Homesteading How NOT To's

Today I am going to divert from Alaskan tales and throw out an Idaho anecdote. I live on a twenty acre farm in North Idaho, and for the last fifteen years have tried my hand at a myriad of farming applications. This morning an errant predator spooked my daughter's horse, who in turn, ran through her cattle paneled pen. I pulled my carcass out of bed after a blissful night of insomnia and caught the mare. As her pen was out of commission; I released her with our other two horses. Before I could get the halter off of the escapee mare, I became aware of my form being lifted into space. The rear end of an equine has quite a bit of thrust, and I used that bit of propulsion to launch myself sideways from the fracas that resulted. Sliding through the snow on my rear I found myself pondering the fact that getting kicked in the leg is better than the head. Animals in heat are the worst. Long story short, that incident reminded me of our quest to build the perfect chicken plucker for our pastured poultry endeavor. Those two things totally go together. Like chicken and chocolate. Enjoy!

After a few seasons of manually processing our pastured poultry, I was pretty excited when my husband said he was going to build a chicken plucker. The idea behind the device is that you can drop a scalded chicken into this barrel, a rubber finger bedecked apparatus, and twenty seconds or so later you have a naked chicken carcass. I personally would rather gut thousands of salmon instead of just one chicken. I think my distaste of the job comes from processing chickens while I was pregnant. That whole pregnancy smells thing really comes back to haunt me when I inhale liquid soap and scalded bird feathers. I almost want to mimic a cat expelling a hair ball thinking about it right now. Moving on, I should have known that my dreams of a lack of ripping feathers out by hand was going to be diverted when my Grandfather decided to help with the job.

My Grandfather likes to go fast. He also has one eye, as the pupil in his left eye was slit when he was a youngster due to a firework beer bottle incident. You would think only having the ability to see half of what was coming would make a person more cautious. Nope. This was the man that bought the most expensive lawn mower in existence so he could drag race it as he mowed. He spent over ten thousand dollars in the nineteen eighties putting a balanced and blue printed, bored out engine in his Chevrolet pickup. I didn't realize that riding in a car could be pleasant and not terrifying until I reached an advanced age thanks to Papa drag racing down the straight stretch in front of his house. I would sit in the floorboards of his Z28 Camaro and cry tears of terror into the burgundy upholstery as he chuckled. He always looked at me, that slit pupil reminding me of the Cheshire cat, and say;

“Hold on Pebbles.”

I got the summons that the plucker, version 1.0 was ready for testing in the kitchen of our barn. My youngest cousin Natalie was staying with us at the time, and I wandered toward the barn with her in tow. She is a very vociferous person, and between her and the bleating of the goats; I was entertained. As I stepped into the kitchen I noticed that the plucker looked like the ones I had researched on the Web. If I wouldn't have been distracted by an eleven year old chattering, I might have noticed that my grandfather had insisted that the one horse electric motor be utilized to power the apparatus. The more engineered minded of us would have also noted the lack of a gear reduction ratio. There also might have been the fact that my husband and Papa opted to stay in the hall for the first test.

Blissfully unaware of any of those things, Natalie and I stepped toward the machine, and I told the guys to fire it up. The whirling of the old washing machine tub was impressive, and I held my prepped bird over the spinning mass for a second of reflection.

“Drop it in there!” Natalie gushed with enthusiasm.

I released the bird. The explosion of feathers that blew out of the wash tub had to be heard in the next county. The velocity of plucker simultaneously removed every feather from that chicken, while also shooting the bird to the ceiling of the barn kitchen. I honestly think it would have traveled to the stratosphere. As the naked bird splatted back down into the basin; I became aware of my cousin screaming. We were both covered with nasty, scalded chicken feathers, and to make matters worse, we were being laughed at by the two cowards in the barn hallway. Bigger is not always better when it comes to horse power, and I felt a little vindicated when I heard my Papa say:

“Maybe we better try the ½ horse instead.”

This book is useful, and we were able to build a nice chicken plucker that didn't try to re-upholster any human in it's vicinity in feathers.

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