31/52: Home on the Homestead

We bought a couple of piglets for John Paul's birthday (well, not for his birthday, they just happened to be ready to go on his birthday. Large Black Hogs, I think?) and they've been growing like crazy! I wish I had gotten in there to take pictures when they were still little, because they've definitely gotten less cute in the past few weeks... Which is good, because those adorable little piglets were too cute to think about butchering! I don't think I'll mind once we reach that point, though. The kids (Mary Claire) decided on "Gweh Gweh" and "Piggy" for their names. We decided that was stupid, and Andrew suggested "Gerald" instead of "Gweh Gweh" and that's what has stuck. Except I can never remember which is which! 

We will likely take them to a butcher in the late winter/early spring? I don't want to deal with all the sausage making myself!

The garden is in full swing, although the second sowing of sweet corn is oddly short, and we have no idea why? The gourds are starting to develop, and Cecilia's bottle gourds seem to be the most prolific. She's got big plans for making drinking gourds and birdhouses out of what develops.

We harvested every partially ripe tomato we could find on Thursday before leaving for Edith's surgery, and when I looked back at the plants on Tuesday (we got home Monday night, yay!!), there were so many tomatoes I had to send my sister to the playground with a bag full and gave quite a few more away to a sweet friend who brought dinner. And right now there are still a ridiculous number of ripe yellow pear tomatoes that I can't manage to reach and the kids don't care enough to crawl through the plants to get them! I froze a gallon for sauce making when I have more, and we crammed our bellies full of all the cracked ones we found while we were harvesting them (because of heavy rains the day before that swelled and cracked them). Now I should probably go out and harvest more...