At Howmars Farm, getting ready for Christmas started back in October

 

At the start of October, the Christmas trees had been calling to me to come over and get them ready for the holiday season, even though I still had nearly 2 months to go! Usually we shear the trees in early September, but other projects came first this fall. The day I set out was a great day to work in the trees, so I grabbed my shearing knife and hand clippers and headed to the woods.

I walked the quarter mile to the trees, passing the pampas grass growing along the roadside that my grandmother had planted years ago. She has been gone17 years, but part of her lives on every fall when the grass looks so beautiful. I worked in the trees for a couple of hours, about as long as my right elbow could stand it. The trees look pretty good. Some of the balsam fir had produced cones this summer, with a few cones still intact. Fir cones disintegrate to disperse their seeds. One section of the plantation looks like it's getting hit by a needle fungus. We'll have to remove those trees later this fall.

I headed back to the farm to get ready for the afternoon milking. The yearling heifers were grazing below my folks house, watching me walk up the road. There isn't really much left in the pastures to graze. We are feeding all the animals stored feed, using about three round bales a day. I'd rather be slinging my golf bag of fence gear over my shoulder and heading out to move fence, instead of hopping on the tractor to schlep round bales into the barn and into bale rings.

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Poultry Day at Howmars Farm

Today was the day we had scheduled Ray Garcia of Cabin View Farm to do process our poultry. We set the date back in May. This year we thought we'd try to save some money and have the meat birds and the turkeys slaughtered on the same day. Ray had agreed to do this, saving us one trip charge to the farm which usually runs well over a hundred dollars. For us, it meant getting the meat bird chicks in August instead of May, and having both the meat chickens and turkeys to take care of at the same time. The experiment went pretty well, and this morning when Ray arrived from Littleton, NH we have 34 turkeys and 30 meat chickens to process.

We did the turkeys first, and I was glad that Justin and my nephew, Brad, didn't have school because of testing in some of the other grades. Because of the muddy conditions, we couldn't move the turkey house closer to the Horse Barn. We had to carry the turkeys a couple of hundred feet through the field to Ray's holding pen. Not fun plodding through the mud with 30 pounds of live turkey trying to flap out of your grip. Ray had the turkeys dressed and chilling by 2:30. Next were the meat birds.

 

I put the meat chickens in large plastic crates that Ray had brought with him. While Ray went to work on them, I hustled through the afternoon milking. By the time I was finished milking, the chickens were all done and chilling in the Rubbermaid stock tanks in Ray's trailer. We bagged the turkeys in big, heavy freezer storage bags, and the meat birds were put in plastic bags and then dunked in boiling water to shrink the bags around the chicken. With the birds all boxed up, waiting to go over to the freezer, I settled up with Ray and then headed back to the barn to finish chores.

After supper, I loaded the boxes in the pickup and Dad's Escape to skip them over to the storage bay. We weighed, marked, and placed the birds in our big chest freezers in about an hour. The meat chickens, 8 weeks old, weighed an average of about 5.5 pounds, and the turkeys, 19-20 weeks old, averaged around 21 pounds. A very good day here at Howmars Farm, and no more meat birds or turkeys to take care of until next June!!