Promised Land Homestead

Plucker's Maiden Voyage

Saturday was our scheduled poultry processing day.  We had 6 cockrels and 3 turkeys to process, and it was time to see what my new plucker could do.

Since I haven't included pictures of the completed plucker yet, here are some.

Here's a picture of "Death Row".  The 6 cockrels and the turkeys waiting for their turn in the chicken tractor.

The chickens were first.

The plucker worked well on them.  One thing that was mentioned in the instruction manual was that using the Whizbang on just one chicken wouldn't give you a very good pluck, but ours did well on just one.  I do have to cut the feet off of our birds before they go in the plucker because they'll get jammed into the feather discharge gap.  Since DW does that anyway before she bags them, it's no big deal to do it before they go in the plucker.  Other than that it worked like a charm.  The cockrels weighed in from 2.8 to 3.8 lbs dressed.

Here's the first turkey that was done.  I was glad to see that my turkeys fit into my chicken scalder with no problem.  I was worried they'd be too big.  The plucker worked great on them as well.  It plucked probably 95% of the feathers and I had to hand pluck the other 5%, which still saved me bundles of time and effort.  The plucker gets a little bogged down with the turkeys if they get a leg or wing wedged between the tub's fingers and the plate's.  That's really not a problem.  I just readjust the bird and fire it up again.  The motor gets pretty hot when it gets bogged down, but if I stop it as soon as I see it slowing down and readjust the bird right away, it's not a problem.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with this plucker.  It comes in most handy with the turkeys as plucking them the traditional way would be just tedious.  We decided not to keep any of the black turkeys whole for Thanksgiving.  Their black plummage doesn't make as attractive a carcass.  We don't care, but since we're taking this year's Thanksgiving turkey home for our whole family, we wanted it to look nicer.  We'll leave one of the white ones whole when we process them.  DW, is going to cut up the rest to make more room in the freezer.

We had a lot of rain on and off Saturday, Sunday, and today... almost 2 inches worth.  Our grass is greening up nicely and the cows are grazing a lot again.

Tomorrow is butchering day.  We'll be taking the pigs and steer in for processing.  I'll post pictures of that soon.

Untitled Comment

8:21 AM, Tuesday, August 19, 2008 .. Posted by CitySteader

Sounds exciting! It always feels so good to know that your freezer is well stocked before winter.