Pickin Pears and Processing Turkeys

Last weekend Nick and I processed our first turkeys for the freezer. Of the six we started with, we only managed to get two fully grown to harvest. Four others were picked off by different predators over the last few months. We were excited that at least two made it. They ended up going in the freezer at 21 and 26 pounds. We will cook the smaller one before Thanksgiving just to make sure we did everything right, since you sure don't want to invite twenty people over for Thanksgiving only to have an inedible turkey. We are pretty confident we did everything right, but you can never be too safe. For the first time in many years of hosting Thanksgiving, we will have homegrown ham and turkey.

A few weeks ago we had our inspection to get our farm based retail meat license and now have a large freezer full of retail cuts ready to sell! This batch of sausage is especially nice and lean!

This weekend, D and I went to a friend's house to pick pears while Nick got a rare morning off to go fishing with a buddy. It was a perfect day for it, sunny and 65 degrees. We came home with 6 five gallon buckets full of giant Kieffer pears and the canning marathon began. So far I have made a case of spiced pear butter and vanilla diced pears and only got through one bucket. The pigs and chickens were pleased to have the cores and skins and will likely benefit from plenty of whole pears once the canning fatigue sets in tomorrow. I put the spiced pear butter recipe up on our recipe page if anyone is interested.