These Little Piggies Didn't Go to Market

Tomorrow we flip the calendar to May first - which around here means it's time to call our local pig farmer and see if he has some weaners for sale (meaning weaned piglets, not hot dogs). 😉 I had hoped to keep you updated on our three little pigs in 2017, but with selling our old house, hunting for our new one, packing, unpacking, and still homeschooling and making three meals a day (mostly) from scratch, my poor little blog got neglected. As far as I can remember, everything went smoothly, and we enjoyed our home-raised ham and bacon.

Fast forward to spring of 2018, as we were still settling into our new house and eagerly watching the snow melt and reveal new suprises on the property (including an apple tree hidden in the woods!) We brought the chickens home, transplanted some blueberry, raspberry, elderberry, and hazelnut bushes from our old house, and even managed to plant a few tomatoes.

Things were looking more and more like a homestead, so much so that in June I decided we could probably even manage to raise a couple of pigs. We almost couldn't find any because it was so late in the year already, but the farmer we'd bought from the year before had a cancellation, and so we we were able to bring home our girls - Maple and Hickory (a hint to my husband that I was hoping to get a smoker for my birthday in the fall). 😉

The summer progressed and the pigs grew just like they were supposed to. Since we'd gotten them late, we would have them longer into the fall, and I was excited to see if we could take a cut out of their feed costs by feeding them products from our new property. One of the first things we used was acorns from the oak trees in our woods. The apple tree we'd found in the spring also bore abundantly that fall, and anything the kids wouldn't eat went to the pigs.

We were very blessed to have friends who were willing to share their bounty with us that summer - at least four ladies called us up and asked if we could use apples from their trees, and were delighted when we volunteered to gather the wormy windfalls to fatten up the pigs. The chickens were delighted, too, to clean up what the pigs left behind - we gleaned so many that our porkers couldn't even eat them all! 

We weren't able to have much of a garden that first year on the new land, but I did manage to squeeze in a butternut squash plant and some cucumbers near the tomatoes. The squash did amazing - we harvested everything that was ripe before the fall frost, and everything that didn't have time to ripen we cooked up and fed to the pigs. And of course if I found an over-ripe cucumber or a tomato too blemished for us to eat, I'd lob it straight into their pen.

A month before our planned processing date, I called the butcher shop, only to find that instead of processing my pigs in early October, as I'd planned, they were booked until early November and wouldn't be able to pick up my pigs until then. I cringed at the thought of feeding two full-grown pigs for an extra month (at that age they're eating a LOT of feed - that extra month would end up costing me over $300), but what could I do?

Then, when butchering day finally did arrive, I was shocked to get a call from the butcher asking when we would be bringing our pigs in. I had specifically asked for on-farm slaughter, since I had no way of transporting them. I explained this, in desperate tones, to the butcher, and he told me he'd see when he could get me on the schedule and give me a call back. 

He didn't call back. 

I called him, daily, and he kept putting me off, while I got more and more desperate.

Meanwhile, friends of ours, who'd purchased their pigs at the same time we'd gotten ours, were planning a butchering party. A member of their church was a retired butcher, and had agreed to show them (and any interested friends, like me) how it was done. I jumped at the chance, and the kids and I spent two days learning just what it took to process a hog.

At that time, we still held out hope that the butcher would pull through for us - my husband really wanted to avoid the stress and mess and just hire out the job. But after the butcher put us off twice more, he finally gave in and said we were going to have to do it ourselves (before we went broke from buying pig feed!)

We headed over to our local Farm & Fleet store and bought what supplies we thought we needed - a pair of gambrels, tow straps, a clean reciprocating saw blade to halve the carcasses, and the smoker I'd been hoping for (a couple of weeks late for my birthday, but I was OK with that!) I was pleased to see that the cost of the supplies added up to less than what we would have paid for processing, so at least we weren't getting any farther behind as far as money was concerned. But we still had a big job ahead of us, and with each purchase the fact became more and more real - we really were going to do this!

Hearing the anxiety in my voice as I told my friends about our decision, they volunteered to help us out. My 18-year old son and his buddy did the actual killing and gutting (his friend's deer hunting experience was very helpful for this), his mother, sister, and my girls helped with the skinning and cleaning, and I got to be manager and facilitator (that's a fancy way of saying go-fer) 😉 for the operation. 

My daughters helping out with removing the hide

We left the carcasses to hang overnight (shooing our kitten out of his normal spot in the garage and locking him in the workshop) and finished processing the cuts the next day. Another friend came to help me with wrapping the cuts in the kitchen, while the rest of the crew did the cutting up outside. The only major hitch they ran into was cutting up the pork chops - we didn't feel like we could do the job safely with either the handsaw I'd bought nor our reciprocating saw, so the chops went into the freezer unchopped, in one big chunk (where they're still waiting to be cut up, almost six months later . . .)

When all was said and done, after two long, anxious days of hard work, we had 300 pounds of organic pork safely stored in our freezers. It was a big job, and one I definitely wouldn't want to do every day, but all in all it went much better than I'd feared, thanks to the help and support of my husband (who financed the whole operation), our kids, and our wonderful friends. 


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