Starting Over - Again

You may have noticed that it's been quiet on the blog for a while. Part of that is because I've been putting more effort into my Ruth's Homemade business (click the link to see what I've been up to over there), but mostly it's because (surprise!) we moved again. Our last move was only three years ago (just enough time to start to get things humming on the homestead). The log house, though beautiful, ended up needing a lot more money invested in it than we had anticipated, and so one June evening we decided we should try to sell it. The very next day, a friend asked if we knew anyone in the area who was selling a home in the in our area with some acreage! One thing led to another, and in a matter of weeks we had a buyer lined up (after explaining very carefully just what they were getting into! We didn't want someone else to end up unprepared like we were).

Unfortunately, the market that made it easy for us to sell made it more challenging when we were looking for something to buy. "In the country with a little land" seemed to be what everyone was looking for in the summer of 2020 (one house we looked at - on the day it came on the market - had three offers (over the asking price) before we looked at it at noon!) But eventually we found a place with some acreage, a few outbuildings (including a chicken coop and garden shed!), and a house that all seven of us (plus our German shepherd and two cats) could fit into.

We hadn't been planning to move; our first really serious thoughts of selling were on that June evening. So in the spring I had planted the garden, bought feeder pigs and meat chickens, and generally did all of my normal spring homestead planning. When we closed on the house mid-August, all of that needed to be either moved or harvested – which meant that in addition to packing, I needed to do all of the canning, freezing, dehydrating, etc. that a normal garden season required. I didn’t get many tomatoes, but I put up all of the carrots, potatoes, cucumbers, beans, onions, and herbs that I could (I am so thankful for my five helpful teenagers! I don't know how I would have done it without them!) We processed the meat chickens the weekend before the move, but we had to move the pigs to the new farm (that ended up being quite the story! We’d never moved pigs before (we’d always put them down on-farm) so although we’d read horror stories of moving pigs, we didn’t really know what we were getting into!)

Finally, the closing date came, and whatever we hadn’t harvested had to be left behind. But now we had to put in the perennials we’d dug up to move with us – I had a couple elderberry bushes and an ice cream bucket full of Egyptian walking onions from my brother (the granddaughters of some I’d given him a couple years ago), and my 14 year old daughter had been assiduously tending a few dozen "daughters" from her strawberry plants. So now we had to hurry up and prepare a place for them!

I saved all of the cardboard moving boxes that I could, and a friend had some old, otherwise-useless hay. I used these to cover a 50'x40' patch of grass for a new garden spot. We laid out the basic plan for the new garden beds and put up fencing to keep the chickens out (otherwise they would make a mess of the mulch, not to mention digging my daughter’s strawberries!) By the time the ground froze, we had a good start on the spring garden. We were even able to get in a late planting of spinach!

We spent the winter settling into the house - and of course, planning for spring! We have apple, plum, and pear trees ordered, as well as cherry bushes, blueberries, raspberries, and a mulberry tree. It's hard not to try to replace everything we had built up at our old house right away - we'd like to get our new place producing food as quickly as possible - but we can only afford to do so much.

We're hoping to set up a permaculture food forest, following some of the ideas on Stefan Sobkowiak's YouTube channel (although I still have to sigh every time I realize that even though he's in Canada, he still has a better growing zone than I do!) The east side of the property was planted in field corn when we moved in, leased to a neighboring farmer. He harvested it in November, so now we have almost 5 acres of blank slate to fill up this spring. Only a small part of that will be orchard; we're also hoping to use some of it for pasture and a start to a future woodlot (including maple trees - it broke my heart to sit on the sidelines during maple syrup season this year!) My daughter is planting a corner of the old cornfield into a food plot for the chickens, rabbits, and pigs - and also hoping to keep the local deer population coming around (she put two of them in our freezer using her crossbow this fall!)

And now, ready or not, it's spring - I have eggs in the incubator and trays of seeds coming up under grow lights in the sunroom. My homestead project list is a mile long (which is a good thing - if I wasn't keeping busy with infrastructure work, I'd be planting seeds outside much too early - again!) 

As much as I hate losing all of the work I put in at the last farm, I'm trying to focus on the excitement of setting up our new place - fresh with no mistakes in it (yet!) I keep reminding myself that each time I start over, I have the chance to make the garden better from the start, with nothing to re-do or fix later. My daughter commented this spring, "This is our best garden ever!" - and it was. It took three years to get it to that point - maybe on this property I'll make it there in two. Sounds like a worthy challenge to me!

