Harvest Monday: August 31

I made a new friend in the garden this week. Although she startled me when I first met her, now I like to look for her when I'm out there. I've learned she's a common Yellow Garden Spider, but this is the first time I've seen one. She's woven her web right among the Juliet tomato plants.

This week's harvests were still very tomato-centric; I brought in over 30 pounds, and so far I've canned 9 pints of salsa, 6 quarts of crushed tomatoes, and 7 half pints of tomato juice. I did another dehydrator full of Juliet tomatoes, adding another quart+ to the pantry, and I still have two large bowls of slightly underripe tomatoes on the counter. It seems like it will never end, but I'm not complaining. Our weather appears to be turning this week, with lows dipping down into the 50s and highs in the 70s most days. I think we'll have one or two more 80 degree days this year, but we're definitely on the path to fall. As long as this weather holds for the next 30 days or so, I'll be happy. Fall is my favorite season.

Although the seasons are starting to change, Juliet shows no signs of stopping. look at these lovely tomato clusters!

The Romas are just about done, and the Celebrities are chugging along but slowing down. My indeterminate tomatoes are still setting blossoms; they seem more optimistic about the season than I do.

I harvested some bell peppers and hot peppers, although something seems to be causing rot in the red bells, which is disappointing because they finally got enough color to pick this week. I picked my first Chocolate bell pepper though, and those plants appear healthy. This was one of a number of first harvests.

I hardly use celery in the summer—in my kitchen it shows up most in soups and stews, fall - spring. So when I grow it, it's almost entirely for the freezer. I took my first cutting this week; I should have picked it earlier to encourage more growth, but I'll still get plenty this year. This was a nice bouquet for an afternoon before it was chopped and frozen.

Another first harvest was a Minnesota Midget melon - a short season variety of cantaloupe that grows to be about softball size. This is my first year growing melons in the home garden, and I've been anxious to see if they will ripen (they were planted a bit late, direct-seeded, with very old seed). I'd read about "the slip" with melons—you know they're ripe when the fruit slips right off the vine without any resistance. I picked up a melon that had changed color to inspect it, and I gasped when it slipped! I think I should have let it go for a few more days, as it still had plenty of yellow on it and it was a bit bland tasting. I have one more of these that should ripen (along with lots of Banana Melons), so I'll try to let that one go longer.

Some of my Jacob's Cattle bean pods were dry, so I harvested and shelled those. I'm surprised I got any at all, as this entire row was eaten almost down to the dirt by something right after I planted it, but it was resilient. I'll be lucky if I fill this jar this year with the entire row, but I look forward to eating my first home-cooked dried beans.

My last "harvest" was something I was threatening my husband with all week and had all but decided not to do. We have purslane everywhere in the garden, growing as a weed. Particularly in the area we've cleared to expand the garden for next year (I still need to write about those plans), we have a bumper "crop." The more I read about it, though, the more I wanted to try it. So I grabbed some and brought it in to add to a green smoothie, after snacking on it in the garden to see what it tasted like. I blended it with a tart apple, cucumber, almond milk, and a little light honey syrup left from canning peaches. It made a great smoothie! There's a chance it won't all end up in the compost pile next year.

Here's a photo of some purslane, held up over a field of purslane.

The field of purslane is no more, though. I made it out there with just enough time before sunset on Sunday and tilled the entire space. The plan is to have the layout for the new garden planned over the next week so I can cover some areas with cardboard mulch, mark out the space for the garlic beds, and seed the rest with a cover crop to enrich the soil before next spring's planting.

As for last harvests, I picked two 8-ball zucchinis that may end up on the compost pile (although still small, they were turning from green to yellow like a fall squash would) and then pulled the squash beetle ravaged plants. In a big of spitefulness, I tossed one of the squash beetles into the spider's web.

The rest of my weekend was filled with non-garden food projects, including rendering lard for the first time (somewhat successful) and taking delivery of bulk meat from a local farmer. I wrote about our process of buying a whole hog, if you're interested.

Harvest Monday is a time for gardeners around the world to share their harvest and other garden activities. It's hosted by Dave at Happy Acres; head on over to the Harvest Monday hub at the bottom of his posts to see what he and other gardeners are doing.

