Welcome Dew, way to jump in!
I am so happy to see so many people doing it. It really is an experience everyone should have. Even if you never wanted to do it again, its a great appreciation you didn't have before. You'll never look at the chicken in the meat counter the same again. I do still buy store bought sometimes... but we don't eat anywhere near what we used to as far as meat weekly. They say Americans are eating meat 3x a day, 7 days a week. We probably only eat meat 3-4 times a week total. We eat eggs daily though, sometimes twice.
(And now I have an ice cream maker to boot!!!!)
Anyways, We only processed 4. I didn't get the rest of the birds I was trying to split an order with someone and I was going to add 12 to those 4. Didn't happen so I wanted to wait until these were finished before we got more. The plan is try to do 25 birds a year. If I can at least suppliment what we have with BETTER meat, I'd be happy. I don't eat red meat or pork at all, so we'll never go down that road... hubby is entertaining 'rabbit'. I will probably never be able to do those... too fuzzy... I would just cuddle them to death.
I've been sore today, still not fully healed... but I'm able to get some stuff done in the garden, and this showed me I could.
Mary, I wish I could tell you this went quickly for me, but do to my 'condition' I worked very slow and took breaks through out. We drank a few beers and talked, and didn't just work because of how I felt. It took 3 hours from set-up, to processing, to clean up. Last year we did 10 birds, in 2 hours. So I know I was poking.
