Our weekend

Not much to share, Mike and Cortney did clean up in the garden on Saturday, collecting more dried bean pods( a 5 gallon bucket full of one variety and a old milk crate with another), burned the dried bushes from the bush beans, pulled up the cabbage roots. While I worked indoors on cleaning and getting odds and ends chore caught up. In the late afternoon we did clean the stove pipe and stove in preparation for our burning.If your are interested in a tutorial look under woodstove care for pictures.
We did it the old fashioned way but removing a section of pipe and holding a bag over the end of the pipe to collect the soot, if you'll recall our disaster when experimenting on a new way( easier, so so we thought, LOL!) last year.LOL!!!!

I woke up Saturday with a scratchy throat, so immediately took 2000mg Vitamin C, began my day by drinking echinachea / elderberry tea with a liberal amount of raw honey and increased my Vitamin D3 from 3,000mg to 5,000mg. The scratchy throat went away by about midday but I felt it settling into my sinuses. By evening the nose was plugged tight, which I hate not being able to breath through my nose, so fought sleep off and on all night.

Sunday we'd scheduled to butcher turkeys, six total( 5 tom and a hen), would have been 6 toms but one was injured fighting and lost some weight while he was down. We had all but one turkey sold, or so we thought.*sigh*  When I called people on Friday to let them know their birds would be ready for pick up early next week( this week) two people cancelled their orders, sighting $$$ problems and one lady I couldn't get a hold of, but am fairly sure she's just out of town. So this leaves us with two toms and a hen that were not claimed. Our freezer space is limited so we made the decision to butcher only what we actually had sold and one for us; in other words three toms.
Butchering turkeys seems easier to me than butchering chickens, we timed ourselves and it took 12-15 minutes per bird. All three toms( one was butchered when the buyer arrived, because she wanted to help and learn about butchering) dressed out at 20-25lbs and all were plenty fat *wink* We always pay special attention to the organs( heart, liver, lungs) and all three toms organs were very healthy.
Of course since our toms were bronze and they did have some pin feathers there is a little cleanup involved in getting the coloring scrapped from under the skin. Once they'd been thoroughly washed and the final inspection for pin feathers complete, they were bagged( well, the one buyer took her tom home for final cleanup) and are chilling in the refrigerator downstairs. 
Today I'm putting together an ad for a local paper and will advertise the remaining two toms and pray that the other woman who wanted the hen contacts us soon, otherwise we'll butcher the hen for our freezer :o)

I still am congested but feel fine. I was able to clear on side of my nose to breath through last night and after taking hot tea and elderberry tincture before bed, I slept like a log*wink*
Today's "plan"( as Cortney refers to it) is to harvest ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse,wash, cut and add them to the ones already inside waiting to be milled. Cortney most likely will mill them while I'm getting supper started, stew, in the dutch oven. We also have laundry to start, typically it takes us two days due to clothes line constraints, especially now that our day time temperatures are cooler and the clothes take longer to dry.

                          

                                What a blessing!, all the shelves are FULL :o)

                                Herbs collected, dried and now in their storage containers

We'll need to clean up the dunk pan( used for butchering) and the cooling tank buy dumping them out and washing them down to dry in the sunshine. If we have time after this we have two large heads of cabbage still waiting to be shredded and packed into the crock for kraut. The plan is to do a video of the shredding with a slaw cutter, and the steps in packing it into the crocks, then do follow up videos as if ferments. To bad we can't share the smell*wink* For something that smells so bad, when it is finished it sure tastes good, Ummmm. Ummmm. :o)