I'm Not A Pheasant Plucker

Friday 22nd December 2017
I'm Not A Pheasant Plucker
I have previously made my thoughts about shooting perfectly clear. I'll just say wannabe aristocrats terrifying and blasting a helpless quarry! That should give you some idea!
I wouldn't be allowed to rear my sheep only to release them into a strange woodland, have them chased out into the open and then shot so that a few people can have a right old jolly in the countryside. So why is this an acceptable way to slaughter gamebirds?
A few genuinely wild birds taken to supplement a country dweller's diet might be more open to debate, but that is not what we are talking about.

Anyway, the people who do the shooting can't even be bothered to show enough respect to their 'quarry' to actually take the time to prepare it and eat it. And so, every year, a load of pheasants come my way and I am very happy to accept the free and tasty meat which they provide. In no way does my accepting this gift promote or support the shooters, but at least the birds didn't die for nothing.

Sue is in charge of skinning and taking off the heads and feet. We had a dozen brace to process and this is by far the quickest way to do it.
Once they are processed this far, they begin to look like supermarket carcasses, but they are not yet cleaned.















It is then my turn to finish the processing. I take off the legs and the breasts. Doing it this way means that you don't need to take out the insides, which is a messy and smelly business. Hardly any meat is wasted as the wings are really not worth processing and Arthur is most willing to accept any scraps which I pull off the processed carcass.



Saturday 23rd December 2017
Get Stuffed!
The year has come round so quickly, for on 23rd December 2016 I was writing about how we went to see Santa to show us how to bone out and truss a turkey.
Well guess what.



Paul is a veteran butcher who is always happy to share his time and his skills. He is brave too, for going within several feet of Sue when she is wielding a freshly sharpened knife is not for the feint-hearted.
Paul was involved in the smallholding movement way before The Good Life was screened and is a goldmine of information. Time spent with him and his wife is always most pleasurable and enlightening.

Santa shows us how to stuff a turkey

Friday 23rd December 2016
So here he is. Santa!
This is what he does in the run up to Christmas,

I'll let you into a little secret. It's not really Santa. It is, in fact, Paul from the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group, our friendly butcher but also one of the founders of the smallholding movement who has led a fascinating life. He still leads a fascinating life, for that matter.
It was pretty windy and there was a chill in the air, but Paul's Christmas poultry prep workshop was still held outside and Paul made no compromises with his wear. He always wears tee-shirt and shorts!

Of the two of us, Sue takes on most of the butchering duties. Today's task was to debone and stuff the turkey. We had deliberately not gutted the turkey as it would be good to get Paul to show us. There is always something to learn from an expert. In particular, we had not taken the tendons out from the legs. We had been shown this once before, but could only remember about half of it, enough to remove them with a moderate degree of success.
But Paul showed us how it was done properly and I took photos to aid our memories next time.

Paul sharpened our knives for us and we all then spent the next half hour or so anxiously watching Sue's fingers and periodically issuing reminders about how sharp the knives were.

With Paul's expert and patient guidance, Sue successfully cleaned and deboned the turkey.




We had improvised our own stuffing recipe, based loosely on the percentage ingredient list off a packet of Sainsbury's Taste The Difference stuffing which we found on the internet. We added a few more little luxuries and plenty of herbs from the garden. The result, I have to say, was the nicest stuffing I have ever tasted.
When I get round to it, I'll work out the exact ingredient quantities and post them. Without quantities, it was onion, celery, garlic, bread, sausage meat, cranberries, porcini mushrooms, citrus peel, brazil nuts, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, egg and chestnuts.


We spent all afternoon with Paul and his wife, Anne. They made us feel so welcome and Anne's cake went down very well indeed. Paul kept trying to persuade me to try one of his special malts, but I'm afraid I am no fan and it would have been wasted on me.

We headed home just as the sun was about to go down, but it wasn't long before a warning light came on in the car. I pulled over to discover that it was actually telling the truth. We had a puncture!

I know. I'll clean it!

