Turkey For Dinner

Warning:  This blog deals with killing and dressing a turkey - some pictures and other parts may be upsetting to some people.

Since we got our 16 turkeys, the plan has always been to eat most of the boys.  I've been making enquiries about swapping a couple of boys with someone else so I can have some that are unrelated to mine, but the person I was talking to is overseas on holiday at the moment so that's all on hold.

The need to thin out the ranks has become more obvious lately as it's the start of their breeding season.  There were two of the smaller boys spending most of their time hiding in the house and their normally bright faces were blackened - I don't know if that was bruising or because they'd had their faces in the dirt often.  They were consistently chased away from food and from the rest of the flock.  There is always a layer of feathers, mostly tail feathers, on the grass in their pen.

I've heard lots of varying ideas, stories and opinions about killing a turkey.  Most seem to go with breaking their neck, either by the picking them up by their neck and sharply swinging the bird, or by holding the bird by it's feet, pulling the head down at an angle sharply.  The other method I'd had recommended is to cut it's head off, although after watching an episode of something on tv where the guy who did that had his stomach cut to ribbons by the thrashing around that immediately follows, I was wary of this and had a plan if this did become the way we did it.

Several times over the last two weeks, I've geared myself up to go and kill a turkey.  I've never actually directly killed anything bigger than an insect before.  That's not true, I've been fishing, and held the salmon I caught while it was hit on the head with a hammer.  But I wasn't sure if I could do it.  I'm fine watching someone else do it, I'm fine with the thought of doing it, but doing it myself is a different thing and I believe you never really know until you're there doing it.

The turkeys are brave enough around me to stick their heads into the bucket of food I'm holding when I go into their run, but I haven't been quick enough to get them, perhaps that was some of my hesitation about having the nerve to do it, perhaps it was fear of doing it badly or perhaps it was fear of getting hurt by them.  I've been hit in the face by a wing and that hurt me, if there were flying feet (which are big and sharp and pointy by the way), it could be very messy.

Yesterday, hubby came with me to feed them.  I suggested turkey for Father's Day dinner tonight.  My parents are coming out for dinner, so it could be a point of pride for me to be serving one of our turkeys that we'd processed.  Catching one was the first problem.

Eventually, we herded one into their little house.  We caught him, but it turns out that breaking their neck is not the simple or easy process it's usually been described as.  I think in the end, we broke his neck, but it didn't kill him.  He was still gasping and blinking and we had a very subdued and silent walk up to the house to chop his head off as quickly as we could.  We were both feeling rather cruel in that we'd obviously incapacitated him, but not killed him quickly or cleanly.

I tied his feet to reduce the ability to thrash and potentially injure one of us and we laid him out on a large flat tree stump.  Hubby wielded the axe and my best laid plans of lifting the rope I'd tied his feet by so he'd be thrashing around in mid air proved impractical.  I couldn't hold the rope, I'm just not strong enough to hold on to that while a large bird flaps and thrashes.

The books I have giving practical tips on plucking and dressing recommended scalding birds in a large water bath at about 80 degrees C.  Finding something big enough to contain this bird was difficult, I wasn't going to bring him inside and use a bathtub.  A 60l crate did the job, but it took a bit of moving and rearranging to get all of him underwater.

One large headless turkey awaiting plucking

Then I started plucking.  Most of the feathers came out easily enough.  It reminded me of waxing, hold the skin fairly tight and pull against the direction of growth.  The wing feathers were something else though.  Each feather took a lot of strength to pull out and several times I broke the spine of the feather off rather than pulled it out.  A pair of long nose pliers took care of that eventually.  After about an hour and a half I had all but a few small fine feathers left to do.  Miss Ten got excited and helped me for a while, then her gloves got some holes in them and she didn't want to do it anymore.

Partially plucked turkey with Miss Ten's help.

Fully plucked - well except for some of the small fine feathers.

Gutting was not what I expected.  Bits were easy, but I tore the gullet and spent a bit of time washing fine grains of mash and grass out of the neck.  I also tore a small hole in the tract between intestine and vent and spent even longer washing that off - in the end I cut out the bits that had been in contact with it.

