About a month ago someone on a farm group I am on posted that they were selling shares of a sausage sow. He raises his animals well and others in the group always talk up his pork. I was able to get the last of six shares of it and today it was ready so we went to pick it up. I ended up with:
10 packages of ground pork
7 packages of regular sausage
6 packages of sweet Italian sausage
6 packages of bacon
4 packages of Canadian bacon
2 pork roasts (for pulled pork)
2 packages of spare ribs
Everything but the bacon and Canadian bacon came wrapped in freezer paper. The bacons were wrapped in vacuum packed plastic. I don’t know why this surprised me as the place where we buy our beef is all vacuum packed plastic. I guess I figured they’d go either all freezer paper or all plastic. I would prefer all freezer paper. When we are able to source our beef in this county instead of the next county over, I am hoping it will be all freezer paper.
I am excited to try it. I think we will mix the sweet Italian sausage with our ground rabbit meat for making meatballs on spaghetti night. I don’t like sweet sausage or sweet anything first thing in the morning. But I do like it in spaghetti or meatball sandwiches at dinner time. If I were getting a whole pig or even a half a pig I would request it just all be ground pork so I could season it myself.
The bacon is enormous. One slice of bacon is equivalent in size to 4 slices of regular bacon. We’d have to cut it in half lengthwise and in half widthwise for it to be the same size.
It has been raining today so we didn’t get much accomplished with the garden. The kits are all doing well. They are healthy and strong. Firefly’s are the biggest. I’m really impressed with the Firefly x Wildfire pairing. We did breed rabbits last night. I decided to breed 3 pairs again instead of 2. I bred:
Kalia x Wildfire (white and red)
Serena x Alexander (white and white)
Cinnabun x Starbuck (red and white)
The only pedigreed buns will be the ones from the Cinnabun x Starbuck pairing. I decided to breed Cinnabun with Starbuck because she is a full sister to Wildfire. With Firefly as an unrelated red, I don’t need to breed Cinnabun with Wildfire to get reds. And Ruby will be old enough to breed next month so I will have full red kits then as well. With two pairings having mixed babies, I figured I would be more likely to end up with a black kit, hopefully a doe. And if not, well, then I’ll have pretty food.
Next month’s breeding will be:
Phoebe x Leo
Serenity x Felix
Ruby x Wildfire
Normally I breed Serenity to Leo, but I don’t want to breed Phoebe to Felix as she is Felix’s mother and Felix’s father is also Phoebe’s father. Phoebe hates Starbuck. She likes Wildfire, but since he’ll go with Ruby, that only leaves Alex or Leo. Makes more sense for me to go with Leo. Plus Leo and Felix did not breed this time so it will be their turns.
It’s supposed to rain until Saturday afternoon so I’m not sure what else will really get done. I may go pick up some organic potatoes to can. I like using canned potatoes, it makes my day to day mealtimes go much faster.
When Did This Become a Farm? 
My mouth is watering!
How fun! It’s always nice to have a freezer stocked full of meat!
When we send our pigs to the slaughterhouse for our customers – I take their orders (how they want it cut) and pass it along to the butcher. I always request the bacon be cryovaced in plastic – it keeps almost indefinitely in the freezer that way. Many years ago they would just wrap the bacon in freezer paper – within a few months I would start getting complaints from my customers that the bacon was starting to sour – they weren’t imagining things – as my bacon was doing the same.
The butcher finally invested in a huge cryovac machine – now all the bacon, cured pork chops, jowls comes in plastic. It’s the fat that causes the problem of sour. Once you open a package – simply take what’s left and re wrap in your own paper and it will keep okay in the fridge. 😊