Buying A Whole Hog

We've been buying bulk pork since 2014, when we started with half a hog from a local farmer we knew personally. Today we took delivery of our third whole hog, and I thought it might be nice to write up some details for folks considering making their first purchase. If you decide to opt out of the factory-farmed meat economy, you may be intimidated by the process of purchasing your meat directly from a farmer. This post will help you understand the ordering process from start to finish. Later this year I'll add a post for beef.

Why We Buy Whole Hogs

• We want to support local farmers who raise their animals humanely, and as naturally as possible. We want to know that our pig had a good life. We have, on occasion, visited our pig to "meet our meat" while it's still on pasture.
• The meat tastes better. At least to us, pasture-raised pork chops, bacon, and roasts have a much richer flavor than anything you'll buy in a grocery store. If you're able to find a heritage breed, like Red Wattle, you're in for an extra treat.
• We control the cuts of meat. We like our pork chops thicker than most, and sometimes we want the pork belly whole so we can make our own bacon. We want the butts whole for the smoker. Yes, you can always order these from the butcher, but we enjoy the control we have over the finished product.
• I like the challenge of cooking all parts of the pig. As you'll see later in this post, there's hardly any part of the pig I don't take. While some people may think of pork as just chops or bacon, I like to have the bones for stock, hocks for soup, and even fat for rendering lard.
• We like having a stocked freezer. Between my gardening, canning, bulk purchases, an occasional trip to Costco for dried goods, I can make many meals without going to the grocery store. I love a Sunday night of meal planning that doesn't require a grocery list.

One reason I didn't list was saving money. Although we do save money on a per-pound basis compared to the retail price of pasture-raised pork, "going whole hog" isn't a net money-saver for us. If we didn't have all this meat in the freezer, we would eat less of it overall, reducing the meat bill. There's a full breakdown of our savings compared to the retail price at the end of this post.

I should note, we have more than sufficient freezer space for bulk meat. In addition to the standard size refrigerator/freezer in our kitchen, we have a chest freezer in the basement and an upright freezer (about the size of a standard refrigerator) in our garage. The chest freezer was purchased used on Craigslist, and the upright freezer came from a scratch and dent sale at the appliance store. So yes, we have more freezers than people in our house. Don't judge. A whole hog will probably fill half to 3/4 of a chest freezer.

Ordering A Whole Hog

Ordering bulk pork generally requires planning. We've usually ordered our hogs anywhere from 3-8 months in advance. Prior to this year, our last bulk pork purchase was in 2017. The young farmers we purchased from in 2016 and 2017 decided not to continue producing pork, so we needed to find a new farm. I used the Wisconsin Farm Fresh Atlas to find farms in my area producing pork, and was pleased to find a farm less than 15 miles from our house. I contacted them in early May and was able to reserve a whole hog scheduled for butchering in August. I was required to put down a $200 deposit, and was then instructed to just wait for a phone call in August to provide cutting instructions.

To find a provider near you, either use a similar farm guide, google (although many farms have very basic websites, if they have a website at all), or contact a local butcher. They can either sell you a whole or half hog directly, or connect you with a farmer who uses them as a processor.

Cost of a Whole Hog

All you'll know when you order is what the price per pound will be for your hog. This year, ours was $4.05/lb. Nationally, this can range anywhere from $3.50/lb - $9.50/lb. If you only order a half hog, the price may be slightly more. To estimate the eventual cost of your purchase, you need to identify the following things.

• Price per pound 
• Estimated hanging weight (this varies by breed; your farmer should be able to provide an estimate)
• Butcher and processing fees

Your total will be the price per pound multiplied by the hanging weight, plus the butchering and processing fees.

The hanging weight is how much the carcass weighs after it's been butchered and some non-edible parts (hide, feet, head, some internal organs, some bones) have been removed. The hanging weight is usually about 72 percent of the total live weight of the animal. We've had hogs hang as low as 95 pounds (a heritage breed that was either a runt or was harvested too early) and as high as 175 pounds. I've seen reports of some homestead hogs hanging over 200 pounds. The actual weight of the cuts of meat you'll get will be less than the hanging weight since it includes fat, some bones, and other parts you may not want (I take them all).

