Day Thirteen

Fresh Squeezed OJ

I love Saturdays.  I don't have to go any where, and I didn't.  Jennifer and I and Drake had fresh squeezed Orange Juice and a hard boiled egg for breakfast.

I loved gardening today.  White pineapples ripen in late summer in Hawaii.  After harvesting the fruit there is a lot of new planting material to make new pineapples for next year including all the tops, suckers and the keikis from under the fruits.  Therefore I really needed to plant my new pineapple bed.  I laid down weed mat over a prepared garden including a top layer of IMO #4.  The weed mat should prevent the pesky Wainaku Grass and other weeds from coming up.  Pineapples take a year to fruit and weeding them is a royal pain.  Hopefully this works out.  The bed is four feet wide and about 40 feet in length.  Next August we'll have over a hundred  super sweet white pineapples which make the very best dried fruit treats.

I also harvested an older chicken today, my first meat in two weeks.  This is really the cycle of life on a farm.  If you don't eat meat, skip this.  If you do eat meat, this is how it is done, but by someone you don't know, probably in a factory.  Doing this myself gives me respect for the animals that I take for my nourishment as well as being assured that the animal was raised naturally without antibiotics or any other food factory tricks.

I grabbed a bird, hung it up side down by it's feet and it becomes calm.  Then I cut it's juggler vein with a knife and in a few short minutes it bleeds to death.  The next step is to dip the whole bird in some just boiled water for about two minutes to loosen the feathers.  Then it is easy to pluck the feathers off.  The next step is to remove all the organs and soon you have a bird like you see in the picture below or on your supermarket shelf.

before

after

I chopped this bird into my black eye pea and tomato soup.  That was dinner. Yumm!

Lunch was taro chunks which I am becoming quite fond of as it fills me up.