You may have noticed that I stopped posting pictures from our hog class a while back. The reason is, some of our followers, who love us and love our food, just weren’t excited to see hog parts on their daily feed (Hi Kelsey). While knowing your food and your farmer is very important, I think we can put the killing in it’s own box for a while. I’ve uploaded the rest of the pictures to the gallery so anyone who wants to see the details from our class can scroll to their hearts content. Everyone else can use our feed to stay up on what is happening currently.
Your author Thomas, on class day.
Just because we’ve stopped posting pictures doesn’t mean we have given up on our hog class. Thomas Locke, from CFSA attended our class and fully participated. He also went home and wrote up a very nice article on the class and posted it on CFSA’s website. I can’t thank Thomas enough for his and CFSA’s support of our farm. If you aren’t familiar with CFSA, they are a great organization that is behind a lot of what we enjoy in our vibrant farming community.
Miguel and I took Alice (not his real name) to the market with us the other day. I’m not sure why he says yes to invites to things like this. He’s smart, thinks ahead, and generally is one of the more intelligent people I know. By now I’d think he’d have learned to avoid me when I’m dressed for work. Anyway, we put him to work helping us load about 2 1/2 pallets of tomatoes all by hand onto our little tag trailer we use to haul vegetables each day. Being the observant and careful person I know him to be, Alice pointed out that the tires looked awfully squished and the trailer seemed a tad overloaded. Didn’t we want to take a bit less and be safe? Safety 3rd is our motto, and we do this every day, so the trailer will be fine. Shut up and get in the truck.
The trailer, flipped upside down. Here you see the worn tires and bent axle.
Um actually, the trailer isn’t fine. It hasn’t been fine for some time. The axle was bent at some point in the past. There is no telling what bent it, but hauling the Bridgeport mill probably had something to do with it. Miguel had noticed that the tires were wearing badly on the inside so this past weekend, just after Alice had informed me we had too much weight on the trailer, we flipped the trailer over to find out what was going on. Sure enough the axle was bent and now I have to admit once again that Alice was correct. Please nobody tell him. He’s already impossible to deal with. The bend wasn’t bad, but it was bad enough. I could replace the tires but they would cup again shortly. The axle could be straightened or replaced. Since we use this trailer every day, I elected to replace the axle. Off to Agri-Supply we go.
We determined that we had a 3500 pound axle under the trailer currently. I knew Agri-Supply carried everything to make a trailer from scratch so I thought a nice 5000 lb or so axle would be a nice upgrade for this little trailer. After consulting with the nice man from trailer accessories for about 20 minutes, we determined that there was no such option as a 5000 lb axle. The axles he had in stock were 3500 lb and 7000 lb! Yikes. That’s certainly enough to carry the weight, but that sized axle required new spindles, which were 6 bolt instead of the five bolt we had.
Old tires and wheels, 5 bolt 205/75 R15
The new spindles also required a 16″ tire vs. the 15″ we had on the old axle. Sigh. That means that our fenders were an issue because of lack of clearance. This trailer had to roll at 3pm that day to make the run so cutting off and installing new fenders just wasn’t an option. Keeping the fenders meant that the tires at Agri-Supply were going to be too tall. So off to Universal Tire we go to have 225/65 R16 truck tires mounted.
New axle, mocked up on one side. The new, larger tire and wheel is shown as well.
Did I mention that the 7000 pound axle wasn’t an axle assembly? It was a base metal project. An axle, cut over length, spindles, bearings, etc. all needing to be cut, welded, etc. and all needing to be properly done both in fit and strength. And all done TODAY because we have people and animals waiting on us. Here we have one side tacked up. We’re checking the clearance of the tires, once we mount the tire.
Bolting the axle into place for mock-up
I know it looks like Miguel does all the work because he’s always the one in the picture doing the work. There’s two reasons for that.
One. Miguel actually does most of the work.
Two, I’m always behind the camera. It’s like how the children will have never had a mom if you only look at our photo album. She’s always behind the camera. That’s why her other nickname, besides SWMBO and Darling Wifey is Crazy Picture Lady.
All put back together, flipping the trailer back over
Everything put back together. We are flipping the trailer back onto its tires. Have I mentioned how amazingly handy it is to have a crane hanging around? We don’t use the bucket truck that often, but when we do it’s awfully handy and worth the money I spent on it, very used of course.
Ready to go to work.
We started on this project about 9:30. We had to go to Agri-Supply, Universal Tire, Agri-Supply again, remove the old axle, and weld up a new axle, and get lunch. We were on the road at 3pm. Overall I think we did a pretty good job. Now the trailer has the capacity to carry about 6000 pounds of weight (the tires are the limit now) and should be what we need for a long time. I debated on getting a larger trailer instead but decided that having a maneuverable little trailer was too beneficial considering the places we go with it.
The old axle is bent but serviceable. It’ll probably become a hay wagon or something similar at some point in the future. Who knows, you might ride on it when you come for a tour. Don’t worry though, I’ll straighten the axle before I use it.
After work I was able to go see the new piglets and get some relatively closer pictures.
Penelope with her new brood
I’d love to tell you that this was a sweet and happy Disney moment, but in reality Penelope and I were having an unpleasant conversation about whose paddock this was. Being that I pay the taxes and bring the food, I was under the impression that I owned this particular piece of dirt. Penelope, as a new mother, was unconcerned about my support role for all this and was quite clear that she’s tackle me and eat me if I messed with her babies. She only charged me once which for Penelope was almost like inviting me over for Christmas dinner. Remember this is the girl who bit me.