After probably three hours, I had a plucked, dressed and very well washed turkey.  Dressed weight is 12kg, it's a little bit too big for my largest roasting dish, but hopefully it'll shrink a little in the cooking.

Ready for stuffing, trussing and roasting.

Turkeys

Hubby came home from work a few months ago and asked if we wanted turkeys.

After hearing from him several times over the last few years that we were never getting turkeys, I was quite surprised to hear this from him.

One of his workmates has a friend who has 60 turkeys free-ranging and they were becoming a problem and needed to go.  Because she'd started with two originally, they were all her babies and she didn't want to eat them or know about it if anyone was going to eat them.  She wanted to be able to tell herself they were going off to be pets for someone who would love them like she did.  She'd tried selling them on TradeMe, but because of the recent push for certified humane animal breeders and sellers, her ads kept getting removed.

We talked about it for a few weeks and I rang her.  We converted a pen in a paddock to a turkey house thinking that if we clipped wings, the deer fencing would be sufficient to contain them.  Then we finally went to pick them up with a covered box trailer.  The theory was that if we threw some food in, they'd go in after the food.  I think it took about half an hour for any of them to brave the trailer - after the roosters had been in and out a few times.  After a while, we figured we had all in there that we were going to get and shut up the trailer.  We got six turkeys, four boys and two girls.  And two roosters who escaped as soon as we got home.

Six turkeys investigating their new house.

In my head, I knew turkeys were big.  I hadn't physically seen a turkey since I was a small child though and then they seemed like ostrich size.  I was still surprised by just how big they were.  Then seeing how high they could jump (even without flying) meant that the deer fencing would not be sufficient to keep them contained.  The paddock next door to their paddock had been planted in green feed, mostly oats and kale.  I'm fairly confident our neighbour would shoot and eat any that he found in his greenfeed and I couldn't blame him honestly.

We'd planned to shut them in their newly built house for a couple of days anyway, like I do with any new chickens I get, so they get to know where home is.  The need to create a covered run meant they got to stay confined for a week while the run was created out of deer fence waratahs (or Y posts as they're more correctly named) and 2m wide chicken wire.  Dad and Hubby sat down and did the maths to figure out what would be the best size, utilising existing fencing to get the most area out of 100m of chicken wire (including roof).  Then they discovered that the roll of chicken wire was only 50m and they'd run out with the run only half roofed.

Exploring the covered run.

Finishing the run took a little longer than expected, or rather it took longer than planned because delays, dramas and holdups are pretty much expected these days.  But the turkeys seemed to like their new run and spent a lot of time exploring it.

I worried a little on and off as their wattles seemed to be going white.  In chickens, white comb and wattles are a sign of ill health and I assumed that turkeys were the same.  I spent some time on google but couldn't really find anything definitive - one website suggested that wattle colour in turkeys was more a sign of their mood.

Pale wattles 

Last weekend, ten more joined them.  The lady I mentioned earlier has been feeding the turkeys in a caged trailer for the last month or so and they're used to going into the cage on the trailer for food.  It made shutting in more turkeys a piece of cake.  She and her hubby thought they'd even enjoyed the hour drive to our place.  They'd been quiet but still alert and watching everything around them.

This is the four boys just as the new turkeys were joining them.

As they were backing the trailer up to the turkey run, the six we already had found it quite threatening.  The girls rushed off and hid in the house, while the boys puffed themselves up, tails fanned, wattles bright red and snoods hanging halfway down to their chests.  The new turkeys coming to join them had come from the same place they had, they'd only had approximately a month apart, but obviously the pecking order had to be re-established.  There were lots of fanned tails, red faces and thrumming noises over the next hour or so.  

Pecking order being sorted

They seem to have it mostly sorted out now, but our head count shows ten boys to six girls, so those numbers will need some serious adjusting very soon.  A friend has mentioned she has another friend who has turkeys, so I may try and arrange a swap for some boys just to get some fresh bloodlines in - I think all of mine are related.  I'm fairly sure the lady we got them from said she started with one pair and from them came the other 58.

