Cold..

The cold weather moved in today, ending what was a pretty nice November. I got to go deer hunting last weekend at my great-uncle Don's and shot a fair-sized doe on saturday morning, I got it all butchered on Sunday night as soon as I got home and spent Monday evening grinding hamburger. We ended up with just about 10 lbs worth. I'll be taking another 10-12 lbs of trimmings in to Saukvile to get some hot sticks made. The rest is steaks and roasts.

We have gotten some more good feedback on the turkeys from some of our customers, which we were glad to hear.

I forgot to mention a few weeks back that one of the ducks did finally lay some eggs, I got a grand total of three eggs. That was fine because I really just wanted to see how they tasted. I thought they were good, just a bit richer than a chicken egg. The first egg had 2 yolks, so that was a nice surprise.

A success!

Just a quick note to say that our turkey turned out great and I hope everyone else's did too. I ended up cooking him on the grill as he was just too big for the oven. I took about 4 hours for our turkey and I threw some fresh cut applewood on the grill to give it a little bit of smoke flavor

We got lots of compliments on the bird, so I am happy. Tasting was the last component of the decision whether or not to raise them again next year, so it looks like turkeys will be back.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, Sunday was doomsday for 5 of the turkeys, 4 of them have been delivered to their purchasers and we are going to eat the 5th tomorrow. I sure hope they taste good, everyone is very excited about having a farm-raised turkey for Thanksgiving. I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't be good, but I'm nervous just the same, I want our customers to be happy.

It was pretty rough killing the turkeys. I had definitely grown to like them over the past 5-6 months, but it had to be done, and unfortunately I was the one that had to do it. The remaining turkeys didn't make it any easier on me, they spent the whole day calling for their missing buddies, it was depressing.

I got a call today from Outpost Natural Foods, an organic supermarket chain in the area, asking if we would be able to supply them with any ducks for the Christmas season, I have no idea if they would be interested in the 3 that we have left, but I'll give them a call back on Friday and find out. Our LocalHarvet listing has gotten us more attention than I anticipated. It's a great resource for a small-scale operation like ours.

Hope everyone has a great Turkey Day and I sure hope our customers are pleased with their birds!

Testing, testing, is this thing on?

Hello faithful readers, sorry it has been so long since I wrote anything but the truth is there hasn't been much to tell.

We have received excellent feedback from all of our customers about our pork, and we agree. I think we have had every cut at least once already and we couldn't be happier with how the meat turned out. Kewaskum did a great job in processing and packaging everything, too. Next year we will probably not be offering 1/4 pig packages, unfortunately, because it became difficult to get everything cut to the cutomer's specifications. Next year it will most likely be 1/2 pigs only.

This weekend I'll be processing all of our turkeys, except for two that are getting a reprieve and will probably be heading to a petting zoo in northern Illinois of all things! I think it's nice that they'll have a chance at a long life, even if they will probably have kids yelling at them most of the time.

Weather-wise we had about 3 inches of snow and sleet fall on Friday afternoon, so I got my first chance to use my plow truck. It worked great, took me about 20 minutes to get the whole drive cleared off.

I'll most likely miss the opening of deer season this weekend, because I'll be at home butchering turkeys, but going second weekend is looking pretty promising. I'll be happy just to get a nice doe like last year.