Yesterday we butchered out first turkeys. We did 1 tom and 1 hen. Things didn't go so bad. Of coarse I was so nervous and a little sad. I had grown a little attached to these guys. It wasn't like raising the meat chickens for me. When we raised the meat chickens I didn't grow attached, it seems like they were in and out so fast. We've had the turkeys for 5 months. So here's how we did it...First we started heating the water with our turkey fryer and had to pour it into a cut off rain barrel because the fryer wasn't big enough to scald the turkeys in. I also turned up our hot water heater and used the water from that. Once that was done we tied the turkeys legs together and put them into feed bags with their heads sticking out the other end. You get the idea...right? To keep them from flapping around. They didn't even move a muscle. They just layed there. My husband layed their heads inbetween two nails and used an axe to take there heads off. He said the feed bags worked really well to keep them from moving around afterwards. Then we just scalded them and plucked. Plucking was a little harder than meat chickens but pretty much the same. For some reason my finger tips are really sore from plucking feathers today which doesn't happen when I pluck meat chickens. When we gutted them we expected to find a crop, but to our surprise I guess turkeys don't have one. Not hardly any guts compared to chickens either. Our Tom dressed out at 30lbs not sure what our hen is yet. Can wait to put them in the oven. Here is a picture of our tom with my 2 year old. I never thought he would be that big.
