Howdy all! I’ve been very busy the last couple weeks and have allowed my posting to slack off as a result. But today I’ve got a mostly free day, so I’m here to start catching you up on the busy-ness that’s been happening here at Tanglebranch Meadows.
So, last weekend, January 27, some of our good friends came out to the farm and we slaughtered some of the sheep we have been raising for our freezer and theirs. So here’s your warning, there are going to be images that may be disturbing to some readers! It was a really rewarding experience for me; we had slaughtered one animal a few years back and processed her ourselves for ground meat, but this time we did roasts and everything, so it felt really good to have accomplished that without having to pay someone at the butcher shop.
Here you can see just how full the freezer is!
(There's some other stuff in there too, but all the white paper packages are lamb!)
We slaughtered five animals, with the two different families who came to help taking one animal each for their own use. My math skills tell me I’ve got three left as a result, which will keep our household fed well into the summer.
It was a fairly cold day, about -20 C (that’s around -7 F for those of you who don’t know Celcius), which was actually good for our purposes,as it helped cool the carcasses faster. We dispatched the sheep two at a time. I didn’t take pictures of that part, so I’ll spare you that bit of gore!
The next step was skinning. The guys who were helping had more practice on deer than on sheep, and therefore they goofed a little prepping the first body for hanging, severing the Achilles tendon on both hind legs by accident. So they had to skin their first sheep up on a table.
I have done it a few more times than they, and didn’t have the same tendon issues, so my brother and I got started on the second lamb. You can see the steam rising as the cold winter air started chilling the meat!
Here is my friend Eve, in the pink jacket, helping to skin too.
Eve is the one who orchestrated the majority of the cutting of the carcasses later, as she had done it before. She and her family immigrated to Canada from Germany a few years ago, and she used to help her father processing their own lambs when she was younger.
I saved all of the hides from the sheep, and hopefully I can learn how to tan them properly. I’ve had moderate success in the past with rabbit skins, so I’m going to do my best! I want to make some nice throw rugs to warm the floors in the winter, and maybe some hats and mittens as well.
After skinning comes the gutting; that is, the removing of the entrails. I don’t have any pictures of this part either, my hands were understandably mucky and our spectators had gone back up to the house to warm up. But once we had the first two lambs done, Eve and my other friend Barb started to work on cutting and wrapping up at the house, while the rest of us continued with slaughter, skinning, and gutting.
We did stop for a coffee break! My parent’s house is larger than mine, and we’re right next-door, so we set up to do our processing there.
We finished all the slaughtering by dinner time, and Eve, Barb, and my mom had managed to get two and a half lambs cut and wrapped by that time too, so they did very well! We ate quickly and took a little rest break, and then set to work finishing the processing as a team.
The last two animals we processed were older ewes who had outlived their production years on the farm. We opted to debone these two dear old girls and convert them into ground meat and stew. Here is the first one, reduced to a tray of cuts, ready for the grinder.
I also saved all the bones from them for making some delicious bone broth in the near future.
We let the meat intended for the grinder chill overnight and processed it ourselves the next day, as it grinds better when it is very cold. We got 32 pounds of ground meat, plus 10 pounds of stew, and kept two haunches intact for slow roasting, which I didn’t weigh. The lamb we kept didn’t get weighed either, but yielded approximately 40 pounds, in my estimation.
And that was our busy weekend! We’ve already eaten a bit of the ground meat, it is delicious, and I think I will throw in a roast for supper tonight. Thanks for stopping by to read about how we processed our own meat, and I hope I’ll see you here again soon.
Thank you to my friend Barb who took most of these pictures and shared them with me. The first and last images are my own.
