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.

Pig Pen

Pig pen main gate. The orchard is on the left.

What with having freezers full of meat, portions of cooked stuff and veg and having leeks and sprouts still growing, our weekly shop is normally a very modest affair - bread, milk, bakery stuff, wine etc. Just recently though we have gone into 'project' mode and we seem to have been shelling out money hand over fist. The poor old hoover finally needed replacement and Liz is buying a 2nd hand sewing machine. There is the beehive and now the frames and other equipment and there will soon be the bees themselves. There are the parts for the pig ark. We have had a tow hitch fitted to the Fiat (that one was €400) and we are looking for a small stock trailer. Most recently there is the fencing for the pig pen.

We always knew how vital good fencing is to any livestock enterprise and that is one of the biggest costs you will face. Fencing the orchard in 2012 cost €600 and, last year, the East Field set us back €1050. I use a good local contractor who we call 'Paul the Fence'; a one man band with old but efficient fencing gear and a seriously ancient MF tractor with a 50 kg weight 'pile driver' on the back for the big posts. He's a great bloke and we get on really well. He does not mind (and seems to appreciate) me helping out labouring and we chat away, yarning while we work swapping stories and the time flies. He loves his food, so Liz, who loves to cook for an appreciative audience gets into top 'catering' mode baking biscuits and cake for tea breaks and potato cakes or home made pork pie, hot for lunch stops.

Monkey-strainer pulls the 'barbed'

Neither of us had actually kept pigs before or, indeed, done any pig fencing so we are only guessing but I have read and seen described a version which is basically sheep wire with a strand of barbed top and bottom. The top strand dissuades pigs from trying to rear up at the fence and look over. The bottom stops them trying to root underneath from whence they can push up powerfully potentially lifting the posts out and the fence up high enough for them to get under. Some systems back this up with an electric fence (or even rely solely on the electric fence) but I cannot bring myself to trust only that method, so I like something physical in the way of containment. Also electric fence 'pulsators' are mad money!

So we decided to go with the sheep wire and high tensile (green) barbed wire. We also decided that even though a polygon roughly 35 m N/S and 25 m E/W was way way too big for what 2 piggies would need, we could give ours a satisfying and exciting environment (and save fencing money) by allowing them all the area between the existing orchard fence and the existing East field fence. Our N/S runs were already there and would only need the bottom strand of barbed adding. Our E/W runs already had their end posts against which we could strain our wire going that way. We just needed a gate and since this was to be just a pig and pedestrian entrance (no tractor access) Paul had a spare one from a previous job lying about.

Main rain gulley is now the 'wallow'

You can see from the map above that this pen gives the pigs (from left to right) a bit of grass meadow (which may not last long!), then the lovely gnarly bank with its sticking out hawthorn and beech roots and the huge black spruce trees. Then there is the 'under the trees' bit in the shade of the spruce and, on the east side, the big ashes I am re-coppicing at present. This was TK-Max's vegetable plot till he inadvisedly planted the spruces as saplings in the 60's and is more recently a 'forest floor' of thick pine needle litter. Finally, along the east side is the 8 foot wide, 3-4 feet deep rain gulley which takes all the rain water from the house roof and yard. We thought this would make a nice wallow for the pigs, but it created for the fencers an interesting task of running fence across it at either end. Lots of splodging about in wellies too, especially on the Thursday morning when it rained and rained and soaked us through to the underclothes!

All completed now, though and we are all very pleased with it. Paul was joking that we will have to let him know if it 'works' and contains the pigs, so that he can then add 'Pig Fincin' to his adverts.

In the 'pig ark' department, I have all the parts for a nice ark on order. It is to be one of those 'Anderson shelter' style huts you see in fields of outdoor-reared pigs, with a curved galvanised corrugated iron roof. Our local builders' providers proved able to supply the curved sheeting and we both raked out our 2-Pi-R mathematics from school to find that for a 4 foot radius curve, you'd need a 12 and a half foot sheet to start with.