So kind reader say a special prayer for your farmer who risked mauling to bring you piggie cuteness today.
Some of Penelope’s babies
They really are cute when they are just born. My theory is that God makes newborns and children cute so that we don’t kill them for all the things they do that drive us crazy. It’s worked so far on my kids.
And remember, there’s pork in the freezer if you’re planning on eating this weekend. If you don’t eat on weekends, well, you know something I don’t. Come buy some pork, I have new mouths to feed!
Penelope, with her second litter. You can just see the piglets at the bottom against the leaves, nursing.
Penelope has been waddling a bit more than usual the last few days and it looks like it was for a good cause. Last night she had 8 or 9 piglets, all on her own and not in a farrowing crate. She made a nest and did everything the way God intended. She’s nursing well and so far, so good on the new piglets. I’ll post more pictures as we have them. Right now we’re giving her some peace.
We conducted a survey after our class and had good comments and feedback from everyone however one of our students took the time to write a hand written thank you card. I was very honored he took the time, especially since we worked Eric and Stephan like rented mules the entire day. They were the first to jump in to help on everything we did and were a pleasure to have in our class.
Next weekend we have our bang to bacon class. Since I don’t have time to do the prep this week, we went ahead and killed one of the two pigs we are going to use yesterday.
Getting the scalding water up to 145. Brent stopped by in the morning to help and get organized. Also Bar-B-Jew, Darryl, and the inmates were on hand. Miguel was everywhere, including being the head chef for a batch of carnitas which fed the entire farm with leftovers. As you can see it was a rainy and cold morning.
Just finishing the scraping. Spork stopped by to help for a bit.
The Princess was very keen on doing the gutting. She had missed that part before and she had been learning anatomy in school. She wanted to see it for real. She was disappointed we weren’t going to extract the brain for her to see.
The head, before being cleaned up. Brent will be making head cheese with this one for class day.
Here I am gutting the pig. The Princess wanted to do this but I had to get the heart and lungs out intact for mom for anatomy class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5hZQYVG38
Miguel got busy with his carnitas pot while we processed one side of the hog. We used the front and rear quarter for carnitas, salted the bacon, and left the loin to cool in the walk in. We will process the loin later.
Carnitas with pork so fresh it was still warm when it went into the pot. You can’t buy food like this.
And to celebrate, something to wash the carnitas down.
What’s the first thing that happens when you sell some pigs? A huge load of produce of course. Fortunately a lot of it was cabbage which the cows love so today I will be spreading joy in the pasture to the cows.
I am one of those people at a party that you don’t want to start comparing scars with. Either I am monumentally stupid, or I’ve done a lot of things. Probably some of both. Either way I have a lot of scars and with scars come stories. I have scars from bow and arrow fishing, knife wounds, getting hit by falling steel, having liquid steel dripped on me (thanks Mr K), hole punchers, table saws, bicycles, motorcycle wrecks, and these are just the highlights. However I now have a new mark that ups my street cred, such as it ever was.
What you see above is a pig bite. That’s one side of the wound, just above the knee. I can’t really see the other side. While loading the piglets into the trailer and then sorting the pigs out of the trailer we didn’t want in, I managed to get myself between Penelope and her kids. Miguel was letting Penelope past the partition and I turned my back on her to keep the rest of the pigs from running out too, something they are very good at. Well Penelope saw the opening, then turned back towards me and took a bite out of the back of my leg. I never saw her coming. Luckily I wear Duluth Trading Company firehouse work pants which are heavy and thick 11.5oz cloth. If I had been wearing anything less I would have needed stitches which would have been unfortunate because I doubt Mrs K could have stopped laughing at me long enough to sew me up.
So it turns out that Duluth knew what they were doing when they made the following commercial.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E73Jyf2Dzb0
Miguel spent the rest if the day laughing at me. It felt deserved.
As I’ve said before, tattoos are for people who haven’t earned their scars.
On Thursday I fired the smoke house as I do each morning. I just love the look of the house venting a thin stream if smoke. It’s like watching a fire, but more productive. This particular morning it was only 7 degrees when I took this video. That may explain why its so short.
Before I fired the smoke house, I took the opportunity to remove some if the items we have in there smoking. Mostly cheeses. This particular cheese is mozzarella cheese that I made from our milk. It went from warm cheese, to a muslin and hung in the smoke house immediately. It developed a very nice rind and took on a good amount of smoke in a couple of days. I shredded some into the scrambled eggs for breakfast before storing the rest away. Good stuff. Actually breakfast was really good all around. Scrambled eggs(our eggs) with ground pork (our pigs) mozzarella cheese (our milk and our cheese) and cantaloupe. Alas, it’s the wrong season for our cantaloupe. Still, pretty local as an average.
I also pulled the other cheeses we had smoked , along with the cashews. The cashews are no good smoked. They took on a petroleum flavor which isn’t from and fuel as we don’t use any. It’s just the way they taste smoked. Maybe if I had baked them first. Everything else has smoked nicely though. The salt is really good. Any ideas on what to smoke next? We have a month of smoking ahead of us.
Monday we made a deal to sell all of our Ossabaw feeder pigs to Rare Earth Farms so you can buy them at the farmers market soon. I felt like I got a fair price and started a good relationship with a partner farmer.
