Pear Season

 

This year I got a somewhat good pear harvest.  I mentioned previously that one tree produced somewhat well one year.  Many years they fall prey to late freezes.  Fireblight has been a problem--very much so this year.  I was able to keep more or less ahead of it through pruning and spraying through June.  I'll be more diligent about dormant- and early-season spraying this winter and next spring.

Both Kieffers produced well this year, but squirrels swarmed the trees.  In late July and early August, I saw squirrels running across the grass with pears in their mouths--not good. The pears were still nowhere close to ripe.  They basically stripped one tree bare--the one closest to some cover.

They attacked the other one, too, but I did get about 20 pounds off of it.  I picked them at the end of September, when they were falling to the ground.  Those I canned.  As was my practice the last time I did this, I did not peel them.  I just cut them right down the middle after removing the stem, then used the knife to cut out the core.  Then I halved the halves, and in most cases, cut them again, dividing each pear into eight pieces.

 I have previously noted that I don't usually get as much in each jar as advertised by sites such as the NCHFP at UGA.  The UGA site says that raw pack yields poor quality, but I like the result.  In one of my previous pear posts, I mentioned that Jill Winger got good results with raw-packing unpeeled pears (she didn't use any sugar, however; I used sugar at a rate of 1:3, i.e., 1 cup sugar per 3 cups water.

 I cut up 16 pounds of pears, getting 13 pounds after trimming.  Those went into  12 quarts and 1 pint, requiring about 19.5 cups of water, 3.5 cups of sugar.  I processed them for 30 minutes in an atmospheric steam canner.

 

That required a couple of canner loads.  In all, the process took about three hours, which is better than I used to be capable of.

There were some additional pears on the tree that I stashed in the refrigerator; I may try to do more preserves.  But the main canning duty for this year for the pear harvest is done.

They also dehydrate well, but not this year... 

 

Blueberry Harvest, 2025

 I started harvesting blueberries on June 17.  The bushes were heavily-laden with berries, some of which are the biggest I have ever seen on my bushes.

 

 

The harvest is continuing in early July, but the berry quality is deteriorating.  As it turns out, June 17 was about the time the rain stopped. Summer droughts in north Georgia are not uncommon, but this year the rain held up very well until mid-June before the precip switch got turned off.  June overall was wetter than average at 4.8", but it was unevenly distributed.  I'm now watering all plants, but usually that just enables them to hold on.  The soil wicks away any water I put down fairly quickly.  Still, I'm at about 14 pounds and counting...

  

 

Snakes

Every summer, I find snakes in the chicken tractors.  So far, the only ones I have seen are black rat snakes.  They're fairly ubiquitous here, and since they're black. in the gloom at the back of the tractor, they're hard to see.  They can be long--three feet or more.

Usually they're  in the grass, and I see them when I move the tractor.  This year, they're proving to be more assertive--and numerous.  I have found two in a tractor on a couple of occasions.  Sometimes they have even been in the nest box.

The one pictured above was in the Delawares' tractor.  The egg at the top left is a ceramic one, but you can see that the snake has eaten a real egg--look for the bulge just behind the S-curve near the head.  I don't know how intimidating this is to hens that are trying to lay, but it is also true that on days I find snakes, I find fewer eggs.  The birds are either holding off or the snake is eating them.   This is obviously sub-optimal from my perspective, although it works out well for the snake.  An egg is an easier food source to exploit than rodents, who have to be caught and killed.  I don't think they pose any danger to adult birds; although they might be able to kill one, the birds are far too large to eat.

However, the roosters have a role to play, and they aren't stepping up.  I have never seen any indication that the roosters care about the snakes.  Earlier this week, a snake slithered out of the tractor when I opened the door, and the rooster, who was nearby, glanced at it and kept walking--he stepped on the snake, in fact, not to try to restrain or attack it, but just because it was in his way.  Another rooster looked at a snake that was slithering away in the grass, but made no aggressive moves. 

Snake sightings seem to be grouped, where I'll find a snake (maybe the same one) in a tractor several times on consecutive days, then no snakes for weeks or months.  It's a fairly low-level problem, but one without an obvious solution.  A tractor will always have potential points of entry that a stationary coop might be able to be proofed against.

 

Putting Up Dry Beans

 As I have mentioned before, beans store best in an oxygen-free environment. Buying beans in bulk may work well to hold down costs.

But they obviously can't be stored in the bag for the amount of time it will take most people to go through them, and storing them in a bucket or tub will still allow them to age while they're being slowly used up. Packing them in mylar is fine, but once they're opened, they will start to age again--and they may have aged while in storage.

Therefore, when I buy a big bag, I pack it in five-pound increments.  Five pounds is about right for a gallon-sized mylar bag.

Some mylar bags have a zip lock, but all can be sealed with a heat source (and it makes sense to seal them on top of zipping them, too).  I use a curling iron (it has to be set on high to adequately melt the mylar for a seal).