Less than an hour later I had fitted the spare, we had gotten ourselves to our tyre shop just before it closed and the original tyre was back on, repaired with no charge.

Saturday 24th December 2016
To bring us bang up to date for Christmas, we spent Saturday in Stamford Christmas shopping for ourselves! I go shopping literally about twice a year, but I am quite good at spending money when I do go. Mountain Warehouse were having a sale and I treated myself to some proper wellies, some warm boots and some proper thick socks.
Prize for most exciting purchase of the day went to the packet of Arran Pilot seed potatoes I found in Wilko's. The 2017 growing season begins. These will go into the polytunnel for a super-early crop.

The main reason for our visit was to drop in at Moles Country Stores and pick up some new sheep wormer. Very Christmassy!

Finally, if you're reading this on the day, just to show that I am not a total bah humbug (though I am always disappointed when Scrooge gets 'converted' at the end of that story), MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

The killing month

November is the killing month. Animals have fed on the summer's bounty and the land won't sustain them all through the winter. It's time to thin down to breeding stock and anything which needs to grow for a second season. It's part of the cycle of seasons which rules our lives since we have chosen to live off the land.
So, in the last month I have sent a pig to the abattoir and helped butcher it, sent 4 Shetland sheep off, prepared 20 pheasants and 6 partridges, learned to dispatch, skin, gut and butcher a rabbit, been to a smallholders meeting about preparing chicken and curing bacon and hams and today I helped kill two of my sheep. Now, to many all this will seem unthinkable.
I always knew that I would reach this stage but it has been a journey which I would like to explain. And don't worry. I'm not going for shock tactics with the photos, though there will be some images near the end. If you're feeling uncomfortable with what you're reading then probably best not go any further! You don't need to come on the whole journey with me, but hopefully it will be interesting for anybody starting out in smallholding or thinking about it.
After all, it is all too easy to breed stock and end up with too many animals. Right from the outset you need to be clear what the animals are for and have a clear plan for 'the end' - that means waving goodbye to them, selecting an abattoir if appropriate, transporting them, filling in the paperwork, cutting the meat and having a plan for what happens to all the meat in the end. If your plan is vague, it's best not to let your animals breed, for you will end up with either a farm full of pet animals growing all too large and consuming a lot of expensive food or you will end up with freezers full of meat which you cannot possibly consume. Believe me, I speak from experience.

They may look cute at this stage,
but don't lose sight of why you're breeding your animals.
Otherwise you'll get more stock than you can look after, which is not fair on anybody.

Someone I know says that you should either keep and kill your own animals or you should be a vegan and that anything in between is not a viable position. I don't 100% agree but  do see where they are coming from. It may surprise you that I did actually used to be a vegan. I do believe that if you are going to eat meat then you need to face up to where it comes from and how it is reared. You need to reject mass production methods.

Smallholding and self-sufficiency sounds very idealistic and maybe idyllic. But it is hard work, not that I mind, and the smallholding side is not about keeping pets.
Even with something as cosy as keeping chickens, you soon come across the harsh realities of life and death. However well you care for birds, sooner or later one will become ill and you need to know what to do with it - and we're not talking an expensive visit to the vets here!
Then comes the point when you just can't resist allowing one of your broody hens to hatch out a clutch of eggs. It's all very cute until the chicks grow up and half of them (sod's law actually means it's normally more than half) turn into violent young cockerels fighting for alpha male position. The number of Facebook posts I see from people wanting 'loving homes' for unwanted cockerels, usually with names.

There comes a point when the cockerels have to be dealt with.

As a smallholder, I like to think that I raise my animals more humanely and more naturally than mass-produced livestock. But at the end of the day my guinea fowl, turkeys, geese, chickens, sheep and pigs are there for a reason and most of them will end up as meat.

