Be that annoying dad that drags your 9 year old daughter out to the workshop before her ballet lesson to show her how to change the belt and blade on a bandsaw...
I'm never going to be great at homeschooling. I'm used to spending my days on my own these days rather than having someone (or three people) constantly asking me questions or saying me my name as they think it's gone too quiet.... But I have landed on a good idea, after lunch we have a half quiet reading time now the girls can read in their heads. The boy can either play or I'll read to him one of his animal reference books, but it's been a great bit of our day. Here I'm reading an old book "The Wheel Wrights Shop", my eldest is reading about different breeds of chickens and my middlest is reading Secret Seven. Bliss!
This post contains pictures butchery of poultry, so if you're not someone who wants to read about that then I'd suggest you skip this one. Theh boys from our Indian Game x Colobian Plymouth Rock crosses we hatched out last year have reached around 24 weeks of age and it was time for them to join freezer club. I probably should have done this a few weeks sooner, but so long as I rest the birds once prepared and cook them properly it shouldn't make much odds, they're still plenty young enough and we do prefer to have to chew our food! The girls have also really started to earn their keep in this job now. I got set up (water boiling, big chopping board cleaned and ready) and when they came out to help we started to process the birds. I'd catch a bird (one would open and close the gate for me) then dispatch and leave for it bleed and clean the meat. Once I had about 3 birds done I'd scald them and leave them for the girls to start plucking while I dealt with the ...
The bucket nest boxes I originally put in the Heras Panel Pasture Pens never really worked very well, They just weren;t quite big enough and could cause hens to break eggs. But because I used these pens more for grow outs it didn't matter too much and I changed the one I used for the layers into a bigger nest box like the one in this post. Currently I have all three of these pens with potential laying hens in. So it was time to upgrade the last two pens to have proper nest boxes, which can even stay in when raising meat birds in there as well. I had decided on a blue food barrel as they are easy to clean, about the right size and cheap enough. It almost seems like a waste, but they only cost about £4 and if I was to build it out of new wood it would cost far more. It's fairly simple to make. Cut just a barrel and take the middle section out of it, leaving the sides intack. I do these cuts with a thin metal cutting disk in a small angle grinder - creates a lot of plast...
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