Greenstorm's Journal

Yesterday something happened that I'd been worried about for a long time.

Penny died. I wasn't worried particularly about Penny, but about any adult pig dying. It being Penny makes it emotionally harder; she's the last remaining of my first girls, she was looking sick for a day or two but I can't get a vet up here so I'm blaming myself for not trying an antibiotic shot the first day; I loved her a lot.

It being an adult pig is logistically a nightmare. I got the Ossabaws because they're on the small side, but she's still a 300lb dead weight. Even if I could dig a hole deep enough for her to not be exhumed by wildlife (maybe rent a tractor) the ground is frozen right now. So I had to get her out of the pig house, across the field, and up into the pickup truck before the other pigs ate her. To be clear, I could drag her about six inches at a time using every bit of my strength, then rest awhile.

I am very lucky to have two things: Tucker, who's still (barely) in town, and wheels, in this case a furniture dolly which seemed the better option than the wheelbarrow. He managed to make time to help me between his new job and his evening concert; it took us an hour to move her about a hundred feet and get her onto the truck. She had died early in the morning, so she was starting to swell up and there was intestinal leakage from front and back.

People say they can't handle watching their food killed. Apparently plenty of people leave their animals in the vet's for euthanasia because they can't stand to be there. Today, the day after, I wish everyone the kind of intimate physical contact with a dead loved one where they're using every ounce of their strength and breathing in shit and gas in order to dispose of the body, not in an honoured spot under a beautiful tree, but out where it will be scavenged in the snow.

I don't wish everyone doing that between a workday and and evening second job(third, is the farm a job?). I don't wish anyone thinking they might ever have to do it alone.

So today I'm numb and raw and angry and Avallu jumped the fence and was chasing cars (also there's a neighbour that will shoot him on sight if he's out) and I need to figure out a zoom presentation for tomorrow and vaccine card regulations before heading to the airport to view the new property and I don't *want* to.

I've spent the last hour looking over possible gene inputs for the Sayward property summer cover; cool tolerance is good but so is disease resistance and I can handle a longer season.

Luckily it snowed last night so I could find where Avallu got out by his tracks and patch the fence there. I'm going to be gone and Tucker will be coming by to feed once a day; he really can't be getting out.

I'll water all the plants well and set them up for me leaving.

And I'll take this long-anticipated event as a sign that sometimes I really do need to be around folks who can help. It's not good to be doing something like this alone.

Warm again. We're supposed to have a stretch of warm + rain, which of course is on top of what was 3' of snow and is maybe a little closer to 2.5 now. The dogsled race happened on the weekend: I normally love it but last week's forestry conference kept me busy through the start of the long races, and I was in a pretty bad place mental-health-wise on Saturday, and then on Sunday I just wanted to stay in controlled environments and not jeopardize feeling ok. That said, Tucker's apartment was across from the lake where the event was held, so I could peek out and see the dogs in the sunshine.

Warm again and the new piglets got castrated, pushing the edge of the 10 day/2 week window when I'm comfortable doing it at home. Well, comfortable is a tremendous overstatement but it had to be done: they get castrated or they get eaten very young unless I can source that immunocastration drug. They seem to be doing alright this morning; because my anxiety is running so high it's fixating on everything, and one of them having adverse reactions to castration and bleeding out or something is one of them. That hasn't happened to me. I did castrate one with a scrotal hernia once and had to put him down immediately, which was very traumatic, but they all went cleanly here so far. I'll go out later today and watch them all pee but they're sleeping now with Mama Black Chunk, who's been let out of isolation with her babies. Actually it's pretty cute: when I went out the boar was spooning her, and she was spooning the babies.

