Chickens for 10-20 years or more? Pull up a rockin' chair and lay some wisdom on us!

[thedragonlady]

Someone's sig says "a dog on someone else's property is a pet. A dog on my property is a predator." Not sure whose it is, but I now live by this and I WILL SSS if it comes down to it. I'm a dog lover, but my chickens are pretty much defenseless and I will not tolerate a massacre. I might run Al's situation past them, and the fact that I lost two chickens to my young pup while he "played" with them is evidence as well. We all have stories. No untrained dogs around my chickens - my own dog was even banished from them for a few months.
Funny story on why I say chickens are pretty much defenseless but not totally defenseless: a friend just adopted a full grown dobie and took him home to the family farm for a visit. That dog took off after the chickens and no sooner had 5 roosters on him. Chickens all alive and well, dobie to the vet for stitches! He now avoids the chickens at all cost. Maybe I can get their number and offer them up for dog training!
Arienwolf- Tork is BEAUTIFUL!
Canning: I mentioned at work this summer that I was interested in learning to can my excess tomatoes and within a week had TWO free pressure cookers, a hot water bath, and boxes of jars delivered from 3 different people. I didn't need to buy a thing. They even have me their canning books. Ask around! You may be able to find one cheap or even free. I agree x10 about the risk of botulism being increased by the hot water bath. Yes, pressure canners can produce botulism too especially if jars are not properly sanitized to begin with or not properly sealed. Read up on it

Anybody who cans should buy a copy of "Putting Food By". It tells you how to safely preserve ANYTHING. My copy is tattered from years of use. Remember that Botulism is a clostridium , as is tetanus, which only grows in the absence of air. It will thrive in a water bathed jar of meat , but rarely in pressure canned meat, due to the contents reaching a much higher temperature. Don't fool around canning.

 

[bobbi-j]

Bee and Al - I will admit I have never personally known anyone who has died from botulism by water-bath canning. I was not raised in a household where canning was done. I had to learn myself, and only know what I've gleaned from the canning books, university extension material, etc. I'll admit I'm not an experienced canner, only having done it for 20-some years and haven't grown up with generations of people doing it. I can meat, veggies, jellies and jams. And my sons all know their way around the kitchen and real food. Never have had a lot of pre-packaged food around here. 'Nuff said. I will leave any and all future comments on canning to those who are more experienced than I.

 

[Leahs Mom]

Can you then rehydrate it? Chicken jerky just doesn't sound good.

Yes - you can cook w/dehydrated meats just like you can cook w/dehydrated fruits/veggies. Just rehydrate. Some of the dehydrating books will give the specifics on how to do that - especially the ones that deal with putting together backpacking meals (stews, etc.). Campers/backpackers who go wilderness like to dehydrate to keep their packs light.

 

[galanie]

A while back I dried some cooked chicken in my old RONCO! food dehydrator. I did it just to see how it would come out. It wasn't like "jerky" it was crispy and easily crushed to powder. Which was the point, I wanted to see if it would.

As for canning, just be aware of the risks and do as you will. But DO be aware of the risk. I've not known anyone to get sick from water bath canned meat either. But then I never knew anyone that did it. I can meat but I have 3 different pressure canners here of different sizes. They were mom's.

(Mom would have been close to 100 if she were still around - and from east Tennessee. But a city girl nonetheless.)

 

[NikkiMiChickie]

Thanks for the UTI advice - she'll be outside all day today, but my mother refuses to allow her out at night while I'm here. Oh well

I grew up eating preserved food from my great grandmother, grandmother, and mother. They all (even the great-grandmothers in the last years of their lives, maybe not back in the day, nut they did switch over) used pressure canners with non-acidic foods. I agree with Bee that if the food, jars and lids are handled properly from the beginning then it shouldn't be a problem, but being a newbie canner myself, I follow my grandma's directions and use the pressure canner. Funny how there's so much conflicting information on the same subject. Bottom line: if the jar doesn't seal, or you open it up and give it a whiff and it smells off, don't eat it. Otherwise, home canned food is a pleasure all year long!

I'd take delisha up on her pm offer -- it's always good to have a real person - not just a book - to ask questions. Can't tell you how many times I called my mom, grandma and friend who cans this fall while trying to make sure I did everything right and random questions would send me running to the phone

 

[NikkiMiChickie]

After all how do you explain what a whisk is to a 20 something yr old mom with a 3 yr old who's entire vocabulary consist of words like ...................... Whateveeerrrr, Like and like and like, dude,   LOL. you think I am kidding?? I'm not.

Al, I teach middle school.....

Not only do THEY have the vocabulary of a 13-year-old Justin Bieber fan, but SO often, their parent does too.

When my students give speeches in class, I have the audience keep a tally of the number of likes, ums, and the like. It's an eye opening experience for the speaker when they receive the grand total of 23 likes and 47 ums in a 3 minute speech.....

