The Butcher's Apprentice

Mary and Isabelle enjoy their last few days, here chatting to
one of the westies

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you do not want to know about the messier side of meat production. The back end of this week saw our two Berkshire gilts 'finished' at just over 6 months and weighing around 60 kg each live-weight. I have posted before that these ladies were way lighter than last year's Tamworths who were fed to demand and laid down what we thought was an excessive amount of fat. Even JD Bob was a little disparaging about their size, but we know he comes from a tradition of pig rearing in Ireland 40+ years ago when very fat baconers were the thing. No, we stuck to our guns and we are delighted with them.

Practise loading - the pigs get fed in the trailer for 2 days prior
to D-Day. That way they load without fuss when you need them to

They were booked into pork butcher Webb's in Castlerea for Thursday morning which puts us into needing to practise-load for the Monday afternoon and for Tuesday and Wednesday. Readers here last year will know that we built a special 'race' from their gate to the top of that slope into which we could 'plug' the trailer with no room for pigs to sneak round the sides. On D-3 we then give them a nice long, leisured explore. It doesn't do to hurry pigs anywhere. You are better off throwing down some fruit and letting them find it at their own speed.

Who needs a fridge-van? 4 half pigs and a bag
of 'bits' fit into the Fiat with the seat down.

Then on D-2 and D-1 we feed them in the trailer and they soon get into the rhythm of sprinting up the race and the trailer ramp, shoulder-barging their sister to one side in order to claim the 'best' bowl of meal. Then on D-Day morning you put the bowls in with only fruit (no nuts) and up they go so that you can quietly close the trailer door behind them. The 'no nuts' thing is just because the butchers prefer you to 'fast' pigs prior to slaughter so that the innards are more manage-able at the cleaning stage (Sorry if you're just enjoying your tea!)

I get to play with the new bone-saw

This year we had decided to have a go at the butchery ourselves. The slaughter (including cleaning the carcass, scalding and scraping and splitting in half down the spine, costs €50 per animal and the butchery costs another €50, so we were saving €100. We had a rough idea what to do and, for a laugh, we watched a You-Tube video on "Cutting up half a 'hog' ", 2 and a half minutes of American 'good aul' boys' complete with bushy beards and baseball caps plus random discussions of last night's drinking session and chicken noises off! However, this unlikely 'training resource' explained perfectly where to make the first cuts, how to pull out the 'leaf-lard' (big sheet of top-quality fat which lines the abdominal cavity) and other useful tips, so don't deride it till you've tried it.

In we went, then with all the big chopping boards mustered on the (bleached and scrubbed!) dining table and the knives and my new bone-saw all razor sharp. We completed the first animal in about an hour with a nice ham selected and readied for brining for Christmas and a whole leg chosen for a dry-cure 'Parma' ham style air-dried long mature. I took a break to walk dogs and for coffee, before we tackled the 2nd animal. We found that we were getting better with each half-carcass - some of the first cuts were a bit 'rookie apprentice' but the 4th was a better, more pro-job. I was particularly pleased with how the proper saw worked having only before experienced a carpenter hack-saw (worse than useless). If anyone reading this is contemplating butchery, then your bone-saw will be €40 or so very well spent. It cuts through bone in a jiffy and never clogs with sinew, bone fragments or myelin sheath. We also like quite thick pork chops and we were delighted to find that by sawing through the 'discs' of the spine and running a knife up between the ribs we got fewer, but thicker chops. If you look at supermarket chops you will find that they are half a vertebra and various sharp-ended part ribs because they are band-sawed through perpendicular to the spine, every half inch or so regardless of where the ribs and vertebrae sit.

The Christmas Day ham.

