One thing we’ve learned in our homesteading journey is lot of planning goes into harvesting and storing food. We have had to make a few adjustments (like adding extra freezers and dedicating a room to prepping and storing canned and dry goods).

Hunting season is in full swing but we had to finish up with processing the meat birds before we could even begin to think about putting a deer or elk in one of the freezers.

That is if we even get one. Which is why it’s a good thing we raise a lot of our own meat, just in case we come up empty handed trying to get something out there in the wild.

That’s the thing about hunting and fishing. There are no guarantees, even when you live in prime hunting and fishing country!

We spent yesterday afternoon dispatching some ducks and the rest of the cornish cross. It’s a good thing we waited because this was the smallest one…

Some of them were close to 10lbs! 😮

We both agreed that the chicken plucker was one of the best investments we’ve made so far.

Since we plan to process our own deer (or elk), we needed a better vacuum sealer so we picked this one up at Cabela’s the other day and wow!

What a difference! A perfect seal every single time.

The Food Saver we replaced worked okay but it didn’t want to seal every single time and we wasted a lot of plastic bags trying to get it to, which was frustrating because they are expensive. I’ll keep it in the pantry room so I can use it for vacuum sealing jars since it’s great for that.

So now for winter we are down to just our layer hens, Fred and his breeder girls and our small flock of pheasants. The warming lights are up and they’re all ready to settle in until spring.

Who knows what spring will bring, though. The hubs has been talking about investing in a calf which we’ll keep somewhere else since we don’t have the room for one here. Our neighbors have pasture for rent so we could keep it there, if we decide to do that.

It sure would be nice to raise our own grass fed beef.

Of course we’ll need another freezer for that.

We’ll see.

One thing at a time. 🙂