piggie update #2

Despite everything I have read about creep feeding etc. the piglets are now standing in the feed trough and eating everything, they seem to be fine so am not worrying about whether they're getting what they need, they look fine and have fat little bellies.







The piglets kept breaking through to be with the male, so we have opened it all up again and hopefully the adults will do their business and we'll have one more litter. We've sold all the piglets so far, but will keep back one female from this litter and maybe one more from the next litter. There are some question marks about the virility of our male pig, as clearly he was not the father of this 1st litter, they were both too young to mate so she could only have been knocked up by a very mature male.


So we'll see. I'm quite happy with what we have and is more than enough meat for us.

getting tanked up

We had the wettest winter on record here this winter, which was miserable for most of us but it has meant we've had loads of running water on the land, last year it all dried up by June, so we've been lucky. There's still a bit of water coming out of the spring, but only enough for the pigs. We bought a 1000 litre tank recently which we've been filling up from our 90 meter bore hole.



However, getting the water out of the bore hole requires the good old fashioned engine. Whilst not complicated pieces of machinery when they break down and you're not a mechanic, you are reliant on someone else fixing it.
Without the generator to get the water out of our hole, we have no water. OK, not a big deal as we are not currently living on our land, but we are trying to grow everything we need and grow food for the animals. So, when the generator stopped working, it went straight to the generator fixer recommended to us, but three days later he still hasn't even looked at it, I started to panic. Our neighbour and friend came up with a suggestion and I took it one step further. Our local president is a lovely guy and always seems willing to help and assist. So I asked if we could borrow a 1000 litre tank and pump 1000 litres of water out of the river and drive the water up to our land and get that water out of his tank and get it into ours. These tanks are heavy when empty which is why we needed to borrow one and not use ours, ours is currently in situ by the house which is 30 meters down the mountain. Rick broke his toe last week and I'm recovering from whiplash so bringing the tank up to the truck is not an option......

Anyway, everyone joined in and we all got wet, including my plants

brooding part two

On May 23rd I posted that our black hen had been broody for some time, we tried lots of things, nothing worked. On my way back from the UK I got talking to a man in the airport terminal about chickens and pigs. He was very knowledgeable, he suggested that despite all my efforts the hen would die unless I got some fertilised eggs under her. When we touched down, I rang husband and asked him to find someone in the village with a cock!!! "What" he said, "you know" i said "a male bird", "oh...."
Our neighbour gave us 7 eggs, I put crosses on them and placed them under Betty. Wrote the date in my diary. 21 days later they hatched



well nearly all of them. One disappeared and one didn't hatch, but now we have 5 chicks. Cute...Betty seems very happy although won't stop sitting on them, I guess that's normal.





The brown hens have gone on holiday.


They were being, as per usual, racist and nasty. They've gone to stay with some friends of ours who have loads of creatures, including alpacas!!!
I'll bring them back when the chicks can fend for themselves. I'm rather hoping they'll come back with a bit less attitude.

piggie update #1

The piglets will be 2 weeks old tomorrow.



The three females are way bigger than the male, which is apparently normal.



I have tried using the internet to find out about all sorts of pig related husbandry, and scoured our books, for information on various issues we are having. in the end as Rick keeps telling me, don't worry about it nature will take it's course. The male piglet although a bit thin is just generally smaller, the females are generally bigger. The sow seems to have mastitis, however she's not under the weather and isn't bothered about me touching her udder, so I'm leaving well alone. As she only had a litter of four it doesn't seem be a problem. There's still no farrow rail, again not a problem so far, so we're not getting one.

The ear nibbling also sounds terrible and the blood looks terrible, but the ears heal well and our pigs arrived with bits missing from their ears so, I guess that's normal too.

Click play to watch piggies fighting



There isn't alot on the internet about pig rearing outside of countries like UK and USA, I'm guessing lots of people are doing it like us, they're just not writing about it. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm not loosing any sleep about whether I'm doing all the right things, the fact remains the pigs are healthy and happy and nothing died. We must be doing something right.

thieves in the night

I hadn't actually noticed until my neighbour pointed out that some of my plants were missing.
It took her about five minutes to explain where they had gone and why.