We weighed one of the halves and found it to be 21.3 kg, so a whole animal is 42.6 kg, which is a very useful 71.6% conversion live/carcass. That is about right for pigs. We had also had the heads, hearts and livers back from Mr Webb and the kidneys were still in the carcass halves. Mr Webb had also very generously offered to split the heads ready for the brawn (head-cheese) making and I only needed to cut them again top from bottom (separating the jaws) for them to fit into Liz's big brawn-pots. As I write this, they are now boiled or boiling gently prior to all the onward processing tomorrow. We love our brawn and Liz has found a smashing recipe which uses plenty of parsley; a herb we have in abundance growing in the polytunnel.

A leg gets well smothered in dry-cure
mix (salt, sugar, star anise,
bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli)

We also decided to try some more salt curing. We picked out a nice cut of ham weighing 6 kg and have brined it in a wet-cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, onion, garlic, lovage, mustard seeds, cloves, chilli, allspice and peppercorns. This will get just 48 hours in brine, then be cleaned, patted dry and frozen till December. Next we chose a full leg intending to do the 'Parma' ham salt cure / air dry on it. This gets a longer cure (21 days) smothered in a dry mix of salt and sugar plus I had some fun with the big pestle and mortar "lightly crushing" a mix of star anise, bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli. I love all that pounding. I think my favourite expression in this area is when you "pound the garlic to snot". 'Nuff said, maybe. The cure recipes have come from our lovely new books from Steak Lady. Thanks, SL!

Liz surveys the wreckage.
How am I going to fit all this into the freezer?

Well, 4 hours or so in we were all done. Mountains of bagged pork cuts and bags of scraps, dog bones and suet have been assigned to their places in the big stand-up freezer(s). The sawn-up heads are being reduced to brawn. The cured joints are sitting in their cure. There was only ever going to be one thing on the menu for supper tonight - those lovely thick pork chops.

Liz served them with slices of Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake and we both decided two small edits of the recipes to suit local conditions. OUR pork chops need nothing like the amount of butter that Nigel Slater uses for dry old supermarket chops and OUR eggs do not need the support of all that yellow turmeric to make the 'cake' look bright. The dogs have also done very well today what with some bits of raw pork rib (their absolute favourite food) during the butchery and some roasted ear and tail later on as a treat.

More dustbin lid art. This time for the turkey 'finisher'

That was that. Pigs and butchery all done for 2015. Next year we are fairly sure we will do this again but try with the Tamworth ginger pig breed again but on our 'maintenance diet' of 1.4 kg meal per animal per day; to see if we can reduce the thickness of that subcutaneous fat layer. Meanwhile the pig patch is in recovery mode, even though it is very poached up and wet. We plan to let it all dry out a bit then slot some spring bulbs into each hoof print, rake it over and sow buckwheat and more phacelia into the bare areas. We feel nicely 'Harvest Festival' ish. All is safely gathered in, freezers are rammed with meat, Autumn is looking like it is here and we are both very well fed tonight and pleasantly mellow on Lidl's very quaffable 'Baturrica 2010' (tarragona) Spanish plonk. Cheers.

Not too fat this time.

An early breakfast for Mary and Isabelle

Our Berkshire pigs, Mary and Izzy (Isabelle) reach the 20 weeks stage and I get back round them with the tape-measure to estimate their weights. They are 45 and 46 kgs respectively and looking fine and fit. These weights are way, way below what the Tamworths achieved last year (that was more like 70 kg at this stage) but we are happy and this is deliberate. Last year was our first year and I must admit I poured food into them, ignoring the advice from our 'bible' (Liz Shankland's "Haynes Pig Manual") and giving in to their squealing, raucous demands that I continue the three meals a day, and 800g+ of feed every meal. I scooped food using a 1 litre yogurt tub and I'm sure they got a scoop each at each meal.

Tamworth (2014) pork chop with a good
2cm covering of fat. 

The 'bible' says that up to 16 weeks age you increase feeding so that the portion matches roughly 1/10 of age in weeks (i.e. 1.2 kg per day at 12 weeks) but that after 16 weeks you drop down to a maintenance diet of 1.4 kg till slaughter. This for 'pork' animals rather than baconners. We know from our meat from last year that my over-feeding proves this spot-on. The chops have a good 2 cm covering of fat at least which other than what you can feed to the birds or dry-roast (skin) as dog treats, would be waste. A chop which weighs 288 g includes 92 g of fat and skin, so if you trim that off, you are losing 32% of the weight.