Have you ever had to leave a garden behind? What was the first thing you set up on your new place? Comment below and let me know how you made the transition!

Homestead Holiday Letter 2019

It’s the time of year when cards and letters from family and friends start dropping into our mailbox. My favorite letter each year is always from an older couple who have a hobby farm on the other side of town. We don’t see them often, but we exchange letters every year. What I like best about their letter is that it relates what none of our other friends write in their letters – how their garden did, projects they’re working on, and general home-spun humor.

So, in case there’s another crazy farm lady (or guy) out there who thinks the same, here’s my Homestead Holiday Letter for 2019.

My 2018 garden - adding more space for 2019

This year was our first full year on the homestead. In 2018 we basically had a smaller version of what we’d left at the old house – our laying hens, a batch of broilers, a couple of pigs, and a little bit of a garden (a few cucumbers, a butternut squash, and just enough tomatoes to keep up with what my daughter would grab and eat when she walked through the garden). Most of my energy was spent on getting settled into the house.

In 2019, with the house a little more organized, I got more serious. The fall before, I’d expanded my garden footprint to about three times its previous size by laying down cardboard and covering it with a deep layer of leaves and grass clippings. I let the chickens run through it all winter, so the soil was well fed and ready to plant in the spring.

Planning the 2019 garden

I rebuilt my mini-greenhouse (the flimsy metal frame had crumpled under the weight of the squash I tried to store on it over the winter in 2016) and started most of my garden seeds indoors, since I’d learned that transplants are easier to plant into deep mulch. I’d only done this haphazardly before, starting what I guessed would be a good number of seeds about 6 weeks before our last frost date. This year I took some extra time and planned out how many of each plant I needed for each bed, which companion flowers and herbs would benefit each vegetable, and made a seed starting schedule.  (You can see my basic seed starting plan by clicking here). I really think planning made the biggest difference in the garden this year. It may seem counter intuitive, but my work indoors in January had the biggest effect on my harvest in the fall.

Making maple syrup in the snowy March weather

With my seed schedule set, starting my seedlings was easy, which left time in March for trying something new. I’d taken a class on making maple syrup, and I’d tagged as many maple trees as I could identify in the fall, so it was time to put that information into practice. I set up a little trial-size boiling station in the garden (hoping the ash from the small fires would help fortify the soil even more) and set to work. It was fun to try something new, and a great excuse to sit around a campfire two or three times a week. When all was said and done, I’d made a little over 3 gallons of maple syrup, which was just enough to cover the cost of the supplies I’d purchased. I look forward to making even more syrup this year - now that I know what I’m doing! And this year, it will all be free, since I saved enough making syrup last year to offset the cost of the infrastructure! (You can read about my maple syrup adventures by clicking here, here, here, or here).

Getting the garden ready

Syruping finished up in April, which left a little time for Easter travels before it was time to start garden prep. We needed to mark off the garden beds (I used as many straight(ish) logs from the woods as I could haul over for borders for my beds), scrape the good compost off of the paths and into the beds (it was all one big chicken-scattered bed after the winter), lay down another layer of paper mulch (we’d saved up our feed sacks from the pigs and chickens the year before, so we had a good stash – but even so, we didn’t have as many as we would have liked), cover the paper on the paths with pine needles, and add strips of compost where I was going to be planting seeds (a friend from church brought over a dump trailer full of broken down manure from their beef cattle barn – leading me to wonder what exactly it said about me that one of my most-appreciated gifts of the year was a literal load of crap!)

Apple blossoms on our one year old tree

May, as always, came with a rush – baby bunnies and baby chicks to cuddle and care for, baby garden plants to be hardened off and planted outside, homeschool classes to finish up and field trips to take. It was a wet spring, and the wildflowers were spectacular (the not-so wildflowers on the apple and plum trees were also wonderful). In the middle of all of this rush, I injured myself (not moving logs or hauling feed bags, but moving furniture to wash the living room floor!) I had a herniated disk in my lower spine, which put me out of commission for most of the summer.

Thankfully, my daughters really stepped up and helped out. My youngest daughter, in particular, took on the bulk of the outdoor responsibilities. She fed the laying hens every day, collected eggs, and raised the broilers pretty much single-handedly (and did a great job – probably better than I’ve done!) 

Harvesting wild strawberries

She also took upon herself to forage as much food as she could, hunting out wild mushrooms (after carefully identifying them, of course!), wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, elderberries, rose hips, and hazelnuts from our property and along the side of our country road.