She also told us that the facial colours are a sign of mood.  Red wattles and blue-purple round the eyes is when they're agitated, upset or fighting for dominance.  Pink and white is a fairly relaxed and normal state.

We did managed to drive the escaped roosters towards the chook run.  Once they realised that there were 40 or 50 odd hens on the other side of the fence, they were no longer worried about me chasing them, they suddenly started posing and nonchalantly showing off for the girls.  One wouldn't go into the chook run for another two weeks.  He nearly became dinner as he'd start crowing outside our bedroom from about 4am, but we did eventually get him in there.

Five Year Anniversary

Last month marked five years on our little block.

I still remember moving in.  It was hectic, filling up a rented small truck several times over, loading up cars and trailers and driving more than an hour in convoy to our little block.

For those who don't know the story, we were living in Wainoni in the Eastern suburbs of Christchurch.  Those Eastern suburbs suffered badly in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Mostly because the land we were on was only soil on the top maybe 40cm and sand underneath that.  The house we'd just spent 7 years gradually renovating needed to be started again from scratch.

In some spots, the foundations had sunk enough that you could pull bricks out of the outside walls without any sort of resistance.  The lino had bunched up in this corner but had a gap in that one.  There were cracks of up to 10mm in some of the internal walls.  Walking across the kitchen floor made you feel seasick but according to EQC we were still officially liveable and I had several arguments about what was existing wear and tear and what was new.  We could probably have coped with that, if it wasn't for the constant wearing on your nerves that goes with this kind of event and the tens of thousands of aftershocks.

We'd have a noticeable aftershock at least 5 times a week.  Cars driving slowly past my house felt like aftershocks and made the house shake and tremble.  Everyone was on edge all the time.  Nerves were frayed and we were all brittle and uptight and irritable.

Hubby came home one day and told me he'd arranged for a mortgage broker to come and see us and find out how much we could borrow.  He didn't want to come home to our place anymore, his daily commute had doubled because of all the road damage and he found himself dreading coming home from work every day.  We found that if we rented out our house, the amount we could easily borrow was much higher than expected and I shortly realised that it was possible for us to finally live our dream of having a lifestyle block.

We looked at a lot of places, some okay and some dreadful.  None quite ticked all our boxes.  Then with the help of friends who were real estate agents, we came to have a look at what became our block and immediately fell in love.  Several times since, those friends have said that they've never seen buyers and a property more suited to each other.

It was a very quick process because the tenants we'd organised needed to be out of their previous place by a particular date.  In five weeks, we had finance sorted, insurance sorted (although that had it's dramas), schools mostly sorted for the kids and an extra moving with us - Miss (then) 15's boyfriend found himself homeless and they had this dependency thing going on. It was easier to have him move with us (with some strict rules of course) and then I knew Miss 15 would come home each day, which had also been a problem.

We moved into an old farm cottage that had been extended a few times and needed some love.  Our block took some months to get our heads around the size of our land.  It felt like I was walking in a public park.

Hubby needs a project, he's a busy relaxer.  The gorse that covered half of our block provided him with that.  I make jokes now and then that he and the gorse are like Jean Valjean and Javert - there are times when there have been more important jobs that need doing, but he'd be cutting and burning gorse.  When we got our first chickens, I picked them up before he'd finished the house so that he had to get it done quickly.

Achievements:

We've fenced the half of the property that hadn't previously been fenced.  Where there was a huge open area, there are now four distinct paddocks.  We've strung them with electric fencing, there is undergate wire to continue the circuits, we've put gates in.  There are still two more fences to put in.

We've planted a small orchard and managed to keep it alive.  Keeping it alive might not sound like a big deal, but given the hot, dry gale force Nor'West winds we get every spring and two years of crippling drought, I find it rather impressive.  We even got fruit this year from some of them.

We have taken out more than half of our grocery bill in foods we provide for ourselves.  I haven't bought meat, dairy or eggs in a year and a half.  I only buy potatoes for a few months of the year (depending on how my crop went) and I have plenty broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  There's usually tomato pastes and pasta sauces frozen to last at least six months too.

