Seven Months 10 Days

For those of you that can add, that's how long it's been since I last posted something here.  I know.  I've committed the cardinal sin of blogging.  Establish a Blog, entice your readers, then stop posting.  No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth, just got a tad busy.  Maybe more than a tad.

When last I wrote, we had acquired a veritable menagerie of critters.  Many of them are now gracing the inside of our freezers.  Especially the god-forsaken ducks.  Let me tell you, there's a reason ducks are so damn expensive when you go to buy one for yourself.  They pretty much destroy any area you locate them in.  They go through 4 times the amount of water that they actually need.  And when it's time to process them, you're in for a real treat.  A duck can take up to 6 times as long to process as a chicken.  By processing I'm talking about killing, plucking, eviscerating, cleaning, and packaging.

Most people don't think about the whole process an animal goes through before it arrives in their local grocery store.  Most people don't want to think about it, and with good reason.  It's not pleasant.  But it does give you a greater appreciation for the animal when you perform it yourself.  This year we processed about 90 chickens with the help of our good friend Charlie from Tandem Glass.  Charlie and his wife Terrill create some amazing hand blown glass items in their house/studio across the river from us.

Charlie came over on two of the hottest days in July and we processed all of the chickens that we raised for meat.  The adventure started slowly with just a few at a time.  Then Charlie and I got this great idea to grab a few more with the second trip up the yard.  Not thinking clearly we backed the chickens into a corner of the electric fence, and when we headed towards them they took out the fence. Now picture this, two grown men chasing 30+ chickens all over the yard and all Charlie can think of is Christine driving up over the hill and seeing us.   Speaking of Christine, she did handle the final cleaning and packaging.  She had many rude comments concerning my inability to purchase a lung remover for her.  Something I still haven't picked up.

Ducks were supposed to be processed in late August.  Didn't happen. Instead in September it ended up taking six of us a day and a half to process 49 ducks.  This is because a duck has a wonderful thing called down.  Down does not remove easy.  There is only one place in Maine that processes ducks, and they would rather not do it.  So they charge $13.00 per duck to process them which is reduced to $9.00 per duck if you help and pay a one-time $100.00 membership fee.  I don't blame them.  At $9.00 a duck it's a bargain.  So when you add that cost to the initial cost of the duck, feed, and maintenance, you get a very expensive bird.  We still have 18 ducks that we have kept as egg layers.  Duck eggs are available at market.  Enough on the ducks.

Remember the turkeys?  Well…they’re gone too.  Have to say they were the most fun out of all the birds that we raised.  And the most protective.  When you let them out in the morning they would take off running like a flock of velociraptors out of Jurassic Park.  Then they would follow you pretty much wherever you went. Funniest sight was watching them chase a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses down the road that showed up uninvited.  They would come up onto the deck on the front of the house and stare at the cats through the door and then lay down and take a nap.  They were also the tastiest turkeys we have ever eaten…Bourbon Reds.

 

On to the pigs.  That's Attila above.  You’ll recall that we acquired two Tamworths in May, well in September we a jumped in and purchased a breeding pair of Red Wattles along with two Large Black/Berkshire crossed pigs.  Red Wattles are among the most critically endangered pigs in the U.S.  It’s believed that there are only about 600 breeding pairs.  This makes for a rather small gene pool.  Anyway, with these additions we now had 6 pigs.  Until November.  Which was when Attila met his maker.  Attila, unlike his namesake, was the gentlest pig to be around.  His major concern was what was for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Not necessarily in that order.  When he was dressed out he weighed in at 340 lbs. and provided us with some of the best bacon we have ever had in addition to many other fine cuts.

 

The other pigs, Bungie (Tamworth Female), Hamlet (Red Wattle Male), Zubenelgenubi (Red Wattle Female), and Sox and Dancer the two Large Black/Berkshires all reside in the woods out back of our house.  They have a couple of acres to roam around in and some well-built housing courtesy of our friend Glen Goodell.  Our intent is to raise Red Wattles to help propagate the species and Tamworth/Red Wattle crosses for meat.  We hadn’t intended to start our breeding program until the end of this month but last month Hamlet had other ideas.  So we maybe seeing piglets come the end of March.

We anticipate having forest-raised, organic pork available for sale at market beginning the middle of February.  Please contact us if you would like more information.  It’s not certified organic, you just have our word.

So, that’s where we stand.  There’s a lot of gaps in there that may be filled in with future posts and I promise that there will not be as long a drought between posts.

Rick