My oldest daughter decided that she would be in charge of the tomatoes (which only made sense, since she ate most of them!) We had a little under 20 plants this year, and although she didn’t tend them as carefully as I would have, she did a good job and we ended up canning a good amount (read: it’s almost January and they aren’t all gone yet – a new record!)

My middle daughter took over raising the pigs, which was a major undertaking, since we move our pig pen (four 16-foot hog panels lashed together at the corners, with an old truck topper for shelter) at minimum every 10 days, depending on how much they tear up the ground (toward butcher time it’s almost every day). The pigs ended up a little smaller than usual, but without her help we wouldn’t have had them at all, so I’m very grateful for her efforts!

As you can imagine, with four teenagers in the house (all five will be teenagers this coming year!) we had a busy summer. They discovered sailing, and took their little boats out as often as they could manage. We also took a stay-cation this summer, seeing as much of our little corner of the world as we could fit in over the course of a week. On our last day, a record-breaking storm went through our area, so after our relaxing week we had a week of hard work cleaning up downed trees (a task my husband is still working hard on – turning all of that destruction into firewood!)  

In August, our energy turned to harvesting and enjoying the fruits of our labor. We had enough corn for two big meals of corn on the cob, quarts and quarts of pickles and dilly beans, and just when we thought we could handle the bounty, the apples were ripe. Our own trees are too small to bear (we planted them in 2018 – the first spring we lived here), but friends offered us their surplus and we took advantage of the opportunity. What the kids didn’t eat out of hand we made into applesauce, apple jelly, apple cider vinegar, and apple pie filling  until we ran out of jars, and made the rest into cider. The skins, cores, and wormy apples went to the pigs and chickens to be turned into bacon and eggs.(You can read my post about how many things you can make all from the same apples by clicking here)

Our last harvest of the year was our pumpkins. My middle daughter (who also tended the pigs this summer) always claims the privilege of raising our carving pumpkins every year. They must have liked the mulch, because they were huge – too big to reach my arms around – and prolific – we ended up with about a dozen that size! Needless to say, the kids had a great time carving those giants this fall!

Now the garden is all snug under its blanket of snow, waiting for spring so that the chickens can again clean out all of the over-wintered bugs and add their little packets of fertilizer before I shut them out for the summer growing season. I love how God made all of the seasons so different, so that we can enjoy each one as it comes around again. Each has its own challenges and joys, beginning with hope and excitement and usually ending with an exhausted farmer ready to move on to the next thing!

I’d like to wish each of you reading this a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – may your harvest be bountiful, your animals stay healthy, and your family grow in love and productiveness!

Drop a line in the comment section below and let me know how your homestead did this year, whether it's a pot of herbs on your windowsill or a farm on 100 acres! I love to hear what everyone is up to!

Homemade Sausage Seasoning

A friend asked me about making sausage from home-raised pigs, and I realized I hadn't posted my breakfast sausage recipe yet! I've been using it for years, so I can readily vouch that it's been well tried and tested!

This recipe makes 2 tablespoons of seasoning, which is enough for about 2 pounds of sausage. Feel free to multiply or divide it as you like - I usually make a big batch so I always have some on hand.

Sausage Seasoning

2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp marjoram
1/4 tsp savory
1/8 tsp ginger
pinch cloves and red pepper

Mix it all together, and it's ready to use! I generally mix my seasonings in when I fry up my sausage, but if you prefer you can certainly mix it in when you grind your meat, too. 

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

Independence Day is coming up this Thursday, and in true American fashion, we will be grilling out. And since our great state is Wisconsin, what we'll grilling will be brats. If you love brats as much as we do, but also hate all of the MSG, nitrates, etc. in most brats as much as we do, then I'm here to share the joy I've found with you.

I should note that these are infinitely customizable - feel free to add cheddar, jalapeno, or whatever you like. Our local brat shop - Louie's Finer Meats in Cumberland, Wisconsin - offers a dizzying array of specialty brats featuring everything from onion and garlic to cranberries, blue cheese, and wild rice (my favorites are the blueberry and cheddar and the mushroom and swiss).

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

3 pounds of ground pork or beef (include at least half a pound of pork fat in that total)
1 Tbsp salt
2 tsp ground white pepper
1 tsp dried marjoram
1/2 tsp caraway seed
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 Tbsp minced fresh garlic
(2 tsp red pepper flakes optional)
Stuff casings according to manufacturer's direction. Can be frozen, or grill and serve.

