Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Pumpkin Patch Field Trip

 
Pumpkins as far as you could see.  It looked like a field of basketballs.  This is a farm that grows pumpkins that are sold at stores out front in the big boxes.  In our area, if it says that the pumpkins are locally grown they came from these fields.  The pumpkins shown here are the left overs.  There was an early frost so some of them froze and I am not sure why the rest were passed over.
 
   
 
All the kids minus two.  The little girl that Dancer is holding is a baby that one of the families takes care of.  The highlight of Dancer's week is getting to play with her and she holds her every moment she gets.
 
 
Back to a member's house to carve all those pumpkins.
 
 
 
Checked out their llamas and alpacas.  I loved the expression the middle llama was giving Spark. 
 
 
They are quite large but on the plus side they only poo in one place, unlike a goat who goes where ever, and they don't smell.  Although they don't have any males that aren't gelded so they don't have those hormones flying around like we do with the goats.
 



The family cleaned 50 chickens this fall and then when everything was all put away they realized that they only cleaned 49.  The mom was saying how now they would have to haul everything back out and heat up boiling water to pluck and clean "a" chicken.  Dad told her about how we have had success with sticking the air compressor nozzle in the under the chicken skin and loosing it enough to easily peel the skin off.  "Let's do it!" she said right away.  Her son and Spark headed out to cut off the head and bleed it out with the air compressor humming away.  Dad stuck the nozzle under the skin and the bird blew up, that is why the legs are sticking up like that.  The air compressor was set on 120 pounds and we usually have ours set on 90 pounds for using the stapler or nailer.  We learned when the bird "popped" that 120 pounds is a bit too much pressure.

 
The kids finished cleaning the bird and dug out all the entrails to find all the parts since we had just done anatomy in our co-op last year. 

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