Its the day before Thanksgiving. Thanks to my brother in law who suggested we host Thanksgiving this year (and will now not be attending), we will have 10 people in our house tomorrow. I know for a lot of you this isn't very many, but due to my grandfather being ill and spending all of last weekend with him NOTHING is ready. We have a 31# turkey attempting to defrost that I will have to get into the oven by 6am tomorrow, a whole house to clean plus all of the farm chores we normally do on Sundays (which did not get done due to me being gone and my husband being sick). I still have some grocery shopping to do as well. All of this and both hubby and I are working a full day today.
The reason we were nominated to host Thanksgiving this year is because we raised 15 Heritage Turkeys this year (Bourbon Reds for those of you who care). Late this summer my brother in law stopped by the house and while we were drinking a beer and watching the turkeys gobble at each other he mentioned we should have Thanksgiving this year since already have the turkeys. Then a week ago his wife decided they are going to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Wonderful. But, the show must go on.
We raised the turkeys because a friend of ours has been pestering us to do so since we moved into the farm. It seemed liked a natural transition since we are already raising chickens (both meat and layers) as well as rabbits and pheasants. In early July I received my phone call from the wonderful Postmaster at our local Post Office that I had a box of birds waiting for me. For those of you that are not aware, when you order birds from the hatchery they are sent via USPS. Its rather funny to come out of the Post Office with a big box that is chirping! Even in a rural community I receive strange looks. We had also ordered some laying hens with the turkeys, so we stuck them all together in our "nursery" (a small room in our barn that we raise the small birds until they have feathers and can be outside). Very quickly we discovered the turkeys could not be with the chickens because they are so gangly and uncoordinated and were being crushed. We separated everyone and things proceeded just fine. Once the turkeys had their feathers and the fear of crushing had passed we moved them out to our coop so they could free range during the day and enjoy the summer sunshine. They fit in well with our chickens and other then a little confusion at night as to how to get back into the coop things went fine.
As soon as we received the turkeys we made an appointment at the local processing plant for Nov. 19th. We figured that would be a good amount of time to raise them to a good size and also allow for fresh turkey on Thanksgiving. In early September while we watched the large Toms having trouble getting in the little access door of the coop due to their large size, we decided to rethink our processing date. Then the logistics of how to get these massive birds to the processing plant dawned on us. At that point it was decided we would just do the deed ourselves. In early October my husband and I along with my great uncle and our friend who was the inspiration behind this adventure, spent a Saturday catching and butchering all the turkeys. Despite experience butchering our rabbits, I thought I would have a hard time with turkeys. I had grown to enjoy their antics and looked forward to their morning "meetings" where they would all gather in front of the barn and gobble at each other for an hour before moving on to roaming the property and eating everything green they could find. Everything went smoothly and we were able to butcher all 15 birds in a record amount of time. And even more amazing was that they all fit into the freezers! Our biggest bird weighed in at 31# (the aforementioned Thanksgiving bird).
Being the type of person that procrastinates everything, I will find out early tomorrow morning whether the bird will even fit into my oven. This will be followed by a mad scramble to clean the house as I am sure it will not be completed tonight as planned. I have all the confidence in the world though that everything will work out one way or the other, as it always does. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!
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