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.

Damp weather kills guineafowl

The guineafowl family at roost

Tuesday 16th October 2012

Wednesday 17th October 2012

Just a couple of days ago I was telling a friend how it looked as if all eleven guineafowl keets would survive to adulthood, now that they are past the vulnerable little chick stage. In fact they are looking more grey than brown now and have begun to develop the wonderful spotty and barred plumage of adult birds. But one bird is about half the size of the others. Up until now it's been doing fine, but it was certainly the most vulnerable of the troupe.

Well, as you can see by the last two sunrise photos, we've had two wet, grey days here. Most of the rainfall has been at night and the guineas have looked a bit bedraggled by the morning, since they've taken to roosting exposed to all the elements on top of the fence, all in a line squashed together for warmth, comfort and security. Four lucky youngsters get the protection of a parental wing to form an umbrella over them.

During the day, the guineafowl gang roam freely around the smallholding, though they don't often wander far from the chicken pens. In fact, they regularly hop in and out of the pens. And odds are there will always be one or two on the wrong side of the fence, running up and down the fenceline in a panic, for they regularly forget that they can now get over. Not clever.





All this preamble leads me to the point of today's post. For this evening, at feeding time, I turned round from feeding the pigs and almost stood on the smallest guineafowl, all alone by my feet looking all forlorn. Hunched over with its wings drooping, things did not look good. This had come right out of the blue. All I could think was that it had suffered from two days of murky, damp weather and had maybe got separated from the others and not managed to get enough food during the day to keep its energy up.

Did Minifowl get separated from the rest?

 

Jostling for position dislodged
Minifowl three times.

All the more alarming was that it happily let me pick it up and nestled into my warm jumper. On the whole the guineas always stay at arm's length. I placed it up on the fence to roost with the others, but three times it fluttered back to the floor. Eventually I decided to put it in the hay-filled laying house, alongside one white hen who had decided to spend the night there.






But I knew this was one last throw of the dice. Surely in the morning I would find it quietly passed away.

I must admit, I trudged back up the garden with a slightly heavy heart. Life and death are part of the countryside but that doesn't mean that we lack compassion. We have just had to harden up to it a bit.

Bramblings still present, but not the bird of the day.

Brambling.
The finch flock was very mobile today,
but this bird did settle high in an Ash tree early in the afternoon.
This is the best picture I have ever managed
by pointing my camera through the telescope.

The first three birds I saw as I stepped out of the door this morning were Bramblings as they flew up from the field edge into the ash tree along with a small group of Chaffinches. And for the rest of the day I was delighted by their nasal calls every now and then.

The goldfinch flock which they were with yesterday was much more mobile and split up today. The first flock I scanned through as they fed on the bare soil contained no brambling, but instead about a dozen Meadow Pipits and good numbers of Linnet. Later in the day a small flock of finches in the field right next to me held 5 Brambling. By the time I ran to get the camera, they were gone. It would be absolutely great if they joined the finch flock for the winter.

Gerry has taken a liking to the finch flock too, especially the goldfinches, and today I came across one motionless on the kitchen floor. I picked it up to save it from his clutches and it just lay in my hand. I thought it was a goner.

Goldfinch looking rather sorry for itself.

I carried it outside and, for at least another minute, it just lay there in my hand. Just as I was trying to decide what to actually do with the thing it suddenly fluttered its wings, came back to life and flew off into nearby bushes.

But even this strange incident does not qualify for bird of the day. Nor the two Jays which headed in from the East, the Goldcrest by the pond (only about the fourth for the garden) or the gleaming Little Egret which spent the day in the fields. Not even the Redwings which have found the hawthorns and elders in the roadside hedge.

No, for today I had a FARM TICK.

Just as I was relabelling all the orchard trees I heard a familiar call and there, in the silver birches, was a small party of Lesser Redpolls. They are almost always in birches or alders and for this reason I have planted many of these trees, but it was the already established trees which held them today. They were commuting from these onto the ground in Don's orchard, where a charm of goldfinches were feeding avidly.
They stayed for a good half an hour or so before heading off and as they did so I could finally count that there were five of them in all. Otherwise, they never stayed still long enough to count, let alone to get a photo.

Lesser Redpoll is a long overdue additon to the list, but nevertheless came as a complete surprise. It's certainly the finches that are providing all the entertainment at the moment, but it's a sure sign that autumn is giving way to winter already.

A Pumpkin is not just for Halloween.

Monday 15th October 2012

My heart lifted the other day when one of my pupils, on the subject of pumpkins, started talking about pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie. Could it be that the British public are finally realising that you can actually eat pumpkins as well as carve them into ghoulish faces?