And this is where we get to the nitty gritty of smallholding, the hard facts.
A pig or a sheep is fairly straightforward. You load it into the trailer one morning and drive it off to the abattoir, where you lead it into quite a nice little pen and then drive off. You don't need to know what happens next. It just gets returned to you neatly cut and packaged into joints. The most stressful part is probably getting it into the trailer in the first place, especially with pigs. My only advice it to come up with some sort of plan, give yourself time, be patient and, most importantly, be prepared to see the funny side of it when all goes wrong!

One of our Shetlands returned from the butcher.

The next step up the ladder, for most, comes with learning how to dispatch poultry. The killing, plucking and eviscerating (gutting) is the bit you don't have to do when you buy a chicken from the supermarket. You don't have to see the head or feet either. But most people are quite quick to get used to this, in the knowledge that their chickens have had a good life. You can still opt to send the chickens off to be 'dealt with', but this becomes a significant cost compared to the cost of rearing the bird. Probably only worth it for a turkey or a goose, or if you're selling the meat.
But there comes a stage when you end up with something which approximates the whole chicken you would buy in a supermarket or at a butchers. After that, most meat eaters would not baulk at what might be classed as the first steps in butchery, jointing the chicken.

The next step in our journey dealing with meat came with a friend offering us game birds left over from a shoot. A couple of weeks ago I was kindly given ten brace of pheasants. I was going to write a blog post called pheasants for the peasants, but I never quite got round to it!
Sue and I learned how to skin the pheasants from YouTube a couple of years ago. It's surprisingly easy. You don't even need to pluck the birds and you can get the breast and legs off without going anywhere near the insides. To be honest there's virtually no other useful meat anyway. This method is so quick that I managed to process all 20 pheasants I was given the other day in just a couple of hours.

From chickens and game birds, the next step up was last year's Christmas turkey - well, we actually ate it about February! I don't really do Christmas.
The broomstick method of poultry dispatch (no, we don't chase them round and round the yard with a broomstick) has made Sue and I very confident in dong the deed. Once you can do a chicken, there's not a lot different doing other birds. They're just slightly larger or slightly smaller.

So the journey so far has taken us from sending off our sheep and pigs to actually doing the deed and all the subsequent preparation ourselves with poultry.

But for me the biggest step is when it comes to dealing with mammals rather than birds. I sort of did these in the wrong order. I started by going on a pig butchery day a couple of years back. It was way too complicated, not helped by being led by a good butcher, but not  a good teacher.
A step backwards came last year when I picked up Daisy's carcass from the abattoir and drove it over to the good people at Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group to be used for a sausage making demonstration.

Fond memories of Daisy... but the sausages were lovely too

I spent a day helping (aka getting in the way) Paul cut up and package our pig. I've never really struggled with sending animals to the abattoir. No tears have been shed, however much I respect the animals during their lives. I didn't struggle with picking up our sow either, even though she was very friendly to me and was still recognisable when the carcass came back.
You may think me heartless, or perhaps think I've become desensitised to all this. Yes, I've gradually got used to it, but I have never lost my care or respect for the animals. I am just matter of fact about it. Sue and I still say sorry to the animals before they go.

The next step was when our sheep went off last year. They made very disappointing weights, but we learned lessons and this year we were delighted with the weights which our Shetlands made.
Anyway, we had volunteered a couple of last year's sheep for a Fenland Smallholders Club lamb butchery day. Unfortunately in the end the carcass was somewhat overchilled and chances for us to have a go were limited. However, it was another step in my learning. It seemed a lot less complicated than a pig and, with the help of Youtube to refresh my memory, I would be happy to have a go in the future.

This year's pork when it still had a bit of growing left to do

And so to this year's pig. We didn't raise it ourselves, as we've formed a co-op with a couple of other smallholders. This means that the pigs, sociable animals, can be reared in a group without us having mountains of meat on our hands. The butcher we used to use went downhill quite rapidly last year with the loss of a couple of staff members. We were no longer happy with their service. However, if you get the abattoir butchers to cut your animals, the sausages are made from all the pigs which go through the establishment that week. This kind of destroys the point of rearing your own rare-breeed animals.
And so we went back to the services of Paul, a private butcher. This meant taking the carcass over to his and helping with the butchery again. We have been very happy with the meat and the sausages. I learned a lot more this time. Even better, Paul was able to turn half of our pig into smoked bacon and hams which have proved absolutely irresistible.

