For homesteaders who choose to live off the land and the sustenance that they produce this month is normally marked by the butchering of the farm animals that have been growing all season long. November is usually the blood moon around this area of New England because it generally gets cold enough to butcher and hang the animals used for meat on the homestead.
For us we chose to raise our pigs way earlier in the year so that they could help us with tilling the garden areas that needed lots of work to be planted in the spring. Our meat for the winter is now in a freezer in the basement waiting patiently for us to have some free time to experiment with new ways of fermenting, canning, and curing it. We are striving to learn new, mostly old, ways of utilizing and preserving more of the pig for our own consumption. Our pigs became a part of our lives and daily routines and even though we knew the end would come, we were still poorly prepared for how strangely deserted the yard felt. But to say that the pigs are gone is an ill-conceived statement: our pigs will live on, through us, in the many abundant meals they
provide.
