Honestly, not a lot. The weather has been crappy this year. The wind, severe. Snow, lots. Now it’s raining of course, I’m trying to get stuff done but blah. We have all the things to put up new obstacles on the obstacle course and I’m just waiting for weather to cooperate.
I’m also waiting on the garden. This year I’ve ordered wood chips and I’m buying compost and I might weed fabric. This better work out for me because I have the worst time growing things.
Still have pigs though we’ve added a mini pig who is satanic (jumps in the air to try to bite us). That’s a story because we were basically tricked into taking her. Blah!
I have found the pigs to be surprising in their usefulness. Yes, they are delicious and extremely cheap to keep spring through fall. I didn’t expect the million other things they’ve done for the property and those that live here.
First of all, when we bought the pigs we had a problem. I actually asked game and fish to come out and try to figure out what was murdering all of our poultry. We lost a lot of them; peacocks, ducks, chickens, etc. It was determined it was likely a raccoon and we couldn’t catch it because it kept breaking out of our live trap. I had just accepted the end of poultry keeping. Then Joey was brought to our property and suddenly the killing stopped. We haven’t lost a single animal since getting Joey 4 years ago. So, highly recommend putting a boar in your barn. Apparently nothing wants to mess with one!
Next pig benefit is the way they roam the property digging randomly. Our property needs some disruption. It also unearths things for the poultry to eat. They love to follow them around picking up things they’ve dug up for them.
One very unexpected thing is that the pigs have absolutely no problem breaking the ice in the waterers. I try to make sure they have fresh, unfrozen water twice a day. It’s cold while I’m at work though. It freezes over. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out to give them more water to find the ice broken and random animals taking advantage. I’ve found the cats in their water. The chickens, of course. Wild birds and rabbits. Water isn’t found often around these parts and in the winter it gets rough. The pigs are personally responsible for hydrating every animal on our property.
They also keep the chickens warm. I’ve found the chickens sleeping on them when it’s real cold out. Oh piggies, I do love you!
I have two hives this year and I want them to make it through the winter. On advice of a local bee expert I took the boxes with honey and condensed the bees into a single box each. As such they absolutely need to be fed. I wanted to be able to feed them without having to open up the body of the hive while it’s cold out. I also want to prevent the bees from having access to the empty box where the food is to be. Being cheap, and searching the internet for various ideas, I made this up out of items we had in the garage.
Strips of wood, this is cut from our porch. I cut them into 1 foot pieces.Excess window screen.I stapled it around the wood long ways first.Then I folded over the ends and stapled it. This makes it firm and helps prevent the bees climbing out the ends.Nice, firm bee feeder.Can hold 3 jars along the length.AND it’s in.
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 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.
