Filed under: February 2023 | Tags: home butchering, honey, maple syrup, maple syrup season, Suffolk Punch horses, weather
February 12, 2023
What a crazy busy month it has been so far! We started out very cold and seasonable. We attended a local chamber of commerce event in the nearby town of Geneva, Ohio for their Winterfest celebration. Amee and Abby were well dressed for the occasion. They got their manes and tails braided and all shined up to give wagon rides. The street looks lonely, but believe me it was bustling, just quiet at our loading zone.
They did an awesome job. People were very pleased to meet our girls. The traffic, the trains and the commotion from the celebration didn’t bother them one bit. They were included in many photos.
We are working on the last of our butchering for the year too. Pork has been the focus these last 2 weeks. Our family’s freezers are filling up. What a great thing!
These yummy hogs are now sausage, chops, ham and bacon. It’s good to have that work behind us!
Thanks to two very good friends, we got our 2022 honey all extracted. The bees gave us 26 pints of beautiful, mostly clover honey. It is good on everything. I like it in my morning tea.
Speaking of sticky jobs, the 2023 maple season is upon us. I am a bit behind, but plan to tap our trees this week. A few local guys are off to a great start and have made a little syrup already. This is a bit earlier than usual. That is part of the reason I am behind. I do have the sugarhouse partially set-up and a bit of my spring cleaning done. Hopefully we will have steam boiling soon! This wacky weather came out of nowhere, but as they say, “Time and the tides wait for no man”.
Filed under: December 2021 | Tags: Christmas, firewood, home butchering, labor of love, maple syrup, Suffolk Punch horses, Suffolk stallion, woodsplitter
December 24, 2021
It is here, Christmas 2021. This month has been a whirlwind. All sorts of things were out of sorts. My wife got Covid. We spent two weeks away from folks and her under the weather for many days. Thankfully, all is well, but man did it shorten the “getting ready for Christmas” time. I am very thankful that we were healed. I lost two friends due to this illness in the last couple of weeks. My heart goes out to those families.
Our three “main” horses that power our farm, all got their shoes reset. This makes sure their feet are trimmed and they are ready for the coming icy drive and laneway. Hank is coming along good. He took his shoeing and feet trimming all in stride. He will turn 3 next April. He is growing well and fills up the shoeing stock pretty well already.
He continues to be a gentleman who works well with his mares. He is still a youngster, but will soon be a very valuable part of the inner workings of the farm.
We are working our way through the animal harvest, as we butcher and store the meat we have raised this past year. Beef, pork and chicken grace our shelves. We are thankful for those blessings. We even butchered our old laying hens. They gave us eggs for over a year and now will continue to keep us healthy with chicken soup made from their golden broth.
One of my last remaining jobs for 2021 is to finish filling the sugarhouse woodshed with wood for boiling. In most years, I am done by mid summer. This year however, due to all sorts of excuses, bad weather including lots of rain, I am nearing completion of the job. Hats off to a couple of friends who helped me this week to finish the splitting.
This will more than finish filling the shed. It will also give me a head start on next years wood. We use 12 to 15 cords of wood to make our maple syrup. Wood cutting, hauling and splitting takes a while. It is just part of our labor of love to make great Ohio maple syrup, but to me it is worth it!
Our horse-drawn dump cart works very well for this job. The horses and I will get the shed full and this job finished before we ring in the new year. They are all ready now for sure, sporting their new shoes!
Merry Christmas everyone from our farm to yours!
Filed under: November 2021 | Tags: Compost, ear corn, home butchering, Homsteading, pigs, pork, straw
November 26, 2021
What a wonderful day yesterday was. Plenty of great tasting food, some family , some friends and a good day to pause and reflect.
Our hogs are ready for freezer camp. They have grown nicely and are now eating only our farm raised ear corn. The weather is switching to the favored cooler weather that makes home butchering possible. Now, its just making the plans to get this job done. The pigs are happy, warm and comfortable. They have no stress. One day soon they will be humanely dispatched.
They will be turned into chops, sausage, hams and bacons. They will strengthen us and keep us fed in the coming months. Their cycle comes to an end. I will thank them for their meat, their manure and for helping to complete the farm cycle that makes our farm viable.
You see they provide us with needed protein while suppling us with manure for the compost used to grow the crops they consume. It works very well for us.
