Saturday 30 January 2016

A pair of ploughs for Christmas?

Christmas Day was not a Dickensian display of white snow but the standard grey drizzle that seldom seems to feature on any cards. My wife announced that she had bought me a present but it wouldn't be ready until the end of January. I asked her to keep it a surprise.

However, after I'd opened a book on smallholding and another on keeping pigs, I enquired if she'd bought me a pig. She replied that the seller wouldn't sell them individually and so a few weeks later, I collected a fine pair of Gloucester Old Spot/saddleback cross weaners from a nearby farm:

Scratcher and Hamlet (yes, I know you shouldn't name them)

Currently they're in an enclosure build onto the back of one of the stables. There is a partition inside and a door was cut in the back wall so they have somewhere to sleep. Due to the inclement weather, they haven't been pooing outside as we'd hoped, but the mixture of straw and dung should make good compost in a few months

I remember there being green...
The bottom of the enclosure has an electric tape (7000V!) running around it, to prevent them from digging under the wire. The pigs (both males, by the way) understood the significance of this tape in a very short order, although the dog was desperate to get at them. Funnily enough, it took her a lot longer to realise (after poking her paw through a few times) that pigs=pain but now she won't go within 20 yards of the pen. The other dog (not pictured) has been in to meet them and didn't seem particularly interested or fazed.

The plan is to move them into an electric enclosure that we've paid out in some scrub that will need to be cleared in order to survey and dig the lake. Once they've reduced this to bare mud, we'll move the enclosure to a different part:

Electric enclosure

However, despite them going frantic at the sight and sound of a feed bucket, they were so scared of the tape running across the gate into their enclosure, that we couldn't initially get them out (even though it was switched off as the energiser was moved to the temporary enclosure). Putting a piece of carpet over it solved that but then, despite being knee deep in mud for long periods of time, they wouldn't cross the muddy threshold into the paddock, let alone make the journey up to the enclosure (they hadn't been fed since the day before) and after a period of comedy pig chasing, we cut our losses and put them back where they were. The next plan is to buy an old horse trailer and let them feed in it. This will then somehow be manoeuvred into the field and reinstated as a mobile pig ark. However, with the state of the ground being so bad, it's not going to be easy...

Pigs are due to be slaughtered in June but we have some others on order already to replace them. It's going to be difficult as they're charming beasts but we must remember they were only born because people eat them (and with the amount they eat, they're expensive pets!). Hoping that once the willow really gets going we can supplement their diet with tree fodder but it may have to be a summer thing for the next pair...