing the birds
Hot water about 145 degrees F. is used to loosen the feathers so they come out easier. After the bird is dispatched it is dipped in the water until the feathers loosen up and then the bird is ready to go in the auto plucker.
Old guys gotta go
My butchering station is all set up now and ready for action. Tonight I will select some birds for the task. I’m planning on doing 4 birds. Three older ones and one of my meat birds to try it out. Older birds don’t lay or lay less so they are chosen for this task as feed’s expensive to feed this many chickens with no egg return. I have new younger birds coming on that will start to lay eggs soon.
Digging up berry vines
With the butcher station set up I went out to my cherry orchard and dug up more blackberry vines on and off for the rest of the day. I’m removing small berry plants by where the shovel is. They are just coming up so I’ll get them now when they are small before they get big and are much harder to remove.
Chickens working too
Near the end of the day I let the chickens into the area where I was working to do their thing. Scratching and tearing things up. I’m hoping they will help keep the new berry vines down once I get all the old ones out.
I chair hopped around the yard until the day cooled and it was almost dark.
That means it’s time to close up the chickens which I did.
Chicken selection time
A bit later after dark I went back out and selected the four chickens for butchering tomorrow. It’s pretty easy to do when it’s dark and they are all on the roost so they stay put so I can catch them easily. I put them in a separate cage with water but no feed until the deed gets done.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
A good day and good luck with the DEED tomorrow.