They stay clean in the speltz straw grown here too. The straw makes our compost balance very well. It provides the carbon source to hold nutrients and rot down to feed the growing crop plants. Pigs truly are the “mortgage lifter” as in the days of old. They and chickens are the perfect animal mix for a small farm or homestead. We are so thankful!
Filed under: January 2020 | Tags: beef, home butchering, meat processing, sustainable
January 3, 2020
What a fast and furious holiday season! Happy New Year to all!
We spent part of a day butchering a beef. The new cooler is working out great. I was worried about the rail system. I wanted it to be easy to get the meat into the cooler by using our skidsteer. The new system worked out well.
We butcher the animals outside, using the skidsteer to lift up the carcasses. Once the animal chills outside a bit, we transfer them inside. The new rail system allows me to pull up close, insert a hook and roll the quarter right inside. No lifting or yanking involved.
The rail is also high enough that hogs, lambs or deer can be transferred just as easily, all in one piece. We welcome this addition to our sustainable way of life. Having a secure, cool place to hang meat until further processing takes place is wonderful. The cats may not be as happy, but we sure are!
Filed under: June 2018 | Tags: family, farm, farm to table, grandchildren, home butchering, kind, playing farm, positive
June 21, 2018
My granddaughter was playing farm with Grammy, while her daddy, older brother and I sorted sheep. She set up a corral and placed the animals as she wished. The next thing she did, was give each one a bale of hay to eat. I guess following us around the barnyard feeding chickens corn and such, makes her understand animal husbandry.
Once the sheep had been sorted, my grandson joined his sister in the farm play. He built a feedlot. If you look to the lower right-hand of the photo, you will see a block sitting on top of the others. That block is the gate. Each animal had to walk through the gate. Again, understanding the movement of farm animals is not an easy task, yet my not quite 4 year-old grandson , “get’s it”.
I hadn’t really thought about it much, just how often other’s learn from us. I was helped by my other son’s children load chickens into the trailer for a trip to freezer camp. They were gentle. They were quick and they understood perfectly where the chickens were headed. They had raised the flock from chicks. The connection of farm to table is firmly embedded in their daily lives. I am very proud of them.
I try to goof off a little too. In the photo below, three generations of Rice’s catch polywogs in the water trough! I can remember my sons at four years old doing the same thing. Life is short. The days are long…but the years are short.
I am blessed to share my life and my stories with my family and folks all over the world. Thanks in part to TV, the Internet, magazines and books…but nothing is better than face to face interaction. I hope to always be positive and kind, because the lives we touch are precious! The time we share is priceless and the memories we make last forever.
Filed under: December 2016 | Tags: carnivore, hogs, home butchering, homestead, pigs, pork, sausage, scald, self sufficient, skinning, slaughter, slaughterhouse, Small Farming
December 15, 2016
Home butchering is best done on a cold day. Using nature’s refrigeration only makes sense! This sow was a bad mother, who killed her babies.(It happens sometimes when farrowing in nests) I have no need for a mother such as her, but we needed sausage. I dressed her out before the storm yesterday.
Today, inside our farm’s little slaughterhouse, we deboned her and turned her into sausage for our family. The sausage was very nice, with just the right fat to lean ratio. We will enjoy it in the coming year. It is a wonderful thing to have the knowledge and the where-with-all to be self sufficient. It is even better to be able to share those skills with friends and family.
Perhaps I should make a photo story of the butchering process step by step? I will wait for comments and proceed from there. I would leave out the “yukiest” photos, and simply show my viewers how to dress a hog from start to finish. I skin our pigs. It is much easier to do them that way. Plus we don’t eat the pig’s feet, tail or snout,so there is no reason to scald and scrape the animal.
I confess that having been a butcher as a younger man, sure comes in handy here on the homestead. We will soon be doing beef and a few more hogs before winter is over and maple syrup season starts. Winter is for relaxing, resting and butchering. We make is a social event spending time with family and friends. The youngest people in our family learn early where our food comes from. They also learn to take very good care of those animals and treat them with respect. It’s the cycle of life for us carnivores.
Filed under: December 2016 | Tags: butchering, Compost, crops, grassfed, home butchering, lamb, omega3, Small Farming, soils
December 6, 2016
Butchering season is upon us. This is one of our 2016 grassfed lambs. We will enjoy him ourselves. It is a bittersweet time. The animals that I have nurtured all year, now become meals for us. It is the cycle of life. I understand, I am grateful and yet a part of me feels a little sad. I stun the animals humanely and treat them with respect right to the end of their lives. I take comfort in that fact.