My husband also likes to "hot tub" marinade his brats before grilling - he puts the brats in a crock pot set to low, then adds a bottle of beer and a sliced onion.

Enjoy your summer cookouts, and have a happy Independence Day!

Our 2019 Three Little Pigs

You can probably tell by the last few posts that I've been very excited to get pigs again this year. Not only are they a source of organic, pastured, chemical-free ham and bacon, but they are a great money-saver for our large family as well. So you can imagine how excited I was yesterday when our "pig guy" called and said he finally had a couple of pigs available for us! Usually we try to get our pigs mid-May, so we're getting a pretty late start this year, but that's OK with me - we'll have more garden produce for them when they really start porking out (meaning we'll save more on the feed bill). We should still have a full four months to grow them out, though, depending on the weather. Our processing date depends on when the heavy frosts set in, since we don't have a heater for their water trough. So when the water starts freezing overnight, it's time to butcher. If we have a normal fall, that will put our processing date in October or maybe even November.

But right now the weather is balmy and beautiful, and we're more than ready to bring some pigs home. We got the call before church, and on the drive home I texted my sister-in-law to ask if she'd like me to pick up a pig for her, too - she'd been toying with the idea of raising a pig, but hadn't decided one way or the other. She didn't text me back before we headed out to pick up the pigs after lunch, so I assumed it just wasn't meant to be for her this year. But when we arrived at the farm, lo and behold, there were three pigs in the pen! A black one, a pink one with black splotches, and a little pink runt. Now, not having heard back from my sister-in-law, and knowing my own weakness, I had only brought enough money for the two piglets I was planning on, plus my emergency $20 I always carry with me. When we got to the pen and I told the kids to pick out the ones they wanted, the farmer said he'd give us the runt for half price. I told him that all I had was the $20 extra, and without a second's hesitation he said, "Sold!" And that's how we ended up with three little pigs instead of two.

Which ended up being a good thing, since I got a text message from my sister-in-law on the drive home saying she'd like one after all! We'll be raising it here with the others, but she'll pay for her pig's feed (plus a little for our trouble) and help with the butchering. My daughter, who's in charge of the pigs this summer, is excited to earn her first "farm money".

So now they're home and all settled in, so we just have to settle on some names! All through lunch the kids were brainstorming names for this year's piggy pair, finally settling on Chris Hamsworth and Tom Piggleston (with my oldest son lobbying heavily for Benedict Baconbatch). The only problem was that when we picked them up, we found out that all three of the pigs are gilts (girls). So of course I suggested that we simply modify the names slightly so we'd have Christine Hamsworth and Thomasina Piggleston (which my daughter would not agree to until I assured her we'll still call them Chris and Tom). The runt has been officially dubbed Eggs Benedict Cucumberpatch (Eggy for short), and is already the family favorite.

And so begins another summer of pig-raising. I have to admit, I've missed having pigs this spring. They're such a useful homestead animal - eating food scraps that are too big for the chickens to manage (not to mention the chicken bones leftover after I make broth), clearing the thorns and thistles out of the pasture, and just generally being their happy piggy selves. Our little farm just feels more complete with them around.

Simple Home Smoked Ham

In my previous post I outlined how I make bacon from our home-grown pork; to make ham, I use the same basic recipe, with just a couple of tweaks:

1.Cure the meat for a longer period of time. Since it's a bigger cut of meat, I like to cure it for three days instead of just one, which gives the salt more time to permeate the pork.

2. The other change was for my husband's preference. In my first attempts at curing ham, I followed the bacon recipe exactly, just leaving it in the refrigerator longer, as I said. When I made a pot of potato soup, however, my husband requested that I leave out the maple syrup when I make ham - the sweet flavor just didn't taste right in the savory soup. So I changed that as well, and the recipe became even more simple: just salt and smoke.

Simple Home Smoked Ham

2 pounds pork roast
3 Tbsp salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)
Smoke as in the bacon recipe, again to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. This will take a little longer than for the bacon due to the thickness of the meat.
Feel free to adjust the recipe to whatever size cut of meat you have; just try to keep the same meat to salt ratio.

I should note that the finished ham will be fully cooked in the smoker; no further cooking is necessary, so you can go ahead and slice it for your sandwiches!



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Home Smoked Bacon

I was really wracking my brain to think of an exiting title, but really, what's more exiting than that? Bacon is the product of a kind of miraculous alchemy, a blending of meat, salt, and smoke to make one of the top five most spectacular foods ever created. Knowing how to work that spell and make this magic at home (so you know exactly what is (or isn't) going into your bacon) is one of the greatest homesteading skills you can achieve!