A giant scabious? This fella is 4 feet tall and has flowers two
and a half inches broad. 

We can see why, in these days when people do not want to eat all that fat because they are no longer doing manual labour to burn off calories, the commercial boys go for a much more lean, middle-white style of pig.

Went shopping and 'accidentally' bought
this new penstemon for the tubs in the yard

Did we really produce 90 kg animals and get 70 kg of meat back from the butcher? I don't think so with all that "waste". The 32% will not apply all across the carcass of course, but even so, I certainly spent more money on pig nuts than I should have or needed to. So this year, Mary and Isabelle are on a strict, 'Shankland' diet. I never started the three-meals-a-day (nuts) habit. They have only ever had a piece of fruit each at lunchtime, an apple or a peach cut up for example. In the morning and evening they get a strict one-and-a-half tubs (1.4 kg) of meal (plus more fruit) split between them, so that they get their 1.4 kg each per day. Guess what - thay are still perfectly fit and healthy and they do not squeal for food in between meals and annoy me from half way across the garden. They may only be 55-60 kg at 6 months, instead of 90 kg but we hope they will still look a decent sized animal and should have a much thinner covering of fat. "Ripped" like an athlete, maybe, rather than blubbered up like a beached beluga whale? We'll see.

Newly hatched turkey, still damp from the egg.

When I last posted, we were still waiting for the cheep of a pipping turkey egg or two from the incubator, but not very hopeful because of our mid-term power cut. Well we got two babies over Monday night into Tuesday; the remaining three eggs are awfully quiet. That, we have found, seems to be the way of it with incubator hatches of small batches. Charlotte tells us that they all tend to come out together, encouraged to extra efforts by the cheeping and nudging of their neighbours moving eggs about as they wriggle around inside. They end up, if they are able, synchronised and you don't really get any stragglers - you can leave the unhatched eggs for days more but to no avail. We presume this is an adaptation which would work for ground nesting birds, so that the whole new family could be up and finding food, not sitting around unfed while the Tail-End Charlies hatched. We don't hold out much hope for eggs 3,4 and 5.

Non-skid place-mats from an old folks home, now used as
non-skid floor for new-hatch turkeys.

Many thanks, too, to our new chum Sue, who gave us some non-skid rubber mesh pads to try out. These soft pads are really placemats as used in old folks' homes to stop crockery skidding about but turkeys when newly hatched are notoriously wobbly on their legs. They struggle to find enough grip on the plastic floor of an incubator to flip themselves upright and then get their feet under them enough to stand up. We have seen this. They thrash around flat on their stomachs, flailing like a frog and there is a risk of the poultry-keeper culling them out as crippled failures.

The first batch of turkeys are now 5 weeks old and getting huge.

On this rubber mat, as long as they can get up the right way, they are up on their feet and walking about in no time. They do still teeter and wobble like drunks or baby humans and occasionally fall onto their backs but if you rescue them from that a couple of times, they soon get the idea. The mat is also infinitely washable (as you'd expect from old folks' home ware) and, because you do not need to bed the birds on shredded straw or wood shavings (which they kick into the waterers), it is a lot easier to keep their water supply clean and fresh.

Red Valerian nicked from a river-side wall
in town last year as a root "cutting".

The next job is to teach them to peck up food. I'm not entirely sure I need to do this; they may learn it by themselves from folk-memory. I enjoy it though and it gets them used to me. I sit in by them with a chopstick either "pecking" at the food, dipping the end in water and tapping this onto the side of their beak, or trying to convey bits of food to them stuck to the end. They start first to peck at the chopstick but then get impatient with me and peck instead at the bits I am 'pecking' in the bowl and, lo, tukeys eating! That's the theory anyway. These most recent 2 seem to be playing games with me. They profess complete bamboozlement, looking at me, then the chopstick, shaking their heads vigourously to shake off any food they have got on their beak by mistake. They slope off back under their nice warm 'electric hen' as if bored.