They had been taken in the night by someone (?) and placed in a circle with everybody else's pot plants in front of the font in the village




I have trawled around the internet looking for stuff about Saint Antonio, I won't bore you with it, all I'll say is it involves sardines and lots of them (cancelled here yesterday, due to bad weather!, not sure how traditional that is) and someone coming in the night and stealing all your plants, in my case 2 geraniums and lots of basil. Now whether they realised that it was basil is another matter but basil happens to be THE herb of choice for this particular saint.



All very funny and the cause of much hilarity among the locals at our expense

baby elephants

The piggies made their way out of their nest today.
They are so tiny and cute, I think they look like baby elephants!!

separation anxiety

Yesterday Rick made a new campo and house for the male......



he didn't like it, which is not surprising, it was thrown up rather quickly, he took one look at his new accomodation and broke out and went back in to his old house with his wife and kids!

We have to separate them as she could get pregnant again this week and will be better all round for her milk production, feeding, rest etc. and one less fat pig to roll on the piglets.

The new house is a bit more salubrious than yesterdays,



however he is not impressed and as we were leaving the farm in the pouring rain, pig 2, undeterred by the downpour was digging a hole.



Lets hope he's still in his campo tomorrow.

surprise, surprise

When we got the pigs we were told they were about 3-4 months old. We'd done some research and been told that females can't really get pregnant until at least six months.
When the pigs got moved down to the campo after having had them for about a month, making them 4-5 months old they were "at it" alot.
We then noticed that she was getting bigger and her teats were engorged, neighbours visited (mostly out of curiosity/nosiness), they all reckoned the female was pregnant. Ricks been busy clearing the fprest so that we've got more fence posts and this week was about to embark on creating a new campo and house to move the male into. We pitched up at the farm today, the female had given birth to 4 piggies......

Rick spent all afternoon creating some temporary housing and partition, only to discover as he was leaving that the male had broken out and gone back to the female and the piglets. It's not ideal, but as he keeps reminding me pigs have been doing this in the wild forever and she and her young will be OK.

Fingers crossed.....

a very english tea

Ingredients:

A kind friends' garden
guests
good weather
cucumber sandwiches
egg mayonaise sandwiches
fairy cakes
scones, strawberry jam and clotted cream
shortbread biscuits
fondant fancies
tea cakes
pots and pots of tea
a vintage english car
a very english dog
and loads of wisteria
oh and a godson


yum yum and thank you

brooding

The remaining black hen (Betty) has gone broody.
It's a bit annoying as the other hens can't get into the nest to lay and I don't want her to make them broody too, also she is not eating or drinking and have read that they can literally starve themselves to death when broody. Stupid creatures.

I have been trawling around the internet and found lots of suggestions, some impractical, like: put a clutch of ice cubes under her, not gonna work in 35 degree heat, just getting the ice cubes to the farm would result in puddle on my lap.
Putting her in a cage with a wire bottom, could work but I lent my cat cage which would have been perfect to a friend and it is somewhere between here and Scotland!

A dutch friend of ours visited yesterday and said, dunk her bum in a bucket of cold water. This I can do, when we fill the water butts everyday for our gravity fed watering system, the water is very cold, as coming up from 100 meter hole.
Great, filled a bucket with it, stuck her bum in....lots of fuss.
She unruffled herself and stood straight up and got on with drinking and feeding. Brilliant it's worked I said. 5 minutes later she's back on the nest. Did it again, this time she quite liked it, but went straight back on nest.......Rick's done it again this morning and he left her eating and the others laying.

I suspect that it won't work and will result in a chicken with a very clean bum and I'll just have to let her finish laying her clutch and when she realises nothing is going to happen, she'll give up. I am also considering wearing protective eye wear as when I went to shove her off the nest the other day I got pecked in the eyeball....not good.

out on a limb

There are a number of trees that all need to come down before rick can continue to build, mainly because of their proximity to the house site, within 50 meters they are a fire hazard. There is also an ever present danger of blow-down, as most of them are at 30+ meters each and the mountain slope in that area is scree, loose and febrile, there's not a lot to hold onto up there, so you can imagine, felling is a nightmare, nowhere to stand, and nowhere to escape. Additionally, and potentially the most worrying, some of them have signs of an extremely virulent disease called seco, a nementode disease, causing rotting of the trees and their death, which has become prevalent in the hard yellow maritime pines of the region, if not caught and halted it can wipe out all the trees in an entire region. The biggest hurdle with stopping it, is that many of the trees that have it are on land owned by people who are no longer here, the trees get the disease and spread it rapidly, whole sections of mountainside can get blighted very quickly. in the later stages of the disease the timber is barely fit for firewood, and certainly not construction.



