Another thing I never thought I would do

We added two Tamworth pigs to our small hobby farm a few weeks ago. My son and I in particular were excited to raise some pigs since we are as he likes to put it "bacon buddies". I must say the pigs are quite cute and we all enjoy having them around. We all get a laugh out of watching them run around since they can not bend in the middle and thus have a particularly amusing running style. Don't worry I am not getting too attached to them and I will have no problem sending them off to the butcher when they have fattened up.

Now for those of you who think the title of this post refers to the mere owning of pigs you are very much mistaken. See we purchased two weanling male pigs that were approximately ten to twenty pounds each. No problems so far except that the person we purchased them from had yet to castrate them. My wife brought the pigs home a few days before we went on vacation. A week down in Disney followed by a week of my wife and kids at her mother's place in Alabama. Did I mention that we all caught a nasty cold down at Disney which I am just finally starting to get over. What all this means is that by the time we are ready and able to castrate the pigs they weigh in at about 60 lbs for the big guy and maybe 40 lbs for the runt. I will spare you the details of the castration, except to say it is surgery that I am performing on the pigs while my wife is trying to hold them still. Normally watching my petite wife try to wrestle a pig would be funny, but when I am trying not to cut her or myself with the scalpel, nor cause any undue harm to the pigs during the procedure it is quite stressful.

I am happy to say that the pigs seem to be healing nicely, and my wife and I now know that we can do some things we never would have thought about.

Farm Truck

Besides a tractor a good old truck is probably the most indispensable tool to have on a farm. I had been looking for a truck for sometime and finally was able to find one last week that fit the bill. It is a 1986 Chevrolet Silverado diesel with over 200K miles on it. We now have something besides the wifes mini-van to cart hay, goats, pigs etc. around in.

Thanksgiving Turkey

As my wife is fond of saying, we started Thanksgiving dinner last Easter by setting 18 Narragansett turkey eggs into an incubator. From those 18 eggs we only had three turkeys make it to maturity one of which was white (not the proper coloring for a Naragansett).
We augmented our flock with two birds from Springfield Farm to make sure that we would have a breading pair.

All told we ended up with three Toms one Hen and the aforementioned white. In order to allow the bird to age appropriately and to avoid grossing out some house guests I processed one of the Toms and the white one the weekend before Thanksgiving. After plucking and cleaning our Tom weighed in at ten and a half pounds. The white went into the deep freezer and will be dinner sometime this winter.

On Thanksgiving we also cooked a store bought thirteen pound bird, to ensure leftovers and placate my mother who was somewhat leery of eating our homegrown bird. While our bird was a few pounds smaller it was considerably taller (our turkey is on the left).

All said and done the turkey was delicious and it was great that the potatoes and beans were also grown on our farm.