Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Warning, some people might find this offensive -- but it's pretty much how I process any animal... I process my chickens pretty much the same way I process my deer... (after field dressing anyhow...)

field dressing a deer I just split them up through their rib cage down to their anus, use a hatchet to break the pelvic bone then reach up in their neck as far as you can and cut their wind pipe, then you can grab from near the wind pipe and pretty much pull all of their entrails out without much effort... pull it right down and out past the pelvic bone then cut it loose around the butt. Once I have them hung from their hind legs you skin them by cutting around the hind legs and splitting it loose, once you get it pulled down a little bit you can pretty much just pull and all of the connectivity tissue will just split without really needing to do much cutting until you get to the front legs, cut around the front legs to remove the skin then pull down as far as you can around the neck to the head, cut through the meat in the neck, then it's easiest to use a hacksaw to cut through the neck, but I don't have a hacksaw around anymore so I used a hatchet (a throwing hatchet at that, so was very ineffective). Once the skin is off then I start at the bottom and work my way up. With one hand pull the front leg off to the side so you can cut around the leg until you get down to the shoulder joint and then a slight twist and it should pop free. Repeat for the other front leg. Then remove the tenderloins which are inside the deer along the side of the spine, just cut along the bone on each side and pull the tenderloins out (they are pretty small chunks of meat, but famed for being the best part of a deer). Then repeat the same on the outside along the spine to remove the long thick chunk of meat that runs along the backbone on the outside. If you have a hacksaw you can cut the rib cage in half and make it easier to handle, which adds some meat that you could use for jerky or grind for burger, but there isn't a lot of meat there so since I don't have a hacksaw I just discarded the rib cage / rib meat. Then cut around the hind legs until you get down to the bone and again a slight twist the socket will pop apart freeing the hind legs, then I go to the joint of the hind legs and cut around the meat until I work my knife down to the knee joint, this is a little harder to find on a deer but once you find it you can pretty much pop them apart with a knife too... easier just to use a hacksaw and cut it apart (but again, no hacksaw...) and you're pretty much done quartering the deer... that was the easy part, it takes a lot longer to actually cut the meat up and package it.

It took me about 45 minutes to drag the deer out back and field dress (gut) it, drag it back to the barn and get it hung up in the barn... then it took me about an hour to quarter it and get it in to coolers to pack it with ice. It took me about 4 hours to cut all of the meat up/grind the burger doing it by myself... my wife came and helped package it towards the end... it's a lot easier having two people cutting and then once you get through most of the cutting one person can start packaging, but my wife barely tolerates me making a mess cutting it up in the kitchen so I don't want to push my luck trying to get her to help cut it up...

Growing up my dad always processed his own deer. He had a meat band saw so he would quarter the deer and freeze it then once it was mostly frozen take it out and cut it up on the band saw, so you still had bones in it... was probably faster that way, but after he moved out of state when I was about 14 then we started taking our deer to the processor and they always deboned it, so now we can't go back to leaving the bone in after all these years of having it deboned... the processor was only charging $50 for a really long time, they bumped up to $55 a few years ago... no big deal, two years ago they bumped up to $60 OK still a not a big deal, last year they jumped up to $75... really not terrible, but add that they are now bumping their price up every year to the fact that we think they are shorting us or not actually giving us our deer and we're pretty much done with them I think... two years ago my dad shot a pretty big buck, clean heart shot very little damage to any good meat and when we got the meat back we didn't think about it when we were picking it up, but when he got home and started organizing it in the freezer he didn't have any roasts and no tenderloins, which normally should have 2 roasts and a package of tenderloins... so he thought that since it was a big buck they probably had it on two trays of meat and they didn't note it on our receipt so when we picked it up they only gave us one tray of meat. Then last year I took a mid size and a large doe to them, went to pick it up and took it home and put it in the freezer not thinking much of it... my dad didn't end up getting a deer so I told him take half of mine because we wouldn't eat 2 deer in a year... he said he only took a few packages - far from half of what I had and he didn't take any roasts, but I ended up with just 1 roast when I should have had 4, and didn't get very many steaks was mostly just burger -- and I had clean shots too so it's not like I damaged good meat.... again think they probably had another tray of meat they didn't give me... so we're just going to start processing our own. With the two of us it won't take more than an 1.5-2 hours to cut up a deer (and when I cut mine up I leave my steaks a lot thicker than what the processor does then I butterfly them so I get a nice big steak, they give us these tiny little chops most of the time. We have slowly been working towards processing our own again the past few years because 3 years ago I had two small deer that weren't worth paying full price to get processed, then 2 years ago my dad had a small one so we cut it up too instead of paying to get it processed.. now we have the vacuum sealer, and my dad actually bought 2 vacuum sealers, we should be all set to process deer!

