Author: Anna & Mark

“How
do y’all scald your chickens for plucking?  Or do you skip that
step?  We always end up doing 2 dozen birds at a time just so as
to avoid heating the water more than once.”

— Lindsey

I’ve helped friends who
raise birds for sale butcher their chickens and turkeys, and it makes
sense at their level to use a scalder (a special piece of machinery
that keeps a tub of water at a constant temperature).  But on the
homestead scale, I think most folks will be best off just heating a pot
of water on the stove for each bird.  It’s low tech, doesn’t waste
all that much water, and keeps the scalding water clean.



(Graphic pictures
below.  The usual warnings apply.)



A two gallon pot filled
two-thirds of the way up with water is just barely big enough to scald
a large, heirloom cockerel at three months old, when his dressed weight
comes in around two and a half pounds.  We can generally fit an
old laying hen in this same pot, too, but if you’re raising really
hefty Cornish Cross broilers, you might need to choose the next size up.



As soon as we’re done
scalding and plucking one bird, Mark rinses out the pot and puts it
back on the stove on high while I dress the previous bird’s
carcass.  By the time the next bird is ready for dunking, the
water has reached 145 to 150 degrees (as measured by a meat
thermometer) — perfect for loosening up feathers.



Since the pot is on the
small side, I like to scruff up the feathers of each bird with a wooden
spoon as Mark dunks it to make sure air pockets don’t prevent water
from reaching the skin all around.  Plunging
the chicken up and down also helps ensure thorough scalding.  You
know your bird is ready to pluck when the tough tail and wing feathers
pull out relatively easily.



Having used a scalder,
I’m not so sure our pot method is actually any harder on the small
scale.  Especially with turkeys, a scalder requires frequent
topping off with hot water, and who wants to be the lucky farmer who
gets to turn on the scalder at 5 am so it’ll be ready to do its job at
7?  On the other hand, I do really appreciate our automated
plucker — that
seems like the appropriate level of technology for our farm.

Last year, I cleaned
out the deep bedding in February, but this time I opted to do
so in December.  While I’d like to say my reasoning was
biological, I was really just greedy for the mulch to put my berry
bushes and fruit trees to bed properly.  (I was also bumping my
head going into the main coop, so I figured the bedding was getting a
bit high.)



I started my clean-out
by pitchforking the top layers of most of the coop’s bedding into a
pile, then scooping out the decaying bedding underneath to wheelbarrow
into the garden as mulch.  The area under the perches was twice as
deep and much higher in fertility since most of the manure collects
there, so I shifted the (rather nasty — I should have added more
bedding sooner) top layer from under the perch to the now-bare soil
elsewhere before taking out the lower layers under the perches to use
as a compost-mulch mixture.  Finally, I forked the top layers of
bedding from most of the coop under the perches and on top of the
manure-laden bedding to keep the chickens’ feet clean and to keep the
deep bedding system going.



In the garden, I treated the
bedding from under the perches and the bedding from elsewhere in the
coop a bit differently.  The former is very high in nitrogen and
was already breaking down into a compost that will feed my perennials
but won’t keep the ground covered for long.  In contrast, the
bedding without much manure in it will act as a longer-lived, complex
mulch.  I figure I’ll need to top off the rich bedding in the
spring to keep weeds at bay, and can probably leave the areas mulched
by the less rich bedding alone until summer or fall.



Cleaning out both coops
and our brooder only managed to fertilize our blueberry patch, one long
row of blackberries and raspberries, and two peach trees.  As
usual, I want more deep bedding, but our pastures can’t bear any more
birds…yet.

 

(By the way, there were
no signs of worms under the deep bedding, so my stab
in the dark was a failure.)