A Sheep on the Loose (or The Boar who Sat Down)

Friday 19th January 2018
Sheep On The Loose
"JOHN! JOHN!"
Sue's voice woke me up sharply. It had a sense of urgency. Thoughts started to go through my mind of what might be wrong. "One of the sheep is on the drive".

I threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs, still bleary-eyed and trying to get my bearings. Sure enough there was the brown wether lamb confusedly wandering around on the gravel. Panic over. It wouldn't be difficult to drive it round to the other gate where we could let it back in with the others.
With this done I investigated how it had gotten out. The three strands of electric fence were pulled and snapped and the rickety stock fence was pushed aside. The lamb had obviously been trying to reach some out of bounds willow and I guess had got its horns caught in the electric fence. This would have given the poor thing quite a shock and it had obviously blundered its way through the fence and onto the drive. Fortunately the others had not followed.

I had to go to work, but the fence needed mending first. It was just a question of fixing the wire using small metal connectors, but the icy air made this job considerably more tricky than it could have been.

Saturday 20th January 2018
PE One Two Zero launched
Lots of preparation to do to be ready for tonight's meeting, but before all that I had a couple of pigs to pick up. Unfortunately they won't be ending up in my freezer, for they belong to friends of mine. I just pick them up in the trailer and drop them off at the abattoir early in the morning. Although Steve hadn't fed the pigs all day (the standard way to get them to do what you want), they refused to follow a bucket of food up the ramp of the trailer. They got to the bottom of it and then stopped. The boar sat down! After a couple of minutes the young sow decided to take advantage of the food up in the trailer but the boar resisted all efforts to coax him forwards so we decided to gently nudge him in the right direction. But you cannot hurry pigs. They have a sixth sense and their stubbornness automatically kicks in.
In truth, it didn't take too long and experience had taught us to channel the pigs and not give them the option of backtracking, so there was no chasing around in the mud.
I tried the tickling technique but the boar stayed firmly plonked on his bum.
So I informed Steve of the wheelbarrow technique (use your imagination, it speaks for itself). He was dubious that this could work but I assured him I had done it before.
We gave it a few more minutes but there was no change in the situation, so Steve lifted the boar up by the back legs and we both bundled it forwards. Basically the pig goes into forward freefall, a little like the principle of a spacecraft staying in orbit.
Success. We quickly closed the back gate of the trailer just in case the boar decided to reverse and that was it. Job done.

We threw in plenty of straw, for tonight was going to be icy.
When I got home the pigs buried themselves under the straw and went to sleep. Little did they suspect what was in store for them.

PE One Two Zero
At 7pm we were expecting up to 20 people to arrive. I have started a new local group of smallholders and this was to be our first get together. There was no agenda, just to get to know each other, share some good homemade food and good company.

In the end we had sixteen people which was a great turnout. We are all in the Fenland Smallholders Club, but most never go along to the monthly meetings down in Upwell. I figured that if we kept it local people might be more likely to take the time out. More importantly, we could hold the get together in the evening, outside those precious daylight hours when we need to be outside working on our smallholdings. With no-one travelling more than 5 miles on familiar country lanes, there would be no worries about driving in the dark or arriving home too late.

Some of the people I already knew quite well but some I had never even met. It was great to be able to find out more about each other in a relaxed atmosphere. I hope that a good time was had by everybody and that they all come back next time, which will be in about three months.

Sunday 21st January 2018
Snow!
An early start to take the pigs to the abattoir. The drop off went quite smoothly, although the boar sat down again. In the end we had one pulling him from the front and me lifting him from the back - this is easier said than done when you are jammed inside a 4 foot high trailer with two pigs which could quite well squash you!
I had been keeping a close eye on the weather forecast, for there was a possibility of snow arriving about 8 in the morning. For the second time in a week the BBC got it disastrously wrong. After failing to mention the mini hurricane that swept through midweek, they now had no mention of snow for this area on their website. Shortly after 8.30 we had a couple of very light flurries, but about an hour later it started coming down with more determination. An icy surface meant that the snow settled quickly.

