Time to Bring Home the Bacon

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Keely

Last year, we were a little more on the ball when it came to purchasing feeder pigs. We tracked craigslist for a while, made some phone calls, and finally reserved our pigs a few weeks in advance. We didn’t yet have a truck, so we borrowed a dog carrier from a neighbor and drove the three stinky little critters home in the back seat of the Nissan. We had to ride the whole way with the windows rolled down to keep from gagging on the stink.
When buying feeder pigs, it’s important to get healthy animals from a knowledgeable, competent source. If they aren’t healthy as piglets, they’ll grow more slowly and convert feed to bacon less efficiently. Meat from intact males can have what’s called boar taint. I’ve never tasted it, but it’s not supposed to be delicious. If you don’t want to deal with castrating your own, ask for cut males. Last year we purchased two barrows and a gilt. Barrows are cut males, and a gilt is a female who has never had a litter. They were part China-Poland and part something else.
At that time, our chickens were only a few weeks old and still lived in a Rubbermaid tub in the living room. We brought the pigs home and locked them in the chicken house overnight to get them used to their new home. In the morning, we let them romp in the fenced chicken yard. I remember flipping out the first time we saw one snurfling in the dirt with its little spade face. We had set up the electric fence just inside the chicken yard fence to train them to the electric wire. With the fence set up this way, if they ran through the electric fence, they’d hit a real fence and have to turn back. Pigs are very smart, and these learned quickly. They’d bump the fence with their sensitive snouts, squeal, and back off. A week or so later, we put them out on the site of our future garden with nothing but the electric fence to keep them in. After one mishap (which I described here) they were fine. By the summer, our pigs wouldn’t cross a single strand of electric fence lying on the ground unless they were in a panic.
The first of last year’s pigs, BigUn, was slaughtered for a whole hog barbecue to celebrate the end of the school year. A neighbor helped us butcher the hog, which was a tremendous learning experience for us and for everyone who came to be a part of the festivities. It was fun to watch the fascination and revulsion take turns on our friends faces as they passed around a warm heart. We shared that meat with our community, and I had a ton of delicious pulled pork in the freezer to get me through the summer. The second hog, Raccoon Eyes, we butchered with the help of some visiting friends and the internet. That process was much longer and more challenging for us, since there was no one experienced there to help. We ground meat for almost two days straight to make several kinds of sausage.
Finally, there was Pinkie.

Pinkalink was the last man standing, and he must have weighed over three-hundred pounds. We hoisted him with a rope slung over a tree limb and tied to a comealong attached to our truck. It looked like the truck might come off the ground before Pinkie did. Butchering Pinkie was a slow and careful process because this was the pig we had saved for cuts: porkchops, shoulder roasts, bacon, etc. Sean actually cured the bacon and hams himself. We saved lard from Pinkie (he had plenty) and are still rendering that to make soap.

chunking the frozen lard

Sean is grating the lard and rendering it in the two pots.

Sean made a lard-pig!

soap! We have to let it cure for a few weeks, or the lye could make it too harsh to use.

Slaughtering Pinkie was an emotional experience. As I’ve said, pigs are intelligent. They are also sensitive. With Raccoon Eyes gone, Pinkie was less active. He would lie in his shelter all day, only getting up when someone would come to feed him. When someone was down there, he’d be all exuberance, running up to scratch against your legs, sometimes even rolling over to get his bacon scratched. It looked a lot like loneliness, and it left perfect muddy snout prints on my legs every time I’d go into the pasture. Pinkie was really attached to Sean and would roll right over when Sean walked up like nothing so much as a hugely oversized pink puppy. When it came time to shoot him, Sean put the .22 right against his skull and Pinkie didn’t budge. He went down completely relaxed and easy, which is what I would want for any animal in my care. I cried over that pig for two days, but I was also proud of what we had accomplished.

Sean and Jesse proudly display the New Years roast.

At New Years, when we ate that roast, our friends shared a perfect Wendell Berry poem, For the Hog Killing.

For the Hog Killing

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the
shooter in the eye,
let them die while the sound of the shot is in the
air, let them die as they fall,
let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let
its freshet be full,
let this day begin again the change of hogs into
people, not the other way around,
for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding
with the world,
for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew
the bond.

