beautifulchaosorg

Things grow in strange places

This mushroom is growing out of the seam between two concrete slabs

These small plants are growing hidden underneath a big slab of Larchwood.

We bought a cow for meat

And had it butchered right where it lived

I try to buy good clean and basic food for my family. This can be ratter expensive, especially with meat. I had found a source for grass fed, grass finished beef, but this meat is very expensive. While going out to press hay and straw bales for farmers my husband came across a farmer that has cows and happened to have a cow that would not get bread. He wanted to sell the cow, but for him it was difficult to get only this one single 1 ½ year old cow sold. This was a change for us. We bought the cow and agreed that the cow would get butchered right there where she lives. We called around to find a butcher that butchers at home and where lucky to find one that still hat time this fall.

The butcher did a good job. The cow did not suffer and was gutted hanging from the frond end loader of a tractor.

The farmer had a cold room where the cow could hang before further processing. A week later my husband picked up the cow and the butcher came to us to process the cow.

The kid’s where so excited helping with packing and sealing all of the meat, seeing how the meat gets cut, what is discarded, how a part of the meat gets ground, etc. Especially we where all excited to try the meat. This was not a grass fed cow, but for us the next best thing. This was a hay fed cow, no grains, kept outside. It was a young and ratter small cow, but that is fine with us. I cooked some bratwurst and hamburger for lunch and it tastes amazing. We got about 135 kg of meat from this cow, to that comes the bones from which I will be making broth and the discard meat and guts we fed to the dogs. After our calculations this comes to a price/kg below the price I was paying for ground beef. Obviously for that same money we have all of the good parts of the beef as well. Tenderloins, steaks, roast meat, etc. For us this was worth it. We will do this again as soon as we go through most of this meat. We estimate that we will have most of the meat used by spring, we will see if we can already get another cow from this farmer again by that time.

What I forgot to mention is that we had to buy another freezer in order to do this, but even with these cost added the meat is still very cheap and these cost will divide over many years of using this freezer again and again.

Harvesting and processing cabbages and carrots

After the first night frost I wasn’t too worried about the cabbages, since they have a cover, but since it is getting colder the cabbages do not really grow any more. So I planned in to harvest and process them.

After going around in the garden I only found 4 small heads I could process, so I decided to harvest a bunch of carrots as well. We had just eaten the last of our fermented carrots and I really needed to make some more.

After harvest I started with cutting up the cabbages. I used the white cabbages to make sauerkraut, since my son only wants sauerkraut from the white cabbage and not from the red. I mixed in the salt and let it sit for an hour or so before working the cabbages to get some liquid out. Then I packed it in a glass. A smaller glass would have done. Since we are completely out of sauerkraut at the moment I will have to buy some cabbages to make a useful amount of sauerkraut.

The carrots I only washed thoroughly, cut of some bad spots and cut into strips. I had enough for 2 glasses in which I packed the carrots tight. Pouring enough saltwater to cover the carrots and these are done. I put the glasses into our barn to ferment. In a few weeks we will be able to enjoy our ferments again.