May update

So the months keep flying by and I keep getting behind in posting. We drove the hogs to the butcher on Mother’s Day. This sounds like an easy task but convincing the hogs to walk onto a trailer was anything but easy. Poncho, our laid-back, friendly hog, was very trusting and walked into the trailer almost immediately. Lefty, our crazy, smart and temperamental hog was not convinced. After three days, she was hungry enough to walk on the trailer to eat.

We picked up the meat 6 days later; heads, hooves, lard, bacon slabs (we are going to cure it ourselves), ground meat for sausage (we will stuff it ourselves), specific cuts of meat and bones. We have been enjoying the meat and we are so thankful for our hogs; the work they did on the land and the delicious meat they provided.

When we arrived home with the meat, we were surprised by the amount of meat we had. Poncho dressed out at 214 lbs and Left dressed out at 164 lbs. We have a 19 cu ft freezer and we had to go buy another freezer (13 cu ft). My cousin, Derek, was visiting us that day and he was a big help, along with my in-laws, hauling in the freezer, unloading the truck and loading the freezer. We paid him in pork chops! The kids love Derek so much and we had a great time visiting with him.

We have been harvesting quite a bit of vegetables for this early in the season. We have now harvested all of our cabbage; I have been making a summer salad with cabbage instead of lettuce, squash, cucumbers, peppers, corn and feta cheese. Adam also made sauerkraut and I am excited to taste it when it is finished.

Here are some updated pictures of the kitchen garden:

Fig tree

Blackberries

Here are some pictures of the 1/2 acre garden and our rhode island reds that should be laying soon.

This is an area blooming from the hogs. We would give them scraps from the kitchen and they would eat, root and poop. There are squash blooms everywhere!

Here are some updated pictures of the kids. Graham really loves drumming and I caught him in the act!

This face is awesome. He was really into it and I love that he is using Lincoln logs as drum sticks!

 

I will be posting some canning pictures soon. Our canning shelf is looking happy and we have been experimenting with lacto-fermenting vegetables!