Orchard Helper

Newspaper as weed blocker- it sucks

I am starting a new garden, a bigger garden. Fully fenced and with drip irrigation I have great hopes for this garden. I did have a little issue with grasses and other plants in this area. I set the pigs and chickens to work clearing the area up. They did a somewhat ok job of it. At least when I threw their food out on the spots I wanted taken care of.

So obviously I still needed to do something about all the remaining vegitation. I started saving newspaper. So, let me tell you about how much that sucks. I tried two different ways of laying the paper down. The second one was much better than the first but still a pain in the butt.

Now, let me remind ya’ll that I’m in Wyoming. It is pretty much never at least a little breezy here. There was a bit of a breeze while I was laying this paper down and trying to get it wet before it would blow away was driving me a bit nuts. Plus while I’m spraying it down and trying to flatten it it’s ripping and basically making me regret my life decisions.

Then comes the issue of planting through the paper. That was a pain in the butt as well. Some of the planting turned out ok. The paper remained in tact enough to still be a sufficient weed barrier. With others it just crumbled and became useless. Frustrating!

I carried on and planted all of the cabbage and celery. Then mulched over the top with wood chip bedding.

Will let you know how this works out for me. I’ll do a separate post on my other newspaper method.

PIGLET!

We knew it would happen. After a week of beautiful weather another hard snowstorm was expected. We’d been on high alert for one of our younger gilts to farrow. As the days ticked by we just knew she would do it as soon as it started snowing. Lo and behold, she did.

Monday morning I went out to do my normal checks and feeding and there was the tiniest little piglet shivering in the hay. I grabbed it up and stuck it in my coat to go inside to warm up. Then I turned on the heat lamp (which was not on before for safety reasons) and went out to check on Mama. She had another piglet (3x larger than the one in the house) that was stillborn. I couldn’t save it. No others.

I’m not sure what it is about my guinea hogs but they have TINY first litters. Tu-tu just had 3 babies her first time around. She did have 8 the second time though, so there is hope. This mama had 2 and was done.

I sat out in the barn with the piglet in my coat debating what to do. Do I decide it’s too cold out and keep the piglet as a bottle baby? I know the risks involved in that. I called a few friends and asked opinions. Most told me to give mama the piglet and let what happens happen. So I did. Oh the angst. I was just determined that our 3rd farrowing be successful. I checked mama and baby often. The tiny little piglet was staying under the heat lamp and mama was laying in front of it which helped block any drafts. I put hay all around them. Still, I did not expect it to survive.

I went out the next morning sluggishly. I did not want to have to pick up another dead piglet. To my utter amazement the piglet was alive. Same with the next day, and the next. The weather has warmed back up now and mama and baby are doing just fine. It may be the smallest piglet ever but it makes my heart feel light!

Oh boy. I failed again

Breeding pigs is much harder than I had anticipated. After Tu-Tu’s first failed farrowing I had become convinced she was sterile. She was so sick after that farrowing and it’s been almost a year without a successful breeding.

So we bought some gilts to see if we could successfully breed them. They will be breeding age in March and I am excited to see how we do.

Then I started looking at Tu-Tu with some skeptical eyes. Is it just me or is she looking, well, pregnant?

I took some photographs, asked various pig people. Had other people out to look at her. The consensus was that she was not, in fact pregnant. Just really fat.

Still, I had a strange feeling about her so I put her into seclusion in the barn. She was there for a week without showing any changes to her body and I began to doubt myself. She must not be pregnant and I’m losing my mind, I thought.

Then one morning, after our first night in the negative temps, I went out to feed and…babies. Babies everywhere. 8, in fact. All frozen completely solid. Little blocks of ice.

I gathered them up and took them to the burn barrel to be cremated and cursed myself for not keeping a better eye on Tu-tu.

How can I be so bad at this?

Tu-tu is out and about with the other pigs after breaking a solid metal horse gate after a week. I had hoped to keep her confined until February so I can plan these farrowings better. Hadn’t expected that gate to be so easy to snap.

Bee more careful!

I went to check the bees to see if they needed fed. Lots of dead ones all around the hive. I unwrap it and press my ear to the hive to listen. Silent, feels dead. So, I decide it’s time to open it up and get the honey out before anything else beats me to it. Surprise, bees are alive and I’m an idiot. Luckily it wasn’t that cold outside and I put the lid back on but….I admit, I ran from some super angry bees. I obviously need to work on my bee detective skills. 😉

Jumping into home brewing by growing it all

After watching a rather inspiring Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Fight we decided we just had to brew our own beer. Jimmy made it look easy peasy and we had a lot of things growing we could flavor our beer with. Fresh honeycomb from the bees. Lemonbalm. etc etc.

Obviously I decided we should grow 100% of what we needed to brew. I started researching barley. I decided on trying Calypso barley for winter planting. Now, we have no idea if it will grow. It’s winter tolerant in Michigan, we have no idea about here. We bought seed from Schmidt Farms. They send us a bushel of untreated Calypso seed with the promise of Odyssey barley to try in the spring.

