I have been busy during quarantine preparing the greenhouse for spring planting. I have bags and bags of leaves from my work to use as mulch. My son’s old bed frame as a nice trellis area and a drive to get it done.
First I had to dig a trench under the wood frame for the greenhouse and fill it with rocks. I got to thinking that having planting beds against the frame would really speed up rotting of the greenhouse. After brainstorming several solutions with the people at permies.com I decided the easiest, and probably most effective, would be trenching and filling with rock, making a french drain of sorts under the greenhouse frame.
Then I broad forked the in ground greenhouse beds. Our ground is hard clay and this wasn’t easy! Then the kids assisted me in spreading mulch.
Then I put out the giant pots. I intend to use these to plant things the ground squirrels can’t resist eating. These are not filled yet but I have started the process by putting a bunch of dead branches in the bottom of the pots. I will fill them with compost as soon as I can get some.
I hung some pots up around the walls for storage and because I love the look. Added solar lights, which aren’t super bright at night but work well enough and I do enjoy the look of the lights.
I intend to make a potting bench on the right side of the back wall. I have water barrels coming and am going to wait for them before I build the bench. All in all I am excited to start planting!
I debated how I would write this post and decided I would write about several different categories. I am basing my opinions off our current American Guinea Hogs versus the commercial pigs we raised several years ago.
Temperament
I have enjoyed these pigs. Our big boar is the kids favorite. In fact, they petitioned heavily for his continued existence on the farm. He’s gentle with the kids and with other animals. I have no fear of him attacking anyone. Though I should say that my husband and the pig hate each other. We had two sows who were calm and easy to work with. The third was not as great. She did make some half-hearted efforts to bite me several times. The babies have been pretty easy to handle. They’re friendly but don’t particularly like to be touched.
They are easy on the fences and most everything else around. I have had to reinforce a few spots but that is mostly from separating the boar from the sows. He made a pretty good effort in the beginning to get back to them, then his lazy nature won out and he hasn’t tried since.
Size
This is highly variable I’ve found. Our boar is approximately 350lbs. The sow we bought with him was around 250lbs. We bought two other sows and they topped off at around 170lbs each. Their kids are still quite small at 8 months of age. I was really hoping they’d grow like their Dad, but it isn’t looking like it.
The smaller size is nice when handling them. They are still all muscle but we were able to shove them onto the horse trailer without too much effort. This may also speak to their temperament.
Hardiness
The cold does not appear to bother them once they are grown enough to be weaned. Like all other pigs they cannot handle the cold while piglets. They have thick, long black hair that keeps them cozy with minimal effort on my part. The downside to this being that scraping and skinning involves A LOT of hair. It’s everywhere at butcher time.
Time Investment
These pigs obviously take much longer to grow to butcher size. I’d estimate about two years before they’ve stopped growing entirely.
Feed Input
I think this probably equals out to a commercial hog. I don’t feed them anything from Spring to Fall. They graze the property with the occasional table scrap snack. They get FAT on grazing alone. However, I feed during the winter. As these pigs have to be kept for a longer period of time the feed input probably equals out to a heavily fed, short duration commercial hog.
Quality of Meat
They are delicious. Some of the best tasting meat we’ve ever had. Even considering that one of them was 3 years old the meat is just perfect. It isn’t tough. The flavor, again, amazing. HOWEVER, and this is a big however, the quantity leaves something to be desired. Check out this pork chop. I laughed so hard. Once you cut the fat off these pigs there just isn’t a whole lot left. We did get a ton of lard and we’ve been cooking with it. It adds great flavor to everything. Husband has been joking that we’ll be out of pork by the fall, and we killed 6 pigs. It may not be a joke, we really might eat it all by then.
I finally installed all of the windows and was ready to start sheet metaling the rest of the structure. It was slow going as I could not work in the wind and yet again, I was pregnant.
On a nice day I recruited my child slave labor to clean the windows. It was a messy job, cleaning the kids up afterward was just as much work.
Still. my children did a good job cleaning all the years of grime off of those windows and the greenhouse looks very nice clean.
Now is the tricky part, sheet metal. Wyoming is WINDY. I was only able to do this in bits and pieces as I waited for periods without wind. I felt like it took forever, but in reality it was probably just a few weeks.
Fully enclosed in metal I only had the finish work to do. I debated the molding portion of this project for awhile before deciding I would use fence pickets. They were the perfect size, required no cutting width wise, just length.
I should probably stain/paint or somehow otherwise seal the wood pickets to prevent damage. I may get around to that eventually, or I may not and regret it years later. Who knows.
I must admit, as wonderful as having our own honey is, that was a heck of a lot of work. It wasn’t even the spinning that was bad but the clean up. Of course, we did harvest in our house, next to the wood stove (so the honey would be warm and easier to spin).
We had the fire roaring and took turns spinning frames as it was still a lot of work and required holding the spinner still so it didn’t rock all over.
Daughter is happily taking her turn
I had experimented with the hive by having some frames with foundation and some without. Of course, the frames without foundation did not have the comb aligned so that it would fit in the spinner. Thus, I removed it and stuck it in some cheesecloth to be squished and drip out with gravity.
Bottling honey
I wanted to have little, adorable jars of honey to give as Christmas gifts. These turned out so well and were so well received that I may get more bees just to do this again.
As the bees died I scraped all of the wax off of the frames and began melting it down, over and over and over and over and you get the idea. This is the final product. One candle jar full of clean bees wax. No idea what we are going to do with it.
All in all it was an experience. Again, I was pregnant, so the workload was really hard on me. We are enjoying the honey, we estimate 2 gallons worth, but I don’t know if it was worth it.
With honey waiting to be harvested we decided to try brewing mead. Husband began researching recipes and techniques and supplies were purchased.
I did not get any pictures of him starting the mead. Again, pregnancy, pain, craziness. I missed a lot. He used this recipe: Joe’s Ancient Orange Mead
After first racking
A month or so in, when the yeast appeared completely used up Husband racked the mead and we had our first sip. We used two different kinds of yeast. One is regular active-dry bread yest and the other was fancy Red Star Premier Blanc yeast.
It is my opinion that the premier blanc had a better taste at this time. The bread yeast just wasn’t as enjoyable.
After second racking and ready to bottle
After racking a second time it was crunch time and the mead needed bottled as we intended to give some bottles as Christmas presents.
Husband, being the scientist he is, bought the required equipment to test alcohol content.
Testing alcohol content
14% alcohol is what they came out to.
Bottling using the siphonCorking the bottles
Then he obsessively frowned at his corking job and re-corked several bottles.
Finished, labeled bottles
Husband designed the labels for the bottles and voila, done. Beautiful bottles of mead for family to enjoy, and us.
Now, upon this tasting, at the bottling stage, I must confess the bread yest mead had a better taste. Crazy, huh. It was really enjoyable, and I hadn’t really enjoyed mead previously. We will be doing this again.
Well, I was pregnant ya’ll. It was a tougher pregnancy. I had a lot of pain. While we were both perfectly healthy I did not feel well at all. It made accomplishing anything very difficult.
Thanksgiving morning, at 4a.m. I went into labor. It was a scary time for us. We had some monstrous snow storms and we’d been very afraid that we would not be able to get into town and I’d have an unwanted home delivery.
Thanksgiving Day labor was God given. It was essentially the only two days the weather cooperated for us to get in and out of our house. If I’d gone into labor before or after I would have been stuck home.
Baby girl is perfect and not a good sleeper. That on top of this crazy weather has meant we still aren’t up to much.
Not sleeping
I did accomplish some things though and I will share some pictures as soon as I can.