The renovations we've done have made the house warmer in winter, more vermin proof, far more pleasant to live in.  The leaks in the roof have been fixed, the rotten floors in two rooms have been ripped out and replaced and we're slowly insulating the external walls.

I handraised a cow that I am now milking.  I am currently taming two heifers (that are the daughters of my older cows) so that I can milk them when they calve.  I can touch them briefly without them bolting now, they just shake their heads and step away and you can almost hear them telling me to go away.

Paddocks that were probably three quarters gorse are now cleared.  There is still and will most likely always be the odd small plant that pops up, but they're easily managed in under an hour.  Compared to the weeks that each paddock took to cut, burn and spray.

Lessons:

Sometimes a visual barrier works as well as a brick wall to keep livestock contained, but sometimes it doesn't - it's important to know when it will and when it won't.

Hay is a commodity that is worth more than gold, treat your hay with respect.

If you have livestock, you have dead stock.

There is a right and wrong way to set up an electric fence.

It pays to learn how to do your own plumbing and drainage repairs because getting a plumber to even return your calls in less than a year is a major achievement.

There's no such thing as "Unusable land".

Never say never.  Animals that you (or rather Hubby) declared you'd never get can easily become a well-loved feature of your farm.
In the last five years, we've had our ups and downs, we've had successes and failures, joys and heartbreaks but there's still nowhere I'd rather be.

Sheep and Flystrike

This post has been wanting to be written for a few months.  At the same time, I haven't wanted to write it.  However, I am hoping that my painful lesson may help someone else.

During our humid summer, flies were a huge problem.  I'd been waiting for the shearer to come and shear my sheep and he was very busy - it was put off twice taking an extra two months.  As February rolled on with temperatures in the high thirties, I was worrying about my sheep - especially my hoggets which had never been shorn.

Then one afternoon, my neighbour called and told me that my lambs had flies.  He dropped in with instructions and a bottle of dip.  He told us to clip their dags and legs but leave about 1cm of wool and liberally pour the dip over.  He said to leave that layer of wool for the dip to soak into and keep working.

I cleaned up the two lambs with flies and dipped them.  I caught the other two and although they had no sign of flies, I dagged them anyway.  I caught my two hogget ewes, checked them and dagged them too.  No sign of flies on them either.  It was quite obvious with the lambs because the flies were hanging around them, but not the other sheep.

I was quite surprised about one of my hoggets, I'd noticed her across the paddocks, spending a lot of time lying down while the others were up and around.  I'd been sure she had flies, but she seemed clean.

I had a hard time sleeping that night.  I kept seeing the maggots eating the lambs.  It's a nasty thing to see.

About a week later, the neighbour rang again (apologising profusely for 'interfering') and said we'd missed one.  I went back to check, I thought it was the same hogget I'd been worried about as she was still spending most of her time lying down and listless.  She got up and ran, it was very hard to catch her, but catch her I did and I could find no sign of flies or maggots on her this time either.

Perhaps it was the heat?  That was all we could think of and the shearer was supposed to be coming that weekend.  On Saturday, we penned the sheep up ready for him.  The ram we'd borrowed nearly a year earlier was going home after shearing.  We'd just gotten back to the house after penning them up for a cuppa when we got the message that he'd called and won't be able to make it today.  The place he was going to just before us had considerably more sheep than he'd expected and it was going to be too late by the time he finished with their sheep.  Give him a call during the week and he'd come out one evening.

We managed half a cup of coffee before the ram's owners arrived.  So we went back to separate the ram from the others.  Getting him onto the trailer was fun - it took four of us to drive him half the way and then a flying tackle from the owner as he was charging at me before we finally got him under control. It was a good thing that he hadn't been shorn because fistfulls of wool at scruff and rump was the only way to move him.  I warned the owners that we'd had issues with flies, they checked him over and said he was fine and rams rarely suffer from it anyway.

While I still had that hogget penned, I checked her over again.  I checked between her toes, I pulled apart the wool to see her skin for at least half of her body.  I found nothing.  It was bugging me that she seemed unhappy and lethargic, I worried that I was missing something and that my sheep was unhealthy.

