the weekend of the pig

note: messers update. it's a good one.

nothing says 'i love you' like a weekend in the country up to your elbows in raw meat.  so to celebrate our anniversary why not hop into our four door city car...buy a pig... then slaughter and process it over the course of two days. 

(note: there is only one picture of a dead animal and it's not scary...any friend who would like to see the other pictures can come to my house to view them. pennie will be learning this stuff as she grows so she knows how to be grateful for her food)

i was trying to decide how to group these then i just decided to stick with the order that i saw them... 

so you're experiencing it like i experienced it (minus the 'real farm life' pictures)

as soon as you see logs and chinking you know you're at an old farm.

scratch chickens were everywhere... my grandmother just informed me that scratch chickens have the best tasting eggs.  

draft horses.... i know you know this isn't my only picture of them

'i've got my eye on you'

our pig is the one in the middle.  well, half of him.
all three were 'processed' though.

here it is... the picture of the dead pig.
but let's think about it.  this pig's life was way better than any dead pig i've bought from walmart.
having visited many farms (mostly dairy) i'm familiar with how much work farming is and how you have to love it to do it.
so mentally i had a knowledge of it but to live it (and comparatively it would be a vacation to a real farmer)
it's definitely a different perspective.
the next day we ate biscuits and sausage gravy (guess where the sausage was from) but thanking God for that pig was a lot more powerful than any other meal prayer i've ever said.

i said there'd be more... as soon as i saw the horses at a the fence i bailed on the boys working with the pig and went to take pictures. (truth be told there wasn't much for me to do that day)

the eggs we collected that are now sitting in my fridge

the  next day we woke up to snow.
it was the perfect two days for slaughtering.
first day was warm for working.  cold overnight and next day to freeze the meat.

on our way to do chores

feeding the chickens i admit i had to quote a movie:
'breakfast time, breakfast time. everybody up. hurry hurry breakfast time'
can you name it?

this is what we were doing most of the second day (with many steps before this one) and soon after we cleaned up and ate it.
it was yum.

i had to do all the pictures large scale because i really liked some of them and i couldn't do some and not others... that would just be weird. then again a giant picture of ground meat is really weird too. eh.