I first heard of this recipe from a class I took at the Hay River Traditional & Green Skills 2018 event. The class was called Makin' Bacon! Home Smoking Basics, taught by Brett Laidlaw, a blogger and author with a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, less than an hour from where I live (here's a link to his blog, which I encourage you to check out: troutcaviar.blogspot.com)

In his class, he showed us how to choose, cure, and smoke bacon in a cheap backyard grill. The best part? He gave out free samples of the finished product, so we could know if we liked it before we went to the trouble of making it for ourselves at home. Smart guy!

Here's the recipe, straight out of his book, Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager:

Home-Smoked Bacon

2 pounds pork belly
1/4 cup maple syrup or brown sugar
3 Tablespoons salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)

Rub the pork belly with the maple syrup, sprinkle salt on all sides, and let cure, covered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning occasionally. For a brown sugar cure, mix the sugar and salt and pat it evenly on all sides of the meat. 

The next day, rinse off excess salt, pat dry, and smoke at 200-220 degrees for 2-3 hours. The bacon will be both smoked and fully cooked. If you are unsure about whether the bacon is cooked at this point, set your mind at ease by placing it in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes. A meat thermometer inserted into the bacon should read 160 degrees. 

Be sure to sample a small slice of he still-warm bacon straight from the smoker and sweating fragrant fat. You'll see that it's more than worth the small trouble of smoking your own.

See how easy that is? Only three ingredients, and if you use an electric smoker with a temperature probe (here's a link to the one I have), it takes all the guesswork out of it. I just rinse the marinaded meat, pat it dry, and set it on the rack. Insert the probe, shut the door, push a few buttons, and a few hours later - pork perfection.

If you don't have a smoker, he details in his book how to smoke your meat on a regular backyard grill. It's more putzy than an electric smoker, but you can still get the same amazing result.

Either way, it's suprisingly simple, and the results are well worth the effort (I heartily second his recommendation of sampling while it's still warm - and perhaps licking the pan . . .) Make sure to save any drippings; these are great for greasing the pan when frying eggs, etc.


Please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!

Taking My Piggies to the Bank

So how much did it actually cost me to raise my pigs last summer? To me, it was worth every penny to know exactly how my pigs were raised and what they ate (actually, I think I saw Hickory chewing on a golf ball once - but I was not about to reach around those teeth to try to get it out! I just let that one pass. Literally . . .) As much as I try to find good food, unless you're buying from someone you know or raising it yourself, you just don't know. And I want to know.

But I still have to try to be practical about it. We need to be good stewards of the resources God's given us, and money is one of those resources, just like the land and animals we're here to care for. So here's how our numbers from 2018 broke down:

Purchase price: $50 each; $100 total
Feed: $.4975 per pound; 2,123 pounds; $1056.28 total
Processing equipment: $296.20
Total cost: $1452.48
Weight of meat (added up after butchering; does not include lard and bones): 300 pounds
Price per pound: $4.84

Oof! That feels like a lot. But then I compare it to how much I'd pay for the cuts of meat we actually eat:
(Prices are all per pound)
Organic Pork Chops: $6.21
Conventional Pork Tenderloin (I couldn't even find organic): $10.94
Organic Nitrate Free Bacon: $15.00
Organic Ham: $11.50
Brats (from Louie's - our favorite local meat shop; not organic): $4.79

And of course that cost included purchasing the processing equipment (which turned out to be less than what we'd payed for processing in the past, but still an expense we needed to account for). Without that extra cost, our price would have been $3.85 per pound. I still have to do my own smoking for the bacon and hams, but I actually prefer that, since I have control over what goes into them.

I do wish we'd been able to butcher them on schedule (click here to read all about why we didn't); that would have saved us almost 300 pounds of feed per pig - and judging by previous years' totals, it wouldn't have reduced their weight by very much, so we could have saved another $300 right there.

So, if all goes well next year, based on my last three year's numbers, I can expect to buy around 750 pounds of feed per hog. If the price of feed holds steady and I can still get piglets for around $50 a piece, that should put my average price around $850 for two pigs. I expect to get about 300 pounds of meat out of them in that amount of time, so that would put my price at under $3 a pound - for organic pastured pork. You're not going to find that anywhere!

All in all, I'm very happy with how those numbers work out. As I said, I think raising our own meat is worth it no matter what the price, but seeing the actual amount I'm saving makes it that much more satisfying.

