Friday, January 8, 2010

Winter



Winter is definitely here! The pond froze completely over this week which has not happened in years. The high for today is 34!

We have a pig now. I made a great trade for her. I traded our horse for her. I figured trading an animal that does nothing but eat for one that we can eat was the best horse trade (pun intended) I have ever made. She is now big enough to process, so she won't be with us much longer. She has an appointment on the 19th. I really wanted to butcher her myself but in all my research it just appeared that I didn't have the proper set up for the scalding part to get the hair off and I also found out that skinning a pig is very difficult as well. Combine this with the fact that she weighs about 300 pounds and I just decided that I am not going to be able to process this one. We may "finish" another pig next fall and maybe I will be ready by then. I am going to cure the bacon and hams myself...that part looks pretty easy.
Posted by Matthew at 4:49 PM 1 comments
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Welcome!

Welcome to our family blog. We have a small (55 acres) farm and are attempting to raise beef cattle, some hay, laying hens, honey bees, a dog and a small garden. We also have a small pond that has fish in it but they pretty much raise themselves.The Twenty-eight eleven is the name of our farm. It comes from Deutronomy 28:11 which reads: "The LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you." We count on God's blessings for our life as we know it so we thought it appropriate to go ahead and give Him all the glory for anything good that we produce, be it crops, cows, or children. This blog will be a fun project for us to document what is going on at our farm and hopefully share some natural ways of farming along the way (as we learn too).