"Off With Her Head!" - Processing Chickens is Totally Gross

Yesterday sherm and i "processed" our first chicken. apparently the variety that we have, the cornish cross, is simply bred to be very fast meat producers so you dont have to keep/feed them for more that about 8-10 weeks. sometimes, for whatever reason, they "break" which i guess means they lose the ability to stand. we know this because about a week ago we pointed out this chicken that suddenly would not stand/walk to his step-father, who said, "oh yeah, it broke." and said we needed to process it asap because it wouldnt get better. we were not able to bring ourselves to do this until last nite, so we went about a week having to move the bird by hand so it had access to water and food.

i researched processing techniques on the net, and we had lots of advice from family, so we had a pretty decent idea of what we were up to. however, as neither of us had actually killed anything (on purpose) before, we were both pretty nervous about the whole thing. the poor bird was pretty complacent. she just sat there next to the cutting block, unable to walk, while i shoo-ed away our 3 layer hens because i didnt want them to see us kill a chicken. we had a kettle of boiling water on hand for dunking to open the pores and release the feathers. i held the body and looked away while sherm stretched the neck over the block and whopped off the head with one chop. then i had to hold the body neck down to let it bleed out. letting the body run about without a head is apparently not the right way to do it, from what i read online. this part was pretty horrible. soon as he chopped i looked over at sherm and saw him staring at the head on the ground with a weird look on his face. then i felt the body start to quiver and the legs were kicking pretty hard. i continued looking away and gagged pretty good a few times, but did not throw up. then i kind of started to cry but pulled it together because, as sherm said, this whole thing was my idea in the first place. i couldnt bring myself to look at it to see if it was done bleeding, so sherm let me know when it stopped. then we dunked it in the hot water for about 30 seconds or so, and started pulling off the feathers. they came off really easy, we were both surprised about that. then i used a set of kitchen scissors to cut open the body for the 'evisceration' process. that was gross. i did not set aside to later put into a baggie and freeze inside the body the liver, neck and gizzard as suggested in one of my research articles. the bird is pretty scrawny, but i think thats cuz it was not 'well' there at the end. sherm is supposed to grill it later tonite.

our cucumber crop sucks, the ones we picked so far have been so bitter they are inedible. i used organic seeds this year, as opposed to buying seedlings at menards last year. these are not the 'bush' variety either, and their shape is also very disappointing. large and not uniform. i thought maybe the bitterness was also a result of the organic seeds, but i guess it's some kind of chemical found naturally in the plants and effected by moisture and temperature. this is a drag because i opened a jar of last year's pickles the other day and they are really really good. i think i will go ahead a try to make a batch or two of pickles anyways.

we have about a gazillion sunflowers, planted from seeds from last years flowers. we are so happy that they actually grew! this year we are going to collect seeds from everything to grow next year. we even have some tomato plants this year that just came up i guess from fruit left on the ground at the end of last season.

we bought a big chest freezer and hope to be eating our chickens and frozen garden veg all winter. i'm planning to go with freezing and drying over canning for most of our storage this year.