Unfortunately, when I recanted this tale to Sue, she pointed out that the child's reaction had probably come straight from Homer Simpson!

The sweetcorn which towered over my various squashes, courgettes and pumpkins is now long picked, but I have been leaving the pumpkins etc to soak up every last gram of British sunshine. Today I decided to brave entering the jungle of gigantic leaves and meandering stems, with the intention of removing said leaves so that the crop could have a last few days in the open, still attached to its stems just in case it could wheedle out any extra goodness from the roots.

As seems to always happen, it proved to be a bigger job than I was expecting. It was like untangling spaghetti and a fair few times I cut through the wrong stem - hence the pile of pumpkins and squashes on the goat barrow ready to spend a few days ripening in the polytunnel.

By the end, I was fairly impressed with my crop, especially considering that the same patch has already yielded a considerable quantity of courgettes.

I was also left with about 8 barow loads of greenery, which the pigs turn their noses up at, although they did tuck into all the old corn stems with zeal. So the compost heaps got some good roughage added.

By this evening, Sue was already boiling up a vat full of spiced pumpkin and apple jam. It smelt absolutely delicious, very Christmassy.

First Frost

Sunday 14th October 2012
The First Frost

"Come on! It's freezing.
Budge over, there's room for all of us in here."

What a day we had today! I had my first slightly crunchy stroll down to the chickens this morning, my wellies leaving a line of melted footprints in the lightly frosted grass. Elvis's chicks weren't particularly impressed by this, so they went back to cuddling into mum. But it didn't take them long to get back into adventurous mode. These chicks are absolutely delightful, jumping all over my hands when I feed them and regularly wandering away from mum into unexplored areas. They really know no fear.

The chicks have discovered how to feed from the grown-ups' feeders.



Meanwhile, the guinea family
goes from strength to strength



Not forgetting this character



A new auction
After dropping the pigs off in the morning, we paid a visit to an auction which has just opened up just down the road. Yesterday I spent more than I wanted on an axe, so what should I find sitting in a cardboard box about to be sold for next-to-nothing? Yes, three lovely old axes, wooden handles and full of character. Just typical! We did, however, buy a little veg stall for gate sales. Very cheap and saves me a job.

Back to that axe.

Hatch, Catch and DispatchSqueamish readers may want to fast forward now. For I have to admit we have been struggling with dispatching the chickens. Breaking their necks is not as easy as it sounds, particularly with the cockerels. It requires a knack which we clearly don't have. Then there's the fact that it's very difficult to tell when the deed is done. We always knew that they continued to flap and run around, but are they really supposed to keep blinking their eyes??

So we decided that beheading would be more efficient, better for the chooks and for us. Hence the axe. So today our French Copper Marans cockerel put its head on the chopping block, quite literally. It was quick and efficient and we were both happy with the way it went. This is the way forward for us.
We were also relieved to see that yes, even with the head severed, the chicken still kept blinking. And it was weird, even though we expected it, to literally see a headless chicken running around.

35 lbs of Green Tomatoes
It was still relatively early in the day, so I decided to tackle the tomatoes. We've managed to eat about half a dozen juicy, ripe tomatoes this year, from a total of about a hundred seedlings! That's not good. It all started with disastrous germination, then poor growing weather. Then we couldn't get the polytunnel up in time, so all the tomatoes went into the open ground.

The good news is that, had we not had the delays, I reckon we would still have got quite a lot of tomatoes as many of the plants were covered in flowers and small, green fruits.

The bad news is that halfway through October the fruits are just not going to develop any more. Add to that the fact that blight has now begun to bite them as I was loathe to remove the leaves while the fruits still needed every ounce of energy to develop.

So today I decided to pull the lot up, disposing of any fruits from plants with withering leaves and keeping only the most perfect of fruits, green as they all were.

I still ended up with 35lbs of green tomatoes. Sue has already started processing them with a large maslin pan full of ginger and green tomato jam.

Seven Bramblings and a Tree Sparrow

It wasn't too late in the day for a birding highlight either.

When I came in for a late afternoon break a sparrow coming down to the pond to drink caught my eye. It was a tree sparrow, the first of the winter. These delightful birds were regular at the feeders during our first winter here but have been scarce since. Let's hope this is the forerunner of more.

But then, in the branch just above the sparrow, a superb male Brambling sat bold as brass. And above him two females. Quite possibly one of these was the bird we heard drop in with chaffinches yesterday.

The local goldfinch flock were coming down to the pond too, absolutely delightful to watch, and I wondered whether the bramblings might have joined the finch flock which spend most of the day commuting between the safety of the ash trees and the recently harrowed neighbouring field.