since I mentioned my chickens -- my chickens are pretty much the same except I don't gut them. I hang 3 or 4 of them from the tree and cut their heads off, let them bleed out then I pull their feathers a bit to get the skin on their chest away from the breast meat, cut in to the skin and split them up the center, cut the skin off up their legs and around their butts, cut their tail off and then just pull the whole thing down and the skin pretty much peels off down to their wings then I have to trim around the front wings a bit and pull the big feathers off pull the skin and feathers down until they come off and leave a naked bird behind. then I cut their hind legs off toss them in a cooler of ice water until I get them all to that stage, then take them to a cutting board and cut the meat off the carcass so I have boneless skinless chicken breasts (and wings/thighs etc. as well which isn't most preferable, but doing it this way I don't have to gut them I just toss the carcass with guts in it away).

OK so first question related to AP... anyone know what the heck is going on with this tomato plant? In the small limbs that I trimmed off they have started dying off and now all of the sudden has this white growth all over them... I don't know if this is some sort of fungus or something or if it's just a last ditch effort at trying to survive? I also noticed this on some basil leaves that are dying off too... I haven't touched them because it looks like a bunch of slivers would stick in my fingers, but if I blow on them they fall right off.


the rest of the tomato plants in the AP system appear to being going good still... these pictures are the same plants / same bed... my peppers in that bed the leaves have started dying off but the toms seem fine.


look at all of the new buds! seems to be a thriving plant to me...



On a side note, I added plastic over one of my beds in the garden to keep it going a bit longer. I need to add hoops over the bed behind it that has my lettuce to keep it growing a bit longer too, and the far bed my tomatoes I covered the cherry toms to keep them from frosting, they are still plugging along even though our nights are getting down close to 40F, days are still warm enough to keep them going!

Winter backup plan if it gets too cold in the greenhouse... Picked up a free kerosene heater tonight. Haven't looked it over yet but they said all it needs is a wick. 20k btu so not huge but hopefully enough to keep the chill out if it gets too cold in there at night.

I hadn't seen that white stuff on our tomatoes, although it looks like some kind of mold.

I use this when i see fungus.

Beware of kerosene heaters as they can use up the oxygen in an enclosed space.

I use cinnamon as an antifungal in my system especially for damping off. Just comparing different fungal issues, I think your plants are affected by Botrytis/Gray Mold. Not sure how exactly how cinnamon will work against the gray mold, but it may be worth giving a try.

Not too worried about the kerosene heater in the greenhouse, it's not air tight enough is half the reason I might need it

Need to look in to ways to remove moisture out of the greenhouse I guess. Not going to be worth growing all winter if it's all covered in mold, and it's been cold enough my windows haven't been opening. Might need to look in to auto vents.

Spent a few hours yesterday and this morning cleaning up the garden so it is a little closer to being ready for next year.

I put hoops over two more beds so I'll be able to cover them in the spring to start the plants out there sooner. Cleaned up the last of the plants that were done producing, still have cherry tomatoes producing and some lettuce and basil out there.


A couple of garlic and onions popping through that we missed digging I guess...


Indoor seed starting under the fish tank lights... Day 13 I think...

I love the way you are doing the little hoop houses along side of the big one.

Truth be told I already have plans in the back of my head for some major upgrades over the next few years, but I need to stop working on planning upgrades until I start finishing some of my existing projects =)

With as many ideas about what I want to do and the slow pace of progress lately has me feeling bummed... but I decided to look and see if I had pictures that showed my progress this year and I feel a lot better after looking at these old pictures... not only have I completely build my small greenhouse in the past year (which is a lot of fun looking back at the pictures and remembering what I was doing), but look at this comparison as to what the garden looked like..

This was the beginning of 2016 garden with my pregnant wife doing manual labor... (picture 6/12/16, kid was born 8/7/16, so she was 7+ months and I had her working in the garden!) You can see our first raised bed just at the corner of the picture...


This was the beginning of the garden this year, I had already built two more raised beds by this point...


And the current look that I shared the other day...