I spent an hour or so wheel barrowing the straw from the trailer down to the turkey pen to keep the ground from getting too muddy. I resembled a snowman by the end. I retreated into the warm farmhouse, only to discover that the rest of the family had gone back to bed!!!

The snow continued into the early afternoon, leaving us with a covering of about an inch of the white stuff. Nothing compared to further north, but snow is pretty rare here.
I no longer feel the urge to run outside and play in it. In fact I didn't even venture out to take a photo for you. Instead I decided to start my seed audit for the year, digging out my trays of seeds from last year to see what I can get away with not buying this year.

I sat in the conservatory so I could watch the snow falling from a  position of comfort, sipping a nice hot cup of coffee and occasionally glancing up at the garden birds flocking to the feeders. There is still something quite magical about snow. I could just watch it falling for hours.

Bringing Home The Bacon

I've been away for a while on my annual sojourn to Shetland to hunt rare birds.  It's a bit different to The Fens up there, though the islands are windswept, full of smallholdings and there are Shetland sheep everywhere... so maybe not so different after all!

But just before I flew north, I sent a pig off to piggy heaven. If you follow this blog, you may be confused as I've not actually had any pigs on the smallholding this year.

Sue and I have found that one pig is quite enough to feed us for a year. However, pigs are intelligent, social animals and are best kept with at least one other of their own kind. So this year we were part of a pig co-op. A fellow smallholder raised three pigs, one of which was destined for our freezer. We only ever met our saddleback twice, once when it was just a nipper and then, a couple of weeks ago, to load it into our trailer and take it off to the abattoir.

We are fortunate to live just a few miles from a small abattoir who always give us an excellent service. But finding a butcher to process the carcass for us has been proving tricky. Both this abattoir and another nearby have butchers attached, but they both put your sausage meat into a big batch along with that from all the other pigs they are processing. The result is that, as far as the sausages are concerned, you might as well just buy some good quality sausages from the supermarket.

We did have an excellent arrangement with a very small butchers just a very short walk from Sue's school. They would pick up the carcass direct from the abattoir and cut it according to our wishes. They made an excellent sausage using just our pork. It was sometimes a job to persuade them to produce any more sausages for us than the standard amount produced from all the offcuts, but overall it was a very good arrangement.
However, the butcher who used to do the cutting for us has been poorly for a while and has now left. So the job has fallen to the one who makes the sausages. Unfortunately he clearly does not want to take on this job - our lambs last year came back not even labelled! His default answer to any request seemed to be "no".
And so we came up with a different plan for this year's pig. A real character we know who lives down in the central fens is also a butcher. In fact, it's the same person who transformed Daisy into sausages last year.

The third time I met my pig!

The downside is that it's quite a journey and I have to transport the carcass to him in the back of the car. The upside is that I get to help out and I really enjoy his company.
So just before I left for Shetland I took our pig along to him. It took only a couple of hours to turn half of it into chops and joints, as well as a box full of tasty sausages and a long string of boiling sausages.
The sausages are so tasty that we will not be selling any this year!
The other half of the pig was prepared for bacon and placed in a brine bath. When we started keeping pigs, we dreamed of sausages, ham, bacon and gammon. But there is an art to making these products and so far we have never really been happy with our own attempts, especially at bacon. Paul still uses traditional methods to make bacon and gammon.
It's not really a complicated process, but a skilled curer's experience can make all the difference, judging things just right between under and over curing. Paul has come up with a great way to achieve this on a small scale. After cutting half the pig into about four great lumps, these went into a cooling box which was filled with a brine mix, containing salt, a very little saltpetre, herbs, spices and sugar. A few milk cartons of frozen water help to keep the temperature down and weigh down the meat to keep it submerged.

