Bringing home the bacon

I notice from my regular peripatetic perusal of other peoples' farm blogs that it is also hog butchering season in Oregon and Missouri.

While homesteaders in Aberdeen, Raasay, and southern England are not yet engaged in this occupation, or haven't yet experienced the pig experience.

It's recommended.

Although the butchering makes me miserable, the aftermath makes me glad. Bacon, chops, sausage, pork roast, ham, and fatback for lard and baked beans. "There's a whole world more to a pig than ham" said Renee Zellwiger's character Ruby, in the movie and novel Cold Mountain.

And there is. And we have it. This is the bacon bonanza season at Womerlippi acres. One pig is home already, one is yet to come, but we are already porked up to the gills.

We give some away and we trade off some, but we also keep some for me and our guests to eat. My wife, although raised on Pennsylvania and Shenandoah Valley German Pietist pork products (the finest kind), eschews meat still. She's vegetarian less by conviction and more out of shear cussedness. She turned that way to spite her parents when she was a teen, and stayed mostly out of stubbornness.

Being British to the core, I appreciate this stubborn trait in her, and do my best to eat her share. It's only fair I should pitch in.

Cheese and whine party

We had our friend Vida and kids over to dinner and Aimee showed the two girls how to make cheese.

Neither kid had patience for the kneading part. Whined little S-A, "I want go out out and play with the bubbles." (A big bubble-soap toy that Aimee got at WalMart.) Opined older sister Vanessa, "This is boring now."

But the two women, Aimee and the kid's mum Vida, made them stay and watch and knead to the end. Kids will be kids, but I think they have to learn patience by practicing it.

And then they got to eat cheese.

Shirley-Ann thought the cheese tasted great. Vanessa thought it too mild.

You can please some of the people some of the time.

Slaughterhouse Five

The fall butchering at Womerlippi Acres is well under way, and as usual it's making me miserable.

I hate this part.

Of the five animals we will slaughter and eat this coming year, only one is left, Ophelia Pig, who is actually my favorite pig of all the pigs I've ever had -- so sociable, so pleased to see you when you go to the barn. The under-pig too, dominated for almost all of her life by her big brother Hamlet, now made ham. If I could, I'd keep and breed her, but we don't have facilities, or time, or money, to deal with her when she gets to be 400 pounds, and has 12 kids every six months.

If I lost my job tomorrow, I'd probably go into pigs, natural or organic pork, just because it's the kind of farming you could do on 15.5 acres and actually succeed. And I'm fond of pigs. And O-girl would make a great starter sow. She has the long back of the Canadian line based on the old Yorkshire Landrace, a prime sow for bacon and chops.

But there's the small matter of 50-60 hours a week at Unity College. I don't have time to watch over and feed that many pigs. Herself would have to be bred in three-four weeks, so there would need to be a boar or some semen found soon. And where would the sheep go for the winter? The farrowing pen would probably be their spring lambing pen, currently occupied by ducks. All far too complicated. Life is messy enough as it is.

I don't want to truck her today, but I pretty much have to. And although I wanted to truck the others, I hated it, especially the wether lambs, who were pitiful.

The lambs went yesterday, a day ahead of schedule, but the butcher shop called to say Hamlet was ready, meaning cut up into pieces and frozen, and I should come get him. They wanted their freezer space. I wanted the lambs gone. It was a deal.

The wee lambies went quietly until the end. They loaded easily, were content to be in the trailer, didn't struggle. Until they smelled the butcher shop. Then they had to be pushed out of the trailer into the holding pen, and they were just pitifully sad when I left them.

Betrayal. Total and utter betrayal. What a total b......d I am.

But, b....d that I am, I was happy to come back with the 100 plus pounds of premium pork products that were once a barrow pig named Hamlet. And a bonus: this new butcher shop we're trying, just ten miles away, will grind lamb organs for haggis. Pre-haggis, actually, since it will be me that adds the rest of the sausage makings. But what a labor saver!

We don't have freezer space for all this meat, and we can't sell it because of a USDA regulation affecting the particular butcher shop we chose this year, so we're trading and giving some of it away. Trades so far include weekly yogurt supplies, and the services of a prime Corriedale breeding ram. There was also a sly deal involving some maple syrup. All things we need and just as valuable to us as cash. Even so, we will finish up with a huge amount of meat. Our two freezers and two fridge freezers just groaning full with the stuff. More than we could ever eat. Folks we like, and even some we don't like, will get a chop or two or three. Just because. When you're as lucky as we are, to have so much good food, you should give some away. Build up some good karma.

You're going to need it in your next life. If the Buddhists are right, you're highly liable to be a pig.

But one day at a time. One life at a time. I'm no Buddhist. Today I can have bacon and eggs for breakfast. Hamlet and eggs to be exact. I'm happy to have meat. Our neighbor was glad to have wool to knit with. The people we trade and give meat to are always very happy. They need to taste real food. Their kids need some real tasty meat, so they know what it tastes like. The garden needs the manure. The chickens need pig and sheep shit to pick through. Haggis the sheepdog needs some sheep to herd. Some animal needs to enjoy the apples from all these 200-year old apple trees left over from the Great Farm. Someone, somewhere, still needs to do all this, the old-fashioned small scale mixed farming way. So it isn't forgotten. One day we'll actually need to know how to do all this again to survive. There's no civilisation without farming and no farming I can understand without livestock. Having livestock completes so many circles and cycles, it just is what needs to be for the land.

But...

...someone has to truck the animals to a butcher shop, or we have to butcher them ourselves. Butchering them ourselves is very laborious, but there's no scary truck trip, and no nasty fearful slaughterhouse. Just a dish of food on the front lawn and a clean shot to the head and that's all. Trucking them saves labor, though, and the product is wrapped better. Pros and cons.

