Being an Art Quilter with a farm offers an opportunity to wear many hats and have a number of unusual skills.
Hat #1: Chicken finisher-this does not mean that I do them in or race against them. I do the final inspection for little feather’s etc, before the chicken goes into the bag and into the freezer.
Hat #2: Turkey and chicken broth maker-We raise around 500+ meat chickens a year. This leads to lots of backs,necks,etc. So the only solution is chicken stock. We also had turkey parts ,as my husband helped another farmer to process his 4 turkeys and we got a 45lb turkey as payment!!!!!!!!
And no , that larger than large turkey has been cut up into more manageable pieces and is in our freezer. We ordered our Turkey from another farm as we don’t grow turkeys, the 45lb turkey was a surprise.
So all those poultry parts need to delt with so we take 2 days to make the broth. The first day we cook the parts down, the next day we strain,reheat and pressure can it .
Hat #3: Animal husbandry: We have egg chickens, 8 meat goat does, 4 ewe lambs,2 rams,1 wether,1 ram lamb , 9 breeding ewes , 2 Australian shepherd and 1 donkey who is our flock guardian. They all need to be feed ,watered, feet or toes trimmed,brushed and let out in the morning and secured in their pens at night.
hat #4: post hole digger and nagger: When you have grazing animals you need to maintain your fences so your animals don’t leave your property for your neighbors lawn or get shot in the woods during deer season. But I am also the nagger and reminder to my husband who works at home to get off his butt and help me outside to do fence/farm maintenance. But I have to be honest I need to get myself off my own butt to do the work as well and this gray weather doesn’t help!
Hat #5:My least favorite job,Housecleaning…………………ick and my mother in law is due in 6 hours…………enough said!
Fall is here and most of my time is spent canning local produce and freezing a variety of things from our shared organic garden. My pear tree probably will yield 100 lbs of pears. Hopefully I will not loose momentum and be able to process all those delicious pears! So far I have made pear relish and pear preserves and I hope to make pear chutney ,more preserves and pear halves in syrup.
My husband does three farmers markets a week starting in June and ending in October. Some of the markets are well established and others are only 1 or 2 seasons old. As many of you may know we had quite a bit of rain this summer in the north east and this isn’t always great for the farmers or the farmers markets. But the best basil I had this summer was from a farmers market and I try to buy all my vegeables and fruits from the local farmers markets or farm stands. I know many people say ” I have no time to go to the markets or process much of the bounty available”. But all you need is some freezer space, a cookie sheet and plastic 