I sold the 4runner to mom, which is basically the best news. I love that truck and didn't want to see it go to someone who wouldn't care for it. Mom lent her car to someone who had an accident and didn't know to leave insurance out of everything so they decided to scrap it because it got a dent; she was in the market for something new and I had this 4runner which I need to get rid of because I can't keep two vehicles. I'm so glad it's staying in the family. I need to get the windshield redone (they put sand/gravel on the roads up here in winter for traction, since it's too cold for salt, and it's pretty normal to replace your windshield every year or two since rocks fly up and crack them) and replace the battery and pull the farm junk out of it. First I need to shovel it out the rest of the way from under a snowdrift.

The peppers I planted back in January are up and the other peppers are ordered. I've also ordered some black plastic flats, which-- these are supposed to be extra heavy duty so they don't break every year. I keep wanting to get enough of a carpentry shop together to make myself some wooden ones but that hasn't happened yet so hopefully these last a couple years. I need to get the rest of my peppers into soil. I've also put artichoke seeds in. We'll see how they go. I'm starting to rattle what goes where around in my head.

I've also got start dates for most things on my garden spreadsheet; I do need to go through and winnow out what I'm starting this year and what I'm not. Especially, when I have multiple accessions of something from last year I probably want to grow saved seed rather than bought seed, etc.

I really do need to shovel my way out to the greenhouse and A-frame and start grouping out the geese.

I'm kind of tucking this here at the end but Saturday was pretty rough. I think my brother is going to manage to do what nothing else has, and drive me substantially off the social internet. I need to decide what to do about that: block him? Some other workaround? Gracefully let go of those parts of the internet? Hopefully my counselor can help me come up with some ideas this week. He's definitely infuriating and deep into DARVO right now. He spams the family chat with links about the "freedom convoy" and the constitution, ignores any facts he finds inconvenient, does the two-step "you can't trust media to report the science correctly/reading academic papers too closely to decipher them is some kind of trick or gotcha" and most recently "people are too specialized" (I it's think code for scientists are wrong) followed by "are you familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect" which is basically like being trapped in some sort of horror sitcom where someone who doesn't believe in science tries to use a science idea that explains how non-experts think they know a lot to explain why he, a non-expert, knows more than other people.

Horror sitcom is not my favourite genre. Maybe a laugh track would help?

Anyhow, being almost totally offline for the latter half of the weekend meant I watched Leverage with Tucker and had some time to think about a particular scene that had been picking at the back of my mind. In it a dude is flirting with a woman across a counter, and she is flirting back. At one point her hands are lying on the counter between them, he puts his hands on hers, she looks slightly uncomfortable, he lifts his hands away and says "the hands, it's too much, right?" and she nods and says yes and they keep flirting but he doesn't reach out to touch her again.

This little snippet of interaction has stayed in my mind, and I've finally dug out why. A lot of the male-assigned folks I've engaged with sexually would have had trouble getting all the way to the end of the four parts of this: 1) try something 2) collect feedback based on body language 3) ask for clarity if they detected something amiss and 4) course-correct and continue to enjoy the interaction. If they were actually willing to try doing a thing they'd be unable to assess for feedback, if they assessed for feedback and detected something slightly amiss they'd spiral into self-loathing and be unable to clarify and course-correct. Obviously this prevents meaningful feedback; anything other than positive feedback drags the whole experience to a screeching halt. I wonder if this is linked to protect women from even a hint of bad feelings/women are delicate flowers who should never have a moment's dissonance in their lives? I wonder if it's linked to a model of masculinity that's about prowess and always being right the first time? Or what's going on? Anyhow, that bit in the show made me happy.

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

Pigs/Geese: winter over in greenhouse and then move through fields

March/early April onto frozen ground as the greenhouse thaws enough to plant: field #1 from frozen ground to 1" thaw: barley, kale, cabbage gets planted when the animals leave.

April till mid-May into field #2 for and tomatoes, squash, and corn go in after.

Mid-May into field #3, either perennial pasture or fall/very early spring plant of grain (rye?).

Quick sweep through haskap and apple pastures to pick up excess fruit. in summer/late fall as required.

Mid-Sept back into field #2

Oct back into field #1

Nov back into greenhouse.