Butcher and processing fees are somewhat variable, but usually there is a kill/butchering fee, a processing fee (to cover the labor for breaking down the carcass) and specialty processing fees such as smoking/curing or sausage making. Our total butcher and processing fees are usually between $100 and $200 for a whole hog, depending on what cuts/products we order.

You won't know your final price until after the hog has been butchered and processed. The farmer will call or email you with the hanging weight and the total amount due. They may or may not have the butchering and processing fees available depending on how they're handling pickup (see below).

The hog we ordered this year is our largest (and most expensive) yet. It's also the first time we haven't ordered a Red Wattle; we decided to opt for our closest farmer who practiced natural techniques rather than seek out a Red Wattle farmer. Here's how the price of our hog was calculated.

• Price per pound: $4.05
• Hanging Weight: 174 pounds
• Butchering Fee: $50
• Processing (60 cents per pound): $104.40
• Ham Smoking (85 cents per pound): $31.37
• Bacon Smoking (95 cents per pound): $13.49

So, the cost of the meat was $704.70, and the processing was $199.26, for a grand total of $903.96. What did we get for that? I'll share after explaining what it means to submit "cutting instructions" and how to actually get your meat products.

Submitting Cutting Instructions

Cutting instructions are exactly what they sound like—instructing the butcher on how you'd like your meat cut up. There are plenty of options when butchering a whole hog, and when you choose one thing (e.g., pork tenderloin) you impact your ability to have something else (e.g., T-bone-like loin pork chops). If you've never butchered an animal before, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the different ways to break down a pig—even though you're going to have someone else do it for you. This video from Whitefeather Meats is very instructional; I especially like how they make different choices on each of the two sides of pork to show you what is possible.

Your farmer or butcher will complete a cutting sheet to document your instructions. This is the cutting sheet I completed (pork is just the bottom third of the sheet). When you order your hog, ask where it will be butchered and then you can research their cutting sheet in advance. Here are the cutting instructions we provided for our hog.

• 5 lb roasts (we like them large for smoking)
• Chops 1.5" thick, 2 per package (since there are two of us)
• Hams: smoked, in half portions 
• Bacon: Smoked, half sliced regular, half sliced thin
• Spare Ribs: yes
• Country Ribs: yes
• Pork Butts: Roasts, keep whole
• Pork Hocks: Yes
• Pork Fat: Yes, and I requested that the leaf lard and back fat be separated.
• Neck Bones: Yes
• Pork Liver: Yes
• Trimmings as ground pork
• Special Instructions: Save the jowls and the head. I couldn't get the trotters because of the way they butchered it and the timing of my instructions. It pays to get your instructions in early!

You can change this up any way you like to get you the most of what you love. In the past I've had them cut out the tenderloin, resulting in smaller pork chops. We've also had them make bacon out of just one belly and give the other to us whole. I've forgone pork chops all together and had the butcher cut a bone-in loin roast (but they didn't remove the chine bone and carving it was difficult). I've skipped all the ribs and just added that to the ground sausage. I've ordered brats instead of ground pork. I've also historically ordered my hams "fresh" which means they're just like any other pork roast you'll receive and can be used for pulled pork-type recipes. This time I finally wanted to get some smoked hams so I have something too cook at the holidays that seems more traditional.

I use the pork fat to render lard (it could also be used in homemade sausage making), the neck bones and head for pork stock, and the liver for... I'm not sure yet. Perhaps this year I'll make a pate. In the past we had it made into liver sausage which we honestly didn't love and ended up feeding to our cats. At least it was used. 

I know for some people pork is all about sausage, so you may forego some of the roasts to get more of it. I personally love plain ground pork (especially in kimchi fried rice), so I take it plain.

Picking Up Your Pork

Your farmer will explain the pickup process to you; in my experience it happens one of three ways.

• Pick up directly from the butcher, paying them the butcher fees directly and paying the farm the pork fees separately.
• Pick up at the farm, paying all fees at once (if they have lots of freezer space)
• Home delivery, paying all fees at once.

