I'm totally exhausted (but happy)

So we're ending our no dig market gardening training this weekend and forest raised pork on the barbecue tonight, pre cooked in the oven. It's going to be awesome. Look at these little illies. Crazy. Now, pollination's not been perfect, but it also hasn't been that bad. Look at these beauties. Look. Homemade beets and beans. I had a good weekend. Did you not have a good weekend? Yeah. Yay. Where the blue of the sea meets the sky and the big yellow sun leads me home. I love you. The waves of the sun as they fly and by the water sustains me without even trying the water can't drown the iron dust. So we're making smoked chicken again. Three kilos of salt to 30 liters of water and I'm doing 50 birds, just setting them off in brine and we'll be testing pulling the meat off next week and vacuum packing it. See how that goes. Well, six o' clock in the morning, slaughter day today. Just opening up the smoker. Look at that. So we've got the first 50 birds in here and a little smoked turkey for lunch. Very nice. We like it. These are birds that we discover. Got a vacuum packing machine. So we're going to pull the meat off these and weigh the meat to complete our daily set and then also start this trial of packaged already pulled meat that's going to be super convenient for either the end consumer but also for chefs, restaurants and as I've said in other videos, this is specifically for chefs that just want to be able to pull out meat for, for salads or sandwiches or whatever. But for cafes that can't handle raw chicken, it's a high risk product. It's a super convenient thing. So super happy about that. So we had a really good market garden training and lots of Norwegians and people from Belarus and from other localities, all from Europe pretty much, which is unusual. We often have people coming from all over the world for such courses. But really good time and focusing on tools, techniques and strategies and planning, but also on ecological principles. It's something we are quite heavy on because market gardening is needs a few shifts I think to really bring in a bit more soil care, a bit more ecological thinking, to take it to another level. It's definitely the most input intensive of all the different regenerative ag strategies and there's better ways to do so. We like to take the best of market garden planning and tools and techniques and apply that to good soil care. Keeping soil covered all the time and focusing on microbiology and the soil, not the Vegetables, Vegetables grow themselves, as I always like to say. But really good time, amazing people and some projects nearby that I want to go and see and document for this channel because there's some people doing some amazing work. Here's crooked neck jar, second to last slaughter and so we'll soon be done with all the chickens. Everything's ready to go in here and I expect to be done by lunchtime. We just had breakfast. We always start an hour earlier slaughter day just so we can be done with clean down, have a lunch and just feel like organized and able to take care of the rest of the farm chores. So we do an early egg collection today to fit in with the whole latime being in the processing because it's ultimately, if you are running at full capacity, we could have three eviscerating, three on clean down and do probably 150 birds an hour or something. But we typically have myself or two of us on evisceration and today we're going to be swapping a few people through to have a go at different stations that they haven't been on. But I expect to be done by lunch and then we're going to pull the chicken meat off the smoke birds and test out our new vacuum packing machine. You won't bite. Nice to meet you. So the penultimate slaughter is done, finished by lunch, which is great. And now we're just going to take out the smoked chicken and pick it apart. We are going to weigh the birds before and then weigh what we get out. Now we have decided not to make broth with the carcasses because it is actually quite smoky flavoured. It is not actually so nice for broth. We have done it before and we decided not to do that. We are packing a few fresh for customers and then we will take the rest and pull them apart and vacuum pack them down in one kilo bags. We also have an event coming on Saturday in a local town, big music event where we might serve some food and just have a bit of a relaxed market. And so we might save a few birds for that too. But we're basically going to work out the pricing from the data we get today. And we know that we lose 25% of the weight, about 23% through the process of smoking. Now, for those of you watching that are interested in this, bear in mind this is for our smoker and we soak birds for 24 hours in 10% brine. These are quite small birds we're just testing out on, but the smokery that you use will be very Different. In different cases, our birds remain really moist and tender and even with a long smoking period of about 20 hours. So you need to do that kind of research yourself, basically. But then now when we take the meat off, we'll know what we get off a bird and then we can judge by the number of minutes or hours it takes to do the process, what price we should put on the smoke birds. So some birds for private customers. And then this is our first smoked turkey from this year. Look at this beautiful bird. That's gonna be dinner one of these days. So we're taking the meat off the smoked chicken. So it's important to be super sterile and clean in here. This is a cooked meat product that's getting vacuum packed and then it's gonna be for sale. It's got a few months on freezer date. So really regularly we are sanitizing knives, sanitizing the top. We've sanitized ourselves really well up to the elbows. I'm all wearing clean clothes. Nicholas has polished his beard recently. But yeah, really important to work really sterile. It doesn't take long to take the meat off a smoked chicken and so I'm going to show you that now. So to take the meat out, we're not taking the skin off seat, I'm just pulling the leg. And because it's been cooked, you can really just peel off the flesh right down to the bone. Now the skin is not useful in the pre pack method we're going for. We can keep that because we can bake it and have it like a crackling. But actually what we want to do is make stock as far as we can. But it's not so good for selling because it's a bit smoky flavoured, but it's fine for us. So we'll just do that personal use. But the breast meat comes off really easily. We're just tearing that into pieces. You see, it's a very quick process