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.

Underfed?

Snout in the trough....

I was getting a bit concerned there for a while. I am feeding my pigs with what seemed like a decent amount of food, based on the "by sight" principle of "do they hoover it all up in 20 minutes?" If it's all gone then you may not be feeding enough, if they leave some then you are feeding too much. Well, these young ladies seemed to be hoovering it up in about 15 minutes and are always ready (often squealing their desire!) for each meal. I was feeding by the 1 litre yogurt tub, one each for breakfast, one split between them for lunch and one each at supper. At each meal there is also fruit, so for example an apple and a tomato chopped up between them.

A contented Tamworth almost 4 months old?

There was nothing for it - I needed to refer to 'The Bible', Liz Shankland's (Haynes) Pig Manual. Liz S advises that you feed pig nuts by weight according to age, basically at 0.1 kg per pig per day per week of age, so that a 16 week old pig should be on 1.6 kg of nuts PLUS any fruit or veg you can add to that. She does not advise substituting fruit and veg for the nuts and hoping that your pig will put on weight based on a bucket full of knackered old cabbage and potato peelings.

I love the ginger bristles on these ladies, glowing in the sun

I needed to check the weight of food I am feeding, so a quick experiment with the yogurt pots told me that a pot is equivalent to 850 g. On that basis, Mapp and Lucia's 2 and a half tubs per day is over 2 kg of nuts! I am over feeding, if anything and the girls squealing for more are just lying (telling me porky pies?). In fact, Liz Shankland has pork animals (rather than 'baconers') on the 1.6 kg only UNTIL they are about 20 weeks old - after that you actually cut down to 1.4 kg to avoid the pig laying down that thick layer of fat all round. I am going to have to sneak the volume down a bit without Mapp and Lucia raising a written complaint to the Management!

13 healthy babies

Did I ever give you a final score on the Buff Orpington babies?  13 chicks was how we did; all now in the brooder box under Infra Red (though for the picture, I carried them to the sunlit window so that they could admire the front lawn and you could see them in the natural light). When I say 'final' score, I refer only to the hatch, we expect about half of these chicks to turn out to be roosters who will not be added to the flock, but the hens are very much part of our future as small holders, all being well.

In an earlier post, I was possibly a bit disparaging about the "lacks-a-daisical" time keeping of Kenny, our sheep man. I think it would be safe to include our "fincing" man, Paul in that category too. We have done a lot of business with Paul and we have long ago learned not to hang about waiting on his returning calls, coming up with quoted prices, or showing up to erect fencing when he says. When he arranged to have the woodwork for the post and rail fence round the front lawn delivered "on Monday" we fully expected it to arrive on the Thursday, and when he left us on that day saying he'd be "back next week" (now this week) to put the fences up, we both mentally decided to believe that when we saw him arrive with tractor, fencing wire, rammer, monkey strainer and all his other gear.

The geese and goslings race home to supper,
from orchard to their house

In fact, it has not been a problem, because a) time is a commodity of which we have plenty here and b) it has given us a chance to take advantage of a cheap offer in the Irish DIY chain 'Woodie's' for some 'Forest Green' fence paint. We have been able to unpack the rails and posts, dry them in the sunshine, and larrup a good old layer of this paint onto them prior to putting the fence up. Painting downwards onto fence rails when they are all in one place is always easier than working your way along 54 m of fence painting the bottoms of rails 'upwards'. If some of the rails have to be cut, we can always nip round and paint the grain ends after the event.

There are not many apples in our orchard this year but
this Bramley cooker is looking good so far.

What else is there tonight? Young 'Pirate' is now well settled and getting quite cheeky with his waiting out front of the house and sometimes yowling for attention. He can hear us when we retire to the terrace furniture for a coffee and a chat and will come round and jump up on the table, un-bothered by the objecting shouts of the dogs indoors. He then finds a lap and gets himself comfortable; the only problem being that he is one of those cats who 'knead' you with their front paws while purring, so your belly gets a bit lacerated by those claws through the thin summer clothing. That's about it for this one.

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.

Settling in

The pigs are settling in well and seem to be quite happy. They were out of their house and exploring the patch the morning after arrival, the grassy bit, the woods and the storm-water 'ditch'. They are always together and they amble around making quiet little grunt noises, a cross between an adult pig's bass-y grunt, and the wheeze of an asthmatic man. It is loud enough that they cannot actually hide from you once they are exploring - you can always hear the faint chuntering noise coming from whatever tall vegetation they might be in, or from the ditch.

Muddy noses - we've been a-rootling!

With the ditch being quite deep (4 feet?) and steep sided, I'd been worried that they might tumble down into it and not be able to get back out, so I had dug out a more gentle ramp - I needn't have worried. These ladies are long leggedy beasts, very agile at the jumping and running. They used my ramp to drop down into the ditch but then made their way towards house and happily sprang out up the near-vertical bank back into the Secret Garden.

