October 27, 2006

e butchered the piggies today. And it snowed last night. And snowed more than half the morning. It was nice to have it snow rather than rain. I have never butchered hogs before. But a friend of ours is a professional butcher and he came over to do them and teach me how. He let me work on the third one and this is a picture of me getting the tendons ready in the back legs to hang it to dress it. My index finger is running under the tendons.

The three hogs weighed in at 192#, 178# & 169# dressed weight. I was very much off on my live weight. I wish we could have ran them into our hog scale, but my boyfriend did not want to bother. We loaded up the hogs in the 4-wheel drive truck wrapped in lumber wrap to keep them clean and took them down to the butcher shoppe to be cut and wrapped. Placed my order of how I wanted the meat order and we will pick them up in about a week.

In the last few days, we had some hard core readers from Washington State come up and visit and learn how to butcher pigs. Started to teach her how to knit and her father who came with her is a master carpentry craftsman as well as a wood and other medium artist and tomorrow has volunteered into helping us get the root cellar door on finally!!!

Last night I ate llama for the first time. Some friends gave us 2 pounds of llama hamburger and we had an excellent meal out of it. All of us really like llama meat now and if I find any geldings which no one wants, I may just take them to put them in the freezer.

It has been a fun whirlwind the last few days and I have not been on the computer very much, but it seems the magazine has picked up a 7th country it is being sent to.. so "Down to the Roots" is now in Canada, the US, France, Australia, Switzerland, Taiwan and now Ireland. WOO- HOO!!