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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A New Adventure

It’s been a while, dear reader (to put it mildly), and so much has happened since my last post! One of the biggest changes is that we’ve moved to a new house. We left our old manufactured home on just under 8 acres and purchased a full-log home with 22 acres - half wooded, half pasture. The kids are loving the woods to roam in, my husband is enjoying the verdant views and wildlife (we've seen whitetailed deer, turkeys, hawks and bald eagles, bear tracks; we've heard barred owls hooting in the night; and a pair of phoebe birds are building a nest above our porch), and I’m having fun trying new things in the house and garden. I’m also enjoying the rich deposits of Obtanium we have in the woods on the property (“Obtanium” is a word I learned from a teacher at the Hay River Traditional and Green Skills Event a year or two ago – the definition being, roughly: “that which is found, gathered, or bartered for - not purchased - and put to good use”. See also “Redneck Recycling”). The fallen leaves, old dead wood, and abundant rocks have all found uses in the gardens - and the morel mushrooms my daughter discovered were a welcome addition in the kitchen!

We moved in mid-February, for which I am heartily grateful. It was a challenge on our actual moving day (I remember temps of -17F as friends helped us transfer furniture from the old house to the new), but after the heavy lifting was accomplished, it was nice to have time to set up the house while the yard waited patiently under a foot or so of snow. We had a late winter (on April 16^th I posted a shot on Facebook of the hill outside the kitchen door where I was planning to put the garden – the yardstick measured a 16-inch snowbank there!) and the snow stuck around until the end of April.

I was very blessed to have a friend who was willing to keep my hens for me during the transition. It’s not many women who will add a friend’s 18 chickens to a coop that previously only held her 7 birds! Obviously, this created a major egg surplus compared to what she was used to, and even supplying us, she was able to have a little fun selling eggs on the side (she bought a dozen or so more chicks this spring, so I think it’s safe to say she liked the experience!)

We finally brought the hens to the new property in May, thanks to another friend who offered us her old coop – which is actually an old pickup-bed camper converted for the job. It works great, and I certainly couldn’t complain about the price (free)!

Gotta love that Obtanium!

We also picked up our new pair of feeder pigs just this Friday: Maple (the brown girl) and Hickory (the black male). This year’s names reflect my hope that I’ll be able to try my hand at smoking our own bacon this fall (I took a class on home smoking at the event I mentioned above, and I can't wait to try it out!)

Little by little, our new farm is taking shape!

The Cheerful Agrarian and the Three Little Pigs

Once upon a time (about 1:30 this afternoon, actually), the Cheerful Agrarian went with two of her children to pick out two little pigs to live in her back yard. On the drive to the farm, she texted her friend Monica, who said she would like Cheerful to raise a pig for her family, too. And so it was that Cheerful brought home not two, but three little pigs.

Now, these pigs do not have houses of straw (it's been very windy here in Wisconsin lately (a tornado went through just two miles south of us last month), so even if a house of straw could stand up to the huffing and puffing of the big bad wolf, I don't think it would do so well against the weather this spring), nor do they have houses of sticks (I haven't perfected my wattle-and-daub technique yet - but it's on my list!) They definitely don't have a house of bricks (have you priced bricks lately? Definitely out of my price range!) Instead, they have a house of fiberglass. An old truck topper, to be precise, that a friend gave us last year ("and please don't give it back!")
The pigs are named Chris P. Bacon (a name that my daughter had picked out last year, but we opted for other names for our two previous porkers, so it was only common courtesy to use it this time around), Alexander Hamilton (he's so popular these days!), and Spot Chop (my 10 year old son named him - I told him to try to think of something that included a reference to his spots and the idea of pork chops. So Spot Chop he became - Spotch for short.)
Weighing in at just 30 pounds each, they are the perfect size to be loved on and adored by the kids (and their mother . . .) They love their new home - before we had even unloaded them all from the truck, Spotch had already started digging holes with his until-now-untried snout. They certainly didn't need to be taught how to root! Four and a half hours later, and they still haven't so much as sniffed at their hog feed. I'm sure that will change pretty quickly, though.

I'm going to try to keep a running tally to see how much it's costing us to raise our own bacon (the two we raised last year ended up around $3.16/lb- $1195.25 total - including on-farm slaughter, processing, and curing the bacon and hams) These pigs cost us $55 each ($165 total), and their first bag of feed (we're going all organic) was $24.88 (65 cents more per bag than last year). So, at 90 pounds total, they've cost us $189.88.