That's 3 fields minimum plus orchards and greenhouse. It supports a rotation, either a 3-year one or a couple years in field #3 which could also be planted with a good hog mix. Realistically it would be better to have several field #3s if it's not going to be perennial pasture and they could step through maybe 1 per month.

Requires mobile hog housing and some sort of watering infrstructure.

Hm.

Alright, mom & brother are coming up tomorrow sometime. They are bringing an order of fun sausage casings: I currently have a very practical set of hog casings sized for what most people think of as "normal" sausage, sort of hot dog to smoky size.

I've been wanting to make some nduja and some larger diameter sausages, maybe a mortadella or a bologna (yes, I know that's not necessarily the best size to start at for an emulsified sausage) and some more standard coarse fermented dried sausages like that. So I've picked up some sizes of beef middles and caps, as well as some artificial collagen middles and a round of umai snack-stick sizes for some fully dry sausage (I've had trouble with oxidization on these before so I'll be smoking them I think).

Also got some starter culture and external mold culture since my current stuff is Very Old and I'm wanting more certainty than just adding a bit of sauerkraut water to the sausage for lactobacteria.

Now I need to look up some recipes. I have lots of pork belly to use up especially, but I'd like to do a long low pasteurization on it if that's possible without breaking the fat. Easy on an emulsified sausage, I'm not so sure about a spreadable sausage. It will be exciting to use up my hoarded jar of calabrian peppers. It would be nice to do a sausage that contains some of my tomatillo/pepper ferment too, maybe the dried snack sticks.

I wish I hadn't packed my sausage book. It's unhelpful not to be able to get at it. Anyhow, methods needed for:

Emulsified sausage for cold cuts: grind then food processor method with crushed ice, smoking, sous vide poaching (what temp, and do I poach before or after coldsmoking). How much liquid? Do I need a binder? I know everything needs to stay painfully cold. What are typical mortadella spices? Do I bloom it after poaching? Do I want to see if I can find an all-pork hotdog recipe while I'm at it?

Spreadable sausage: multigrind, do I use a food processor? Ferment during and after smoking, at what temp? Can I pasteurize in the sous vide, and what's the lowest temp I can do that at for trich, and for how long? Does playing with casing size matter? What's the difference between belly and backfat on the finished product, and what's the difference between 50 and 70% fat content?

Dry-cured sausage: These are pretty straightforward, I need to max out the antioxidant ingredients. Maybe a pepperoni, something with sichuan peppercorn, and a fennel? Smoke everything for the antioxidant properties, then put into umai bags.

Snack sticks: What grind and meat to fat ratio is optimal? What % of fermented solids? Do these need a ferment before drying? Can I dry them in a cool room, will they go fast enough, or do I need to fridge them?

It might be fun to try a composed sausage, like a capicolla, but I won't do that this round.

I also tried a round of soap with cranberry seeds (bought) rather than ground apricot pits; they're a much larger size and rounder, so we'll see how comfortable they are in the final soap. If they work I'd like to use them; while apricot is a lesser allergen than walnut shells, I believe cranberry seeds are likely to be even less so. They do take more volume for the same effect though. This soap also contains my newly acquired "muscle and joint" essential oil mix, which smells very eucalyptus/menthol-y (not birch/wintergreeny). I should make myself some lotion with that oil mix too, I am very achy this fall, especially my fingers.

So a lot of my energy/money goes to my farm, which is primarily dedicated to breed preservation. That is, I keep my freezer full but I'm maximized neither for feeding myself nor making money. I'm maximized for being able to have as many people keep Ossabaw hogs as breeding stock as possible.

I'd been maintaining two boars for the genetic diversity, knowing I needed to downsize to one but really waffling on who to keep. I'd also been starting to cut down my original sows and keep offspring.

The other day I got a call from someone who was looking for an adult breeding pair, just two, to keep as homestead pigs. It sounds like his situation is perfect to keep Oak, from the Ontario line, and Nox, one of my original sows. They're both very friendly animals, they're a little on the smaller side, and I think they'll be a good fit. That's a substantial relief since it means none of those boars will go for sausage, they'll be in a breeding home, and Ossabaws will be introduced to a new town.