So I crossed the dyke and aimed my telescope at the feeding finch flock. As the field has been worked perfectly flat I had stunning views of every goldfinch and chaffinch, along with SEVEN bramblings, including two handsome males.

I would be very pleased to see this many brambling feeding with finches on any day out birdwatching in Britain, but on my own doorstep was outstanding. Only problem is that these birds are most definitely a harbinger of winter, as were the forty or so Redwings which flew across the garden earlier in the day.

Tomorrow I tackle the pumpkin patch.

Three Little Stubborn Pigs

Late yesterday we loaded the pigs into the trailer ready for a little journey in the morning!

The photos make it look easy, but believe you me it was far from it. Not the comical chaos which has happened in the past - my ingenious fencing ensures there's no stress about the pigs escaping off into the big, wide countryside.

No, this was more a battle of wills, who could be the most stubborn!!
First problem was that, in a very un-pig-like way, none of the girls seemed bothered by a bucket of food, despite it being well past their evening meal time. Next time, they don't even get fed in the morning!

Second problem was that one, the spottiest, was very wary about leaving its pen. Pigs don't like crossing boundaries at the best of times, but this one had a real problem with it. Several times we had to let the more adventurous pair leave the pen then go back in. Each time we hoped the third would follow them back out. Each time it lost its bottle and doubled back at the last moment, as the gate was being shut on it.



Eventually all 3 pigs were on the move



At long last the Three Pigs were out into the corridoor leading to the stables, and progress was reasonable until the end of the straight, when the same pig just kept doubling back, several times all the way back to its pen. Thank goodness it couldn't get back in there. We improvised a barrier at the half way point, which came in handy another half dozen times or so.



The Three Little Pigs lingered awhile
 before being ignominiously shoved
up into the trailer



We have learned to give it time and accept that it takes some pigs a few approaches before they are willing to enter a new area. Not that I wasn't getting totally stressed about it all by the end. Darkness was approaching and I was being led a right merry dance.

Anyway, we finally got them past the next barrier and into the limited area by the stables. But persuading these three to go up the ramp into the trailer was never going to be easy. At last, one showed enough interest in our liberal sprinkling of food pellets and apples to snuffle around at the base of the ramp. This was our cue to inch it up the ramp using every ounce of stubbornness we had and a couple of sheep hurdles to ease it along the way. Once up, it didn't look back and we were able to repeat the process with the next and, finally, the third little pig.  


At last the third pig is on its way in.

Well, that was yesterday, and this was this morning.

The Three Pigs, all blinged up with their ear tags, ready to go.

The short drive to the abattoir went smoothly and we didn't even have to queue when we got there (which meant not having to reverse the trailer with a line of onlookers).

The guy who gets up every Sunday to receive the animals made moving the three pigs look ridiculously easy! I couldn't even get them to stand up.

They were ushered past the pens of sheep, goats and other pigs and into their own little cubicle, where they could relax until Monday morning! Which is when I need to pay a visit to my butcher and give them the cutting instructions.



Birds everywhere

Saturday 13th October 2012
An atmospheric start to the day

From the moment I stepped outside this morning there were birds everywhere. The Ash trees and hedgerows were alive.
Even as I let the chickens out, a Kestrel disturbed a Barn Owl which flew very close along the hedge. By this time I had already seen two species of woodpecker. A Green Woodpecker flushed up from the lawn and a Great Spot feeding in the Ash trees, accompanied by a trio of Jays, a couple of Jackdaws and a very noisy Crow.
Finches were darting around everywhere and Blackbirds clambered around in the hedge and darted across the garden. A thin call announced the first Redwings of the winter (yes, I've used that word). Even Robins and Dunnocks had clearly arrived to boost the resident population, along with Great Tits and Blue Tits.
The winter's first flock of Lapwings flew over, nineteen in total, and a few Skylarks passed over calling too.
And that was all before I'd got back from my morning routines.
Later a flock of Chaffinches arrived and, in amongst them, the buzzing call of a Brambling. Even Sue noticed its obvious call.

So, nothing particularly rare, but if that lot made it to my garden overnight, heaven knows what's hit the East coast this morning.
Hopefully nothing too outrageously rare as I could really do with being around the farm this weekend, at least till Sunday morning when the pigs go off.

After that, anything's possible!

Say Goodbye!

Left to right: Indian Game, French Copper Marans, Welsummer

Yesterday's blog was about the joys of new life.
But, much as I love the birds and beasts on the farm, we must not forget why we have them. So this weekend will see a bit of a clear out.
Several of the young cockerels are looking particularly tasty at the moment! Although they've sorted out their pecking order and fights are infrequent, the girls don't really want so many boys around. Besides, we are spending a small fortune on feed and the boys don't give anything back unless we eat them. So there you are. The harsh realities of farming.
I certainly won't enjoy dispatching them, but I'll be doing it in the knowledge that they had a good life while it lasted.

