Spring Animal Plans

Right now we're in conversation with the couple down the road, David and Ray, to raise a few hogs and possibly some chickens together.  They have an ideal, flat-ground pasture with stables that were on the property when they bought the house.  So we are thinking between the four of us we think we can handle feeding and cleaning without it taking up too much of any one person's time, since we all work off-property at least a few days a week.

Until recently, Big Ag and I were buying shares of my nephew's FFA hogs, but he's graduated now and is out of the program, so if we still want a freezer full of pork we're going to have to raise it ourselves.  And we were buying store-bought organic, free-range chicken, until we discovered even organic chicken has the same bacterial loads of salmonella as factory-farmed birds do, which is not encouraging.  So meat birds are a definite possibility.  One of the chefs at the winery even offered to do all the butchering of the birds if we give him a few to take home with him!

I feel lucky to be going into this proposition with not only Big Ag, but also two other strong men, who will be strong enough to wrangle the hogs once they get large and potentially unruly.  I am hoping we can do all this animal raising before the heat comes, since hot animals are stressed, and I don't want to have to worry about their well-being when it's over 100 degrees.

It will be a lot of work, but I know I will truly appreciate the bacon, chops and sausage in the freezer come summertime.

Primitive Comfort

The weather turned foreboding yesterday afternoon, after we had a kind of barely-there, weak sunshine and high clouds most of the day.  But as the afternoon drew to a close, the dark grey clouds started rolling in, the wind began rattling at the windows and chasing itself down the flue of the stove, and things changed quickly for the worse.  When I stepped out to the back patio, the air smelled like the sea, which told me a front was moving in quickly from the Pacific.

There's something primitive about fixing dinner for a night like this...earlier in the day I had gone out to the lettuce beds and picked a large, fresh salad.  Then I took a whole chicken out of the freezer to thaw, made a generous amount of stuffing, a rosemary/mustard rub and set to getting it all ready, knowing that when darkness fell and the temperature began dropping even more rapidly, everyone would arrive home to a hot, delicious meal, to warm them from the inside out.

Surely nothing is more simple, yet better than this:  A warm fire, a hot meal, and shelter from the wind and cold.  It was a good night here at the homestead, and this morning we gratefully woke to clear skies and sunshine.