Pork Broth, Dollar Store Finds, and Improvised Art

 

1.) Broth. So MUCH of it. 

We were given that hog carcass last week, and it included most of the bones. 

We didn't want to just throw them away, but we didn't have room or large plastic bags to store them in the fridge or freezer. So we ended up having a small cooler full of ice, bloody water, and pork bones on my back porch for a couple days while we feverishly processed as many as we could at a time in the pressure cooker and crock pot. 

Then we fired up the pressure canner and preserved the resulting broth. 

We ended up with about sixteen quart jars of pork broth in the pantry. One jar makes a pretty good concentrated base for a large pot of soup (the kind big enough to provide leftovers for a few days after) so it should last us at least a few months. 

One of the batches from the canner. We can do four jars at a time. 

I haven't even started rendering the fat for lard yet. Thankfully there was room for that in the freezer, so I've been able to put it off a bit. 

In a strange case of inconvenient coincidence, I got out a turkey from the freezer and put it to defrost in the fridge a day or so before the sudden pork influx. So that got roasted in the oven the day after we processed most of the meat, and we now also have a gallon bag in the freezer absolutely stuffed with turkey bones we need to make broth with. 

I'm putting it off until we have a little more room in the pantry. 

There are downsides to being frugal with food. When it rains, it pours and you're caught running around like a madman trying to make the most of it. Thank God for freezers. I can't imagine what butchering and preserving a hog was like in the days before refrigeration. 

2.) Eggs! 

The lights that we installed in the coop worked! 

We're back to getting 5 or 6 eggs a day again. Our chickens are no longer mooching off of us, and we no longer have to buy eggs at the store. 

3.) Loss of a Hen

(Skip this take if you're squeamish about animal injuries).

Unfortunately, one of our hens sustained an injury and we had to cull her. 

We think what happened was that she suffered a prolapsed vent when she laid an egg. Part of her insides were basically turned inside out, and she was obviously in pain and bleeding. Prolapsed vents can be fixed, but only if you catch it right away, and this one had obviously been like this for awhile. The most humane thing to do was put her out of her misery. 

Catching her, however, was a bit of a chore. We have a big, brash, aggressive rooster with big spurs on his feet named Donald that takes it personally whenever we chase one of his hens. Which is great during hawk season, but not so great when a bird is sick or injured and needs to be removed from the run for whatever reason. 

We tried several things to distract him and the other hens, but to no effect. Luckily, it was getting to be twilight and they started heading back into the coop. The injured one hung back (which isn't unusual: injured or sick birds usually isolate themselves, and the other hens usually peck at them or drive them away if they do try to come close), so we were able to shut Donald in the coop and, after much running and being outwitted by the injured but surprisingly fast bird, we finally caught her.

I herded the kids into the house (they knew that we were about to euthanize a bird, but I still didn't want them to witness it) and Chris took care of the actual killing and disposal. 

Not a fun part of owning animals, but an occasionally necessary one. Wasn't the first time we've had to do this, and it won't be the last. 

4.) The Dollar Store will be my undoing

Did you know they sell crafting supplies? 

I just found that out. 

A small sample of what I've bought, about $5 worth.

Some are actually more expensive than from a traditional craft store like Hobby Lobby (it's cheaper per ounce to buy washable tempura paint in big bottles than little ones), but lots of others are WAY cheaper there (like popsicle sticks, pony beads, thin elastic for threading beads onto, glitter glue, pieces of felt, and those detailed pretty stickers that people use for scrap-booking). I even found a pack of tube watercolors 4 for $1, and 3 ounce tubes of acrylic paint -- the thick kind that's good for painting on canvas rather than the runny stuff they sell for wood projects. It was a very limited selection but also WAY cheaper than at the craft store.  

As a result, they've been getting a fair amount of my money lately. The store just happens to be right next door (in the same strip mall!), to my already established shopping Achilles heel-- Goodwill. I have a set amount of money set aside for "educational" stuff for the kids, and craft supplies and projects definitely count towards that, so there's at least some regulation on it. 

Some. A little. In theory. 

5.) Gardens and Other Seemingly Impossible Projects

Bermuda grass is the devil. 

Don't get me wrong, it makes very nice lawn grass. But part of the reason it makes very nice lawn grass is because it's darn near impossible to get rid of. It's heat and drought resistant, and it comes back from a tiny little bit of root left behind, or creeps in from existing plants sending out runners. 

