Bust Squared x Length x 69.3

Taking the 'bust' measurement of a 99 day old Tamworth

Bust Squared x Length x 69.3. It's not every day we do 'sums', but this formula is a good standard used around the pig world for estimating the weight of your pigs. 'Bust' is a measure of the pig's chest just behind the front legs. 'Length' is  the length of her back from between the ears to the base of her tail, both these being quoted in metres. The formula in my title line then gives you weight in kg. Doing these today, Mapp, who we knew was slightly smaller, comes out at 31.8 kg and Lucia is 36.3 kg.

According to 'The Good Book' (Liz Shankland's (Haynes) Pig Manual), "traditional breeds reach pork weight at between 5 and 6 months old", pork weight being 55 kg or there abouts. Baconners are normally much heavier ( more like 80 kg ) and there is an in-between standard called 'cutters' which is kept for 9 months to produce bigger joints than you'd get from a 'porker'. We think we are therefore doing OK, with ours having reached 30 kg in 3 months.

Apparently you do have to watch it with Tamworths lest you just build up 2 inches of back-fat all along the spine which weighs a load but is not really cook-able unless you like very fatty bacon. It will be interesting to see how ours do compared to Anne and Simon's cross bred trad which are a good 2 months in front of us and are being fed on a little (organic) pig-nut but mainly fruit and veg obtained from shop back doors, a way more cost-effective solution than our 'mainly pig-nut' diet. Ours get some fruit in every meal but it tends to be a cut up apple, nectarine and tomato between them per bowl of nuts. We get the fruit from the Supermarket 'reduced' bins, a bag of apples for a Euro style. Anne thinks hers will be ready in about 6 weeks.

Hole ripped by a fox.

Meanwhile a tragic end to our Guinea Fowl keets saga, 3 rips in the chicken wire of their new run, one where the wire had been pulled out of the staples and a place where the wire had been torn up from buried under soil and rocks, a few sad feathers and some blood, but all 5 keets gone. We thought at first this might have been a mink but Anne has looked at the run, the big holes and the complete absence of bodies, and thinks more than one fox was the culprit, possibly parent animals out with learning cubs. The big rip was an entrance hole and the smaller ones may have been foxes snatching keets through the wire as they panicked trying to escape.

Goldie is in clover

We are kicking ourselves again - it is always the human's fault. We are meant to keep the birds out of danger. I know in theory that chicken wire is no protection against a fox and the run contained a perfectly fox-proof house, but the keets were devils for not using it and preferred to sleep in a huddle among the rocks on the ground. You cannot easily persuade guinea fowl to go where they do not want to go, so we had stopped trying to lock them in the house at night and instead trusted our belief that we did not really have a fox problem. Famous last words. Poor things. It can't have been a very nice end.

Pirate tucks in to home made fishy cat food.

Better news in the Pirate department. The lad is doing very well on his week of incarceration in the caravan being fed lots of lovely food, antibiotic tablets wrapped in salami, and having his good eye smeared with ointment. He is also warm, dry and not having to fight rival cats, dodge dogs, scramble through barbed wire fences and bramble thickets so he does not get new cuts, scratches, tufts of fur missing and a bloody nose every day.

Bulging tummy on a skinny cat!

He is looking cleaner and whiter every day and must be enjoying not always having to nurse sore cuts and bruises (all be it he may still be feeling a bit sore around the surgically closed eye-lid and the... um....manly bits). He is still quite thin and you can feel all his vertebrae so we are always quite amused by the view down on him from above when he had eaten a great wodged belly-full; his stomach sticks out either side like a cartoon snake after it has eaten a big animal. Liz got a couple of enormous fish-heads from our fish-van lady yesterday, poached them down to make stock but then peeled off any edible bits ('neck' muscle, brain, gills etc) and created a delicious (to cats) cat food to which she added back the oil rendered in the stock. Pirate thinks this is WONDERFUL stuff and cannot get enough of it.

He is also getting very affectionate towards us and who ever is feeding and medicating him sits down in the caravan for a nice long cuddle and fuss which he cannot get enough of even though his full-to-groaning belly must be telling him to go for a lie down. He is on this regime for one more day, after which he has completed his course of antibiotics; we will probably keep giving him the eye ointment till we run out of that too. But he's not house trained (why would he be?) so he is making a bit of a mess of the caravan despite our giving him a litter tray, so we are now in two minds whether to confine him for a week or more longer till he 'really gets to know this is home', or whether to throw open the caravan windows and let him come and go at will.

Elder-flower 'fizz'

Time enough for that decision on Sunday. Tonight we are relaxing with some of this year's very successful elder flower 'champagne'. It's always a bit of a judgement call - stop this wine too soon and you end up with bottles going off like soda syphons, too late and you have flat wine. We are pleased to have got it just about right this year. It comes chilled from the fridge and we open it at a lean, then smoothly (no glugging, no allowing it to pour back into the bottle) decant into a chilled jug. It stays crystal clear that way for your 2nd glasses and the dog end! Cheers.

