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 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.
Every year we eagerly await our sainfoin bloom. Acres of pink flowers blowing in the breeze. The sound of bees buzzing and watching butterflies flit from flower to flower fills me with joy. The sainfoin, it’s a success.
This year the pigs set out every morning to much their way through the field of growing sainfoin plants. I find how the pigs graze on the sainfoin quite interesting. They’ll take a bite of the top of a plant and then move on to bite a different one, leaving tracks through the fields as they explore all the plants with their mouths. It is also a very sustainable way of grazing. As they never eat an entire plant there are always flowers left to bloom and go to seed.
The field in it’s beginning growth this spring being grazed by our boar.
I don’t believe the sainfoin is as tall this year as it was last. It was a weird spring though, with snows into June and warmer weather in between. It killed many a plant and tree with the instability of the weather. Still, the field was tall enough that I lost the pigs in it entirely several times and freaked out thinking they’d wandered away or been taken.
We wandered through the fields many an evening trying to determine if the field was thickening and spreading or not. It has been determined that it is indeed spreading by seed beyond the original planting area. We can tell because we planted right up to the fence line and there are many plants on the other sides of the fences now.
We also have new critter activity in the area. We’ve had a badger going crazy digging holes everywhere, even in the sainfoin field. I’m interested to see what impact that has on the sainfoin around it next year.
Also, if you are wondering if it’s nutritious, enjoy this picture of Tu-Tu who clearly isn’t missing anything in her diet.
Surprise, baby #3 is on the way. Due in Nov/Dec with another girl. If how much she moves right now is any indication, we’re in for it! This pregnancy has been very hard on my physically. I feel generally unwell a lot. My veins in my leg are really swollen and painful. It’s really prevented me from living fully as I had been.
So with another baby expected I’ve been looking at our pigs. I believe I only want to carry one female and our boar into the winter. Our boar has had a wonderful pen built for him so we will not have any more surprise winter farrowings.
As weird as it sounds I believe I’m going to keep our older female Tu-tu and slaughter the younger, smaller females that have farrowed. This would seem like a really odd decision except…these two smaller sows have had horrible problems free ranging. Grass seeds get into their eyes and I’ve been battling a lot of eye infections in them. I’ve had to lock them up 24/7 as a result. I decided I really didn’t want to breed pigs susceptible to eye problems so we are selling all of the young and eating the sows. I don’t believe other people will have the same problem with the eyes as I have had as I’m fairly certain I’m the only person ever to free range their pigs here.
So Ads are up for the piglets and we are excited to see them go to their new homes. Wish us luck!
The weather here has been crazy! I thought for sure that storm would hit us but it missed us, thank goodness. Still lost power for about 30 minutes.
I have been determined to grow pawpaws. So determined that I think this might be my 4th attempt in a new location. I’ve had some success in the kraters but they get eaten back every year and eventually die. Near the pond was nice but they were squished and eaten by farm animals.
So, onward to location 4. The newly transformed orchard garden. The barn shades a portion of the area for quite a bit of the day. That is where i planted these pawpaws.
I had some troubles with this order. The delivery was a rough on a couple of the trees. Branch breaking rough. I planted them anyway but thought they would die. At the very least they look pathetic. Enjoy my children holding the damaged trees for documentation.
I received my trees from One Green World. I generally love all the things I order from them. In fact most of the living orchard trees are from them. I ordered the pawpaw tree bundle which was a sale of 4 different trees. I should have written down what the tags say because at the computer right now I can’t remember what they are to save my life. I know they didn’t have 2 of the varieties in the bundle and I told them to just send me whatever they had.
I have really long grass in this area as I haven’t planted anything else here because of the shade. The grass has been fantastic actually. It insulates the pawpaws from the mornings scorching sun and has kept them all looking well. There is some insect damage, more on some than others, but they’re looking good so far.
Vegetation in general is very tall this year. Can you see my daughters head walking back to the house?
