We have been busy!

Sorry for the lack of posting recently to those who are keeping up with us.  Life has started to get really busy leading up to spring.  Ok...who am I kidding, we are always busy.  I traveled with all of the children back in mid-February to visit family and from the time we got back up to now it has been a constant stream of stuff to do.

The day after we returned from our trip we butchered our first hog.  He was the biggest of the males and estimated him to weigh 300 lbs before slaughtering.  I found this nifty method you could use to predict and then weigh to find out for sure.  We don't have a scale, so we are going off the prediction.  What you do is measure around the heart girth and multiply the heart girth by the heart girth and then multiply by the length of the hog and divide by 400.  Our hog came in at 305 lbs to be exact.  We figure once you subtract the weight from the head and organs from the body cavity we figure we got close to 175-200 lbs of pork from our first hog.  We still have three more hogs to butcher.  One is pretty close in size to the first hog, but the other two are quite smaller.  We will hopefully get them fattened up and get them all butchered before warm spring weather arrives. 

We did the kill in the pasture and went very smoothly. We hooked him up onto the tractor and drove to the shop where we skinned and gutted him before transferring to the shop for the night to hang and chill.

Junebug loves getting her hands dirty. She was hardly paying attention to what we were doing, but once we started working on cleaning out the body cavity she was right under foot. She is not squeamish at all! Wearing a white sweatshirt was not a good idea that day.

Hanging in the shop for the night packed with ice and wrapped in plastic wrap to keep the fat from drying out and then wrapped in blankets to keep it from getting to warm or too cold.

It took us roughly three hours to kill, slaughter, and hang the hog.  Not bad for frick and frack out there who had no clue what they were doing!  We had hoped to get a hog done each weekend or every other weekend and be done with butchering by the end of March.  Well, life has a tendency to throw you some curve balls.  The weekend after our first butcher we had some other chores that needed done on the farm and we decided we would just take that weekend "off" and wait until the next weekend to butcher.  Well, the next weekend was finishing up some project and then hopefully get to the next hog.  It was a lot colder than the first slaughtering day so we decided to wait.  Maybe it's good we did or maybe not cause then the next life event might not have happened.  B was working in the shop and managed to sprain his ankle really good.  We thought it was broken at first, but after x-rays and a CT we are confident it is not.  It's slow going for him, but he is improving each day.  I'm just glad that his injury wasn't as severe as my friend's husband was.  He may have a rotator cuff tear and surgery may be in order.  Not a good thing when they run a dairy and now Kerry has to step up and be a milk maid on top of her other duties.  She has a great blog too if you want to check it out.  www.imarriedamilkman.com  Then he got sick with a nasty sinus infection.  Monkey developed croup and the other four have colds.  Mama is the only one not sick and I don't know why not.  Monkey has been sleeping terrible for the past five days.  He slept really late this morning so I hope with some good rest and continued treatment he'll be better soon. 

The weather had been teasing us off and on.  We have had a few days where the weather was absolutely beautiful and then followed by winter yuck.  I sure hope our snow is done for the season, but I won't hold my breath.  Last year we had snow in May!  I have started to work on the new pen area to move our piglets into.  They have done some amazing work in our main garden so now they are off to garden plot number two.  The second garden plot will be planted with sweet corn and strawberries.  Around 750 strawberry plants to be exact.  If anyone wants to come and help plant I'll let ya know when they arrive.  It will probably be the end of April to early May! 

I have started some of my seeds for the garden and they are taking off quite well, for the most part.  I started 4 trays of tomato seeds which hold 72 plants.  If you do the math, that's 288 tomato plants.  Don't worry...that many won't make it into the garden.  Some seeds didn't sprout and others are really small so I don't know how strong the plant will be.  I hope to sell any leftovers that I don't have room for or give to friends who need some plants.  My peppers are very slow to sprout and my first try at growing onions for seeds is off to a good start.  Most of the 72 seeds sprouted and received their first haircut last night.  I planted broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower last night.  I still have flowers and herbs I want to start from seed.  I may try to plant a few more peppers since my first planting isn't taking off as well as I had hoped and I don't want to cut myself short.

This weekend while B is off the farm I hope to work in the greenhouse with the kiddos and get it prepped so we can start some lettuces and peas in there soon.  I also hope to start carrots and beets for Bubba.  That boy loves beets.  We went to Pizza Hut a week ago for lunch and he was so excited to see beets on the buffet with the salad.  He was extremely disappointed to find out once back to the table that they were cold beets.  He slid them under a slice of pizza to try to warm them up, but it didn't work so well.  We are gonna try a couple different varieties this year for him.  One is a golden beet which is yellow instead of the normal red/purple color.  We'll see if he likes them or not.

Today I am working on rendering lard.  It doesn't smell the best, but I am looking forward to making my first pie crust with it.  Hope spring weather is visiting you all too!

Until next time,

T

P.S.  Sorry if there are typos...my brain is so tired from being up at night with little Monkey.  Hope you will forgive me!