"About Bloody Time!" exclaimed Liz when she finally got this
Philadelphus to flower after many years of trying and three
different 'blind' bushes.

I wonder if they will ever learn, but then I come downstairs and I can hear, through the floor boards, the sounds of vigorous activity above, like a plague of rats has taken over the spare bedroom. Surely that is the tap-tap of efficient pecking? Sure enough, when I next visit the bowl seems very empty and the bamboozled birds are looking up at me as if to say "What food? Wasn't us!" No matter. New hatch birds get a 24-48 hour breathing space before they must eat on account of the yolk re-absorbed into their abdomen just prior to hatch, so their failure to eat on Tuesday or Wednesday would not have been a problem. They need to eat (and drink) today, mind, so they can do it sneakily upstairs if that is their thing.

A good sized thyme grows in the side
of our keyhole bed.

All being well, Liz returns to the fold today after her most recent 'Ministering Angel' trip to Silverwoods and I 'd rather have two well fed birds to show off, than 2 starvelings.

Mary's Marked and Isabelle Isn't

This year's piggies. Berkshires. Mary and Isabelle.

After the trials and tribulations of yesterday with its bee losses and poorly lamb, we needed a good and successful day to restore the equilibrium and our faith in the fact that we have the general idea on this small holdering lark. With great timing, our pig supplier had rung to let us know that this year's pigs were ready for collection at 8 weeks old, down in Colbinstown, Co Kildare, south of Newbridge and Kilcullen.

How would you choose. 

These lovely people (Therese and Michael) have the website  http://www.freerangepigsireland.com/ which resolves, rather alarmingly to a page splashed with the header "PiggyWiggy's". You are trying to be a ruffty tuffty stockman, all professional and serious, and you wonder what you are getting into - Piggy Wiggy's? Don't worry. This is geared to their Kune-kune "pet pig" operation. They get all serious and proper when you want Tamworths, Berkshires or other 'proper' pig breeds. They even do "Iron-Age" pigs (Tamworth x Wild Boar, not for the faint hearted).

Mary (left) and Isabelle (right)

We can thoroughly recommend them but it is a bit of a hike from here - 2 hours 40 minutes which is probably not ideal for the young pigs. They seem to be like human babies in a car, though, and drop off to sleep reassuringly at the drum of the engine and the thunk of the Kildare potholes. €65 a pop, in case you are interested. We have this year and last year made a day-trip of it, taking friend Charlotte along, for her pig-wrangling skills (you should see her grab a scarpering piglet by the back leg in the 'proper' manner and lift it, helpless, into her arms). Liz cooks a superb picnic which we eat at the farm sitting on big logs upturned to make tables and seats. This year it included sausage rolls made from last year's Tamworths but Michael (pigman) declined as he has a gluten intolerance, so he needed 'spelt' flour in his pastry. Ah well. All the more for us. The site also houses their nursery - big beds and greenhouses of hellebores and the like. That, they describe as the 'day job'; the pigs are a sideline.

Crated for the run home.

These two pigs had already been named - we had put the question out on one of Liz's internet forums (fora?) and then offered it to the redoubtable Olive (90), good friend of our own "Poobie" in Leeds. Olive was reported to have gone "pink with pleasure" at being asked to name the piggies, and chose Mary Elizabeth and Isabelle Heather just because they were her favourite names (and spellings!). I baulked a bit at naming a pig 'Elizabeth' but I am re-assured that this is OK provided the Elizabeth in question is not your good lady. So Mary and Isabelle it is, but which was to be which?

Charlotte, ace pig-wrangler, gets a firm grip on Isabelle

Driving home, it occurred to me that one had a big white face-splash marking to go with her white socks, while the other only had the tiniest white dot on her forehead, hence "Mary's marked while Isabelle isn't". Had this (Olive's names) not happened, these were going to be named for the Berkshires in the 'Empress' books by one of our favourite authors, PG Wodehouse, but we will have to save those names for another year. We love that as we drive out of the breeder's site. Michael bids us farewell and "Probably see you next year, then?" We are working our way round the breeds at present and can see no reason why not.