Thus far, as far as mammals are concerned, I had managed to stay well away from the killing part of things (and the skinning and gutting).
But last week another smallholder was sending a litter of rabbits on their final journey and had volunteered to show other interested parties how to do it.
(This is the point where you may want to stop looking at the pictures if you're sensitive about this subject matter)

The transition from feathers to fur
certainly makes a difference
to how it feels

So we headed down to Prickwillow in the heart of The Fens. Four furry rabbits were meeting their maker. I didn't actually do the deed on any of them. Sue tried but needed help. However, we did discover that the broomstick method worked even better on rabbits than it does on poultry! A karate chop to the back of the neck is another quick and efficient way.

Saddle of rabbit x4

The rabbits were large-breed and it really did feel different to killing a bird. However, when it came to the skinning and preparation, I was surprised by how very similar it was to skinning a pheasant. The skinned and eviscerated carcass was remarkably similar to a large bird, just with an elongated section in the middle. The jointing was very simple too. In fact, rearing rabbits for meat is a strong possibility in the future. The meat is not as 'rustic' as wild rabbit and is very lean and low in cholesterol.





And so to today. A couple of my older Shetland sheep had served me well but needed to go now before the winter. For the first time I was planning on not sending them to the abattoir. Instead I was going to home kill. Well, to be more precise, Paul was going to home kill them for me. There are rules about this. Firstly the meat has to be solely for the consumption of the owner. Also they still need to be dispatched humanely, stunned first.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect and approached the day with some degree of trepidation. But I felt that I owed it to my livestock to at least see what happens to them in their final moments. I feel this actually increases my respect for them when they are alive.

The ewe on the left and the wether below.
Both photos taken a while back.

Without going into too much gory detail, the whole process was not as traumatic or as messy as I had imagined. I'm sure some of this came down to Paul's careful handling of the animals, both while alive and once dead.

Bleeding out our Shetland wether

Obviously the most shocking part is the stun gun, which is basically a bolt to the top of the head. This is quick, humane and all totally above board and within the rules. I was surprised by how instant it was. It actually pretty much always kills the animal outright anyway. The next bit which I was dreading was the slitting of the throat to drain the blood. However, Paul was quick with a knife through the neck and the animals just slowly bled. The most disconcerting thing was that, just as with a bird (and the rabbits did this too) the muscles still keep on twitching so the animal is still kicking and twitching for quite a while. But rest assured, it absolutely is 100% dead.

The skinning was fascinating. This is the part where the walking, living animal which you once looked after suddenly starts to look much more like meat. Again, the process was remarkably similar to skinning a bird. It just needed a bit more effort. Paul was remarkably skilled at this and left virtually no residue on the skins.
Finally we were on to the gutting. If you've ever experienced the smell when a chicken is gutted, you'll understand just how little my nose was looking forward to this! However, Paul's careful knife work ensured that there was no leakage and the intestines and other bits came out remarkably cleanly. They went into a bin bag for disposal (more rules).

And that was that. The carcasses, as they most definitely were by now, were left to hang overnight. It would have been easier for me to get Paul to cut the meat on the same day and take it away, but I hadn't realised that before the fat 'sets' the whole carcass is remarkable wobbly. This means that any attempts at preparing the meat inevitably end up with difficult, messy cuts.
So I returned on Monday morning. Paul had already pretty much finished one sheep and had the pair of them finished in no time at all. I was really pleased with the finished product. One of the sheep had been an old girl who, although appearing very healthy, had steadfastly refused to put on any weight. I thought we'd just get a few scraps of mutton off her, but in the end she gave us some very nice cuts of meat.
The good thing about getting Paul to butcher our animals s that you get everything back. The bones can be used for the dogs, or for stock. The spare fat can be rendered down for the wild birds (with a pig, the flare fat makes a wonderful product called leaf lard). The liver, fresh as fresh can be, makes for a delicious treat. I am learning how to make tasty treats out of some of the other offal too. Again, I feel that out of respect for our animals we should use every part of the body if we possibly can.