Oh, and that pig-weight formula applied to me? That'll be 'bust' 1.25 m, 'length' 0.82 m, so weight 90.1 kg. Now that'd be nice! I will be claiming that my legs are 'extra' and not really piggy shaped.

Make Do and Mend

Another lovely day in our current run of warm ones, brings us to the end of June and day 28 for the Guinea Fowl keets. They are thriving and seem a very happy little group despite our decision that these would never get to go free-range. They are in a rabbit run at present but we are creating them an aviary between the 'Primrose Path' and the East Field. It will be roughly 30 feet long and a 6 foot by 6 foot rectangular 'tube'. You can see from the picture that they are getting their long necked, slightly stooped, adult shape but have so far not shown any sign of losing feathers from the parts of their face which will be bald and 'splashed' with vivid white and there are no signs of the bright red 'chilli pepper' wattles which their mother (Min the Hin!) has. They have a high, piping version of the adult 'buck-wheat buck-wheat' call and amuse us every evening with a joint chorus at bedtime. We have no idea what they are discussing (with hens it is traditionally meant to be Danish politics!). They group together and drift slowly towards the pop-hole calling continuously. Bizarre birds!

Also growing fast are the pigs, now 10 days off their 3-months birthday. They are well used to us by now and well familiarised with what time meals should be - if they see either of us walking about when they think they are due one, they are up at the fence, grunting and then starting to squeal to get our attention. I tried to get a pic today of their lying-on-your-back-getting-your-tummy-tickled thing but they were too interested in the food and too playful for lying down. Of course, after supper they strolled out into the grass by the orchard and stretched out in the sun, bellies exposed to the warmth, catching the rays - if only I'd have taken the camera.

Rolo sleeping in the strawberry patch.

We did our weekly bee-inspection today. I was hoping that the colony would have expanded outwards from the original 6 'nucleus' frames across the remaining 6 of the brood box (3 either way) but we could not see sign of this. Maybe the frames were not all full, and the brood in them very young. Still, there is plenty of activity each day and we've seen plenty of pollen brought back to the hive (that is the protein to build little bee-larva bodies, so it is a sign that your queen is laying eggs each day). We will just have to be patient. We put the 'super' on anyway because we'd taken it down there with us. For those who know about these things we are not yet using the Queen excluder, so we are running the so called "Brood and a half" system. If the bees fill this, we will give them the 2nd super over the excluder, so that the top super will be just for honey. Mrs S (and little niece R) will be delighted to know that we used the smoker today properly and the bees were calm and relaxed - only a hundred or so came out to repel boarders - we were all done in about 10 minutes. Nobody got stung.

Meanwhile, Liz has diversified from the pure knitting into a bit of seamstress-ing. She is enjoying remembering her needlework classes from very young school days (so young that when you had a hem to make on a napkin, you had to get Mum to iron the creases into the hems). She has bought herself a very full kit of cottons, threads, needles, elastic and measuring tape as well as some nice fabrics. All the old saggy PJ's are suddenly as waist-hugging as new, many clothing items have been repaired for the little rips and tears from the barbed wire and I have seen an excellent fringe benefit in the work-shirt department.

Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

When I was working in the UK I had amassed quite a collection of reasonable quality cotton shirts (Marks and Sparks was the 'tailor' of choice!) and for a lot of these, the only thing which went wrong was that the collars would go threadbare at the neck crease. Those would get 'audited out' and join the rag-bag. Not any more. Liz has found that they can be very neatly and professionally de-collared and go back into service over here where no-one is making rules about wearing a tie. I also have quite a few more 'posh' shirts for going out in - we bought Jaeger and Louis Copeland and neither of these got used for work or saw much use, so I am very much the snappy dressed pig-wrangler when I feel like it. It's not all 'grunge'. We are not quite 'Make do and mend' with the wartime ends-to-middle bed sheet fixes, but we do feel a bit green and recycling-orientated. Usefully, my beekeeper suit also got elastic thumb-loops on its sleeves today - they keep the sleeves pulled down nice and tight into the long gauntlet gloves. No gaps for the stinging marauders.

Snake's head fritillary seed pod

So that's about it for June 2014. My final picture is of the snake's head fritillary seed pods now ripe and opening. These plants flowered back in Mid April, so you can immediately see why they can not survive in the wild in any commercially used grassland - grass in these parts is either grazed down hard by cattle, or it is zizzed off very short by the silage-mowers once in May/June and then again 10 or so weeks later. Plants like this simply do not have the time to flower, set seed and then ripen and shed it as they would have done in the more traditional July/August cut hay making regimes. In fact the silage boys got lucky this year and a lot of them saw good weather forecasts and left the grass which had been cut for silage on the ground, shook it through a couple of times with the hay-tedder and then baled it as hay. A lot of old, little-used equipment was getting greased up and dusted off. Fair play to them - make hay while the sun shines.