The shearer didn't come that week, I left messages and didn't get a call back.

A week or so later, I saw her lying down in her paddock with a heron picking over her wool.  She wasn't moving and I was afraid that she had died.  We went to have a look, as we opened the gate for that paddock, she got up and ran away with half her wool hanging off her and dragging on the ground.

We managed to get her into a pen to check her over.  Her entire rump and back legs was bald.  No wool attached at all.  Around her middle was a wide band of scabs and maggots.

How did I miss this?  How could I check her over thoroughly a week earlier and not see a single wound, fly or maggot?  I clipped the rest of her wool with my dagging shears.  The neighbour came down with some fresh dip and to check her for us.  He thought she'd survive since she was up and eating when he came over.  He said to be sure that she had shade because sunburn could be an issue.  He also said that once the shearer had been, give him a call and he'd drench all of our sheep and give them a pour on.

I went away on holiday for a week.  It's a trip I make every year.  The shearer came while I was away.  The neighbour did his thing and iodined that hogget's healing wounds.

She went down and wouldn't get up.  Hubby and Miss Ten made a sling for her to hold her up.  They rang and told me about it and sent me pictures.  She survived the night, but still wouldn't stand on her own.  The next morning, they found her.  She'd gotten out of the sling, but had put her head through the wooden railings and broken her neck.  They figured she'd given up and wanted to die.

I beat myself up for it for weeks.  It didn't matter how many stories I heard about experienced farmers getting caught out with flystrike this year, that it could have only been a few days and it takes them that fast.  It didn't matter that I'd checked her over three times in as many weeks.

While I know that if you have livestock, you have dead stock and that's how it is, I still felt responsible for the suffering of my sheep.  Death by flystrike is a brutal and truly dreadful thing and I blamed myself.

Then I told a friend who is a vet.  I think it was part of my self-flagellation.  I told her and sat back waiting for the accusations of negligence and the telling off that I was sure I deserved.  Instead, I got an explanation about how sometimes the maggots burrow inside the animal instead of staying on the surface and eat it from the inside out. I was told the chances of finding the tiny entry point early enough to save the sheep are very slim to none and how there is nothing you can do when this happens.

It helped.  After a while.  At first I was disbelieving, I thought she was trying to make me feel better.  Then I thought about the kind of person that friend is.  She's not going to lie to anyone to soothe a guilty conscience, if I'd been negligent, she would have given me both barrels like I'd thought I'd deserved.  What she'd said about the maggots going internal was also later backed up by others.

I'm still upset about my sheep, but now I'm okay with it.

Dear Weather Gods,

I wish to lay a formal complaint.

I understand that weather is variable and that there are never any promises or guarantees regarding what kind of weather we will get.  I've always had faith however, that the weather will at the very least suit the season and time of year.

It's the first of May today.  We're supposed to be approximately halfway through Autumn.  We can usually count on the first frosts around now.  In any normal year, they're not too surprising as nights are usually getting colder over the previous month.

28 degrees for most of the day, dropping to 25 just before the sun disappeared behind the mountain is not a normal temperature for May.  It's almost as though we're getting a normal (if short day length) Summer finally after the Summer on steroids that we've just escaped from.

I became rather excited last week when I saw that we were forecast for rain this weekend.  The ground has gotten drier than it was all Summer.  Imagine my disappointment on Friday night when I saw that the forecast had changed and the rain was no longer coming (and sadly, the forecast was accurate) and we're still left high and dry.

Normally, I prefer the heat, Summer is my favourite time of year.  I will confess that the Summer we've just had challenged that somewhat.  I found myself hiding from the sun and the heat rather than revelling in it.  I am enjoying still wearing t-shirts without an extra layer and hardly ever getting the fire going even though that is not normally possible at this time of year.