And so I headed off to Shetland, half a pig in the freezer and half left at Paul's to cure. There is no waste either. The bones go to Boris or will be boiled up for stock, along with the skin. The flare fat from inside the carcass will be used to produce more of that wonderful leaf lard which makes such excellent pastry and lardy cake.

Sue will hate me for publishing this photo,
but the main subject is the smoked bacon

Fast forward two weeks and today we went back to Paul's to pick up the bacon. It had come out of the brine and been smoked in Paul's home-made smoker, made from a hollowed out upside-down fridge.
He showed us how to use his slicer and we set to work slicing while Paul cut up the large leg ham into more manageable gammon joints for us.
Fast forward another few hours and we've just enjoyed our first taste of the bacon, along with a few of the sausages, a couple of our own eggs and some fried mushrooms. All I can say is that we most definitely won;t be selling any of the bacon either!

Daisy, Daisy!

Daisy was a good pig. She came with the farm when we bought it and it wasn't long before she had her first litter. She was always a brilliant mother and gave us 30 piglets in all. The sound of her contented grunts is sadly missed.

But she was in danger of turning into a pet rather than livestock. If we carried on like this, we would pour an awful lot of food into her and then, one day, we would find several hundred pounds worth of pig passed away, leaving us with a big problem to deal with.

But our options for Daisy were limited. Our small butchers would not be able to deal with turning such a large sow into sausages. The best they would be able to manage would be to turn her into an awful lot of mince. And the butchers attached to either of the abattoirs I have used, so I'm told, just out all their sausage pigs in together. If I out Daisy in, I wanted Daisy back, not somebody else's meat reared goodness knows how.

So when the Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group were planning their sausage making demonstration and Paul the friendly butcher suggested using Daisy, it seemed like a perfect solution for the old girl.
We would be able to make her into all sorts of sausages, plus a few other well chosen cuts of meat - an old sow like this is no longer suitable for the most tender cuts - and everybody, not least us, could learn how to make sausages thanks to Daisy.

I've already written about the adventures of getting Daisy into the trailer and off to the abattoir. Well straight after lunch last Thursday I headed off to pick up Daisy's carcass. (Sorry to be so matter of fact about it, but that is the best way to deal with these things. I have no problem looking after animals, even naming them, then eating them. In fact, I have a problem with people who are not willing to face the fact that they are actually eating what was a living animal.)

It was, however, pretty disconcerting to be given Daisy's head first. It did still look like Daisy, but if you've ever seen a dead body you'll know that there is something missing from it, the spirit is gone. When the heart stops beating, the essence of a being leaves it. Nevertheless I determined to make sure that Sue didn't have to see this.
We then loaded Daisy into the back of the car. She really was quite a size. The carcass had a lot of fat on it. Usually, if this were a weaner, I would be ashamed at such poor rearing, but I guess this was a sign that Daisy had become more of a pampered pet.

I met Paul at 2:30 and we proceeded to get the room ready to start the mammoth task of turning Daisy into meat. As Paul says, "livestock is deadstock". This is a good thought for all smallholders to hold on to.
Our task was not helped by the malfunction of Paul's mincer - he had lent it out and it seemed the smallest piece had broken off rendering the whole machine useless. Emergency phone calls were made and a couple of non-commercial mincers duly arrived.
From nowhere, too, reinforcements arrived to help with the task.
I'm sure we slowed Paul down considerably, but he is a very patient man and was keen to teach us as much as he could.
The sausage making was actually quite straightforward, though there were a few techniques to be mastered. I had purchased ready made mixes of spices, herbs and rusk. These were mixed with a little water, then about 20lb of meat was minced and the whole lot was mixed, kneaded and pummelled by hand until we had sausage meat. This was loaded into one end of the sausage making machine and by turning a handle the meat was forced out of the other end into the waiting casings. We used natural hog casings, which we had washed and loaded onto the nozzle at the end of the machine.
The person stationed here had the job of trying to make sure the sausages remained the same thickness and the skins did not split. Obviously there were a few misshapen souls, but on the whole we ended up with some decent sausages. Paul showed us how to twist and tie them and voila!
You'll have to imagine the finished product, as this is when my phone ran out of battery, so no more pics.



