Root Cellar and Butchering

The root cellar is finally starting to look like we are prepared for winter. In the pic, some heads of cabbage hung for fresh eating all winter long and below them about 20 heads of celery. The celery is dug up and set, roots and all, in a container and watered occasionally.We have several barrels of potatoes packed in dry leaves and a cooler full of carrots.We don't have any apples this year but thankfully we have a lot of dried apples from last year.
   Monday was butchering day. We slaughtered one of the potbelly/kune cross sows. She has not raised a single piglet so it was time. I have the bacons out of the cure,rinsed, and drying now. As soon as they are dry they are going in the smoke house. The hams will be ready to smoke Saturday or Sunday.
  We also butchered four of our older doe rabbits. These we boned out to use with the pork trimmings for sausage. Since there is very little fat in the meat of rabbits ,the very fatty meat trimmed on the pork was a perfect mix.

The bowl on the left is the pork, right the rabbit. These were mature does and yield 13 pounds of meat from the four. I added enough pork to make a 35 pound batch. This is a fresh breakfast type sausage. It came out very nice, spicy, with black pepper,sage,ginger,thyme,nutmeg,salt, and the cure of course.I order mine on the internet. It is usually called Prague powder no.1. This is of course, a nitrate, which some people don't like. For myself, I would rather risk whatever health hazard there may be in the nitrate instead of facing the known fatality of botulism.

That is why nitrates are put into processed foods like this, especially if they are to be smoked. A smoke house eliminates oxygen and is the perfect temp. for botulism to grow. Nitrates prevent this.
  I stuffed the sausage into these meat bags with a canning funnel. Not the fastest job but it works.I get a lot of satisfaction from curing my own hams and bacon as well as sausage making. It saves a lot of money and most importantly we know what we are eating.

We are very careful and down right picky about our butchering practices. We want the animal calm right up to the moment of death and we want that to be as painless as possible. We try to keep the meat absolutely clean and if some dirt does get onto the carcass we immediately trim that off. While cutting up meat we trim out and discard any thing that doesn't look  wholesome. I wish we could somehow preserve this with out a freezer but if you want fresh year round that is the price.

Here's your cuteness for the day . This is one of Ann's kitties  and Lily helping her sort some Alpaca fiber. The cat is in love with the stuff. Lily is just try to hog the attention!