Mother has her babies - 5 gorgeous piggies!

The next Saturday night Mother gave birth to five gorgeous little piggies, 3 girls and 2  boys. The black and white ones are boys and the rest are girls. We plan to keep two and sell 3 once they are weaned. Teeny tiny little boy pig. the brown one in the back with the belt is "Lucy". A keeper. The big black boy with a little white is also a keeper. And the other brown girl is already sold!

Then the dinners meet their inevitable fates.

Yes, our meatbirds became frozen dinners the very next day. Saturday, pork; Sunday, chicken. The last 8 birds made the long trip to the back... Uneventful, except for the rain, which drove us into the garage for the last few. All were over 4 lbs.; the largest was 5.25 lbs. Yummy!

Pork Chop becomes pork chops!

Catching up on my blogging. Three weeks ago, some of my guy-friends-who-happen-to-be-big-and-experienced-pig-butchers came over and "helped" us butcher Pork Chop. This was no surprise; we did name him Pork Chop. I say "helped" in quotes because we actually did the helping and they did the butchering!

Anyway, it went pretty smoothly, from the bullet in the head, to the sliced throat to drain the blood. Then they hoisted him up on our table and began the skinning. Here's where I helped.

Notice a few things in the photo. Nice sized pig. Two guys are skinning it. The rest of us are holding the dead pig in place. (?) Notice I am doing my part by holding up a leg. I also am the only one wearing gloves. No shame. If you know me, you know I have nail beauty to protect! Then the master deftly removed the private parts and the guts, all in one, similar to what we do with the chickens, cut off the head and feet, and all that was left was meat and bone! Note: this time around, we discarded head, feet, skin and innards, figuring we'd have plenty to deal with as it is!

They hung the carcass from the rafters in the garage, then cut it right in half with a sawzall!

Whole pig hanging...

Presto!

Two halves! Then the sawzall went to work on each half, cutting up chops, roasts, hunks of fat, dog food scraps, rib racks, chunks for grinding. And bagging and labeling. Guess who did the bagging and labeling?

Yip, that's me again! You can tell by the gloves! Over a hundred lbs. of meat, and, yes, I'm putting it in bags of 2 chops each. We are only 2 people, and if we have company, we can pull out more than one bag! Later that afternoon we ground 15 lbs of meat and fat and made two types of bulk sausage. Deeeelicious! Freezer full of pig.