3 little pigs

This little piggy went to market... she and her sister are for sale, they're approximately 75 Lbs each now, grown quite a bit since this photo. They're half Yorkshire and half Tamworth, that's her mother that she's following. Doesn't exactly show off the best side of Tammy... I'll have to work on my photography skills.

Strawberries!

It's almost time to get out the jelly jars.......... and the shortcake recipe.......

Oh yeah, It's strawberry time! WooHoo!

Can't wait to start picking, and picking, and picking, and picking :)

Pastured pork

We bought some pigs last november and put them on pasture. They haven't grown as fast as they would in a confinement system of course, but I daresay they've been happier and healthier. The amount of rooting that they do seems to be proportional to how often we move them. The higher the pasture is, the less damage they do to it. But even in tall pasture they'll root around stumps, fence lines and low swampy spots. They dug up 3 stumps that I didn't even know were there! I've read that it used to be a common practice to let them clear new pasture, farmers would even drill holes next to trees and fill them with corn to encourage the pigs to dig them up. I haven't tried it yet but I certainly intend to. If you're interested in raising a pig or two yourself, I highly recommend Sugar Mountain farms blog, Walter gives alot of information on how to do it and he's the one who inspired me to try. We've had good success without the hormones, antibiotics and chemical medications normally used.

We have 3 piglets, or larger feeder pigs available for sale. Alternatively, if you don't want to raise them, we sell hogs by the whole, half or quarter, based on hanging weight at the butcher. You'll tell the butcher what kind of cuts you're looking for and will pay them their fees, $25 kill fee and 46c per Lb. cut and wrap fee.
Prices by the pound:

• Whole hog - $2.75
  Half - $3.00
  Quarter - $3.25
  

Sizes differ signifigantly, so whether you want a large hog or a small one, we can accomodate.

New Addition to the farm

Cornish pullets.

Cute huh?

Poultry Update

I'm just amazed at how fast our ducks have grown. When we got them at the end of February they were such tiny little things.....

.....and had a tendency to fall asleep on their feeders :)

Now they're just HUGE!

These Pekins are getting really close to butcher weight.

Interestingly, the Khaki Campbells have a much higher pitched "quack" than the White Pekin ducks

I'm looking forward to the day these girls start laying! Duck-egg omelet anybody?

Tuesday's to-do list

Weed potatoes!

I can't believe how quickly the weeds are coming up and taking over.

In fact, I'm on my way out to the shed to get a hoe right now :)

Good Ol' Fashioned Bacon

I love to prepare and cook things that are a bit out of the ordinary and while bacon is by no means unusual, home-cured bacon definitely fits into that category.

We've been experimenting with a few different curing methods. Well, okay, we haven't gotten all that adventurous. So far we've only tried the standard brown sugar/salt method and a variation with black pepper. We also did the standard open-air curing and we tried the zip-locs-in-the-refrigerator method.

We Loved the black pepper variation and prefer the open air curing to curing in the 'fridge.

In the future (like, maybe the next time we butcher a hog) we'd like to try both maple (and/or honey) curing and smoking the bacon.

In any case, the basic curing is very simple, tastes great and is good for you. Next time you pick up bacon at the grocery store read the ingredients and you may decide to try curing it for yourself ;)

Gabriel trimmed this piece of pork prior to adding the curing mix.

Here you see the pork ready to begin curing next too all of the ingredients.

three parts brown sugar, two parts salt and one half part black pepper.

Rub this all over the pork and shake off the excess.

I snapped this sloppy photo while the pork was curing.

We lined cardboard boxes with parchment paper, sat those on a tarp and let it cure for seven to ten days. We did this in our spare bedroom closing off all of the vents and opening the window.

You can also put it in zip-loc bags in the refrigerator. It works just as well but doesn't dry out as much making it harder to work with when you go to slice it.

The finished product.

After the seven to ten day curing period the bacon can be frozen. Because salt dries the meat as it cures it becomes less prone to dangerous bacteria and so it really doesn't have to be frozen. As long as the parchment paper is changed (or preferably the meat is hung so it gets air circulation on all sides) and the meat is turned so that it doesn't stay wet on the bottom it

should be fine.

I recommend freezing it however because the longer it cures the saltier it becomes.

Plus it's always better to be on the safe side when it comes to meat.