When I say that we ended up with some decent sausages, we actually got about 160lb of sausages in the end! In fact I was so busy mincing, mixing and trying to bag everything up and label it that I never actually got a go at the business end of the sausage making machine.

We also made a boiling sausage, made from leaner mince mixed with red wine and garlic, ideal in cassoulets or to use for meatballs. In addition to the sausage, Paul cut the back legs (the front ones are actually referred to as hands and not legs) into quite a few lovely gammon joints and a few roasting joints for us. We got spare ribs too, a couple of strips of loin, plus a whole load of mince and diced pork.

In the evening the rest of the Self Sufficiency Group turned up for the demonstration and a barbecue. They were all amazed by the shear quantity of meat which had come from one pig. Some chose to have a go at the various sausage making activities, others were content just to observe. Everybody enjoyed the barbecue and the Daisy sausages went down very well indeed, as did the bunny burgers supplied by Mick.

The only pity was that we were kept so busy turning Daisy into sausages that I didn't really get to socialise or enjoy the barbecue. But it seemed more useful to get Daisy processed (sorry that sounds harsh) while we had the help and the machinery at hand.

Overall, I felt this was a fitting end for Daisy. I was immensely proud of Sue, too, for coming along and helping out. She hadn't been sure if she would be able to bring herself to, but in the end I think it helped her.

I was determined not to waste anything. This would have been disrespectful to Daisy. As well as all that meat, I had six bags of fat and bones in the car. Making the best use of this would be my Friday task.

Meanwhile, if anybody wants to buy any Daisy sausages, please email me. You will know that they come from a pig who was treated well and had a good, long life. You will know too that they contain no dodgy ingredients, no factory sweepings, no eyelids etc. You will know that they were hand crafted by expert sausage makers!

We have available, at £3.80/lb:

Lincolnshire (sausages and sausage meat)
The Great British Banger
Cumberland
Chilli and Coriander
Old Dubliner (peppery, sausage meat)
Romany (herby)
Hickory Smoked

 

Thank you Daisy.

Goodbye.

Daisy. One Stubborn Pig!

We spent Bank Holiday Monday in the pleasant company of a larger than life figure and his wife down in the southern fens. The reason for our excursion off the farm was to discuss sausages and bacon products.

If you follow this blog you'll know that we only have one pig at the moment, Daisy, our breeding sow who has become too close to being a pet since we decided to stop breeding her.
The Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group are holding a sausage making and barbecue evening in the near future and the subject of our art is to be Daisy! This seems like a fitting end for the old girl.

We have ordered half a dozen different packs of sausage flavouring and are researching the chemistry of bacon curing.

But Daisy has other ideas!!

We started trailer training her over a week ago. For Daisy cannot be manhandled. Daisy goes where Daisy wants to go.

I had two major concerns. Getting her in the trailer and getting her out the other end. I figured that I needed to get her used to eating and sleeping in the trailer and coming back out in the morning. If we could get to this stage then I would move the trailer onto drier ground and repeat the process there, leading her up from her pen every evening. The next stage would be to take her for a little drive so that she got used to coming out of the trailer after a journey.


Now all this sounds like a good plan and Trailer Training Stage 1 went reasonably smoothly, although it took 3 days to get her into the trailer the first time. I had to move it so the ramp didn't slope quite so much. But we eventually got to the point where she went straight in every evening for three nights.

Then I had to use the trailer to fetch the lambs. I decided this would be a good time to park it on higher ground. Well, that was four days ago. It took FOUR hours of coaxing to get Daisy up into the trailer on the first evening - it was gone midnight before I got back into the farmhouse. Part of the problem is that Daisy is so long that I need her to go right into the trailer before I can shut the gate on her. I lost count of how many times she backed out just as the last couple of inches of bum were still sticking out!