A five-gallon bucket will hold about four five-pound bags of beans (maybe five with a little bit of work).  A bucket provides extra protection against pests and damage to the mylar bags while they're in storage (although mice can get through a bucket wall--nothing short of a metal can is truly pest-proof).

 

I don't know how long beans will keep in mylar.  I don't plan to hang onto them for too long before opening them up, but as I've mentioned previously, researchers have found that they seem to keep for up to 32 years and possibly longer.  With rotation, it should be possible to keep the storage time well under that in most circumstances.

 

When Roosters Get Rough

 Various sites recommend having about 10 hens per rooster so that the hens don't get over-mated.  Chicken mating is pretty rough on the hens, and the degree to which hens suffer seems to vary by individual rooster.  I have had roosters who never pulled any feathers out of his hens' backs, and I have had other roosters who plucked a few bald. I run my chickens in tractors, and my tractors aren't big enough for 11 birds--so my hen to rooster ratio is always lower than 10.  I have seen others with substantially larger flocks, and they still had one or two birds with bare backs--so even with a large harem, roosters seem to have favorites that get mauled.

There's not much to do to change rooster behavior (as far as I know), but there are some things that can be done to protect the hens.  One of the most obvious is to give them a saddle or flak jacket.  It straps on their wings and protects their backs--some have shoulder pads, as well.

I've tried a couple of different manufacturers; there are many that are available on Amazon and elsewhere.  The price varies widely.  Until this year, I have never needed them, but I now have one rooster (formerly two) who is drawing blood when he mates with his go-to hens (others in the flock are fine).  These seem to be working well so far. 

The hens adjusted to them quickly, and it made an impact on their behavior within 24 hours.  The hen pictured above with the shoulder pads had been nicked on her side by the rooster's claws and she had started to avoid coming out of the tractor.  A day after getting the saddle, she was back out foraging with the rest of them.  In this tractor, two of the five hens are currently saddled.

Hopefully the hens can grow back their feathers and avoid any further injury.

 

Easy Chicken Harvesting

 As I have previously mentioned, my chickens (currently all  layers) sometimes transition to the dinner table, one way or another.  Sometimes I sell them.  Most people, when they process a chicken, pluck it, carefully evacuate the abdominal cavity, and refrigerate or freeze it whole.  There are innumerable videos online of how to do this, such as this one from Justin Rhodes.

Plucking is a barrier.  I have done it--by hand, as I do not have a plucker.  I did not scald (I have done only one to five birds at a time).  I gutted the rooster in the post linked above, and I kept the skin on for the leg and thigh quarters.  Boneless skinless was the most natural way to process the breasts.

After that first bird, the solution that works for me with chickens is skinning and parting them out, leaving the guts in the abdomen.  Two very helpful videos on this are provided by the Sage and Stone Homestead and the Sarah Lynn Homestead. In my experience, about 75% of the hassle and upwards of 50% of the time associated with chicken processing is linked to plucking.  I like crispy skin on drumsticks as much as anyone, but I can give that up to save the effort and time. This is even more true when the parts are canned. Yes, automated chicken pluckers are fast, but they require scalding and they're expensive.  For my scale, they aren't worth it.

I can go from a live chicken to parted-out breasts and thigh/leg quarters in 20-30 minutes when following the practices in the videos above.  Given the amount of meat I get from my layers, that's a decent ROI for the time.

Older chickens can (should) be canned bone-in, and they turn out tender (trying to eat a two-year-old rooster that has been oven-baked is masochistic; I tried it; the flavor was okay, but my teeth hurt the next day).

Younger birds can be oven-baked and they turn out fine.

 This was a five-month-old barred rock rooster. I basted it with a simple mix of:

4 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon of thyme, sage, and salt

It was tender.  Coming out of the oven, it looked like this:

 

That's perfectly decent.  I didn't miss the skin at all. I don't know that I'll ever raise chickens primarily for meat, but going forward, any that I do process, I plan to skin them and part them out at the time of butchering.  It's vastly easier than the alternative.
 

 

Pruning the Muscadines, 2025

 Muscadines flower and set fruit on new growth, so annual pruning helps ensure that abundant new growth will yield a good harvest.  There's one caveat: once the sap starts to run, they'll leak sap profusely when cut. It can go on for days.  Pruning earlier in the dormant season is helpful to avoid that, but they won't be noticeably hurt by the leakage.  With the best of intentions, I plan to do this at the end of January, then the realities of January weather deter me.  When it's 45 and windy, it's not going to happen.  So this year, the end of February and beginning of March it was.  I did not prune them last year, so there was a lot to remove.

 

The pictures show the before / after for my Ison, which is easily the most vigorous and productive of the plants that I have.

The sap was running, especially with the last ones pruned, but it wasn't too bad: it stopped after an hour or so.  I have seen it much worse.  Now it's just a waiting game until they break dormancy.