Our animals are well treated form birth until death. Even in the final seconds of their lives, they know no fear or mistreatment. I believe the stress free lives that they live, translates to very safe, wholesome food for me and my family. They spend much of their lives on pasture in the fresh air and sunshine. I watch over them, keeping them safe and well. We get the benefit of vitamins and minerals consumed from our grass and converted into the flesh of our animals.
We feed the soil with compost and pH buffering limestone. The soil feeds the crops. The crops feed the animals and in the case of cover crops, the soil itself. The animals feed us very nutritious protein, packed with vitamins and omega3. The work that I do taking care of our soils is worth every minute. I see it in the crops we grow and I taste it in the beef, lamb, pork and chicken that we eat.
Filed under: December 2014, Uncategorized | Tags: family, hams and bacons, home butchering, maple syrup, meat
Hams and bacons smoking
December 28, 2014
Instead of working on firewood this weekend, I got the hams and bacons from our recent butchering into the smokehouse. They have been brining in a mixture of salt and brown sugar for a week. Today, I smoked them with hickory wood. It took all day, but was well worth the effort.
I babysat the meat as it smoked. I, and my dear wife, stayed busy putting order in the slaughterhouse. Santa Clause brought us a couple of new tables. We continue to work on traffic patterns and ease of operation, but our little meat house is coming together nicely.
This building doubles as a summer kitchen for canning our vegetables. It also makes a nice place to wash maple syrup filters and equipment. It is a multipurpose building that is working out well for us. It is even a nice place to warm up and drink coffee with my boots on! I sure do like this place!
a great place to work
Filed under: December 2014 | Tags: family, home butchering, homemade sausage, homesteader, pork, pork chops, sausage
Two nice hogs cooling
December 18, 2014
Tuesday, I butchered these two nice hogs. They walked outside to their play area, looked up at me and dropped in their tracks. There was no stress, no shouting, no problem at all. They led a happy stress free life here. They had a clean dry bed, all they could eat and drink and access to a play area every day. The meat tastes wonderful.
Today we cut them up, made fresh sausage, pork chops, roasts and spare ribs. The hams and bacons have been brined and await smoking and cooking in a few days. It was the first big job we did in the new slaughterhouse. The building and equipment worked flawlessly. There was plenty of room to work and having the hot and cold water was awesome!
We had a nice full day with friends and family. My grandchildren made their own sausage, then cooked it in a pan. Fresh sausage sandwiches don’t come much fresher than that 😮 The children helped stuff sausage into casings and even leant a hand during clean up. They were very involved and have a good understanding where their food comes from. They are 5 and 8 and well on their way to becoming homesteaders.
I am tired, but very happy. I see the next generation learning skills handed down to me from my grandparents. My son worked right along beside me. He does better every time we butcher. He made the primal cuts, took the spareribs off his bacon. He deboned many pieces and helped with the brining process. He did most of the grinding and paid close attention to the seasoning process. My wife gave lessons to our daughter-in-law as she wrapped her family’s meat. Yes, it was a very good day!
Primal cuts, ready to go!
Filed under: December 2014 | Tags: cutting meat, home butchering, smoked hams and bacons, summer sausage
No more working outside!
December 16, 2014
Today, we will butcher a couple of pigs. The weather isn’t the best for woodcutting, so I will switch gears. It will be nice to have the fresh meat. I also plan to make some summer sausage and a few other meat treats to be eaten over the holidays. The smokehouse will soon be filled with all sorts of yummy treats. The best thing about butchering this year, will be using the new slaughterhouse… no more working outside!
We do the killing, skinning and gutting part of the job outside, but the job of cutting the meat, making sausage and preparing hams and bacons will now all be done inside. The big sink and hot and cold running water will be a welcomed addition. It is so nice to be able to wash hands and equipment any time you want to do it…and without a bucket of water!
December temperatures continue to be unseasonably warm. It is still cool enough for butchering and a nice day to keep fingers warm. The pause from farm work and wood chopping is a welcomed one. I like to do this job every now and then. It was once the way I made my living and fed my family. Now, it is just a job I like to do and ultimately… I’m still feeding my family 😮
I will stretch this work out over the next few days. The smokehouse will run by the end of the week and even in to next week as we smoke the hams and bacons. It is a wonderful time of year. The tree is mostly trimmed. Rows of cookies line the table. A few wrapped packages are under the tree and now the harvest for our freezer is underway. Yes, I like butchering day.
RicelandMeadows 