So this time I planned to make proper use of the hearts -I have eaten these before, but just fried them up to see what they were like. This time I followed a YouTube recipe by the wonderful Scott Rae.
Here is the link and, despite our doubts, it really did make a tasty, nutritious meal.
As a little side dish, we had crispy lamb's tongue. You wouldn't usually get this back form the butchers, so I was keen to give it a try. To be honest, it wasn't too bad but I wouldn't call it a delicacy. I'll try it again though, or I'm quite sure that Boris and Arthur would not turn their noses up!

As for the skins, I would have loved to have turned them into sheepskin rugs for us but Sue and I just don't have enough time for this at the moment. It's quite a lengthy process. You also need a licence to do this, so of course we would not have tried it even if we did have the time. But we knew a friend who was very keen to take them off our hands. It will be fascinating to see the finished product.

Salting a sheepskin

So that's it. My journey from vegan to butcher! Well done if you've stayed with me the whole time and good luck if you're thinking about embarking on a similar journey. My best advice would be to find someone who can show you how to do everything properly and to never lose respect for your livestock.

Pork day and thoughts on pig-keeping

Before I tell you anything else, a pleasant surprise this morning. I tentatively opened up the chicken house expecting to find a cold runt guineafowl but, instead, there stood a bright eyed and bushy-tailed keet, fed and warmed up and ready for action. It quickly joined the others and got on with life as if nothing had happened.



Thursday 18th October 2012


Onto today's main business, which was picking up the pigs from the butchers.

I popped in on Monday morning and left my cutting instructions. I still don't understand all the possibilities, but am beginning to learn what my choices are. Every time a visit I ask a few more dumb questions. I don't always really understand the answers!

The last pigs to go off, the two boars, I had cut into small chops and small joints, suitable for two people. However, apart from the sausages I've got quite a lot of those pigs left. The trouble is that it takes a lot of customers buying small joints to get rid of a pig.

So this time I decided to aim for larger joints, plus more sausages, which always sell out within days.
These, then, were the instructions I gave to my butcher:

Pig 1 was basically to be cut into portions suitable for a large family. The loin was to be cut into pork chops and the trotters were to be kept (though I'm not sure if they remembered this last instruction. I couldn't see them in the box, though they could have been hiding at the bottom.) This pig was pre-sold.

Pig 2 was to be cut into 4-person joints or larger. I decided to leave the chops fixed together to produce loin joints.

Pig 3 was to be used for increasing the amount of sausages, so I asked for the belly and the shoulder to be made into sausages, leaving leg joints and pork chops.

When I picked up the pork I was very pleasantly surprised. Firstly, the dead weight of the piglets was perfect, all three between 51 and 53 kg. The fat layer was absolutely perfect too. This is down to the experience I gained from previous pigs, judging how plump they looked. It is surprisingly easy to control. Just cutting or increasing the amount of feed by a fraction results in noticeable changes to the pigs' plumpness within a few days.

I was most pleased with the loin joints. They look absolutely delicious, a classic on-the-bone joint. At the end of the day, they can easily be sliced to make pork chops if all else fails.
The chops too, being from slightly larger pigs, are good slabs of meat.
The leg joints are a very lean meat surrounded by a thinnish layer of fat. These joints are ideal for today's fussier consumer. My favourite cut, though, is the shoulder. Slow roasted and kept moist by the layer of fat which gradually melts into it, there is nothing more succulent. The crunchy, salty, meaty crackling is just the icing on top of the cake

We ended up with 12 packs of sausages from each of the first two pigs and 40 packs from Pig 3. The sausages from our new butcher are truly delicious. It's tempting not to sell any of them!