—Wendell Berry

Raising my own meat is important to me. With a very few exceptions, I don’t eat meat that wasn’t raised with respect for the animal, the planet and people anymore, and in this part of Arkansas that pretty much means raising it ourselves. Sean was a vegetarian for years before he had the revelation of “happy meat.” I became aware of the issues around meat around that same time and transitioned to a mostly vegetarian diet with what happy meat we could afford when we could afford it. If you’re interested in hearing more about why we eat the meat we eat, ask me! I’m happy to talk or write about it all day, but this post is about our new piggies, so I’m cutting myself short.
This year, we didn’t reserve pigs ahead of time and actually had a pretty hard time finding any. Nobody nearby has feeder pigs for sale, or if they do, they aren’t posting on craigslist. We wound up getting three Hereford gilts from a man a few hours north of us who is selling off his stock in preparation for a move. Since the truck isn’t working this week, we had to drive them home in the dog carrier again. My most recent experience with pigs was with Pinkie, so it was impossible to believe that three pigs could fit in such a small carrier. We hopped out of the car, put on our gloves and the man walked us over to his pig enclosure. He had a network of very clean pens on a concrete slab, and we got to see a few young Hereford hogs before we got distracted by our little squealers. When you pick up a baby pig, it screams bloody murder and releases any solids or liquids it can come up with all over you. Sean got a nice poop splatter down the front of his pants. The man we bought them from carried one by its back leg to avoid this. I wasn’t sure I could pull that off without hurting it or dropping it, so I carried my pig under my arm and it relaxed a little and stopped screaming, which surprised me and confirmed the rumor that Herefords are easygoing pigs. I also managed to come out clean. When we got them into the crate, they hardly took up half the space.
We got home around ten thirty last night, and put them out in their temporary enclosure. For shelter they have the a-frame structure that Sean built for our pigs last summer, and we’re, once again, using the chicken fence as a backup against the electric fence’s failure, though we made the electric fenced area about half the size of the chicken yard, and it doesn’t include the chicken house this year, so our birds still have someplace to scratch.

You can see the electric fence/chicken fence arrangement here, as well as the pig shelter.

When we set them down, they stood still for a moment, then scampered away from us. It’ll take a few weeks before they’re really friendly, but these babies are already less skittish than the last bunch. They bumped the fence a few times (squeeeek!) and then stopped, already miles ahead of what we expected. They immediately began rooting in the mud, searching for tasty grubs and shoots and roots to eat. We went to bed listening to their soft little snores through the bedroom window last night. They are awfully cute when they’re this little.
Our freezer is still nearly full of homegrown pork, as well as turkey and chicken, so we won’t be raising these girls to full size.
One of them is for the end-of-year barbecue, and a second is for Sean to practice his charcuterie on. The third is for a friend, who has asked us to raise a pig for her family. I’m thrilled that we have the opportunity to share what we do here. It’s all very well for us to try to eat sustainably, but the two of us aren’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Spreading the skills and desire to raise and eat good meat is what it’s all about, and our friend is going to leave here knowing how to turn a hog into porkchops!
It’s time to get up and get ready for the week. I don’t want to: I can see the little piggens snurfling in the corner of their pen from bed, and I can hear them grunting and occasionally squeaking as they bump the fence. What more could I want? But there’s gardening to do, and, as you can imagine, laundry. It’s a beautiful day for it. I’d best put on my work pants and get busy.
Here they are! I saved the best for last.

We suck at taking a break

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Keely

Anything but rest! We’ve had a full house all week with Roma (a dog) and Mark (a human) staying here. They hit it off and went exploring together.

Actually, everybody got to go on that adventure. We hiked up behind the house and found the most miniscule frog in the pond at the top of the ridge. We also noticed the helicopters for the first time. They have been conspicuously present this week, flying low over the St. Francis river.