For some reason, Daisy wasn't happy when I closed the gate that time and she has steadfastly refused to go in the trailer for the last three nights. She takes the titbits I throw to try to tempt her, but most unusually for a pig her stubbornness is overcoming her hunger.


To be quite honest, I have been getting very frustrated by the whole situation. However, something always happens to lighten a situation and this time it has been a family of wrens which provided the entertainment. For they have nested in the top corner of the garage porch, in an old swallow nest. While I have been waiting for Daisy to go into the trailer, there have been constant high-pitched begging calls coming from the nest. Then, on the third day, four young wrens appeared on the scene.









One of them found a very novel perch!

















Despite this, there was no budging by Daisy on the trailer issue. So yesterday I took the decision to move the trailer back down to her pig pen. This is now a major worry as we have had constant rain for two days and I really am not confident that I will be able to pull it back out again... if Daisy goes in that is. I have decided that she will only be fed right inside the trailer. She could do with losing a little bit of fat before she goes off anyway.

Turning Piglets into Pork

There have been comings and goings at the farm in recent days. Most obvious goings were the two piglets at the weekend. It still seems strange when we go to feed them and only two pigs emerge from their hut for food.
But today the two piglets came back, just not quite as they went away!

I was impressed by their eventual weights. I usually send the pigs off at just over 50 kg, but leaving them that bit longer gave us some much more chunky chops. By my crude reckoning, the extra feed costs were more than compensated for in the extra meat.

The extra growth gave us some lovely, traditional style chunky chops too and we also had the leg cut into steaks. The leg joints are always the leanest, but our customers know their pork and know that this makes the meat slightly drier too. When I discussed this with my butcher, he suggested steaks and very nice they look too.

Mind you, with the piglets weighing in at 68 and 63 kg it's no wonder I couldn't get them off the trailer!

It was interesting to chat to the butcher for a while too. The sisters of these two piglets, which I sold to a new smallholder just around the corner, grew much quicker than ours. So much so that, when their owner came and asked me if it was time to go off, he was obviously surprised at the size difference. It made me doubt our pig-rearing too. Could it be that I was not growing our pigs fast enough? Although I take pride in the amount of space they've got and in producing slow-grown pork, could it be that I've been keeping them too long and spending out far more than I need  on food?

I wrote a post on how much to feed a pig some time ago. I didn't give any numbers, just advice to keep an eye on the piglets' condition and not be lured by their persistent squealing for more food. Could it be that I got it wrong?

Of course not! For my butcher informed me that those two piglets which had grown so quickly were insulated by a very thick layer of fat. Some fat is good, maybe up to a couple of cm, but any more than that and you have just been turning expensive food into a layer of blubber.

So, if any of you want any perfectly reared pork, the likes of which you'll never have tasted before (unless you're old enough to remember what good old traditional pork is supposed to taste like), just take a look at the Pork and Sausages tab on this blog and pop in to see us on the farm. 

Feelin' Hot Hot Hot.

Finally a proper summer. Yesterday, after a couple of cloudy ones, it was into the 30s here. It must be two weeks of hot weather we've had now and the temperatures just seem to keep cranking up. Occasionally we get the benefit of an east coast breeze or some North Sea cloud cover, but often as not the sky's been solid blue from morning till night. And I love it!

But it's not without its challenges. Keeping the animals amply watered takes longer than usual, and we're having to use metered tap water as the water butts ran dry long ago. Most of the vegetables and flowers are well enough established to have sent their roots down far enough to find moisture, but the cracks are opening up and we could do with some rain to swell the crops. The young plants I need to get in the ground are having to wait too. It's like a desert out there.

In fact, one muggy sleepless night last week I got up at 3:20am, watered the last four empty veg beds and filled them with young brassica plants and nasturtiums.

