A busy week

This I think is about the fist five minutes I have had in the last week to do anything, never mind blog writing, and I am now sat in the car on the way to skiing tapping away on my phone. With pig slaughter, the ensuing work from that, pork sales, plumbing disasters and a few other things chucked in I am feeling ready for the break. We have Christine and Kevin at home animal sitting and kindly decorating the kids bedroom. If anyone else fancies decorating our house while we are away or even while we are here, do get in touch. I may have to start a waiting list on that offer.

I would like to apologise now for the grammar, spelling etc being worse than ever this time as writing on a phone is a bit of a pain.

So the pigs having gone to the abattoir near York and we then collected them from a butcher somewhere east of Hull. Harriett and I set off first thing Saturday morning to collect them. They were very helpful at the butcher and went through all the bags of meat explaining what they all were. There were a lot of bags.

Once home the work really started. Initially it was just sorting,  bagging and freezing loads of chops and roasting joints. The chest freezer I recently bought on ebay quickly started to fill. We then started on the sausage making. With the aid of the Kitchen Aid, Zoe and I minced a couple of kilos of belly and shoulder, added some flavours and attempted to force it all into sausage skins. Amazingly it went pretty well and apart from the odd skin splitting, we soon had a sizeable pile of bangers.

After lunch (sausages)  we started on hams and bacon. Hams were tessellated into plastic tubs and covered with brine, bacon salted and a whole leg placed on a bed of salt and then coated in it too. This will hopefully be an air dried ham. I am a little worried about this as it's a whole leg and can go wrong. But I think  we should manage some fantastic air dried ham.

The weekend continued in much the same way, more meat to deal. By Sunday night we were warn out and enjoying our first piece of roast pork. It was stunning and we  felt well deserved. I don't think I've worked for 7 months on a roasting joint before.

Through the weekend we were also getting visits from people buying sausages, chops and roasting joints. I am wondering now whether to get three pigs next time. Two for us and one to sell the meat.

The rest of the weeks been a bit of a blur including a minor heating emergency when I managed to break the heating while doing a bit of maintenance.

Well just finished my seed order while sat in the car here. Just got umpteen veg beds to dig for them now when I get back.

Mmm either the blogger app or F1 hotel wifi doesn't like photos, so sorry can't add any.

Bye to the pigs

So the big new thing since my last update is clearly the pigs. They have gone to piggy heaven. It all started on Friday when I picked up a pig trailer from a fellow smallholder.  A visit to a coopers with the Northern craft brewers association eclipsed most of Saturday. It did mean however that I got to try “Castleford Cavier” in a pub we visited. This local delicacy turned out to be bread and dripping. Not a dish one gets served everyday. Zoe and I spent some time Sunday trying to get the pig trailer up to the pigs before we realised that the field was far too muddy and the trailer far to heavy for this to work. Our plan had been to back the trailer up to the pig run and adjust the fencing so that it becomes part of the pig run so they could get used to it. With that plan scuppered our only option was to hope we could guide the pigs down to the trailer on Monday morning with a bucket of food. The pig run is at the far end of the field to the entrance.  As I didn't need to leave until about 11:30 we reckoned if we didn't give the pigs breakfast then they should be hungry enough for the plan to work.

 Monday morning came and we had our first issue with the pigs. I believe our pigs had been “classically conditioned” to live in their area. So they were used to staying in their run. This meant that when we opened their gate and offered food they wouldn't come out. I think they thought that the electric fence would get them and so refused to come out of their run. We soon solved this by taking down a section of their fence. This seemed to persuade them that leaving their run was safe and so they headed out into the field. Luckily they followed the bucket pretty well. We took them along the side of the fence down the field so they couldn't go to far wrong. At the end of the field they had to go through a small gate into the sheep area and then through a large gate and into an area we had penned off leading to the trailer. This was another area of potential problem as once through the small gate the pigs had a huge field they could run off in. So Zoe lead them through the small gate with food and I tried to get in their way if they tried to make a dash for it into the large field. They did try but luckily I  managed to get in the way and we both guided them into an enclosed area by the trailer. Without too much more persuasion we got them into the trailer and the gate shut. I tagged their ears. This was remarkably easy and clearly did not hurt the pigs at all. The only thing they did was to shake their ears afterwards as if to remove a fly or piece of dirt. That was it, they were in.

All that was left then was me to drive them to the abattoir and drop them off. Not the easiest of jobs but I did it. I kept the radio going both ways to keep me cheerful and managed to do it. There was a small queue at the abattoir so I got to chat to a few other pig farmers there. The only problem I had then was getting the pigs out of the trailer. They seemed pretty happy in there and quite reluctant to move. Stupidly I had left the food bucket at home. But with a bit of persuasion, pushing and help from other farmers and abattoir staff we got the girls out. It was then time to leave them to their fate and take the long journey home.

I felt happy in that I had visited the abattoir already and seen how they slaughter the pigs and seen the way they looked after the animals there.
It's a little bit odd at home not having the pigs to feed and not having them rooting around. I think the other animals have suddenly started getting a bit more attention as the pigs don't dominate my time so much now.
You may have noticed that I have also been busy online getting all sorts of things set up. So I now have a shop on Etsy selling felted goods. I have a facebook page and a website. We are trying to sell some of the pork we get back from the pigs. Through the facebook page.  We want to make sure we have a good amount to last us for a long time, but we also decided we would sell some of it. If that goes well then we may get more pigs next time.
We need to start looking for new pigs already because if we want them in March or April then they are going to be born soon so we need to start looking.