to take the bird down and then that's basically going to allow a chef to prepare a smoked chicken salad or sandwich without any preparation other than chopping it up a bit finer if necessary. And so it's a way that's getting a value out of the bird, still having the carcass to make something else with and not actually adding too much labor to the process. So just finishing up the back end, you see, it's a very quick process to take down the bird. Very minimal wastage. So what we see weighing that, it started off as 1503, ended up 749. It's pretty much bang on. 50% of the carcass is meat. And so we're just going to do the same calculation for the remaining trays and that will allow us to see what the weight is. But it doesn't take long to take the meat off a bird which is really nice. So I'm happy with the product. Now this will give it up to a possible 6 months shelf life but we can choose to label it three months just to ensure it's an optimal quality. So this is going to get packed down and then we still have wings and skew that we can make into crackling and things. What we're gonna do is just look at 500 grams, 1 kilo 250 grams for consumers. Just see what it looks like and then we'll work on the price and get this stuff in the chiller. Just gotta learn how to use the machine. Lucky we got so many Germans here because this is a German machine with German instructions that seems pretty straightforward to use. Just using rolls of bagging so you can down to custom length. This is a 500 gram bag and so we're just playing with some ideas of pricing. So that's the end product of today's test chickens to pack now and they're going off to the freezer room and for delivery. And I've got a drive to Stockholm tomorrow it turns out because the delivery company that's taking a bunch of our frozen chickens to a distributor for a food box near Stockholm as a one off sort of special treat has totally let us down. Swedish logistics is not my favorite thing to work with to be fair. So I'm gonna just have to drive all the way to Stockholm but I'm gonna use the opportunity to check in on a couple of friends and hopefully come back with a load of Azola for our pond which I'm excited about. And yeah, have a just long day in the car thinking and come back with some useful resources from where we used to live near Stockholm. Well it's time for everything to be going back on the fleece pretty much it's going down to four or five degrees at night. Feels really cold sometimes and especially when it's contrasted with 20 degrees in a day or whatever. And yeah it's. That's the limit of the short season. I think a lot of people are not from here that come here just quite wrap their head around just how short our season is. I mean we could be getting frost in any time in two or three weeks from now. Now there's new Seedlings going on in the tunnels and we've got some nice carrots developing here and it's really that time. Now you've got to get the last crops in for the year to make sure that you are able to get your last crop out as it were. We've been talking a lot this weekend at the market garden training about, you know, designing your first and last vegetable plans entirely. First and last boxes. If you sell like that so you know that you can meet that supply. Because in the middle of the year it's easy to have way too much. Here's some yellow sticky chunks. You see just how effective they are against flea beetle. Now we have a multi prong strategy with flea beetles. It doesn't always work because the Brassica is just hammered here in Sweden. But one thing is insect nets straight on the bed as soon as something is seeded and you know to try and really keep it down well. And then the next part of the strategy is diatomaceous earth which we use ideally you want to put that on like four or five days before seeding. Part of their life cycle is in the soil so you want to be able to get the juveniles while they're still in the ground insect net. And then things like these yellow sticky traps are really good. They, they're really attracted to them and so that's something to keep on top of. But yeah, some nice cabbages coming on. We'll be making sauerkraut soon but these cold nights and foggy mornings that are typical this time of year are coming back and it can be beautiful. Walking out down to the cows. You might just see in the background there and you just see Clovermay's face coming out of the mist and the sun quickly burns it off after breakfast. It's a very special time of year. I often really enjoy those days. It's a different sound in the valley. We have a lot of interesting echoing sounds because of the way the forest and the valleys and ridges are and beautiful bird calls along the valley and echoing up through misty meadows. It's a wonderful time of year and I'm really, yeah, really ready for things to slow down a bit. It's been a busy year and we're all tired, you know, everyone's tired here. I'm tired and we need to make some new plans for next season. Things can be a bit different. I'm thinking to bring back internship program. I really see the need for people to spend longer term mentorship under myself and so I think we need to restructure things in a way that allows me more time on the ground. Because this year, like people have often have desire to actually sit and plan and train around certain aspects and it's just too busy. I need to be running around the entire day. Eggs is coming in, chickens getting packed behind me. They're off to town this evening after dinner. So thanks so much for watching folks. Just a little update there and I'm really grateful and appreciative of all of you who follow along so regularly with our channel and comment and feedback and it keeps me inspired to keep doing this and I know a lot of you gain a lot of benefit from it and I think you can see I'm pretty tired. And yeah, it's that time of the year when the mist starts coming in and the cold mornings come back and we need more sleep. And yeah, as things quieten down on the farm that that becomes possible. I just wanted to remind you folks that we'll be in Ireland in about a month's time. We're doing a 10 day regenerative agriculture training there and I know there's not so much of that happening there, so I really hope some of you come down. If you're nearby in Europe, then come and see us there. It's going to be an amazing place to host such a training with some amazing people. So do come on down to that. I'd love to meet you there. And thanks so much for watching folks. You can find out a whole bunch more in our links below and we'll see you in the next video.