Pinky, Perky, Punky, Polka, Pesky, Porky, Spot, Dot, Smudge...

 

 

 

Tuesday 6th November 2012
It was an icy welcome for the newborns.

No! They are not getting names!

Not much else to say really. All eleven piglets and mum seem healthy. For now they're just to be marvelled over and enjoyed.

I have managed to count at least six girls though, which is good news. And at least four boys. Little blighters kept moving and it's a bit hard to recognise which ones have already been checked!

Anyway, enjoy the piccies.

ELEVEN little piglets!!!



As the sound of fireworks echoed in the distance yesterday evening, an altogether different drama was unfolding in the stables. Having spent the day constructing her nest, Daisy was now giving birth to her third litter.

Some time between 6 o'clock, when the builder arrived, and half past seven, when he left, Daisy had started popping out baby pigs! As was the case last time, the first out did not make it. By the time I got to the scene, it was lying peacefully in the straw breathing its last few breaths.

Now, the next bit may seem a bit cruel, but Daisy actually seemed to help it on its way as gently as she could.

 

The second one out almost came to the same fate. She gave birth to it standing up but, not sure which direction to crawl, it ended up on the wrong side of Daisy and got snapped at as it stumbled past her snout. Eventually I picked up the slimy bundle and placed it on the teat side of Daisy. At this point she rolled over slightly to offer it milk.

Daisy clearly finds the first one or two babies a little stressful, so we retreated to the farmhouse to let her get on with things on her own. She seems happy for us to be present, but is clearly uncomfortable for a while and a little tetchy. Can't blame her really!

 

Maybe next time we should try some soft background musci!

The next time I tiptoed out to the stables I found three spotty pink piglets
huddled together in a hollow in the straw, which Daisy had nuzzled out for this purpose. A fourth was suckling greedily.
Then out came a fifth.
To witness this is a real privilege and a humbling experience.

It's amazing how quickly the tiny, slimy bundles become active, clean, spotty little piglets. Poor Daisy looked absolutely knackered and one of her teats looked very sore indeed. Newborn piglets have razor sharp teeth.













It wasn't much later that I entered the cold of the night to check on progress, and this time Daisy was up to ten and had passed the afterbirth. What a remarkable coincidence that she should end up with ten piglets for each of her first three litters.

But I was mistaken, for an eleventh litle critter spluttered into life and clambered over her back leg to jostle for a teat upon which to suckle.

Daisy had taken just over 3 hours to give birth to eleven babies. Now that her labour was over and all seemed well, I retired for the night, hoping that the live squeaky toys, for that's what newborn piglets are like, would survive the coldest night of the winter so far.

3 Months, 3 Weeks and 3 Days

 

Saturday 3rd November 2012

3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days. That's the gestation period of a sow. Nice and easy to remember.

Now Daisy and Gerald got it together on Friday 13th July (easy to remember again), so by my calculations I had 5th November in my head - easy to, well - Remember, Remember!

So I was a little surprised last night to find Daisy lying down puffing and panting. She looked decidedly ready to give birth. But surely this was too early.

That got me wondering...When they say three months, precisely which months are they talking about? The ones with thirty-one days or the ones with thirty... or even the one with twenty-eight?

Cold nights.
Not ideal for newborn piglets, as they cannot regulate their own body temperature.
This is why I have brought Daisy into the stables.

So a quick search of the interweb revealed the magic figure of 114 days (+/- 2 days). A quick bit of reverse mathematics told me that those three months must be thirty day months, despite the fact that this would be impossible with the months in their current order!

And the +/- 2 days bit meant that my original 5th/6th November estimate needed to be revised forward by maybe 3 days. Last night!!!

Like an anxious expectant father, I tiptoed into the dark every hour or so to check on Daisy. But by 11 o'clock she was calmly asleep, snoring.
And today she was back to normal, though she has been spending a lot of time asleep.

Maybe it will be 3 Months, 3 Weeks and 3 Days. 

Luckily I'm not expecting loud explosions from fireworks in the immediate vicinity.

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.

Down and Dirrty...with the pigs

Saturday 7th July 2012
A promising start.

A young Roe Deer at first light comes just close enough to snap.

An early start today to make the most of the fine weather. A day of ragwort and thistle extraction. More on this in tomorrow's post. Suffice to say I've been pricked, stung, electrocuted and I have a nasty rash on my arms! And how could I forget...a tiny bit of sunburn!...And back ache.
By early afternoon I'd done 8 hours and was whacked. A good time for a supermarket trip as we'd not been for almost four weeks.

Down and Dirrty with the pigs

Rejuvenated by my break and on a slight sugar high from my supermarket treats, it was now time to move Gerald, since I'd separated the piglets from Daisy yesterday. We'd been holding Gerald in the stables for a while, mainly to avoid having to sell the piglets as weaners over the Christmas period. It takes 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days for a pig to have her babies, then another 8 weeks till I separate the piglets from their mother. So even if Gerald does the deed today, it will still be about New Year's Day when they are being weaned. It could be up to two and a half weeks before Daisy is ready to become pregnant, though in my experience it seems the sow changes her cycle to make the most of the boar's interest!