Yesterday we went with Ian for a hike along a section of the Trail of Tears in Village Creek State Park. The part that we were on was a portion of the Memphis to Little Rock road, which was built to facilitate forced Indian relocation. Until yesterday, I had not appreciated the premeditated nature of the ethnic cleansing that took place here. The loop hike was only a little over two miles and the terrain was moderate. Mark and I are both a little sick, so the short hike was exactly enough. The trail along the ridge, where the road had been, resembles the cut that our own gravel road is now in, suggesting that our road was indeed created by wagons, maybe as a route for settlers on their way west, as our landlady has described.

We’ve accomplished a great deal around the house this week. The porch swing is now the same, dark blue as the door, and we built and painted a corner shelf for the kitchen today. The gents planted root veggies this morning while I drew up plans for our construction project. When Mark and I were roommates, we built a shelf together for our dorm room. It was a first attempt, and it looks it, though Sean and I still use it for tools. Last spring, Sean and I built a fairly nice kitchen shelf for our spices and cookbooks, and now the three of us have teamed up into a shelf-building dream team. The result is easily the nicest shelf I’ve ever had a hand in making.

The new shelf is the one on the left! It’s super exciting because we don’t have to keep our potatoes on the floor anymore!

Mark shot a gun for the first time today, and he’s already a far better shot than I am, though not as good as Sean. Sean has made three ice cream flavors so far, in addition to the perpetual flow of delicious gourmet meals.

We went out to bring in the laundry at about 9:30 and heard a rustling in the brush. Sean shined the super-powered flashlight into the woods and spotted an armadillo! We chased it through the woods to the mouth of its burrow, where it stood, twitching its cute little ears, long enough for us to get a good look. Tomorrow, we intend to get set up for some new additions to the menagerie. With a little luck, we’ll be bringing home three little pigs sometime before the end of this week.

Country Living Challenges: Laundry

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Keely

We moved from Waters Road with a washer and dryer. This house didn’t come with laundry machines, and we couldn’t imagine carting our clothes to and from Marianna (which actually seems to have a laundromat) so we purchased ours from our old housemates. There isn’t exactly a laundry closet with a convenient water hookup. In fact, running water is exclusively found at the back of the house and in the tiny kitchen and bathroom. We set up our washer and dryer on the screened in porch, which worked out fine since the washer leaked.
Pros: the laundry area didn’t clutter up our house with dirty laundry and loud noises, and the leaky washer wasn’t a big issue because the back porch floods when it rains anyway. What’s one more flood?
Cons: doing laundry when it’s really cold or windy outside is a real bummer and sometimes the washer freezes so we can’t do laundry at all. Because of constant flooding, our back porch is pretty icky. It isn’t a nice place to be.

This winter, the washer froze solid and then completely crapped out, spilling water constantly. I’ve done laundry at friends’ houses for weeks, once in the middle of a St. Patrick’s day party. Sean and I make a lot of laundry because school is dirty and so is gardening when you get home. It’s been a pain. Sean Pulsfort, that heroic amateur handyman, got the washer fixed up yesterday, and it works better now than it ever has.
It’s a breezy, sunny day, so I put our clothesline to work. Sean and I try to line dry our laundry whenever we can. It’s a free, solar powered alternative to an expensive electrical draw. In the winter, I usually go for the dryer, so I haven’t line dried anything since fall. I had to detangle the clothesline from the fallen limb that had crushed it, along with our chicken fence, during an ice storm, and tie it back up, but it was worth it: we actually have more line space now than we did with the old arrangement.

I love line-drying. It makes me feel righteous, yes, but it’s more than that: I like the fresh smell and stiffness of line-dried clothing; I like folding my laundry into the basket as it comes off the line and dusting off the seeds and spiders that have caught on the seams; I like walking up and down the line, looking for a match for a single sock; I like the colors and the movement in the corner of my eye, and I like feeling the sunshine teasing out a smile while I do a usually tedious job.

Bonus pictures of chickens! Freckles is sitting on eggs right now, so keep your fingers crossed for chick photos in three weeks!

The Blue Door

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Keely

Spring is the right time to paint your door blue. I worked on things today that might have felt frivolous in the summer or fall: I cleared the poison ivy from a long-neglected rose bush, cut and arranged three kinds of daffodil, and painted my front door. I napped in the sunshine with my belly to the sky and I walked through the pasture to the house next door.