Charlotte and Liz check out the parent sow and boar with
Michael the pig-man. 

The girls are now home safe and were set down in their ark which looks enormous against their tiny bodies and they were quickly out exploring the range of their new home. They seem so tiny, I was worried they might sneak through the fences but we've now watched them for a while and maybe they are just a bit big. Tonight the dogs met them through the orchard fence and they took a few wary sniffs at each other but the pigs were unimpressed and wandered off. Liz tells me that the Irish for pig is 'muc' (pronounced 'muck') but there is also the word "banbh" which comes out as 'bonham' and this is a word used a lot in Irish pig farming for young male piglets. Liz tells me that this caused the young Irish girls employed at London auction house "Bonhams" (where she worked for a while) much amusement especially as some of the managers had a particularly 'porcine' look.

Home and exploring the woods.

I guess I should give you an update on yesterday's woes. The lamb seems to be recovering on her doses of liquid paraffin. She looks much more comfortable today with none of the arched back or high tail stuff. We caught her when we got back from the pig run, to give her another dose and she definitely looked like she had passed some fresh poo, so we hope she is feeling a lot more comfortable and relieved. We will keep an eye on her and keep reporting back to Aoife the Vet, but we hope she is on the way back up. Poor little mite. It cannot have been comfortable to be 'backed up' like that.

Checking out the sunny grassy bit.

When I was out in the orchard giving the dogs their run this evening, I was enjoying the dogs trying to chat up the wary pigs, but also took a look at the hive. It is a bitter-sweet thing. The few hundred remaining bees are soldiering on gamely, still out foraging and flying to and fro. They cannot know that there is no future in this and that they are the end of the line for the 'Two Marys' colony from last year. With no queen there is no new young coming through. These ladies will live out their allotted 6 weeks and fade out. I am relying on the promise of some replacement stock soon as the fruit trees in the orchard come into blossom. It will be a shame to have another blossom season go by with no bees going about their work. I'll keep you posted on pigs, lambs and bees.

Was It Worth It?

Tamworth variety pork shoulder cut.

Was it worth it, then, our first 'go' at keeping pigs? The short answer would definitely be 'Yes' and the proof of the pudding, if you like, is that we will be doing it again next year, possibly with the Berkshire breed. Last night we cooked up our first roasting joint from these 'pilot trial' pair, a shoulder cut, butchered to be around 2 kg. Liz deliberately cooked it in just oil and salt so that we'd get the full, unadulterated flavour. It was a great success - delicious, succulent meat of gorgeous flavour and superb tenderness. The eating experience alone would probably have us trying again in 2015, but I'll give you a bit more waffle around that, if you're interested.

The same cut, resting from the roast.

You can see from the picture that the joint had the expected 'traditional breed' good inch thick layer of fat below the skin. These days we pretty much chuck that, so Liz would 'peel' off the outer skin to quick-roast for the crackling, and I'd be trimming off more at carving time, but that's just modern taste. These breeds were really all about putting on that fat layer to produce fatty meat and bacon , fat is flavour after all, and back in the day, your physically hard-working farmers would have consumed it all hungrily as a way of getting their 3000 calories a day sustenance. Now, with Tamworths, we know that you can reduce the pig's food amount at 16 weeks and put them on a 'maintenance diet' up to slaughter to stop too much fat being laid down, or you can fatten them up us baconers and happily take the 2 inch thick fat layer. We tried for a result closer to the 'slim' end, though I admit I was too much the softie to resist these girls loud squealed appeals that they were STARVING! I was probably over-feeding just to stop them plaguing me.

Carved  result. We did it justice!