After a relatively straightforward journey from the stables to the pig pen, Sue and I spent a pleasant summer's evening with the pigs and chickens. Spending time observing the animals is not only a very pleasant experience, but is an important part of good husbandry.



The rest can be told in pictures.

 

Gerald was keen to get
out of the stables.



Watched by the geese,
he headed straight down to the pig pens.



 

He even broke into a trot at one point.
The only tricky bit was getting him
over the threshold into the pen.
For some reason, pigs are never keen
to go through gates.
Could be that he discovered clover along the way!
We actually brought Daisy out
and he followed her back in.



 





Daisy clearly remembers Gerald. She was
impressed at how well turned out he was.





Until...











That's better!
Gerald doesn't get out much these days.
He was straight into the mud.

Now, this website is not in the habit of displaying adult content, but the next section comes with an X-certificate. 

It contains scenes of a sexual nature as well as full on nudity.

Look closely and you'll see a part of Gerald that doesn't normally come out! (It's the thing underneath him that looks like a stick poking out of the ground.)

He was clearly pleased to see Daisy. I had heard rumours that the part in question was corkscrew shaped at the end and it was!!

Gerald's amorous advances included

gently nibbling Daisy's tail.

But Daisy was having none of it.
The last time she saw him was
2 months ago and he had been playing away.

She was in no mood for forgiveness.

Not yet at least.

... and definitely not with the children watching!





Gerald played the family man card



The piglets were very keen to meet their

father. Did they know who he was?

Only one of them had ever seen him before.

  



Lest we forget, the chickens proved more than capable of providing entertainment too. When we led Gerald down, they all lined up along the fence to watch. But their minds quickly turned back to chicken affairs, especially their evening ration of wheat.



Gerald and Daisy were last seen getting very grumpy with each other over accommodation for the night. The ark will be very cosy, but I'm sure they'll make their peace and find a way to snuggle in together.

I left them at dusk, both mooching around outside.

One, Two, Three....Seven



Friday 25th May 2012
Hot, Hot, Hot.



Someone obviously got out of the wrong side of the perch this morning! Two of the teenagers suddenly started to behave all grown up, squaring off against each other and even jumping up in the air, claws stretched ahead.

Onto important matters. I left you all on tenterhooks about the piglets. This was a deliberate ploy to increase my viewing figures, learned from the likes of Big Cat Diary and Planet Earth Live.

To tell the truth, I wasn't really all that worried. The great escape was probably accidental, borne through inquisitiveness and an inability to find the way back in. Mind you, I still hear tales of the piglet lost by the previous owners which was finally shot after wandering the countryside for nine months!

All still present and correct, mum and piglets very happy to be together. Today was a real scorcher, which was great news. It meant that the pig family spent almost the entire day in the shade of their ark, leaving me free to turn off the leccy fence and do what needed to be done.

The bottom wire of the fence needed to be dropped one notch to piglet height, but this made even more necessary the job of trimming the grass under the wire.

In theory, the battery to start the strimmer had been charged and it should be all systems go, so when I just got a slight whirr instead of a chugging engine and a whizzing strimmer, my heart sank.  

More machine problems. Just then though, a cough and a splutter (the strimmer, not me) and it stuttered into action after its winter break.

We quickly made friends and a couple of hours later it was job done.

The Great Escape.

Thursday 24th May 2012
The sun tries to break through on a misty May morning.

No wonder some of the eggs are getting cracked - why do they all have to try to get in the same nest box?

Meanwhile, just look how big the teenagers have got!

The animals get through a lot more water in this weather and for the first time this year I had to use the hosepipe (it is allowed for this!) as most of the collected water has been used up. Trouble with a hosepipe is that piglets just can not resist playing with it!


As the temperature climbed into the 70's and the sun beat down, the piglets made their first ever wallow.

The return of Mr Mow-tivator
At 11:30 today this arrived back...Mr Mow-tivator.

By 8:30 this evening, I'd achieved this...

Perfect pathways in the potager

One hundred trees mulched with the accumulated clippings of the day - a convenient way to dispose of a mountain of grass cuttings, and a friendly way of protecting the saplings from weed competition without using nasty chemicals.

The Great Escape.

One more job before I could put my feet up and relax. The nightly round up of G'nea G'nea. Sue was at her community choir tonight, so the job was infinitely more tricky.

But not as big a problem as what was still to come, for I heard the familiar click-squeal sequence of a piglet encountering an electric fence. Problem was, all my piglets were kept in with wooden fence and stock fence. Only Daisy was hemmed in by an invisible force field ... until now.

Two of the piglets were in with her, and three more were outside all the fencing!! Thank goodness all that was on their minds was getting back in with their brothers and sisters or their mum. Two braved pushing under the electric fence to reach the safety of mum, but not before they got a bit of a shock! The last one, I showed through the secret gate at the back of the pig pen. I had been thinking about reuniting the piglets with Daisy, but not before I'd strimmed the grass and lowered the electric fence. Oh well. In the fading light I took down the partition and allowed the last two piglets through. Daisy was very excited to see them all, though I think she's forgotten that she had ten before. Let's hope they're all still there in the morning.