He came in an egg sold as Cornish Dark Indian Game.
Clearly not, but still surplus to requirements.

Sadly, there is an economic necessity regarding the hens too. Unlike most of the cockerels, they get names and stay with us considerably longer. However, Mrs Brown has not laid an egg in a long while now. (For that matter, neither has Hazel, the other brown hen). I suspect that these two originated from a battery farm, where their bodies would have been remorselessly overworked until they were worn out. Both these birds have failed to properly grow back their feathers since last winter's moult.
If I keep every hen which only lays the occasional egg, I will effectively be doubling the cost of my eggs. I've been putting it off, but Mrs Brown has made things easier for me as she has been looking decidedly unwell of late. She has spent the last three days on her own, hunched up. As you can see, her comb is decidedly limp too, a sure sign of an unwell bird.

I guess I just need to get used to the idea of the hens being a constantly renewable source of eggs. As new ones are born and reared, so the older girls must make way.

The end of the line for Mrs Brown.

And it's not just the chickens.
For, many weeks ago, a date was set for these three. And that day is Sunday.

They've been on a special diet, with tasty treats such as potatoes, pumpkin and mangel wurzels every day. They've responded by becoming more friendly! Just as it's time to go.


ed. This blog post was written last night in readiness for publication.
Sadly this morning Mrs Brown was found dead in her roost box.

Chicks growing up fast

Thursday 11th October 2012

Main event of the day was letting Elvis's brood out of their run to join in the fun with all the other poultry. I kept an eye on them for a while, just to make sure none of the cockerels took a dislike to them, but it was quickly clear that they are strong and independent little things. I have witnessed this at feeding time, when they literally climb over my hands and arms to be first into the feed bowl!



Elvis keeps a watchful eye over her brood.



The chicks were very bold
and quick to explore.



Priscilla and her 3 chicks.
They've started to get their wing feathers now.
I should be able to work out their parentage soon.

Meanwhile, Priscilla is quietly getting on with raising her three chicks. They are in the high-rise coop for now, as Elvis has the other coop with a run.

The 2 Crested Cream Legbar hens along
with the ridiculously hair-styled Polands.

The previous chicks, the two Cream Legbar hens, are doing very well too and are taking on the form of proper hens. It won't be long before I separate them off with the Cream Legbar cockerel to make a trio. The trouble is, the two enclosures I can put them in are taken up. The ducks have one of them, though they'll be moving into the veg patches once I've cleared the beds a bit. The other has been adopted by the guinea family, still with eleven fast growing keets. However, they all roost in a row on top of the fence rather than in the house now. Seven keets have to rough it out while four get the shelter of their parents wings.



On the left: we still have eleven healthy keets.
On the right: Two Cream Legbar hens, two Polands
and the stripy one is one of Priscilla's last brood.
How quickly they grow!

 

Friday 12th October 2012
A grey morning following yesterday's rain.



Courgette wine - mark II

Sunday 7th October 2012
Two hours after getting home from Ireland.

Monday 8th October 2012

Tuesday 9th October 2012

Wednesday 10th October 2012
Cold air arrives

Autumn is now most definitely in the air, for today a notable chill arrived and the wind had a bite to it. It's probably really a sign that we are into the middle of Autumn, but I don't want to think about what that means - the ushering in of winter. Actually, winter is a beautiful time of year and we tend to hunker down and snuggle up in front of the fire. It's a time to reflect, to look forward and begin to put plans in action.

Anyway, with the change in seasons the courgettes have finally stopped showering us with their wonderful fruits, but it was very welcome while it lasted and we've got plenty preserved in the form of relishes, frozen griddled slices, fritters, bhajis and soups.
If you remember, we even stooped to trying to make courgette wine with 32lbs of courgettes which came out of the garden in a single day!

Well, that effort went disastrously wrong. Sue used a recipe off the internet which contained no yeast. We're pretty new to brewing our own alcolholic (ed. alcoholic, and no, I've not been at it already!) beverages, so presumed the yeast would come naturally, as it does when we make our cider. There were even questions on the website, unanswered, asking if there was really supposed to be no yeast.
Well, I think I can give the answer...that recipe needed yeast, for all we ended up with was a bucketful of mouldy, cabbagey water.

So, unperturbed, Sue used some of the last overgrown courgettes to have another go, this time following a different recipe (sorry, I don't know where she found it) which did include yeast. And this time, hallelujah, frothy yeast action!
 
I'm still holding judgement on the result and we have to wait a year to find out, but at least it looks more promising.

Next up, pumpkins!!!