There is also a lot of liver - pigs have very big livers. Sue is going to have a go at liver pate. Kidneys and heart too. These will go into the freezer, along with those from the last pigs, until I find time to seek out a good recipe for them. I'm not one of those who will eat every part of the pig, but I do think it is wrong to only eat very selective cuts. I may, in the future, experiment and ask my butcher to save this bit or that for us to try, but for the moment anything unused goes into sausages anyway and they are delicious.

One part of the pig which we do get back is the lungs. This comes as a large bag of squishy, red, spongy stuff. It really isn't very appealing and I've not found a good use for it on the internet. Most people recommend it for the dog or there are a few Chinese recipes around which use it.
Until I feel more adventurous, I think there will be a very happy dog somewhere. On that subject, all the bones went to a couple of dog-owning friends who were very appreciative.

In case you're wondering how all this works with the butcher, we basically book the animals in a good few weeks in advance (remembering that December is a no-no) and at the same time we let the abattoir know to expect them. Then, on a Sunday morning, we drop them off at the abattoir to be processed on Monday. The butcher picks up the carcasses directly from the abattoir and has them all processed, to my instructions, by Thursday.
For this I pay £45 per pig for a basic kill'n'cut. Then I pay £1/lb for the sausages. This is to cover the cost of the extra ingredients, skins etc that the butcher has to use.
So for the 3 pigs I paid £208.
Add to this the substantial cost of feeding them, keeping a sow and getting in the boar, occasional vets bills and medication and I need to sell all the meat just to make a very small profit. We get to eat any packs of sausages, chops or joints which are imperfect and if we eat any more then we are eating into our income.

Is it all worth it?



There are other options, such as not having a sow!

Yes, but...

... there are other options, such as not having a sow and buying in weaners. It all depends on how the meat sells and whether we can sell the male piglets as weaners.

There's also the consideration that having animals is tying. A massive pro, though, is that we get delicious slow-grown meat and sausages, unparallelled by any we've ever bought.
We also get the less tangible rewards of keeping animals. The time spent with them, the early mornings, the customers we meet.

We've gone into pig-keeping at just about the worst time. In the past two years feed costs have gone up massively, as have other indirect costs such as wood and metal for fencing. Not only has this increased our costs massively, but it also means there are fewer smallholders looking to buy weaners from us. Add to this the fact that people have got less money at the moment and it makes for tough decisions. We continue litter by litter, all the while assessing whether it remains viable. We don't mind making a small loss, as at the end of the day it is a hobby / lifestyle choice rather than a business upon which we rely.
I just keep thinking, if we can just persist without incurring too much loss, that things have to pick up at some time. As long as people like our meat our customer base should gradually increase and we won't be left with freezers full of meat to eat or give away.

Anyway, let's see how this batch of meat goes. Daisy should be having another litter within the next three weeks and the whole cycle starts again. She'll at least be safe until early January when we wean the piglets off her. That's when the last two of the current litter will go off for sausages and possibly bacon and hams. Whether Daisy goes with them may even come down to whether she manages to have more gilts than boars.

In the mean time, I have a kitchen full of meat to be sorting out and getting into freezers.

Not for the Squeamish!

I had been looking forward to this for a couple of months. Today's butchery course, organised through the Fenland Goatkeepers and Smallholders Club. At 7.30 I picked up Brian, who used to keep a large herd of wild boar, and off we headed to deepest Norfolk. A great day to pick, since there were "standing water" warnings issued by the Met Office for the day ahead - I think that's a new way of saying it's going to rain cats and dogs. 