I never do anything “normal” and growing barley is no different. I planted a nice amount of it in the fenced off garden. I even watered that. I suppose that is my back up barley plan. That barley is likely to grow and succeed. The other plantings, who knows. Fascinated to find out! Some of it is going to be planted in the tree line. I’m interested to see how it does there. Some has already been planted in the un-planted kraters. Then we will plant a few of the bare spots on the land to see if it grows there. May go throw some in the dam area to see how it does there. Based on what grows where we’ll do our spring plantings maybe a tiny bit more structured.

So how am I planting it? Well that varies as well. In the garden I did till. *gasp* I know. Unfortunately the garden keeps getting broken into by chickens and ducks and they’d obliterated the mulch. We had A LOT of weeds growing in the garden and I’d done nothing about them. I could have mulched again but that wouldn’t help us horribly much when I wanted to plant immediately. So we borrowed a tiller and tilled it up. Then I spread the seeds around by hand and raked them in. Then watered. I’ve already chased the stupid ducks out once. I’m trying to keep the annoying creatures locked up. I have no idea how they are escaping the pen. It’s just a few of them that have figured it out, the smaller ones. Probably squeezing under the gate. Anyway, so if the darn birds don’t eat all the seed that one is a sure win for growing.

The kraters were planted by hand. I simply used my new weeding hoe to scratch a trench. Then the kids sprinkled seeds in and I covered it over and stomped it in.

I have no idea if this will work but hey, we’re experimenting here people!

The rest hasn’t been planted yet. We really need to get on it. Unfortunately the tractor battery was dead, dead, dead. We replaced it and now I just need a minute to go get the stuff ready for planting. We are going to plant the rest of the barley like we planted the sainfoin. Use the grader/scraper to rip up the top of the ground, sprinkle the seeds and then grade over it again.

Taking a little planting break with the pup.

Getting her out of the bucket is the hard part.

Coming soon is our hops plant which I believe I will keep inside until spring where it will hopefully be planted on our new pergola by the swim pond.

Wheat isn’t something we don’t have to plant. We get enough seed blowing over from the fields around us that we can just harvest wheat without effort. Now if the wheat grows like that, fingers crossed for this barley!

Am I the only one doing this?

Alright people, if you’ve been reading my blog at all you’ll be surprised by what is to come. I’m starting to feel like a weirdo. Yup. All the stuff I’ve been doing and I’ve never felt particularly weird about it. This pig thing though, it’s starting to make me feel weird.

Am I the only one “free ranging” pigs with other animals? Am I the only one not having any problems with it? It’s so easy. I have the laziest system set up in the entire world. This is awesome, because I am essentially lazy at my core.

I have considered that it is the area that has made me so successful at this. We have 40 acres. We have wheat fields in front of our acreage. Our neighbors houses are placed so that there is maximum distance between our properties. Our road is only used by 3 families. Also, it’s Wyoming, old wheat fields that have been over grazed since being developed into residences. In short, there is pretty much nothing to eat off of our property.

So, perhaps I am not having any problems because there is nothing tempting my little piggies to wander. Maybe I’m just lucky. I don’t know. All I know is I open the gate in the morning and all of my animals come pouring out. Chickens, ducks, geese, peacocks and pigs. They all hang out together in the barn until release. Then the smarter chickens follow the pigs around waiting for them to dig up delicious morsels.

The pigs themselves wander here and there. We have no fences around our acreage that would keep a pig in except for those around the barn and yard. A few times they’ve gone to the end of our property to nibble the weeds around the road. We escort them back when they do. The neighbors are used to the sight of fat black pigs wandering about. At night they put themselves up and I shut the gate again. A few times I’ve heard coyotes close and have gone out earlier to lure the pigs back to the barn with a bucket of treats. This is, of course, not because I’m worried about the pigs. It’s because I’m worried about all the birds who would be left with the gate open until the pigs returned. The pigs can handle themselves. Our dogs are terrified of them.

As I watch YouTube videos and read blogs of various people I notice pigs are treated with suspicion. People seem afraid they’ll eat the other animals or escape to never return. I admit to being surprised by this attitude and it makes me feel…well….weird.

I should also note I don’t feed them except when absolutely necessary. We give them our food scraps but otherwise spring, summer and most of fall they are on their own. Get out and find food or starve!

I don’t want to mislead you all though. We had a dog break in and kill our chickens. When I went in and started making a pile with the bodies I woke the pigs up. They went to work destroying all the evidence aka eating the dead chickens. I don’t know that I would leave someone actively bleeding out there with them. However, I’ve seen them wait and watch a chicken die. They didn’t approach it until it was actually dead. Then they ate it no problems. Pig morals.

They’re just wandering in this picture.I took it from our living room. I love watching them meander.