Old-fashioned grinder

Last year at a local antique store, we purchased a weird-looking meat grinder thingy. It's made of cast iron and very heavy.



At the time we got it, it was rusty, and since we'd never used it, it stayed rusty. But during hunting season last year, a neighbor (who bagged his deer) called and asked if we had a grinder he could borrow. We warned him our antique was rusty and may not work well, but he took it anyway... and then wire-wheeled it and cleaned it up beautifully, ground up his meat, and returned it in far better condition than we got it. (That's a good neighbor.)



Anyway this week we ran out of the bacon bits I'd canned up earlier. So I purchased several packs of bacon ends to cut up, fry down, and can.

It's the cutting up part that's a pain. So -- why not try the grinder?



We quickly discovered a couple of things. One, if we're going to use this grinder on a regular basis, we'll have to mount it on something. Trying to crank it while holding it down was tough.

Two, the blades are dull. No surprise, considering its age. Make a note, sharpen the blades.

Three, don't overstuff. The more meat being processed through, the harder it is to crank. Feeding it at a moderate pace works better.



But it worked just great!



(Note Lydia's intense interest in this procedure.)




The meat was ground so fine I wasn't sure how it would fry up into bacon bits. So we ground just one package and tried frying it up first.




It fried up just beautifully...



...so we went ahead and ground up the rest of the meat. Here are some neighbor kids joining in the fun. Many hands make light work!



When all the meat was ground, I opened the grinder to remove the stuff still caught in the blades.



It wasn't hard, and only took a few minutes.



Ah, now cleaning it... that was a different story. What a hassle. Make another note, only use the grinder when there's a lot of meat to grind. Otherwise the cleanup procedure isn't worth the effort. Fortunately the blades can all be removed, but it still means that each part must be scrubbed separately.



Cleaned and ready to go for the next time...



Despite the hassle of cleaning (which, frankly, would be inescapable even with a new meat grinder), I'm more than pleased with how this antique performed.

I think it's a valuable thing to start collecting hand tools of assorted varieties, both shop tools and kitchen tools. This antique grinder now has an honored place in our pantry.

Berry beds and buying antiques

One of the stalled projects we wanted to complete last year but didn't have a chance to finish was fruit beds. We needed a dedicated place to put strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.

So last year (before the tractor died) we managed to heave the beams for the beds into their rough places. Last week we nudged the beams into their correct spots. Yesterday we completed the boxes. Whoo-hoo, progress!

We hauled some long boards into the garden.

Don cut them into four-foot lengths.

Some of the beams had rotten ends, so he trimmed them.

We squared up the beams evenly, then he hammered the end caps in place.

Now we have four nice squared (well, rectangle-d) beds, ready for hardware cloth and topsoil.

The next step will be to lay several layers of newspapers on the ground in the beds (to keep the prairie grasses from coming up) and overlay that with hardware cloth, of which we bought several hundred feet. We have a problem with moles and voles in this area, so hardware cloth will discourage the little critters from munching our plants from underneath.

Yesterday we also took a short excursion to buy some antiques. There's a junk / slash / antique cooperative just outside of town that sells an amazingly varied jumble of things for amazingly cheap prices. For some time now we've been coveting such things as extra scythes and other garden implements. They've been closed all winter and opened up for the first time yesterday. So we all piled in the car and took a trip. It's located in a converted old farmhouse with several outbuildings as well as many things just jumbled and scattered outside.

Here, for example, is one of the outbuildings. It's a treasure-trove around this place -- you never know what you'll find.

We ended up purchasing three scythes, an extra snath (scythe handle), several garden tools (rakes, shovels, etc.), and some miscellaneous kitchen items such as cast iron pots and pans, some grinders, etc.

It was kind of funny -- the sellers didn't expect us to actually use any of the things we bought -- they thought we were just planning on (cough) hanging them on the wall for decoration. Wrong! How else are we going to harvest the wheat field except with scythes?