If I actually successfully get a deposit from them this will be very good.

Now for something actually super great.

The guy came and killed/skinned/gutted 5 pigs last Saturday. I tossed a bunch of primals in the bathtub in ice to get the heat out, put some in the freezers (meat is insulative, so you can't pack too much in a freezer), and got to work. There are still maybe a dozen primals in the freezer -- mostly hams -- and there was a bunch of extra waste of bones and fat trim because I figure I had enough of some things for now. So:

Two dozen jars of concentrated tonkotsu stock
A dozen jars of Ellen's carnitas recipe, likely to make more
A bunch of thin-sliced ramen pork, maybe an oz or two per pkg
Several boxes of chops, mostly loin chops with about an inch to an inch and a half fatcap left on them but some leg steaks and sirlion chops
Many roasts, primarily picnic and leg roasts
A couple boxes of belly, uncured as yet
About ten pounds of ground in 1lb packages, likely to be added to
A box and a half of coppa and prosciuttini and three slabs of bacon in cure with sichuan peppercorn, juniper, whisky, and seville orange in varying amounts
A kilo and a half of "crack pork jerky" waiting for the dehydrator
A bunch of odd bits, ribs, tongues, kidneys, hearts, cheeks
Two jowls in cure and the rest untrimmed in the freezer waiting (those things take a lot of trimming, there are so many salivary glands in there)
A full 5-gallon bucket of soapmaking lard <3
40 or so portions of rendered leaf lard in single packages plus more to be packaged
10 kilos or so of sausage either in process (ground and waiting for casing) or in chunks waiting for grind
5 smoked and a couple unsmoked/uncured hocks

Additionally we smoked a bunch of bacon from the last butcher which had been in cure for long enough, and three prosciuttos and one lonzino. I need to drop my salt percentage a bit for the bacon, since it's eaten hot-- it's good for bacon sandwiches but a little too intense to eat on its own.

Plus we harvested most of the wheat, and I'd previously harvested my beauregarde soup peas. Although the peas were primarily a seed multiplication exercise, I have enough to make a small pot of pea soup from my hocks and my peas and my chive or onions. How amazing.

Some of my pepper plants are inside awaiting frost. I've been picking smallest unripe winter squash and eating them which: makes up for the bad zucchini year, encourages the remaining squash to grow better, and keeps them from being wasted by frost. Plus they're very dense and tasty, unlike zucchini which can sometimes be a bit squishy.

Mikado Black tomato is my new go-to black tomato. Very smoky tasting and it ripened!

Jory is starting to ripen, it's got nice big fruits. Unexpected and I'm interested to taste it.

Most of a 5 gallon bucket of soap lard trimmings rendering in the oven, plus two crockpots' worth on the table. Instant pot full of dog scraps. Dehydrator on with bay leaves. Supergiant stock pot with bones on the stove overnight. Dishwasher on. Freezers all stuffed full, with more work to be done tomorrow.

Gonna be a big electricity bill for today, and small grocery bills for awhile.

Can one cook doughnuts in lard?

I'm incredibly tired, and I've been super sad and anxious all day except when I can get completely caught up in deboning a picnic shoulder or something. I don't want to be sad the whole time Josh is here. I want to be present and enjoy his company. He's a wonderful person to project with though.

There's not even any point in discussing my communications with Tucker right now. They go terribly, then really well for a bit, then terribly. Why am I doing them? What do I want to get out of them?

Lots of rain last night and today. Everything is muddy and chilly. Summer is over. Next dry day I'll take in grain and tomatoes I think. A dry day might be a bit if it stays this cool, since I don't think it'll dry quickly.

Demoncat hates the rearrangement of the kitchen for butchering and meowls piteously.

This is going to be my first full week's vacation where I don't have to manage a trip somewhere.

My mind doesn't exist. More tomorrow.