We've had a fair amount of produce come from our garden in the past, and we've been working on introducing more organic matter to amend the soil (mainly sawdust and pig/goat poop from the high school agriculture barn), but we didn't put in anything this past season or go out there at all because Chris was starting back up at work and I was sick to my stomach thanks to Bitty Baby. 

 Despite laying down a thick layer of wood chips, and despite the fact that we've been growing stuff there for a couple years now, the grass absolutely came back with a vengeance. It got to the point where it looked like the rest of the yard.  It rooted and spread over and into the mulch. The mulch did nothing. 

So Chris has been out there with the tractor, disking it all up and tearing it up with a middle-buster  (a really simple metal hook plow) trying to stir it all up and rip the grass out. It basically goes against all the precepts of sustainable organic gardening (all the books I can find say, "put organic matter on it, keep putting organic matter on it, disturb it as little as humanly possible.") but it's the one idea we have to try and get rid of all the grass without spraying Round-Up on it. We're just going to keep doing it until we exhaust the roots and starts that are left. 

I am going to put layers of used chicken bedding and cardboard out there once Chris gets it leveled out, so we can keep building up the soil at least a little bit, and because they're materials that we can mix into the soil without depleting it (unlike the wood chips we usually use as mulch) once the grass starts coming back again, which it undoubtedly will. 

But between Bitty Baby coming this summer and the war we're waging against the grass, there's not going to be much, if any, yield from the garden this year. 

6.) Upgrading the Prayer Corner

In addition to craft supplies, it turns out you can also get small home decoration items at the dollar store.  

I found small white frame art with "edgy" comments in them, and saw some potential. 

I scraped the raised print bit of the thing off,

 painted the inside, 

It took several coats of paint to cover up the remaining text. If you do this project, learn from my mistakes and paint with a dark color first, then do some lighter colored coats on top once the first coat has dried. 

and then glued in a holy card and a photocopy of some art I liked from a book. I put some little dots and stars around them to set them off from the background, and added some paper scrapbooking embellishments I had lying around to the outside frame (lucky find at the thrift store, not the dollar store). 

Image of St. Joseph originally from a painting by Cecilia Lawrence, Photocopied from Consecration to St. Joseph by Fr. Donald Calloway. Check the rest of Cecilia's stuff out, it's gorgeous. Some LOTR art too. 

I was going to fashion some wall hangers out of a twist tie, a chunk of plastic cut from a discarded blister pack, and hot glue, but Chris insisted on picking up some wall hanging cleats and putting them on the frames (he was convinced that it wouldn't hold up. He's generally tolerant, even appreciative, of my experimental cheapness, but occasionally he prefers to go with something already proven to work from the get go). 

I also found a full sized frame for a picture of Jesus/Divine Mercy that I already had (and had just stuck on the wall with poster putty) and gussied it up with some paint. 

The ending result is nicer looking than the plain poster and two random prayer cards I had stuck to the wall, and much nicer than the Popsicle stick/ cereal box frames I had before my toddler decided to indulge her destructive lust for poster putty. She pulled down everything she could reach in her quest for the sticky stuff, and then I'd find it in her hair where it acted pretty much like chewing gum would.

The popsicle stick frame was flimsy and did not survive being ripped off the wall. The current frames are hung on hooks stuck into the wall, and so hopefully will avoid that fate. 

7.) Mending 

For whatever reason, all at once, we've got a bunch of clothes that need mending. Worn holes, ripped seams and a few pairs of little boys' underwear worn to shreds that I'm patching because I have some old t-shirt scraps that need a home (and because I evidently have nothing better to do with my life). 

 I've been doing that at night instead of messing around with my phone while Chris and I watch TV. Or while he plays video games with friends online and I watch something on my own. 

Better for my stress level (seriously...if you haven't ditched social media yet and used to use it like I did, it's amazing how much a difference it makes not to have it in front of me all the time), and actually makes otherwise wasted time into something somewhat productive, though I suppose that's arguable in the case of the boy's underwear. 

And I recently got a thimble, so it's much easier on my fingers now too. 

 

See the rest of this week's takes here (they launch on Fridays... I publish mine on my blog sooner than that most weeks).