 

[Ridgerunner]

I like to look up statistics so I have a bit of a better handle on what I’m talking about. According to the CDC there are around 20 to 25 cases of food-born botulism reported each year. Most of those cases are from home canning. About 8% of those that get it die, which would mean maybe 2 people die a year. It used to be 50% but medicine has improved. Let’s see. 300,000,000 people in the US now and 2 die a year. Nope. I didn’t know either of them for this year.

I have no idea how many people do home canning or how many of those water bath green beans instead of pressure can. I have no idea how many of the 20 to 25 people that get it from food got it from water bath canning, pressure canning, or just from eating food that had not been canned. They just said most was from home canning.

I see this as another one of those things where there is a big difference in what can happen versus what will happen. The scientists have put botulism in food and run it through different canning techniques, then checked to see where it survived. Or they know that botulism is killed at a specific temperature so they test them to see how long you have to keep a specific food under pressure to reach that temperature. Botulism won’t grow in some foods like pickles and jelly so they say you can water bath them. For the others they give recommendations for how long you need to keep them at pressure to get them hot enough to kill the botulism organism. Then they recommend you boil most canned food after you open it in case it grew anyway. That’s why there is a world of difference in fresh green beans and canned green beans. They are overcooked to start with when you can them, then you boil them some more.

Why do they recommend this? They don’t know where the stuff we can comes from. They don’t know how it is handled. They don’t know how clean you got your jars. They don’t know if botulism is present or not when you can. There’s a lot of stuff they don’t know so they have to assume you screwed up and that it is present. That’s their starting point. Can you imagine the public outcry if the government published recommendations on how to do it and those recommendations were set up where they knew some people could die but most won’t? As always, the people most at risk are the young, old, and weak.

Those recommendations have to shoot for zero percent of people getting sick from botulism. Nothing else is going to be acceptable to the general public or the lawyers that review the Ball Blue Book.

Do what you want. That’s your business. My granddaughter eats stuff that I can. I’ll pressure can green beans, corn, soup, stuff like that. And I’ll follow the recommended times. I’ll water bath pickles, jams, stuff like that. Not because of something that absolutely will happen but because of something that can happen, however unlikely. My granddaughter is too precious to me to take even a small chance when it is so easy to avoid. To me, that is just taking reasonable precautions.

 

[galanie]

I like it when Bee get's all riled up over a subject, I can even imagine smoke coming out of her ears LOL.
I agree though about not worrying your head off over getting sick from home canning, if done properly you needant worry. We can here at home by the cases and often and have never even once came close to throwing out a batch and that's been years and years. The scare tactics started when the current 40-50 yr old mom's who have children but refused to make time to teach them the way around the kitchen and real food, not the stuff that just comes off the shelf at the corner market. So now we are left with the 20-30 yr old moms with a kitchen full of overly processed tasteless foods and still need to read the 2 paragraphs of directions on the back every time they make them LOL. They hold in very high regard the large box that sit's so convienantly on the counter on it own alter shrine they call they the microwave, generation X calls it the stove LOL. In a few years they won't even sell real ovens in stores, you'll have to buy them off the antiques section on e-bay LOL.

What is happening here is very sad, you call us OT's like were some kind of dinosaur but we don't have to search the internet just to make a simple dinner of real food, and we don't listen to the idiot people on TV that say everything in the world that doesn't come in a box is bad for you either. I almost stopped handing out recipe directions on forums and such when people ask because in the directions i give calls for some basic knowledge kitchen utensils and technics. and after they read the recipe they ask wellll can't I just put it in the microwave for like 30 seconds LOL NO NO NO NO. After all how do you explain what a whisk is to a 20 something yr old mom with a 3 yr old who's entire vocabulary consist of words like ...................... Whateveeerrrr, Like and like and like, dude,   LOL. you think I am kidding?? I'm not.

Anyway for those of you that want to try and can, go ahead you'll love it and have fun too, don't listen to the nay sayers, listen to somebody who actually knows where the kitchen is LOL.

Bee   You go girl !!!.

Like, dude. Like ur 2 hard on us. Like chill. dude. A few months ago my son couldn't figure out why his biscuits were like rocks. I asked if he cut in the shortening. He hadn't a clue what I was talking about. He promptly got shown three different ways to do it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Galanie, my mother also grew up in East Tennessee. It wouldn't be quite right to say she grew up way back in the hills. Dad grew up on top of a hill. Mom was further back, up a holler.

Mom water bath canned some stuff. She pressure canned some stuff. Not every granny that grew up in the depression was limited to water bath canning.

Galanie, I realize I did not phrase that well. I should have said something like
Just like yours, my Mom sometimes pressure canend and sometimes water bath canned.

 

[smyers32]

Wow, I had no idea people felt so strongly about canning methods!!! Like I said, I know nothing about it, I wasn't even sure if there was a way to can without a pressure canner. Thank you everyone for your thoughtful input, I appreciate it all. I will ask my Ganny if she has one I can have, she won't be needing it in the 'home'. It sounds like I need to do a lot more research before I delve into canning.