Homesteading
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Springtime Flurry
It’s the springtime flurry! Activity everywhere and non-stop. I start my days early and fall asleep by 9 most days, completely and blissfully exhausted. It’s been a very busy May, but it feels so good to be active after this past winter and the slow start I had to spring! I’ve been able to walk regularly the last few weeks, and what a difference it makes! Sure, I do get tired some days from all the activity between the gardens, house, and walks, but I can feel my strength and energy returning. The saying “You don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it,” is so true. I don’t enjoy…
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Plans for 2022
I’ve been thinking a lot about our plans for 2022. It’s been a little bit difficult to come up with something I feel is fairly solid, because we have a couple of variables that are, to some extent, unknown. But I’m doing my best to try to map out a plan for the year so we know what steps to take and when. Every year, there are several factors we take into consideration when coming up with a list of goals for the year. Finances and time commitments, as well as our desire to reach a goal are all things we need to think about when making our plans. If…
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Review: First Time Raising Pigs
It’s been a few weeks now since we butchered our pigs, and I’d like to do a review of our first time raising pigs. We added two things to our homestead this year that were complete game-changers for us: a new tractor with a loader bucket… and pigs. I love all of the animals we’ve raised up until now, but pigs were on a whole other level. They were no more difficult to raise than chickens, they didn’t require lots of extra time or materials. Granted, we added meat pigs to the homestead, and not breeding stock. But meat pigs? So simple, and the best thing we could have done…
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Butchering Supplies
It’s true that you could butcher a whole animal with nothing more than a good, sharp knife, but it’d be an unpleasant task. When we began butchering, there were a few supplies we decided to invest in to make the job bearable, and over the years, we’ve added to our collection so as to be able to better deal with butchering of different animals. It’s deer gun hunting here in Wisconsin this week, and we’ve got meat to process! Aaron shot his second deer ever, the first for us for the season. It’s not our first time butchering deer, so we didn’t need to add any new supplies to our…
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First Time Sausage-Making
It took nearly three years, but I FINALLY got around to using the sausage stuffer that Scott gave me for Christmas awhile back! I’ve been wanting to undertake this project for a very long time, and I feel like such a homesteading geek for getting so excited about this! Our first time sausage-making went well, and I’m glad to finally have it under our belts. After I was given the sausage stuffer, a relative stopped by with some ground beef they needed to clear out of their freezer, and I was all set to use that meat for our first sausage-making. However, this was when I was very pregnant with…
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Preserving Meat: Why and How We Do It
There are a few questions I tend to get from people when talking about how we butcher our own meat. One question is why we raise so much of it. The other is about how we store it. We’re not experts at this, but since we just wrapped up butchering season, and we’ve been getting a lot of these questions, I thought it would be good to address these questions. Question One I’ll dig into the question one, first. Why do we raise so much meat? This year, we butchered 16 chickens, 7 turkeys, and 2 pigs. We also bought a quarter of a cow, and now we’re hoping to…