The Fiat gets a tow hitch.

The steel man asked that I come along to see the sheets rolled (and to explain to him exactly what I was after) so that we both knew what we were at. I was happy to. The rolling 'mill' turned out to be an ancient and venerable, rusty dusty beast about the size of a dining table with an old fashion electric motor and flappy drive belts, which they hefted out of the corner of one of their sheds into the daylight with a forklift. The guy ran our (3) sheets through several times each, turning up the tension at each pass, and then setting the sheet down against floor markings to check we had an 8 foot wide 'building'. Fascinating to watch. The sheet and the wood will be delivered on Monday. That's my jobs sorted out for next week, I'm thinking.

Doubling in Size Each Week

We were told when we first started with the geese that goslings grow amazingly fast and 'seem to double in size every week'. You'd take that with a pinch of salt, wouldn't you, but we can report that it is very true. Ours are now two weeks old and seem to have suddenly put on a growth spurt in leg and feet size, neck length and body length. Their little wings have not grown yet and now seem to have been left behind in this race for size so that they now look like tiny vestigial stumps such as you'd expect on a flightless bird.

They continue to thrive and we are hoping they are leaving behind the 'vulnerable to hooded crows' stage. One little one continues to worry us a bit. We seem to have 5 big bruisers and one smaller one who seems to be always lagging behind, off on a world of his own, still pecking at grass when everyone else has moved on, or still dawdling round the pond when everyone else is out, dried off and preening. Yesterday at midday-ish when I went out to check I could see only 5 goslings so we feared the worst and went into 'search' mode, both Liz and I combing the grass, ditches and bumps in the ground. We gave up the search and thought him lost, gone for good.

Then at about 3 pm I was out there again and there were six again, so we assume he was off dawdling, got left behind but then, fortunately, the parent birds passed his way again and he heard them and came running.

We have had two small tragedies in the rabbit department, both maybe related to the hot weather and, maybe also to my inexperience and bad husbandry. You will recall that I found 4 of Padfoot's litter outside the nest box and wriggling in the dewy grass. I rounded them up and gave them a shallow 'tray' (the bottom 3 inches cut out of a box) to contain them. It did not occur to me that there might be other babies scattered about the 'bedroom'. On Saturday there were actually 5 in the tray, so either Mum had found one and brought him into the fold, or he'd crawled there. Unfortunately there was a 6th now lying in the gap between the back of the tray and the outside wall and this poor little mite had died of lack of Mum's milk. His little corpse was all slack and loose-skinned. I could kick myself.

Meanwhile I had looked into Ginny's box and her kittens seemed to be safe enough at the far end of the hay from the 'door', so I had not given them the tray and 'Berlin Wall' treatment. One of these little ones had managed to escape the nest and had gone on to escape the mesh run too (small gap underneath where the ground was not 100% flat) just before we, unawares, let the dogs into the orchard for their off-the-leads romp. Towser had found it and had it in his mouth when we rescued it. It managed a few gasps but then expired. I suspect that the sweltering heat is what is making the babies move about, to try to find somewhere cooler, so we have now put 5 inch high 'walls' in each box to stop escapes, moved the runs to more shady spots AND covered the tar-felt roofs with a good layer of cut, tall grass to stop the intense heat. Everybody seems to be sleeping happily and it is much much cooler in those hutches. I should just say that this, on the latest count, leaves Pads with 5 babies and Ginny with 5-6.

Meanwhile, the horses have been moved, by means of electric fences, to the front lawn and primrose path. They seem to prefer this kind of grass - regrown mower-aftermath to the long straggly, not-yet-cut stuff. Suits me - less mowing of lawns for me. It is also quite fun that they can now come right up to us when we are lazing at the terrace table on the front terrace and we think it looks very picturesque from the lane outside to see three horses on the lawn, swishing their tails or rolling luxuriously on their backs in the sunshine.