Certainly in terms of enjoyment it was worth it. Regular readers will know that I was sure we'd not 'do' pigs because I wasn't sure we could fence them in, or feed them cheaply enough, or learn to love them. A friend (no names no pack drill) had ended up hating their animals and being so scared of being bitten or barged that feeding at the end was by chucking milled barley over a stable door without daring to go into their pen. Another friend, contrarily, thought we might fall so in love with them that we'd not be able to take them to the abattoir and we'd be left with these expensive pets for decades.

The young Buffs enjoy perching on the gate.

Well, I was totally charmed, I must admit, from the moment we set eyes on our two in a crate at the supplier's farm and I did learn to love them and was never scared. I could go into the pen throughout and scratch their backs, measure them with the tape measure, pulled a grass tick off one, rubbed their muddy ear-tags clean with my thumb and so on. I only got one bite and that when I foolishly waved 2 apples at 2 pigs through the fence but then focused only on getting one apple accurately into the one pig's mouth. The 2nd pig got impatient at her apple being waved vaguely in front of her while I wasn't concentrating, and took a snapping lunge at it. She almost ended up with some finger mixed in with her fruit, but she didn't draw blood and it was my fault. The pigs were superbly biddable through-out and easily trained to follow the feed bucket. So I loved them in the sense of respecting them, protecting them and wanting them to have a good, stress free, happy life and stopping anything or anyone doing them any harm, but I always got the impression that they didn't really 'love' me back; they seem to be 100% mercenary - if you had food or a back-scratch on offer, they'd stick to you like glue, but otherwise they'd have no interest in you at all. I was always sufficiently detached that the 'expensive pets' thing was never going to happen.

Warming stuff. A nice gift of flavoured
poitín "to sort my cold out" from the van
owned by a shopkeeper to whom I
got talking! Only in Ireland?

In terms of money, they worked out OK, all be it only in our 'Mickey Mouse' accounts system were proper farm costs like land, fencing and labour are ignored. Putting in the costs for the piglets initially, pig-nuts, fruit, slaughter and butchery, we came up with a cost per kg of finished meat, of €4.84. This is, I know, a lot more than Anne and Simon managed (they got most of their fruit for free and did their own butchery) but is still excellent against the current supermarket prices, even the cheaper 'commercial' (intensively reared, indoor housed) pork and is brilliant against anything high welfare, outdoor reared and traditional breed. We're happy with it, anyway and we have, of course, the added bonuses of knowing what went into our pigs and what a happy, carefree life they lived

Happy Hallowe'en. 

If there are downsides, I can think of a couple of unexpected ones. First there is the sheer amount of meat you get and have to then 'deal with'. I had gone through the process fending off requests for 'half a pig' or a whole carcass. We only had two, I said, and we want to get a good taste out of them, so we could try out the brawn, some bacon-curing, maybe a ham or some salami. I didn't want to sell it all and be left with none to 'play with'. As you know, I ended up with 7 boxes of meat (124 kg!) from the two animals and nearly ran out of space in the freezer(s) and now wish I'd found homes for some in advance. There was also the constant nagging worry that they'd tunnel out or break through the fences. All the advice we'd been given said you NEED electric fences but I was clinging to the paragraph in my Haynes 'bible' (Liz Shankland's Pig Manual) saying that a strand of barbed wire added along the bottom of sheep fence would suffice. I gritted my teeth and prayed that the pigs would not break out and send me running to the electric fence crowd with my tail between my legs. It was a relief to get to abattoir day with no escapes and to now trust the 'Shankland' fences at last. Finally there was that loud, insistent squealing for food. I wound up unable to go visit the geese or bees, or sometimes the yard without one of them spotting me and starting to shout. It's not a good noise and a bit annoying especially if you KNOW they have just been fed. I loved their quiet contented grunting when they were getting their own way, but I was happy to lose the squealing!

Yes, on balance it was definitely worth it and we will be back in 2015 for the 2nd chapter.