Our teacher for the day was a very accomplished butcher. It's just a shame I couldn't spend a while with him telling him how to teach! No disrespect, just that there was such a wide range of experience amongst the group that the poor bloke didn't have a clue how to cope with it. Unfortunately for me, I seemed to have the least experience by far. So, after 5 minutes, I began to feel like the 'thick' child who's missed most of his lessons and doesn't have a clue what's going on.!
I carefully made a mental note of everything I was told for the first 5 minutes. For the next couple of hours or more, I watched a very interesting, adept and enthusiastic demonstration of how to cut up and add value to a pig. Then we were put into teams to repeat everything we had seen! By now, I had forgotten that first 5 minutes and all the rest. If I'd been put into a group of less experienced people and given more attention, I would have been very willing to have a go. Unfortunately I wasn't and I wasn't, so I spent the rest of the day waiting for the sausage making. At least I'd get to have fun on the sausage machine, that stalwart of the have-a-go gameshow. As time ticked on, it became apparent that this was not going to happen either, and I left the day having gained very little knowledge. What a shame. I just hope that the other people on the course got a lot more out of it.
I did meet some very nice people though, and may even have found a couple of ladies for Gerald (the boar who overstayed his welcome) to go and visit.

If you're squeamish, look away now!
Scenes of blood and gore will appear on your screen if you scroll down any more...

This is what we started with

Then we were shown how to divide it into about a hundred cuts!

Then we were expected to do it!

Luckily 2 people on my team had previous!

By the end I felt about the same as this pig.

This Little Piggy...

Saturday 28th January 2012.

Just enough overnight cloud cover to ward off the forecast frost.

The day continued warm and dry.

Out with the Old, In with the New - We're talking Pigs.

No piggy pics here today -  just in case anyone out there is getting attached to them! Yesterday evening we sold Squiggle and Curl's legs! Don't worry, they get to keep them till the end, they're just promised to someone else when the pigs no longer have a use for them...which will be Monday 13th February. This morning I phoned the butcher to arrange for their dispatch. It's a small family concern, some 20 miles away, but it has a much better reputation than the abattoir nearer home. Part of an animals welfare is minimal stress at the end. 
I have choices as to how the pigs are  divided up, but despite having read about this several times in the past, it doesn't seem to be sticking in my head. On top of this, I have no real idea if my pigs are the ideal weight, or whether they will be too lean or too fatty. So I thought it better to profess my beginner credentials to the friendly butcher and have arranged to go in one day so they can take time to explain the choices I have. Pork chops and loin...or bacon...or a bit of both? And what is a gammon? Do I have to choose between that and a shoulder, or will I not get one as I've sold the legs already? And if I want more sausages, which bit do I not get?
I'd better read that section again before I meet the butcher. There's a difference between beginner and rank amateur! 
Anyway, I just need to get their ears tagged (phoned this morning, tags promised early next week) and get the right paperwork ready - a movement form, which I'm familiar with, and a Food Information Chain form, which I've no idea about.

The patter of 40 or more tiny feet won't be too long after Squiggle and Curl have gone off. I'm pretty sure Daisy is preggers - it's not easy to tell, even for the vet. I'm guessing just over 2 months gone. Pigs are pregnant for 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days (Though surely that must depend which months are involved??) so she should give birth sometime in March. To that end, it's time for Gerald, her boyfriend, to go. He's actually going to perform his services on another farm next, but don't tell Daisy.                                                                           
                                                                                     Daisy and Gerald,

                                                                                chilled out in the stables.

                                                                          (I know I said no piggy pics today,

                                                                               but these two get to stay.)

Chicken House Clean Up

Finally managed to snap Chick of Elvis snuggled into her new egg-laying site.

Today was a good day to clean out the chicken houses properly. Every couple of weeks I empty out all bedding, shavings and hay, and scrape the floor and perches clean with a cheap wallpaper scraper. In fact I have three sizes to fit different nooks and crannies. I then liberally sprinkle the accommodation quarters with mite powder. I can use as much of this as I like as I've found an unbelievably cheap way to buy it. Branded, it costs almost a tenner for a small tub (300g), which doesn't go very far at all. However, the ingredients are 100% diatomaceous earth. I discovered that I could buy 25kg of this on the internet for £28. That's over 80 times the quantity for three times the price. Maybe I've made some huge mistake and I'm not buying the same thing, but it looks the same, feels the same, smells the same and is called the same! And so far, no mites. Maybe I should offer a cheap refill service.