The upsides and downsides of livestock farming, in a nutshell.

It's a busy fall for me at college. I have a serious day job, a career, even. I don't have time to butcher five animals, especially two pigs, which take a whole day to do. Trucking is a must this year. Were we willing to truck another 50 miles, we could have them wrapped for sale, even. (We don't have a trailer good enough for that right now, but if I had the money for one, I would definitely make the investment.)

Either way, I hate this part. The Death Chore.

Silly season

Definitely the silly season for animals. With three young wethers just recently separated from their mothers and trying to return, one more feeder pig who has to put on another twenty pounds in two weeks to meet the target weight of about 225, ewes who keep getting in the duck's stall in the barn or hop their fence to get apples, and a raunchy old ram who patrols the fence line of his pen like a North Korean on the DMZ, everyone is antsy and wants to be elsewhere, preferably in someone else's pen.

This too shall pass, though. The three lambs will go Sunday and I may take the pig too if I think she's big enough. That will calm things down. I'm hoping the ducks will go soon, back from whence they came, a student's private project. The apples will all get eaten or rot. And the ewes will get bred and stop coming into heat.

There's the small matter of an outside ram who has to come visit and breed the three daughter ewes. We'll need the pig gone for that, so we can use the pig sty for a ram pen. It's the best high security space we have, and this guy is reported to be big and a bit of a knucklehead. I hope the young ewes like him. The old ones will go, as they've always gone, with our own ram, Abraram, but he's the father of Molly, Maggie and Nellie, so they need to meet this new guy.

Snorri is his name, named for a Newfoundland viking.

Like I said, a knucklehead.

Silly season.

Not easy being green...

Last weekend I stripped all the large tomato plants and pulled up their roots and cages. This shelf full of ripening berries is the result.

Some are of the German Green variety and so already ripe. Most are just green tomatoes.

I probably won't can any of these shelf-ripened fruit since when finally ripe they are of poor quality. They get used for sandwiches and in cooking. Our family in England makes a green tomato chutney, but I never have the energy to can the green ones. What's the point if the pig or chicks will eat them, and we have so many already canned?

My favorite pickles are, in order: onions, brown chutney (AKA "Branston"), red cabbage, and sauerkraut. Aimee loves cabbage and cucumber pickles.

Our onions were all too big this year to pickle. Last year we had a lot of tiny ones. But we do have a flat of old spring onions I might try. Other than that, I'm done with canning season and into slaughtering and putting the gardens to bed season.

Last night I tried some of our peaches. Very good. So sweet. Worth the effort.

Busy as a couple of one armed paper hangers...

...is what we are now that college has started. Aimee is especially busy, as she is tapped for so many groups and committees. I have a barn to build with students, and two map-reading classes, but these activities include exercise, which at least makes me feel physically better.

Aimee is struggling to keep her chin up. And yesterday was our fourth wedding anniversary.

What this means is no blogging, or not much blogging for me.

We are still doing farm and homestead stuff to blog about, but less of it, especially now that most of the harvest is in. We have one pig, three lambs, and a trellis full of dry beans left to go. Everything else is in the house and canned, root-cellared, refrigerated, shelved or otherwise preserved. The remaining feeder pig and lambs will go soon.Soon the bad weather will come and we will slow down again. But this is the busy time at college.

Oy.

But regular readers in need of a rural fix can do what I do: visit other blogs. Here are my favorites.

"Life at the end of the road" : a crofter on Raasay, a Scottish island I used to know well.

"Musings from a Stonehead": Another crofter, in eastern Scotland

"Sugar Mountain Farm", in Vermont

"Throwback at Trapper Creek", in Oregon

"Colour it Green", in southwest England

What I like most about these blogs is the daily round of work, and how similar it is to ours.

Time to go let the ewes out to graze. And it's Friday. I'm looking forward to a rainy slow weekend of not doing much at all.

Canning tom-ae-toes vs. bottling tom-ah-toes

Canning is what Americans do to fruit. Brits "bottle" it.

The procedure is much the same, although the equipment is, at least in the rural parts of America, much more easily found in hardware and grocery stores than in Britain.

These are Juliet tomatoes, a small plum- or Roma-style berry, suitable for canning whole. They are first washed in cold water, then parboiled in hot water to help free the skins, re-cooled in cold water, then peeled and placed in jars. Each quart takes about 40 peeled Juliets. We add 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid and a little salt, then boil the jars for 45 minutes in the water bath canner.

We also canned whole some Amish Paste and froze a bunch of quart Ziploc bags of mixed tomato sauce, cooked to thickness with basil, oregano and garlic already added.

We have now on hand more than 40 quarts of canned or frozen tomato products and we're about 3/4 done with the harvest. We did will with the Juliets which keep well and avoid rot. We lost some of the Amish Paste to base rot. The other large varieties were productive but we lost some to rot, water cracking, and mice. The pigs got all of the bad tomatoes, which they scarf up happily.

Even so, we have as much as we can use this winter and perhaps more.

Most of the cherry tomatoes have gone to waste because we've been too busy at work to pick them.

Aimee made 80 half-pint jars of pesto, which we also freeze. And we arranged for Hamlet, the fattest of our two feeder pigs, to go to the butchers. Ophelia will follow when she's put on a bit extra. Right now Hamlet fights her for food, so she's leaner than she needs to be.

We won't starve, or be cold this winter.

When we remodeled this house we put in a huge kitchen, 28 by 14 feet. There's lots of room for this kind of work.

Aimee made cheese again, so we're having pizza tonight. With our own sliced fresh tomatoes and Aimee's pesto.