Yellow Aquilegia

So far they have grazed a fair amount of the herbs in their patch, quite enjoying the foliage of the Cow Parsley (Queen Anne's Lace) and my 'pig nuts' (commercial pig food) were immediately recognised as food and wolfed down. They have also made some bits of tomato vanish but have so far turned their noses up at anything else we have tried including foods I have read they 'should like' - banana, pears and carrots. We'll just keep trying things till we hit on a good treat, I guess.

Logging for Bob again - sycamore this time

Readers may not know that feeding pigs is all very controlled and restricted now (if you are law-abiding!) since 'Foot and Mouth' in 2001 and Swine Vesicular Disease; you should not feed anything that has been in a human kitchen. No more left overs and 'swill', certainly nothing that contains meat or animal fat, so even bakery waste which can include pizzas, lardy cakes and pork pies. You can buy or grow fruit and veg especially for the pigs and you can, if you want to, run a special boiler away from the house kitchen, to create hot mashes or swill from, for example, potatoes and peelings. We are pretty much using the commercial ration supplemented with special offer or end-of-life-for-sale-cheap fruit and veg (when we can find something these ladies will eat!)

Choc a block full again. Bob's sycamore is the split wedgy
stuff at the top. It splits nicely while still green.

I am trying to befriend them and get them to trust and even 'love' me. They are nervous little girls and wary of coming close. I go in there and sit down quietly talking to them and curiosity brings them near. They have come to within 12 inches today but their courage seems to fail them and they dart away again. I have made a point of not bothering them when they are inside their ark. That is their 'safe' place. I might sit a few yards away and talk to them but I will not invade their space. Hopefully they will soon get confident enough to come right up to me and accept a scratch on the ear, a tickle of the 'tummy' or a food treat. My 'pig bible' (Liz Shankland's "Haynes Pig Manual") describes the pigs being delighted to see and hear you and running up squealing an excited welcome. I wonder if I can get to that stage? I have to admit I find them utterly, utterly charming so that some cynical friends on Facebook are starting to suspect that when we get to slaughter time I might have a problem.

These toadstools popped up in the horse muck in one of our
planters, looking when they first emerge curiously like hen
eggs laid blunt end down.

We also have an ongoing light hearted 'argument' going with Anne and with my pig training course guy. They are convinced that only electric fence will contain pigs, and seeing the way Anne's pigs have quickly ploughed deep holes in their peaty soil, I can see why. I am baulking ( a bit nervously, I must admit!) at buying and using an electric fencer, and going with Liz Shankland's suggestion that good high-tensile sheep fencing with a strand of barbed at ground level should work. It is said that boredom and hunger make them try to escape, so we are hoping that our patch is sufficiently big and interesting. Also, the worry can be about burrowing in soft ground and potentially lifting your posts out by pushing their noses under the fence and lifting. Our ground is, as we know from the bitter experience of digging, not soft - it is clay with head-sized boulders in it and, in the pig area, a fair amount of big-tree roots (60 foot spruces!). So far the little piggies have not done any digging, just a bit of nose-ploughing in the litter layer, a couple of inches down. We'll see. I have been offered loans of fencers should a problem develop and we spot some escape attempts, and I can always buy one in a hurry locally.

Guinea Fowl keet at 6 days

Meanwhile, we have had a mini tragedy which it gives me no pleasure to tell you about. I was on my first-thing-in-the-morning dog 'patrol' prior to releasing the poultry from their houses and did not realise that our littlest gosling had sneaked out of the goose house (possibly through a small gap under the door). I accidentally walked the three dogs onto him where he was hiding out of sight round a corner. They were on leads but were on him in a split second and that was his lot. We are back to the one gosling, George Junior. I am kicking myself - I had heard some noise from the adult geese and should have gone to check minus dogs - then I would have found him and been able to return him to Mum and Dad. Ah well, that's terriers, I guess. Entirely my fault.

Keets already starting to look Guinea Fowl shaped.

The 11 keets are thriving and putting away their diet of chick crumb with lots of "salad" - they love their greens these guys and actually graze a lot of grass as adults. Their chick crumb comes with finely chopped grass (3 mm lengths or so) and finely shredded lettuce which it is great fun to see them dive onto and then try to run away with their prize so that the other keets cannot have it. I think I have already posted that keet No.12 who hatched with the un-absorbed yolk sac did not make it, and the 4 eggs that were left proved to have partly developed but dead embryos. So good fertility (16 out of 16) and, for eggs rescued from a wet hedge into a borrowed, not-particularly-sophisticated incubator, 11 is a brilliant result, One of the babies is giving us slight concern as his toes do not straighten - he walks with his toes curled round, on the side of his foot, but he gets about OK and certainly wins plenty of the lettuce fights. We will look after him a bit and hope that he does well. He is certainly OK running forwards and that, in our experience, seems to be what Guineas spend 99% of their time doing.