I do find myself wondering whether there is some sort of shenanigans going on up there.  Have there been staffing changes or a new quality system that no one really understands and doesn't seem to make any sense but the management believe in it so you just have to go along with it?  Is this some kind of hold out for more prayers or rain dances?  Has the sheep mortality rate due to new and nastier flies encouraged by the unseasonal weather not been sufficient sacrifice to you?  Do you have it in for North Canterbury farmers so much that we have the wettest January ever but the driest Autumn?  Did someone forget to flip a switch or are you all drunk up there?

Please get it sorted before we feel compelled to try another company for this service,

Yours sincerely


Most of North Canterbury.

Dried Plums

As I said in a previous post I had been thinking about drying plums as a way to preserve the huge amount of wild plums I had already picked.

My first batch, I thought I'd cut a slit in the side, down to the stone and assumed that it would dry around it and the stone would sort of pop out and be standing proud of the rest of the plum.

Yeah.  That didn't work.

Plums are dried and stuck rather firmly to the stone.

So I cut the plums in half and took the stones out of those I could easily (the others went into a plum syrup type thing that I'll explain below) and spread them out on the dehydrator trays.

It took a few days of drying - I don't like leaving my dehydrator on when I go to bed, the noise alone is a nuisance - but I started to fill my jar with dried plums.  I think I'd done several batches before I thought to actually try one.

All that delicious juicy sweetness that these plums fill your mouth with when they're ripe must evaporate with the moisture.  These were so face-puckeringly sour as to be almost inedible to me.  We tried a few each to be certain it wasn't just that I'd picked a bad one.

Well bugger.  I have kept them, sure I'll find something they can work in.  A Phillipino friend who visited tells me that the Chinese would love them, they use a lot of flavours like this in their food.  Sadly I don't know any Chinese people to give them to.

The plums that didn't get dried - the slightly over-ripe ones that squished when I tried to halve and stone them - were stewed up with sugar and sieved.  I'm using them to make a plum fruit leather.  Unfortunately, I think there may have been too much liquid.  This is taking forever to dry out enough to remove from the paper and roll up.  I have been trying to dry this for more than a week!

Butter and Buttermilk

Since we weaned the calf from Brownie, the volume of cream we're getting with our milk has increased significantly.  It becomes so thick and rich that if we don't scoop most of it off, it forms lumps in the milk jugs and looks as though you have melted butter in your coffee.  I don't mind this in the slightest, but it can be off-putting for others.

I finally understand the "double-cream" that I see in usually British recipes.  This is no good for a cream sauce as it splits and melts and looks quite disgusting.  So I make butter.

Butter is really simple to make. Put the cream into a cake mixer and beat it until it's butter and buttermilk.  With my cream, it doesn't take long.  In fact, it's quicker than whipping cream with store bought cream.

Cream

Nearly there, but not quite - note there's no liquid

Now we have butter

Once you have butter, press it together lightly and strain it through a sieve, making sure to catch the buttermilk in a jug.  Then run the butter in the sieve under the tap until the water runs clear.

Buttermilk.  You can see the tiny butter blobs around the edge of the jug.

Put your butter into a clean bowl and beat it quite firmly - more liquid will come out and more rinsing will be needed.  If you want to salt it, add 1 tsp of salt to 500g of butter and beat it through at this stage.

From there I turn it out onto baking paper, shape it into a block, wrap it and freeze it.  It doesn't keep as long as store-bought butter.  I don't know if this is because I don't always get all of the buttermilk out or if it's because I only pasteurise and do no further heat-treating.  Freezing has the added bonus of being perfect for making pastry.

The latest attempt at spreadable butter on the left.  A block for freezing on the right.

Several times I've tried to mix it with olive oil or rice bran oil to make it a simple sandwich spread - my mother used to do this when I was young, but it's hard to tell when you've added enough oil as it's soft and spreadable when it's freshly made.  So far, all of mine have been rather firm.

Many people ask what do you then do with the buttermilk.

Anything you like!  Choices are endless.  Miss Ten likes to drink it as it is.  It works nicely in my cheesemaking.  I've used it making bread and baking.  There's nothing particularly unpleasant about buttermilk, except maybe the odd tiny globule of butter that may be floating in it - and even then that's only if that is unpleasant to you.