Autumn Tidying

Red Kuri Squash and yellow courgette

Our amazing run of rainless, blue sky, sunny days is still managing to hang in there, though the forecast tells me that a front may nip through and interrupt this happy situation tomorrow. Let's hope only briefly. The clear skies at night though, have given us the first few frosts and crunchy grass in the morning and so, inevitably, have done for the foliage and stems of the most tender crop plants - our bountiful red kuri squash and yellow courgettes, the borlotti (runner) beans and the French and 'Gaucho' drying beans. Surprisingly, however, not the nasturtiums yet; I expect these to turn into a soggy black, stringy mess at the first whisper of frost but they are untouched so far.

'Autumn Bliss' raspberries still giving us some good two-person
dessert sized pickings

Nothing for it on these collapsed plants but to pull up and cut out the stems and foliage and to collect up any 'fruit' for storage in sheds and the polytunnel. The latter was for the drying beans both of which varieties I am not 100% convinced by despite the claims of the heritage-variety seed company we bought the seed from. They (Brown Envelope Seeds) tell me that these beans are all proven in County Cork, so should 'work' here but I think our season is just not long enough.

That lovely pink-pig scarf gift. 

Both the 'Borlotti' runners and the 'Gaucho' French-style did the growing, flowering and podding up well enough but despite our Indian Summer they have not really completed the end stage, the ripening and drying. These beans are meant to move all the moisture and goodness from the pod-skin to the bean seed, leaving the beans big and hard enclosed in a papery thin, rustling, desiccated pod by about September. You pull the pods and easily rub out the seeds  so that you can store them and further dry them as an over-winter dry ingredient in stews and so on. These pods are still fleshy, thick skinned and moist, though I can feel full bean seeds inside, so they are in the poly-tunnel on a wire frame to see will they finish the drying process away from the bines.

Pig Party. A splash of the black stuff in their wheat and
milled barley. 

The pigs came up to their 6 month Birthday on the 10th October, so we decided that they should be allowed to celebrate and finally try out some Guinness. For their lunch I replaced their usual pig-nuts (which I thought might turn to mush when the Guinness touched them) with a 50/50 mix of whole wheat and milled barley with a generous glug of the black stuff stirred into it. They were mightily impressed.

Very interested in the empty tin!

Not only did they scarf down this new food, but also they kept trying to get at the empty can just outside their fence where I'd put it down while I took some pictures. I also swear they were looking at me a bit 'old fashioned' at their supper time when the exciting new flavours were replaced back with boring old pig nuts and apples. With Autumn in the pig-keeper's world comes the annual Ministry census. We get a sheep census too, but we've only ever had a zero count to record and we've had to avoid the option where zero might mean you are no longer a sheep keeper and you would like them to close your herd account.

Pig Census form.

It was nice this time, then, to be able to record a '2' - yes we do actually HAVE pigs and we intend to keep on having them. We are not sure how this will translate next year, but probably with a try at pure-bred Berkshires, the black pigs. The supplier of this year's Tamworths (freerangepigsireland.com, which 'resolves' to a website called PiggyWiggy's) impressed us with their set-up and the quality of stock so we may go back there for more. Last year they had Berkshires on sale too, though I can find no mention of Berkshires now on the website. Ah well. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Mapp and Lucia

Welcome aboard, Mapp and Lucia. 

A big adventure today when we are scheduled to head for Ballymount in Co. Kildare  to collect our pigs, 2 Tamworth females ordered back in February before they were even conceived, to be taken as 8 week old weaners in due course. Due course turned out to be the 5th June and our pig area, house, feed and water were all ready and in place.  It's a bit of a hike down to Kildare from here - 2 and a half hours in the car but Charlotte had asked to come along for the ride so we'd even had to practice fitting 3 people and the dog-crate in the car. Charlotte is an experienced and knowledge-able pig handler so we could definitely use her help and support and then another good reason arrived - she was invited to collect a fancily-marked 'special' Dutch rabbit from a breeder near Mullingar, not far off our route.

Mapp and Lucia cleaned up for the journey. 

