The boys carrying a crate of nettles European-style; the boys with Wallace (dog) and Foxface (cat); Steve taking the sheep back to their pen.
Most of the fun this week revolved around the animals:
As most of you know, I loooooove chickens. So whenever I made it out early enough to let the chickens out of their coop in the morning, I had a good laugh at the chickens running around. And with the compost pile right next to the chicken run, I could feed the chickens grubs!!!!
One day, Steve, Michael, and I were taking a short break from working to watch the pigs root around. The fence you can see in the video is electrified, as are all the fences around the farm, and the animals stay well clear of it. However, since the pigs dig with their snouts and therefore can't see, and since they were blindly heading toward the fence in search of food, we were convinced that one of the pigs would get too close and give his ears a shock on the fence.
So we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
We waited for probably fifteen minutes before giving up and going back to work.
Not five minutes later, we hear a squeal and a scuffle. Upon returning to the pig run, we see it: a rooted-out path dug past the fence. One did indeed get zapped!
In less impressive news, a new WWOOFer, Babette, a Hungarian woman in her thirties, came in for the week and she and I mucked out the rabbit pens. *wrinkles nose* Rabbit refuse smells like ammonia. It was gross.
In more impressive news, the boys spent all of Thursday chopping last week's slaughtered cow into pieces.
You may remember that last week, we witnessed a cow get slaughtered. Well, this week, we got the cow back in huge chunks from the slaughterhouse. It was the boys' job to break it down so that Barbara and Peter could have people come over to pick up their orders. So Steve, Michael, and Aaron spent the entire workday chopping meat, cutting steaks, sawing bones, slicing and cubing fat chunks, and various other meat-processing exercises.
Babette and I spent the day preparing food for lunch, baking pies, and making elderberry jam. [This really means that Babette cut up some potatoes for lunch and peeled some apples for the jam, and I diced a dozen onions and sliced up three cow livers and made liver and onions for lunch, cut up six cow kidneys for steak & kidney pie, cleaned out and sliced up a cow heart, and boiled elderberries for the jam.]
This, my friends, is a cow heart that has been cut open.
At lunch, we were asked if we would be interested in working overtime in exchange for Friday off. Of course, we said yes. So after an hour-long break following lunch, it was back to work.
I strained the elderberries for the jam and helped Babette knead the dough for the three blackberry and apple pies we were making before heading over to the too-full, too-testosterone-y kitchen where the boys were making SAUSAGES!!!!
Steve stuffing sausage; the boys showing off their creation: a THIRTY-EIGHT LINK GIANT SAUSAGE!!!; Babette, Barbara, and me putting jam in jars to set; the blackberry apple pies - Babette did the lattice pattern on top with the extra dough that I didn't eat. Can you believe it was her first time making pie?? Very pretty and tasty for a first-timer.
I think it was about ten o'clock at night before the beef was ground, the sausages were stuffed, the elderberries strained, the jam reduced and bottled, the pies baked, and dinner served.
It was a long, long, tiring day. Who knew food processing was so laborious???
But at least it ended with a belly full of sausage and pie, a good night's sleep, and a three day weekend!
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