Chicama Run Farm Blog

I’ll start off with the large black hogs.  We took in 2 last week to be butchered (our 2 smaller boars since we had 3).  Last night came home with all the meat and I was curious about the taste and a little worried – some people swear by what is called “boar taint” and since our boys were intact (still boars instead of barrows) I wanted to make sure they didn’t taste funny.

Well I will tell it quite simply – the pork chops were some of the best tasting I have EVER had!  It tasted like PORK!!  I know – look at me funny all you want but it had a stronger pork taste.  I am hoping that all the items have this wonderful taste and I will be sad when it goes away.  We finally got to try bacon as well and again LOVED it!  More of a meat taste than the stuff we have had previously.

Don’t get me wrong – I will never go back to store bought pork as long as I have hogs available to me – it’s a totally different taste.  But in the past we have always had traditional/commerical crossed hogs which are bred to gain size faster than the heritage meat.  I love that meat – and I am a sausage nut, but this pork topped everything we have had – INCLUDING our Berkshire hogs in my opinion.  The meat is a little darker in color which makes you think “off” at first but it was incredible. 

So if you want to reserve a heritage hog – definitely wait until we have more of these as they are yummy!

I’ll stop bragging and ravign about this meat for a minute and move on to cell phones with the kids.

This week I took the kids into a Verizon store to get them cell phones.  Now, 1st things 1st – THEY pay for them.  That’s right!  With the llama beans they sell at the market starting this week and Jacob works for me at the market on Saturdays they earn enough to pay for their service.  They have NO text messaging, NO web access, and on top of that I have to put in the contact information of everyone I ALLOW them to call and to call them.  What a great feature as it is wonderful that most people we know have Verizon and it won’t cost them minutes to call them.  But man I can’t wait until the novelty of these things wears off!!  They call each other constantly and call me for goofy stuff.

Good thing they start school work next week.  We got the books in this past week and I am SOOOO ready for them to start up again.  We are doing the curriculum from Rod & Staff.  It’s a Christian curriculum and looks to be awesome.  It’s a lot more involved than what they did last year and I am excited about that.   They both completed last years work and tested just fine (right at average to just about above average).  Jacob is in 6th grade with 7th grade math… and Alexis is in 3rd grade all across the board.  I hope over the summer that we will breeze through some of it (social studies doesn’t look too hard for either of them)  The curriculum looks a lot more traditional in nature – hardback school books and having the assignments written on notebook paper.  It also seems a lot more complete than what we did last year.

We shall see – my patience is running thin at the moment with everything that is going on with the farm and family life.  Putting priorities in order is REALLY needed and something I truly need to think and work out some days.