The pig breeder is found by typing FreeRangePigsIreland.ie into an internet search but appears as 'Piggy Wiggy' on the website. They (Therese and Michael) are lovely, helpful, cooperative people who could not do enough for us even when our arrival coincided with them taking a delivery of fresh concrete being pumped from a lorry into a prepared hole in the ground - those guys do not stop if you are not ready; you end up with a quickly setting heap to deal with, so it is all hands on deck. We were sent for a wander round to look at the pigs on offer, while they leveled the wet concrete into the shuttering - a new piece of car park. They actually sell Tamworths, Kune-kunes, 'Iron Age' pigs and Berkshires. Only after that were we loaded and documented, our two pigs having been scrubbed up clean for their journey, possibly because they knew we were collecting in a private car.

Back on the road by midday, the two pigs were safe inside our dog crate on the back seat of the car with a dog blanket to lie on if they chose to. They actually lay down as soon as we were in motion and spent the journey home fast asleep, occasionally twitching or moving their mouths in piggy dreams. We had decided to bring a picnic although I'd been worried that the pigs might not enjoy the run and we might have to get home as quick as possible and eat the picnic on the run. No need to worry. We parked under some dense trees to shade the car and the pigs slept on like children in car seats, apparently unaware of the break in the journey.

We wouldn't let Charlotte sneak this tiny
Kune-kune piglet into her pocket.

We made our little diversion to Gainstown to collect the rabbit at an agreed rendezvous outside the National School. Charlotte checked it was the colour mix she'd ordered, checked it over for general health and then quickly sexed it to make sure it was her 'dream boy'. She is a keen breeder and favours the 'Dutch' strain of rabbits, and this boy has Show winners in his blood line. Back on the road then and up through Lanesborough and across the Shannon to Strokestown. Home again we left the still-sleeping piggies in their crate in the car while we relieved the dogs and fed any poultry which was noisily and hopefully greeting us (Hubbards and Geese mainly) and collapsed briefly with a cup of tea.

Snuggling down into the straw.

Next job was to carry the crate down to the new pig house already well stuffed with straw. I had read that if you put 2 tiny piglets into a big area they don't get very comfortable - it is better to put whole straw bales around the edges to give them a smaller 'well' in the middle in which to make their bed. These pigs are not much bigger than our Westie dogs and the ark floor is just under 6 by 8 feet. I had put a bale at either side, intact but with the strings cut and taken out, and then broke up a third bale in the middle.  This seemed to be met with porcine approval and when we left them to it and went back an hour later to check on them, all we could see was straw shaking about disturbed by invisible pigs well snuggled down into it. Charlotte tells us that they are not great travelers and will probably feel a bit queasy and exhausted after the car run so will just snuggle down in there for the night to recover. Tomorrow they will wake up inquisitive and ravenous. Good night little ones. We will come and find you in the morning.

11 keets now dried off and up and about.

Meanwhile, I was going to give you a Guinea Fowl update. We had a burst of 11 eggs hatching over the 24 hours or so of the main event. These guys are dried off and now up and about, rescued to the brooder crate with the Infra Red heat lamp. After a pause, a 12th tried to hatch but came out with a wad of un-absorbed yolk sac outside its body and lost a lot of blood. This one did not make it through the night. The remaining 4 eggs are doing nothing and now, on candling, appear to have the too-big air space which is a sign of a dead embryo. This is quite normal, to have all the 'good' ones hatch in a burst. Any that do not come out then are probably weak or poor in some way. 11 good ones, though, out of 16 eggs rescued from a wet hedge-bottom and incubated in an unsophisticated incubator is still a brilliant result. We are delighted.

We have had a third gosling hatch and this one is doing well, so we have a rather dysfunctional looking family wandering about, with George Junior, at over 2 weeks, looking huge and robust alongside "Very" Junior who is only 2 days old. The other female adult is still hanging in there, sitting on the 6 or so eggs which still remain. It's all 'go' isn't it - pigs, keets, goslings all in the same week, and soon, the bees will be arriving.