Chicken Harvest

I can talk about my weekend using two different terms; harvesting being the first and killing being the other. Both are correct and can be used interchangeably depending on the context. You can say I killed roughly fifty some chickens. You can also say I harvested fifty some chickens. Both are true. Either way, there are now fifty some chickens, drained of blood, plucked, beheaded, and eviscerated, in the walk in cooler.

I came to farm Saturday morning knowing this is what I would be doing and really I didn’t have any qualms with any of it. I’ve never killed an animal before save for the thousands of misquotes, flies, other bugs, and a few random animals whose lives I took with the wheels of a car. It was interesting to puncture the neck and feel the life literally draining out of the chicken. Sometimes they twitched and flailed about. Sometimes they flopped out of the cones and I had to put them back in before they stumbled away. Sometimes they crowed or squawked while I opened up they necks. Mostly they just stared wide eyed at nothing in particular until their lids close and their body went limp.Flipping the chickens upside down causes their blood to flow into their heads and it kind of stuns them making the blood letting one of the best ways to harvest. 

I didn’t have any problems or reservations on being the one who did most of the killing. This was a choice I made and really it wasn’t that hard of one. Chickens are pretty dumb animals. They’re instincts are pretty simple. Eat, peck, and run away from anything bigger than themselves is about all they can manage. Yes they should have good food, plenty of room to run around and starch about. They should be warm in the winter and cool in the summer and when harvest day comes; their deaths should be relatively quick. It is important to have a deft hand and a sharp knife. Other than that, there isn’t much to consider. Our chickens lives contained all of these elements and there for I am proud and excited to eat them.

Processing a chicken from oblivious bird to what you would find at the supermarket is pretty easy. They are hung upside down in a cone and their neck arteries are cut. After the blood is drained they are dead. The next step is to dunk them in 160° water for about 30 seconds or so. This makes removing their feather much easier. Even still sometimes their wing feathers can be a pain in the ass to pull out. Plucking is tedious and two people per chicken makes the whole things go much faster. Then comes the evisceration. Many cuts are made and I really didn’t catch the whole process cause I was mainly killing and plucking. After the guts come out, you can clean the gizzard if you want. I haven’t eaten one but I heard they’re crunchy. I’ll stick with using them in stocks and gravy.

I named one of the chickens; which I know isn’t good. It can cause attachment. While cutting open his arteries he kicked me in the face causing my glasses to fly off. He caught me on my left eye and I was worried that he’d cut me. It didn’t leave anything but a scratch but it did hurt. I wanted to feel malice but he was only trying to stay alive. I didn’t want him to suffer during the dying process but I had clearly hit a nerve. In the end I named him Soup and he is currently in my fridge waiting to be roasted and turned into stock.

Speaking of stock; I now have several pounds of chicken feet as well. I’m going to turn them into a rich, buttery broth. The idea of chicken feet stock might sound icky and gross but the process involves removing the skin of the feet, cleaning/scrubbing them thoroughly, and cutting way any scabby and rough parts. It makes me happy that I can use most everything from the chicken. 

I’m not going to go into all the vegetarian/vegan/carnivore/omnivore debate talk here. I just don’t have time nor the energy for that it. Call me a killer if you want. It’s true. I harvested some chickens. I will raise and harvest more. I want to raise my own goats and hopefully a pig or two as well. I will kill/harvest them as well. This way I can live more sustainably and still eat meat, which I consider vital to my own survival. I want to have a relationship with the food I eat, wither that's the onions and chard or the chickens and pig. For you it might be different and that’s okay. I’m not here to yuck your yum. If you want come visit me on harvest day; that would be great. It takes a while and many hands are needed. The more the merrier.

Pictures coming soon. 

After the Autumnal Equinox

Hello all you beautiful people.

So I'm going to apologize for being so distant these last few months. The farm has been quite crazy this year and as it was I did not write nearly as much as I would have liked to this summer. The energy for creative writing was just not there. The inspiration was sporadic and the ideas seamed lack luster. What I have written isn’t that good in my opinion and needs a lot work before I submit it to publishers and/or post it to the blog. I have an idea for a novel at the moment and I’m working making the plot all come together. I’ve tried scaling it back to be novelette or novella but each time I try to do so it wants to get bigger and longer. In short it is a work in progress.

Other ideas come and go like clouds. Like the clouds this summer, these literary clouds rarely –if ever—produced rain. I have several documents with half formed ideas, stories that go nowhere, so many characters and settings that are dead ends… for now.

The farm work is slowly coming to an end for year I’m preparing to move on with my life. I’m planning on moving back to Duluth, finding a paying job, becoming a mentor, and continuing to work on my writing. There are many steps to this process and I hope you will be a part of them in one way or another.

The muse is stirring again. I’m finding more energy for writing after work. The story ideas feel better and come out sounding more put together, and for that I am thankful. I’m formulating a project that will hopefully be a step forward in my writing career and you –yes you dear reader-- can be a part of it too. More on this in the near future so stay tuned.