The daffodils still come up in the spring along each straight edge of a long-gone path to the steps. Who lived here once? This house and ours are close together by country standards, and similar in design. In the present, our nearest neighbors are a mile on either side, but this house is the last ghost of something of a neighborhood. The occupants must have been friends or kin to the Lyles, the original owners of our place. Did they work in each other’s gardens and picnic in the pasture together? Did they borrow this and that and forget to return it and eventually forget who it belonged to to begin with? Did they fight and feud and make up? Did their kids play together in the woods? There are stories in the short, pretty walk across the pasture.

Spring is a season of thresholds. Everything is on its way to being something else, and everyone is on the road. A couple of friends rolled in late on Monday night and were gone in the morning like the last frost. We have other guests right now too, though these are less welcome.

The ladybugs sound like a heavy rain, smacking their bodies against the windowpanes to reach the sun. They drown themselves in our tea and crawl up our legs at night. Sean claims he pulled one out of his pocket at school the other day. They get into our towels, and, when I got out of the shower this afternoon, I accidentally crushed one against my body and choked on its sharp odor. I think we’re going to try vacuuming them up and letting them go in the garden.
The garden, too, is on its way to being something else. It’s in that phase just before everything springs out of the ground in spades. The lettuce is growing slow now, but it’s eager, and the more it grows the faster it will become. Plants are wonderfully exponential.

When Sean got home from school, we gardened. He tilled while I raked, and we each took a turn mulching the aisles with straw. I planted cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower starts from the feed store, and we tucked in a row of onions together.

screen door swings the breeze
halfway through this blue doorway
laughing with goosebumps

I’d turn his trucks into just one truck

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Keely

Ms. O: What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t get caught?
E: probably burn down the school
C: yeah, that. Or actually, get in here with a bulldozer and a fork lift. Actually, maybe just mess up some people’s vehicles.
E: I’d get us a new superintendent, actually…
C: I was thinking of him. I’d smash his two trucks together so he had just one. Smashed up.
E: Did you ever see that movie where they make all illegal things legal for one night every year? The Purge?
C: I might murder someone.

I kind of like it when they says things like that, because I can laugh and tell them that they never would, and let them know I think they’re wonderful.
Our conversation changed direction a few minutes later.

C: I think we actually could feed the world, but the economy is all messed up. We can’t distribute the food right.
Ms. O: you might be right. We grow all kinds of crops around here, but most of that goes to feeding cows and stuff. I know some people who are vegetarians because they think there’ll be more food for people that way.
E: I heard this one: A vegetarian says to a meat-eater, “Cow farts are dissolving the ozone! I’m a vegetarian. What are you doing about it?” and the meat eater says “Eating the cow”
C: Ms. O, this might sound weird, but since we’re kinda close in age, do you ever think about, like, having kids? I’m kinda scared to. What kind of world will they have?
Ms O: All the time. It’s scary!
E: I kinda wonder why we, like, kids, don’t get to vote. The president makes decisions that effect our future too.
Ms. O: I think maybe it’s because, even though you’re smart and informed, you aren’t living in the real world yet
C: that kinda makes sense. Like, we don’t really understand how complicated some things are. We don’t work or pay bills or anything. I think people should have food stamps though, but only if you can’t work. There are a lot of people in Forrest city who could work but they don’t. They just get that check.
Ms. O: But where are they supposed to work? There’s no jobs and they don’t have a great education or skills. Their whole family is here. Where are they supposed to go?
C: it sucks that there’s no businesses here. It’s, like, the tire shop and Love’s are the only things that bring money to Palestine, and the rest of the community don’t see it, ’cause the guy at the tire shop don’t have any place to spend it.
Ms. O: what kind of business do you think could succeed here? Like, a restaurant?
E: I heard that this guy my parents know wanted to open a Red Lobster, but the company said a town the size of Forrest City couldn’t sustain one.
Ms. O: what about, like, an ice cream shop in the summer? The only thing around here is Baskin Robbins at the gas station.

We all agreed that Baskin Robbins sucks.