Bacon in the makin'

The gentleman builder, padawan and little miss all love bacon.  With our budget restricted due to the costs involved with building a house without a mortgage, bacon is a novelty rather than a standard in our shopping trolley.  The gentleman builder's response to this was to grow his own.  The eventual plan for the block is to be self-sufficient.  We have a small vegetable patch there which provides the majority of our lunch on a daily basis.  We have Bessie, our house cow, who we plan to put in calf in 2013 and will provide our milk and enough to make cheese and butter.

In the last few weeks, the gentleman builder has been reading some of Michael Pollan's works.  In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan talks of going out hunting and eating wild pig.  This spurred the gentleman builder on to some research into the benefits of grass fed, free range, organic produce (you are what you eat eats, after all).  As a result we now have two piglets - a gilt and a boar - at the block.  The plan is that we will grow the gilt and breed from her.  The boar will be grown until about October 2012 (they were born in late March) when he will be slaughtered.  The gentleman builder has grand plans of again making home-made pork sausages.  The kids remember his home-made sausages fondly and all three are convinced that a grass fed, free range version will be even tastier.  The gentleman builder is also looking forward to the chops, salami and bacon that the gilt will provide.

 

For the moment, we have the pigs contained by a two wire electric fence within the dog pen (which is a mesh enclosure with a wooden bottom board.  The pigs have a shelter, made from recycled treated pine frame and tin.  The floor is untreated pine boards leftover from the floor in the attic.

The pigs are rooting around and we have grand hopes for them reducing our blackberry load on the property.  We feed them our green waste from the kitchen and crushed barley.  

Once again we are disappointed at the lack of options available in Australia.  We have only found one supplier of organic stock feed in Australia and they are located near Brisbane, more than 1800km from us in South Gippsland.  The freight required to get the organic grain to us just seems like  a backward step in the plight for fresh produce.  It's not a sustainable option so we have decided to trial the pigs on the feed that we can give them and hope that we can grow enough organic feed behind them to keep them going. 

We will also keep an eye out for seasonal organic produce (i.e. apples) that we can feed to the pigs at little to no cost to us.  Sadly, it is the end of apple season at the moment so we will be waiting patiently until next summer to collect apples for the pigs.

Charcuterie

The gentleman builder is not only a builder, an artist and a bladesmith; he's also a food lover.  He adores fine food - organic spinach with homegrown eggs, 85% cocoa chocolate and fresh meat are high on his list of favourites.

The gentleman builder has great plans for the block in terms of a mixed farm business that will mean that we can get a bit of cash from selling cows, sheep, goats and pigs and, to a certain degree, pick the markets when they are high to sell our produce at a premium. We aim to obtain organic certification for the farm and have not used chemicals since we purchased the property in 2005.  We will have a mixture of poultry too - ducks and chooks are a given and we're still negotiating on geese (I'm happy to have geese as long as they are not kept too close to the house and they're honking and hissing is not at all appealing to me).  In fact, chooks will be first on our list of stock purchases when we move in to the block as the family eats a lot of eggs and there's nothing quite like fresh, organic eggs!

Anyway, back to the story at hand.  The gentleman builder is not a fussy eater (he married one, though) but has a real soft spot for good quality, fresh food.  I bought him a couple of books from the Book Depository at some point about preserving meats as he had spoken at length about his plans to butcher (or have butchered) a portion of our livestock once we're set up for such things so he can have a meat freezer stocked with delicious meaty treats.  Being a vegetarian, I cannot share his enthusiasm for this particular pursuit but I support him in eating quality food that is free from chemicals and, considering our children are also keen carnivores, I think it is a great idea to take advantage of the beautiful meat we will grow.  Organic, grass fed produce is pretty difficult to find and has many health benefits over produce grown on grain.

The gentleman builder sourced some natural casings, purchased some meat and dug out the mincer my Mum had handed down to me.  He then set about making his own sausages.  

Meat

Sausages

Through the process Padawan and Little Miss learnt the value of sausages.  The whole process took over an hour and the sausages lasted about a week, rationed out.  The kids beg the gentleman builder to make sausages on a fairly regular occurrence and whine incessantly when the response is "when we are living at the block we will have more time for things like that again".