Cumberland Falls Farm

Guinea pigs make such wonderful pets for children.  They are social, and communicative.  They rarely bite and are an easy size for children to hold.  Guinea pigs live for 4-7 years and form strong pair bonds.   We currently have five 8 week old guinea pigs for sale, three males, two females.  They have been…

2020 was a bad year for everyone, it was kind of special bad for us.  It started with my husband breaking his leg falling out of tree and just got worse and worse. Then what I thought was just a personal character flaw turned out to be a deadly disease that landed me in the…

Now we’re really experimenting.  We’re going to brine and smoke our own ham, bacon, and fat back using homemade brine.  People have done this for ages and not everyone died from it.  And yet I find myself googling “will ‘ropy’ brine kill you?” Back a week or two ago, before our bacon turned into a…

Lard and cracklins cook at the same time and it sometimes said “you can have good lard or good cracklins”, perhaps not both.  Apparently we throughly embraced the “good cracklins” side of things, so I’m not even going to talk about our lard right now.  It’s pretty embarrassing lard.   To start out we brought…

This is the day most of the meat turns into tidy wrapped packages of future supper.   There are lots of ways to cut up a hog depending on what cuts you prefer, so exactly how you do it isn’t really that big a deal.   We’re going to start by using a torch to…

Innards are what my daughter calls “man’s food”.  In other words, “I’m not eating that”.  But you can eat it and it’s really quite nutritious.  We save the liver, kidneys, heart and spleen.  I’ve never cooked a spleen before, but I found a recipe so we’ll see.   The liver is the easiest to find…

There is shockingly little information on how to make your own sausage casings on the internet or in any of my books.  Either this is because it’s a bad idea and everyone knows it, or everyone just thinks it’s a bad idea and hasn’t tried it.  So tried it.  It’s really not as horrific as…

There are philosophies to hog killing, and ours is of course the best.  Our philosophy is guided by two main principles.  One, the animal should be as calm and happy as possible, and  two, no one but the hog gets dead.  The first principle is important because not only is it indicative of your quality…

All butchering days start pretty much the same way, but not necessarily how you might think.  It starts the day before, where most things start, in the kitchen.  Usually there’s lots of help for hog killing, and help needs to be fed well. So I start with meal planning.  It’s unlikely that people are going…

On of my favorite ways to practice everyday economy is canning broth.  This year post-Thanksgiving turkey was $0.19/lbs.  It’s hard to be more economic than that.  But unless it’s a holiday I’m not actually going to roast a whole turkey, so I part them out in sections to re-freeze, then all the leftover bits go…