So I guess looking at where I was a year ago and where I was at the beginning of this season I've done an lot this year... maybe it's time to just relax for the winter while I get my money under control (after I buy the greenhouse plastic and frame in the ends of it so the hoophouse is ready to go next spring!) =)

"So I guess looking at where I was a year ago and where I was at the beginning of this season I've done an lot this year... maybe it's time to just relax for the winter while I get my money under control (after I buy the greenhouse plastic and frame in the ends of it so the hoophouse is ready to go next spring!) =)"
Man you nailed that. My heads in a similar place, except it's my health that has me looking back and wondering if I'll be able to something come Spring. I want a big greenhouse something fierce. If I continue to stall on projects all Winter I may be able to save enough to hire an excavator and then build another earth-sheltered greenhouse. I like that earth-sheltered reduces heat loss to a negligible amount.
Brian.

Brian I'm not even done with my hoophouse but I already feel like I should have made it bigger LOL. It's one of those things I'll probably never be completely happy with until I'm providing all of our food (I'd actually love to get myself out of debt to a point that I could quit my job and just live off the land / trade or sell a bit to have a little extra money and stay home and raise my kid while he's young... I don't think I'm really too far off if I get all of this under control and pay my debt off so all I have to worry about is the house... right now my wife pays $600 a month on daycare -- my house payment is about $1100, so if I got to the point that I had all of my other debt paid off it wouldn't be that much harder to get myself to a point where I could make enough money to pay the house bill and have a little extra spending cash on the side if we didn't have a daycare payment too... of course by the time I pay off my current debt my kid will be school age... but it's still something I'd like to do...).

Part of my future expansion plans I'm already planning on a bigger pond for growing fish too. I have talked about swapping my fish tank out in the greenhouse to build a bigger tank instead of two separate tanks, but I've also debated about building a lean-to on the back of the small greenhouse to house a bigger fish tank... now I'm actually debating about swimming pools even though I know there are some concerns about the plasticizers in the sunlight... There are a few swimming pools anywhere from 15ft to 24ft diameter 48-52" deep that people are selling locally for $50... I think it would cost me about $300-400 to build a 800ish gallon tank in the greenhouse, if I want to buy a bigger plastic tank it's more like $700+, so the swimming pool even with it's downsides looks really tempting to get 13,000+ gallons to grow fish in for $50... It would give me a serious pond to be able to grow a lot more fish in... then I could put a small pole-building over it to reduce the sunlight/reduce issues with the plasticizers in the water... I think if I want to make money off of my system that is where the easiest win is -- no one has locally grown fish for sale here. There are a number of other places with road side stands for garden fresh produce, but if I could get to a level that I could grow enough fish I could tap into a market that doesn't have competition here right now. I have not mentioned these thoughts to the wife yet... but I am working through the ideas in my head -- I've already made note that behind my small greenhouse there is enough room in the yard that I'm currently mowing (no need to recover more field and try to clean it up, and would actually reduce the area I need to mow slightly) that I could put the pool back there and it is in a spot that you would not be able to see it from the house, and you would only be able to see it from the road that the house is on for a split second as you drove by, but would be able to see it from the other road that runs east-west to the north of our house, but there is a 3.77 acre field between that road and our property, so every other year you wouldn't be able to see it from that road (when they have corn on the field vs. when they have beans on the field). If I got to the point where I put a pole-building over it to block the light then I could close that side in to make it so you wouldn't see it from that road either)... alternatively I would just reclaim another area of the field and expand the garden area out larger, but then there is more cleanup work to be done, more fencing to redo etc. and it would be more visible from our road...

Last week took a turn for the cold. It was below freezing one morning and close to it a few other days. Even though I had things covered for frost the freezing nights killed the tomato plants and basil. So I pulled everything. I need to pick a few things up before winter still but the garden is done for this year.



The Swiss chard was still good so I picked it and put it in the fridge.


Here's what's left of the tomatoes. Going to try to bag ripen them.


Then I moved on to the greenhouse. I decided to thin the tomato plants out to increase circulation and decrease mold issues.


I might have gone a bit overboard... I am going to finish cleaning it up then lower the vines down and coil them so they are down lower.



Here's what I cut out... Full wheelbarrow load.

Ah, the ambition. I have gone through much of the same thinking. Perhaps you could get your hours switched around so you have more day at home. I never did more than four days per week at the Internet place. That made a big difference having three days at home.

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33F outside this morning. Went to check the greenhouse temp, 45F. Haven't had much sun the past few days, sure hope we get some soon to warm it up in there.