Obviously, it was going to be awkward, the road and telephone line behind on the mountainside, the house and the well head to the right, too many other trees blocking an exit to the left, the hen house, olives and our only large cherry tree in-front. The largest of the trees needed sectional felling, it had a large and prominent fork 3/4 of the way up, which was leaning out over the house and down the mountain and there was no chance of getting it all in the tiny space that it was allocated for the drop. It was a real hazard of a tree. We decided to get in Shey, a tree surgeon who was prepared to climb and fell it. He did a great job.

2cv heaven

The 2cv was the first car I ever bought, £300, bargain, one broken chassis later and a lot of crying, I had a 2nd hand chassis put on by Doug Cuuningham, the famous 2cv mechanic who happened to live up the road from me in UK, very handy.

After several years of driving around in Valentine, and a lot of arguing about the awfulness : comfort, weatherproofness, humility (in ricks case) versus the merits of it : cheap to run, fully convertible, fun and exciting to drive and attention drawing, we got rid of it in a pact, you sell your clown car and i will sell my selfish paris dakar motorbike. (actually I pulled out of the deal, but did eventually fulfil my end of the bargain).
We both regretted it. Years later I asked the 2cv mechanic if he ever saw the people who bought my car and he said he hadn't seen them for years. I explained to him that I would love to buy it back as missed it so badly and we needed another car. As luck would have, but i'd call it something else, the people that had bought my darling 2cv from me rang my mechanic the very next day and said they wanted to sell!!!.
I bought her back cheaper than I'd sold her and I still have her to this day. She isn't here with me but will come one day and possibly on her last trip, back to the country where she was actually built! funny that.
Rick has bought yet another adventure motorcycle, actually he has two, but one of them is apparently for me but in pieces. Both of which also sit uselessly in a garage.

Imagine my delight when this morning I heard some familiar sounds in the village, peeked out of my door and discovered that there was a convoy of pristine 2cv's all lined up in the street. Where they here just for me? maybe. They were on their way to the Estrellas as part of the www.2cvclubdoporto.pt



This is what my idea of heaven would look like, tonnes of 2cv's all restored and shiny and gleaming. If i had enough money I would have a fleet.
Nobody could understand my ridiculous mountain Portuguese so I found a young member of the convoy who spoke english and with a very sad photo of my 2cv, explained that I too had one. Oh but it's very bad they all said. Bring it here and you can restore it cheaply....i quite like it's shabby chicness, but they didn't understand, they were the most respectable, smartly dressed and posh 2cv owners I had ever met. I had a tear in my eye and huge lump in my throat, they understood that, no language needed.

oh that's good, that's very good

Those of you who know rick from old, know how we affectionately call him pudding boy. Not cause he is tubby, but simply because he loves his puddings, and the more english they are the better. I consider myself quite a good cook and am constantly coming up with delicious meals from limited ingredients, but never get to making the pudding stage either because I'm too tired or have run out of time or both. Also I can't eat them because they do make me tubby.

Rick had left open Nigellas "domestic goddess" book (which is a big fave), on the steamed syrup sponge page, it's been sitting in the kitchen for a couple of days, staring at me.

Fed up with being drizzled on all day at the farm and being cold, I decided to come home early and make the bloody pudding. It takes two hours to cook, I was quite nervous about it's success, when the moment of truth arrived I couldn't have been more chuffed, not just because it looked stunning but it made pudding boy so happy.

And boy did it taste good, it's a 2 pint pudding, I've had about 1/2 pint and rick tried to eat the other 1 1/2 pints but had to give up and is saving the rest for later.
Perfect for such a miserable night....