After a week delay due to snow, the bacon harvest has finally happened.  We planted these bacon seeds at 3 pounds and they went off to freezer camp this past Friday at roughly 350 pounds.  That should put close to 450 pounds of pork in the basement.

I am getting around a bit better.  My hip is still pretty weak and stairs make me nervous, but I can get things done.  Thanks to all who volunteered to help.  It was very much appreciated.

Now that Zina is back, this weekend became turkey weekend.  We needed to get chicken wire over the turkey coops because we were sick to death of putting them to bed and waking up the next morning because they’d “Flown The Coop”.  Turkeys like to roost up as high as they can.  We had some shade cloth over parts of the coop, but when their clipped flight feathers grew back they sat atop of the chainlink fence.  They would hop down in the morning and some would go in the coop and a bunch wouldn’t.  So we fenced in the cover and so far we have had no escapees.  Turkeys are big strong birds and not the brightest of creatures, so it had become kind of an annoying challenge to keep them together.

Today was turkey harvest.  We want to get back down to just our breeding stock.  That consists of two Toms and six hens.  We will use them to hatch out next year’s crop.  So today we processed 4 big Toms.  It came in close to 50 lbs. all plucked, cleaned, shrink wrapped and frozen.  The two really big ones are for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

After I get to Cabela’s tomorrow to get our new meat grinder (I was burning out my Kitchen Aid mixer with its grinder attachment), the remaining hens will become burger.  Didn’t everyone become a meat processing plant this weekend? If anyone feels generous I would love a meat processing band saw.  Santa? LOL!

In addition were the usual chores and hay hauling and feed bag slinging.  Zina was snoring at 7:30 tonight.  Tomorrow, off we go to the big Shitty – Zina to a day of meetings at work, me to a Weaver’s Guild meeting and then off to hunt and gather.  Our month of November challenge proceeds on as well.  Have there been any new news stories other than the usual corruption,  celebrity gossip  and political bickering?  I doubt it.  So far our hiatus has revealed that we need more than one farm hand back up.  We have too much plastic storage junk and want to switch to glass with glass covers (seem to be hard to find) we need to start freezing the goat milk in Ball jars instead of ziplocks.  We are going through way too many of them. Also, we need to keep up on our off season indoor greens production.  We found that salads are a quick go to so we need a more reliable source of lettuce. We are doing it hydroponically, but it seems we need more and we need to keep it staggered so we don’t end up with it all maturing at the same time.  Easy fix, just need to do it.  So it was a pretty busy week.  Snow tomorrow and then back to the 60’s.  It hit 78 here on Saturday after a foot of snow the week prior.  Things are getting funny but there ain’t nobody laughing.