The next few months will be a little hectic for me but I’m excited to grow and see where the threads of fate lead. Where ever I end up, and for whatever period of time, I promise to feed those creative fires more, to make them a more prominent part of my life, and to deliver beautiful stories.

Dancing Together

When you dance with someone
                you never dance poorly
To a song you both know every word of

                or stumble over lyrics
You take a part of them with you
                where ever you may roam
                across dusty roads and city streets
Oh yes, you’ll forget the lyrics
                and the tune
But you’ll always remember
                the way you held hands
                or how they held your back
                time and time again

and that is called love

All was not well in fairyland

We are now well into spring and nearly everything has been planted out; though tomatoes and winter squash still have yet to be put in. We haven’t had too much rain which is good for getting things into the ground and bad for seedling that have already been planted. Hopefully it will come with some regularity in the coming months but that’s like asking a bee to fly in a straight line so it’s best not to think about it too much.

And the days are long and the sun is hot and I’m in so much debt and by the time I get home I just don’t have the energy to sit down and pump out 500 words. I don’t know if this will change when the work schedule will have the regularity of harvesting and weeding and less planting. I hope it will. The other interns are great but they are bringing up some issues I have already dealt with and assumed to be a normal part of life here at Red Goose Gardens.

I’ve called the farm Fariyland on more than one occasion. Life here seems so unreal and so different from college or life in Lakeville. The work is hard and tasks can seem insurmountable. But watching seedlings growing in bushes so large and full of fruit can see like magic. The gods bless us with so much summer squash we are literally brought to our knees in their service every day for a good six weeks. An agrarian lifestyle is much like a fairy tale for a suburban kid and though I have lived and worked on this farm for three years now, the abundance of good things the earth gives us still captures my imagination. Maybe fairies really are living in that space off woods between county road 3 and the land in which we work.

So here I am. The world is different this year. It’s not all bad. There are new problems to deal with. I will do my best to try and keep writing. This is a time of transition. Spring is becoming summer. I have new roles and responsibilities on the farm. I’m trying to figure out what kind of adult I am going to be. I am no longer a college student but still feel like I am.

All is not well in Fairyland but even in the most confusing times I still have my friends, the chickens, the growing vegetation, and maybe a fairy or two.

A Forest of Courage in print... or so to speak et alt

My new piece, A Forest of Courage, is featured in the May 2012 edition of With Painted Words. It's short, less an 1,000 words, so check it out. With Painted Words was the first magazine to publish my work and I am so grateful to them for choosing another of my short stories. Support them and their contributors and supports (i.e. Pill Hill Press i.e. the people who published my story The Illumination of Queen Bees) with moneys or words of encouragement.  

P.S. BUGS! (the anthology where you may find The Illumination of Queen Bees) I've been told will be available for kindle/nook/e-readers someday. I thought that it would be available soon after its release but that seems not to be the case. If you don't want to buy a hard copy, you can help all of us contributors by easily clicking on the "Tell the Publisher" button on this page.

P.S.S. It is summer once again and I be working hard at Red Goose Gardens. This also means I will be updating the blog more often then... never... which has been the trend. So add me to your RSS feed. I'll be posting short segments of thing I will be submitting, the little bits of imaginative non-sense that form during my long hours in the fields, and general updates on what's going on I my life.  Check back often for a little bit of everything.

It's Not About Robins

The hawks are happy today

they open their wings to encompass the sky
shifting so I see all their brown feathers,
spread to grasp every warm updraft
they create a tunnel in this spring air

I am happy today
to see them spin in
wide white circles
To know they spin up
to bring the warmth out of the earth
and twist down to drawn down the sun
their catabasis is what renews me today

But I wonder, as I sit in my car
will they climb higher
dare the sun in his sky
and come together
Will they clasp their claws
extend their legs towards one another
And tumble earthwards
Will they spin into one form
of feathers, talons and sun
Will they risk each other’s life
in the decent
Will the earth be soft and kind
if both are unwilling to separate.

For now they will turn
in a column of their own creation
Please bring back the spring
with the sun and earth.

Full Moon Visage

You can’t see her face.
     No not really.
She will look right at you
     and not through.
Her gaze’s wide and white as the moon,
     with pulps black as space.
You are not permitted to see the entirety of her.
     No, not ever.

But then you can’t see the back of her head.
And how she does her hair.
Is it a tight bun rolled like perfect dinner rolls?
Or is it woven in a French braid,
the stands held together by precise handicraft and spells.
When she lets it hang lose
the curls and threads circumnavigating her face.
What is she telling you?
her mouth forever closed.

Let us conjecture,
the she is merely reflecting your light.
Her iris a rainbow of your psych.
A multi-mythology in a single face.

Look at her.
Wide and white.
Open and black.
Do you hair as she does
     (to the best of your ability)
And hope that one day when you see your face
in the reflecting pool of the future
You see her
your sister, your mother, your friend
all at the same time.