Our first three hogs were picked up at the butcher. We'd mail the farm our check for the pork, and pay the butcher the processing fees. If you have to go pick up your animal, bring containers—ideally, coolers. It may help to wear gloves, since you'll be transferring frozen packages from a butcher cart directly into the back of your car. You'll go into the shop, tell them you're picking up an order, provide your name and the farm's name, and they'll wheel the product out from the back for you. They may have a back loading entrance where you can do this without disturbing retail customers. When you finish you'll want to drive straight home and get your product into the freezer.

We lucked out, and the farm we ordered from this year prefers to do home delivery. They tell me that normally they'll even walk the product into your basement and put it directly in the freezer, but since we're in the middle of a pandemic they're doing largely contactless drop off on the porch. This morning our farmer drove up around 8:30 a.m. and dropped 3 medium-size boxes on my porch, grabbed the check I left for him, chatted briefly through the screen window and wished me a good day.

What We Got From Our Whole Hog

My husband tells me I'm a little overboard with my bulk meat record keeping, but I like to say I'm just thorough. Every time we purchase meat in bulk, I inventory, weigh, and label every package (most packages don't have the weight listed on the outside for private orders like this). This helps me keep track of what's in the freezer (since much of it is buried at the bottom of our chest freezer) and calculate our average cost per pound of package meat.

From this processor, each cut came wrapped in butcher paper and affixed with a detailed label. I've worked with other processors that just stamp the name of the cut on the butcher paper, and others who deliver everything in a double layer of clear shrink wrap.

Grocery Store Cuts

• 11 packages of bacon, 1-1.25 lbs each
• 2 pork butts, 8 lbs and 9 lbs
• 20 bone-in pork chops, about 1 lb each (yes, they're huge)
• 2 packages of country style ribs, about 2 lbs each
• 2 packages of spare ribs, 2-3 lbs each
• 13 packages of ground pork, about 1 lb each
• 4 smoked hams, 7.5-9.5 lbs each
• 2 loin roasts, 4.5 - 5 lbs each
• 2 shoulder roasts, ~5 lbs each
• 3 packages of hocks, 2-3 lbs each
• Jowls, 2 lbs

Although some of these may be considered specialty cuts (e.g., jowls, hocks), they're what I consider "grocery store" cuts. You could likely walk up to the meat counter in most grocery stores, or in any butcher shop and get any of these cuts. If you preferred your roasts smaller, you'd obviously get more roasts than we did. We got less bacon than I expected; maybe our piggy had a smaller-than-average belly.

We received 137.5 pounds of grocery store cuts.

"Extras"

I told you I like to cook with the whole hog! In addition to grocery store cuts, we also received the following items.

• Fat - 17.75 lbs
• Leaf Lard - 6.5 lbs
• Neck Bones - 3.25 lbs
• Liver - 3.75 lbs
• Head (in 2 halves) - 7 lbs

We received 36.8 pounds of "extras" from the hog, which surprisingly brought us all the way back up to our hanging weight.

Whole Hog Cost Comparison

Dividing the total cost by what we received in grocery store cuts, we paid $6.57 per pound for our pork this year. That probably seems like a lot if you're used to buying conventional pork (otherwise known as commodity pork), which retails on average around $3.75 per pound. That's what you'll see in the grocery store by default. Pastured pork, however, costs more. It's what you'll often see at specialty shops like The Conscious Carnivore. The August 2020 USDA Monthly Pasture Raised Pork Report provides the retail cost per pound for most of the cuts I received (or the closest equivalent). I've calculated the savings per pound on each of these items.

• Bacon: $11.12
• Savings: 41%
• Butt Roast: $8.22
• Savings: 20%
• Pork Chops (sirloin chops): $9.70
• Saving: 32%
• Country Style Ribs (back ribs): $8.66
• Savings: 24%
• Spare Ribs: $7.04
• Savings: 24%
• Ground Pork: $7.59
• Savings: 13%
• Ham: $7.74
• Savings: 15%
• Loin Roast: $10.22
• Savings: 36%
• Shoulder Roast: $8.30
• Savings: 21%
• Hocks: $5.40
• Savings: -22%
• Jowls: N/A (apparently these aren't as common as I thought)

Every cut retails for well above the average price per pound we paid (except the hocks, which I only have the wholesale price for). Additionally, according to the USDA the wholesale price of the lard is $8.76/lb and the liver is $5.13/lb.

