Well, it’s that time.
A local slaughter company came out and killed and dressed the pigs for us, and transported them to the butcher.
Yes, it is more expensive, and it is a job that Adam and I know how to do ourselves, but don’t have the time or the infrastructure to kill, field dress, and transport three hog carcasses in one day, yet. And this is a good, local business that we are happy to support anyway. We’ve been in touch with the boss by phone, and his son and grandson actually came out and did the slaughter. Any time you have three generations working together, that is something I am willing to pay money to support.
They left us the hearts, livers and leaf lard, so we set up our new stainless steel table to process those.
It’s a pretty simple job. The hearts we put in ziploc bags in the freezer, (they won’t last long enough to freezer burn.
One of the livers we cut into thirds to fry up and eat. The other two were diced and fed to the chickens. They went absolutely crazy over it!
The leaf lard we put into bus tubs…
And put in the freezer to render later, after the 4H/Fair Season.
We still don’t have hot water outside anywhere. Running potable water direct to the shop and putting in a hot water heater is a big job we don’t have bandwidth for right now, and people survived for thousands of years without such infrastructure. We simply boiled water in the house, put it and some dish soap in the pink tub, and scrubbed it out with towels. Seppi rinsed it with the garden hose.
We’ll be seeing these piggies again in the near future, in our freezers and on our plates, and thus the circle of sunshine continues.
Little Farm in the Big City 