A Long Few Days. Pig Butchering :)

We recently put one of our 1.5 year old sows in the freezer. She was a nice sized pig and we put 260lbs in the freezer, or cured to be smoked. I really wanted a picture of Papa standing beside her but the camera had been left in the truck overnight and was too cold to work. SO I got one of all of the pig on the table in the entrance, where we cut and wrapped her. You can't tell but the table is quite a ways away from the straw wall :) I wanted a picture of us making sausage too.. but totally forgot!!! It was a busy few days. We rendered the lard as well and burnt it a bit as we were just doing too many things all at once!

The kids were VERY keen to help so we set up a little table for them and they scrapped the chops off. Papa cut them on the meat saw and then put them on the table and J, L and E scrapped them off with canning lids. R put them in a clean tote to be wrapped. After the tote was full of meat to be wrapped I wrapped it. That's what you call a 'family affair.'

It looks like that is bacon and ribs on the table behind the kids. Ribs ready to wrap on the left. 

 R put them in a clean tote to be wrapped. After the tote was full of meat to be wrapped I wrapped it. That's what you call a 'family affair.' 

Here is a cute picture Papa took after a couple of long days of putting this pig in the freezer. Yes that was Stub.. the wild and hormonal mama pig who kept escaping. 

Baby J asleep on me. I was just about asleep too.. He played hard with the kids while Papa and I were busy deboning, wrapping, cutting, grinding, mixing and making sausage, but really needed some Mommy time by the end of the 2 days.. Papa smoked the sausage in our smoke house and we packaged up 18 bags of 12 hot dogs!!  Weiner roast anyone?? :) We had almost as much Mennonite sausage and Mc. Griggers sausage. We mixed the pork with ground beef from our cow as her hamburger was a bit greasy. We thought she would be tough so we added all the fat we could find.. won't do that again!  It's wonderful stuff. Papa also cured the bacon and a few hams/hocks himself and after curing it for a certain amount of time ( close to a month? I think?) he smoked it just yesterday. Boy are we ever looking forward to having our own bacon again.