The total retail price of the grocery store cuts I received is $1,149.09. We paid $903.96, for a total savings of $245.13 (21%). 

I actually use the "extras," so we should also consider that the fat and liver retail at $224.61, although I wouldn't be purchasing them if I didn't already have the hog. All told, we received $1,373.70 in pork products.

Conclusion

I hope this demystifies the whole hog buying process for you. We've been very happy with our bulk meat purchases, and will continue to purchase meat this way. In fact, along with this hog the farmer also delivered us 10 whole chickens (that's 73 pounds of chicken), and we've ordered a quarter cow for delivery in October. The pork and chicken, along with a few remaining frozen bits of stock, have completely filled our chest freezer, so the beef will go in the upright freezer in the garage. I will write about our beef buying process when that meat arrives.

If you have questions about purchasing bulk meat, or if your experience was different form mine, let me know in the comments.

Harvest Monday: August 24

I neglected the garden during the week, saving all my harvests for the weekend. But Friday - Sunday I brought in over 30 pounds of tomatoes, four pounds of beets, a handful of hot and sweet peppers, a large bunch of basil and a lone 8-ball zucchini (the squash beetles are having a field day in the garden).

Here's what the harvest looked like. Well, most of it. In between harvesting and washing and preparing and doing the dishes and making the kitchen messy and cleaning it again I forgot to photograph a few things.

Friday was a mixture of Juliet, Roma, and cherry tomatoes with some fatali and scotch bonnet peppers and some green peppers This particular sweet pepper variety is meant to be picked green, and therefore was the first to mature in the garden. I also have some red peppers and chocolate peppers that have been growing well, but just started to show some color this week.

On Friday night I combined the freshly-harvested hot peppers with some I'd stored in the fridge and attempted to start my first lacto-fermented hot sauce. I'll report back in a few weeks how that went. Prior to putting them in the food processor, weren't these peppers gorgeous?

Saturday was all about the tomatoes. I brought in 25 pounds—6 pounds of Juliets and 19 pounds of Celebrity and Roma. The few green Celebrity tomatoes had fallen from the branches. They don't even have a hint of orange to them so I'll probably do some sort of green tomato preparation.

While picking the tomatoes I spied this very large beet and decided to pick it before it became woody. It's the first full-size harvest of my Lutz Winter Keeper variety.

On Sunday I pulled my golden beets, as they'd started to get heavily attacked by some sort of bug. Because of that, the greens were a loss and went into the compost pile. Once trimmed, they weighed in at 3 pounds, 10 ounces. I also harvested a large bunch of basil, which I forgot to photograph. 

I had to drag the sprinkler out to the garden to water on Sunday, since we haven't had rain for over a week. This is the first time I've had to water the garden in over a month.

In terms of using the harvest, it was tomato palooza on Saturday. I made a 1.5x batch of Annie's salsa (10 pints canned + 1 quart for the fridge), dehydrated 9 pounds of Juliets (yield: 1.5 quarts). 

I also roasted a large pan of tomatoes. The roasted tomatoes were blended into sauce, which I combined with a too-thick roasted sauce from the fridge I'd made earlier in the week that also included carrots, zucchini, and onions. The resulting mixture was still too thick, so I pulled one of my "failed" jars of crushed tomatoes from a few years back out of the pantry. I'd ended up canning mostly tomato water with a little pulp on the bottom. Opening the jar, it still smelled distinctly like tomato, so adding that to the sauce served thinned it without diluting the flavor. I ended up with just over a gallon of sauce, which is frozen flat in Ziploc bags in 2-cup servings. 

Last, but not least, I roasted up the beets. We'll eat plenty fresh this week, but if I have extra after a few days I'll dice and freeze for use in grain salads this winter.

Every Monday gardeners around the world share their harvest. View all of this week's Harvest Monday posts, hosted over at Happy Acres.

Harvest Monday: August 17

This week was all about tomatoes. I brought in three harvests, on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and they were mostly tomatoes with a few peppers and zucchini thrown in. There are some beets ready to harvest but I'm letting them sit for a bit.