But I mustn't moan. Not after last year.

So, instead, here's a few pics of how the piglets keep cool. (These were taken last week. Two have gone off now. But, as you can see, they had a pretty decent life while they were here.)

An eventful birthday

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

Another computer gave up on me!

But I've got it back now.

Problem is, I go a couple of weeks without blogging and there's just so, so much to catch up on.

Let's start at the end. Today. My 47th birthday.
Wild celebrations don't really happen any more, I'm just happy to have a quiet day with Sue.

It was someone else's birthday too, Thorne's Beekeeping Supplies. A full 53 years older than myself. They had a centenary celebration on today and we had pre-ordered some sale goodies. So we headed up to their rather grandiose home in the Lincolnshire Wolds .

Thorne's shop

Even the oil drums had a bee theme!



Can you believe this fool is now 47?



Inspiration for bee-friendly plants

The museum was fascinating, as was a look around the factory.
All the machines are made for purpose, some being 80 years old.

We returned to the farm late afternoon. I was severely tempted to divert to the North Norfolk coast where a most unusual arrival of several Two-Barred Crossbills from Scandinavia was occurring. But none stayed long enough to tempt me. So instead I spent an hour of my birthday picking the last of the red gooseberries. Prickly!

 

I nearly forgot not to feed the pigs. For this evening we had the job of cajoling two rather stubborn pigs into the livestock trailer ready to go on a little journey in the morning. We are quite well practised at this now, but it always has its stresses. The basic plan is to keep the pigs hungry so they follow the bucket of food down to the waiting trailer.

This works well for about a minute, until they discover the lush grass which grows outside their pen. But we know this will happen, so we bring Daisy with them. She knows the way and they will stick with her.

Today we managed the first part of the operation with incredible smoothness. One pig was left in the pen - this is the lucky one who gets to reach its first birthday before it goes off, in the winter, as a baconer. There was no selection process. Just the last pig to go through the gate.


A stay of execution for this girl.



These two follow Daisy and Sue toward their fate.



   

From there it was a race up the land to the stable area and into the (very) small yard, where the trailer was waiting, door open and ramp enticingly covered in straw. I strewed it with food, but to no avail. This was no surprise. Getting them to make the final climb into the trailer is always a stressful experience. 

The sticking point.
That ramp is a no go area.



We didn't really want Daisy in there too, so we led her back to join the other piglet.

Daisy heads back to her pen,

leaving two worried and

tetchy piglets behind.



But, as has happened in the past, this was the cue for the doomed couple to get a little tetchy. So  much so that they broke through a fence and headed back down toward their pen,

There followed fifteen minutes of fraught efforts to get back to where we had been already been (no photos, too fraught!)

The fence was reinforced (Well, I leaned a couple of sturdy pallets up against it) to prevent further breakouts and we patiently edged the piglets up the ramp and into the trailer.

I make this sound easier than it actually is!

So tomorrow morning we'll be off to the abattoir bright and early. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get them to leave that trailer when we get there. Not that they know what's coming.

That just left enough time to top and tail those gooseberries ready for the freezer before sitting down to a late birthday dinner with Sue - lasagna made with our own lamb and vegetables, including the first of this year's courgettes - oh yes, the glut has already started.

Then a celebratory cake, topped with today's picking of raspberries and a rather OTT firework display thingy-me-jig from the pound shop, complete with sparklers, candles and a rather metallic version of happy birthday which repeated several dozen times until we finally managed to break the device!

So that was today. And after all that, I have to say I actually do feel a year older.

Over the next few days I'll be bringing you up to date with everything that's been happening - hot, hot weather, swarming bees, broody chickens, egg-straw-din-ary goings on with the guineafowl, the start of the harvest, the arrival of a most unexpected new member of the family and, as if I wasn't busy enough, another trip to the Hebrides chasing birds. It's all been happening.