A goal reached
This summer will be the five year mark since we moved up here to the country from urban Massachusetts.
Somewhere along the line, I came up with a goal of growing all of our own food. While the uncleared land and unimproved clay and rock soil of this property have not yet yielded a decent vegetable garden, the thick underbrush that we have been slowly clearing for the past five years has gone a long way towards feeding livestock.
Today our chest freezer is full to the top with meat. That by itself is a good thing, but the really exciting part about it being full is that every single piece of meat in it was either grown here or hunted here. Beef, pork, goat, raccoon, smoked hams and bacon. Sure there are a few "storebought" packages of meat like a package of Italian sausages and some corned beefs that were on sale, but those got moved to the little freezer that is part of the shop fridge and I'll use them up ASAP to get them gone.
When we built the animal pens, they were temporary in nature so that the panels the pens were made up of could be unclamped and moved elsewhere. The plan is that the ruminant animals clear the brush and strip the bark off of the saplings, then we move in pigs who dig up the roots and dig up the rocks. They all manure the dense clay soil. After a couple of seasons, the pen is ready to be dismantled and moved to a new location on the property leaving behind a cleared, tilled, leveled, de-rocked, fertilized patch of land ready to be a productive garden next year.
This afternoon I took everything out of the chest freezer to take out the dividers in order to fit more into it since I probably have another 100 pounds of beef to cut up and package over the weekend. In returning everything to it, I made an inventory of it's contents to keep better track of what we have on hand. At the bottom I found a goat hide that I forgot we still had, a bag of coonskins, a bag of rabbitskins, and a sheep head. I let Caleigh use a scalpel and skin out the sheep head so we can hang it out for the bugs to strip the flesh off of and add it to our skull collection. It's hanging next to Rocky the steer's skull. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the bugs to strip them.
To some people our full-to-capacity freezer just represents a lot of meals waiting to be enjoyed, but to me it represents a major milestone along our road to self-sufficiency.
Somewhere along the line, I came up with a goal of growing all of our own food. While the uncleared land and unimproved clay and rock soil of this property have not yet yielded a decent vegetable garden, the thick underbrush that we have been slowly clearing for the past five years has gone a long way towards feeding livestock.
Today our chest freezer is full to the top with meat. That by itself is a good thing, but the really exciting part about it being full is that every single piece of meat in it was either grown here or hunted here. Beef, pork, goat, raccoon, smoked hams and bacon. Sure there are a few "storebought" packages of meat like a package of Italian sausages and some corned beefs that were on sale, but those got moved to the little freezer that is part of the shop fridge and I'll use them up ASAP to get them gone.
When we built the animal pens, they were temporary in nature so that the panels the pens were made up of could be unclamped and moved elsewhere. The plan is that the ruminant animals clear the brush and strip the bark off of the saplings, then we move in pigs who dig up the roots and dig up the rocks. They all manure the dense clay soil. After a couple of seasons, the pen is ready to be dismantled and moved to a new location on the property leaving behind a cleared, tilled, leveled, de-rocked, fertilized patch of land ready to be a productive garden next year.
This afternoon I took everything out of the chest freezer to take out the dividers in order to fit more into it since I probably have another 100 pounds of beef to cut up and package over the weekend. In returning everything to it, I made an inventory of it's contents to keep better track of what we have on hand. At the bottom I found a goat hide that I forgot we still had, a bag of coonskins, a bag of rabbitskins, and a sheep head. I let Caleigh use a scalpel and skin out the sheep head so we can hang it out for the bugs to strip the flesh off of and add it to our skull collection. It's hanging next to Rocky the steer's skull. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the bugs to strip them.
To some people our full-to-capacity freezer just represents a lot of meals waiting to be enjoyed, but to me it represents a major milestone along our road to self-sufficiency.
posted by MVTCoPete | 5:13 PM
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