Here's what I harvested from the garden this week.

With all of these beautiful tomatoes, they were the stars of our meals this week. We had BZT's on Monday (with no lettuce, we replaced it with a grilled zucchini slice and it was pretty good), panzanella salad on Tuesday, and more BLTs starting on Thursday when we got some more lettuce.

The panzanella salad is tossed with olive oil and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. I used red tomatoes from the CSA and the yellow tomatoes are Mr. Stripey from the prior week's harvest.

Over the weekend I started to process the tomatoes. 5.5 pounds of Juliet tomatoes went into the dehydrator. This is the first time I dried them as halves rather than slices, per Dave's advice. They took a little longer than I expected (about 26 hours), but they were worth the wait. Not only are they absolutely delicious (my husband says they taste like tomato fruit rollups), but because I dried them skin side down, the dehydrator trays are still clean! Cleaning up trays after dehydrating sliced tomatoes can be a pain. You've converted me, Dave. Will do another batch later this week.

Another 7 pounds of Celebrity and Mr. Stripey went into some salsa for canning. I use a tested recipe from Annie, a contributor on the Houzz (formerly GardenWeb) Harvest forum. Annie's salsa is our favorite, and I'll try to make at least two more batches this summer. The Celebrity tomatoes were perfect for this recipe, with their fleshy consistency. They were also extremely easy to peel and deseed. I got seven pints for canning, and about 3/4 cup leftover that I used on a smothered burrito for brunch on Sunday.

If you'd like to see what other gardeners around the world are doing with their harvest, head on over to Happy Acres, where Dave hosts Harvest Monday every week.

Harvest Monday: August Is Here

I had four separate harvests from the garden this week, and plant diversity is increasing. That means August is here! I had the week off of work, so I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden, thinking about the garden, and planning for some big changes for next year's garden (more to come on that in a separate post).

Tuesday, when I posted my July garden journal, I picked a handful of tomatoes and peppers, but forgot to photograph them. I did remember to take photos of the garden though. The first photo has my winter squash on the left, 8-ball zucchini and fennel poking up behind them, and the mass of tomatoes in the back. The foreground is peppers and a row of Swiss chard.

It didn't feel like 80 degrees in the shade; it was a lovely morning. Here you'll see my sparse rows of beans (1) and carrots (4). Behind those are the rutabagas. They look wilted because I'd just thinned them. Behind those you can barely see the rows of beets. So far I've only had to water the garden two or three times because we've been getting regular rain. The squash plants were thirsty by Friday afternoon, but with rain in the forecast on Sunday I held off (right now watering is a production of connecting and running a 50-foot hose). The rain came in multiple downpours, so the squash should be happier now.

I remembered to photograph the remaining harvests. On Thursday I got more tomatoes (Juliets and some cherries), a green pepper, two 8-ball zucchinis, and some super chili ornamental peppers.

Saturday brought two harvests: the first ripe Celebrity tomato, and a mountain of beet thinnings (Lutz Winter Keeper and Golden) providing a glut of baby beets and beet greens, which I've yet to process.

A quick spin through the garden on Sunday before the rain came found more tomatoes, including the first few Romas, another pepper, more chiles, and some jalapenos (Mighty Nacho).

Although I sliced a few for a pizza, most of the Juliets have been roasted and eaten with eggs for breakfast. When I start getting them in larger quantities I'll dehydrate them. The cherry tomatoes and peppers are combined with CSA veggies for mason jar salads that Aaron has been taking to work. While trying to get feedback on what salads he liked best, I learned it doesn't matter what veggies are in it as long as there's some smoked pork. So he smoked another pork roast this weekend so he'd have salads for this week.

Some of the jalapenos I harvested Sunday went into a jalapeno corn bread that we had with the pulled pork and some CSA corn on the cob. It will make a good side for Aaron's Southwest salads this week, too.

That's all from Gross Farms this week. I hope you'll head over to Happy Acres to see what Dave and the other Harvest Monday participants are pulling out of their gardens and cooking.

Hopefully in a few days I can get a post together about the BIG garden plans for 2021.