pigs – Page 2 – Peacock Orchard

The joys of pigs

Last I wrote I liked the pigs a fair amount. You might even say I rather loved them. That hasn’t really changed. Some things have though. It’s warm out. Everyone is coming out of the barn and exploring the run now. The pigs are exploring the fences now. I was confident the fence would with stand the pigs. We built it for our dogs and they’re worse than pigs as they can jump 5′ easy. Like a gazelle, our great pyr is.

The fence is livestock fence fortified on the top and bottom with 2×4’s. They’re digging around it but haven’t made any holes I’m worried about as of yet.

The digging is quite impressive though. They have some massive spots getting tilled.

Our weak spot is the gate. We’ve had two escapes. Both on the same day. The first I was going out to do the morning feed with the kids in tow. I opened the gate and the pigs just bowled me over. I started chasing them in a panic but then common sense returned and I started rattling the feed bucket. They returned and we went about our business.

The second escape happened while the kids were outside chasing bunnies. The pigs come to the sound of our voices and scream like crazy demanding food. This particular day they must have been emboldened by earlier freedom as they started on the gate until it popped open for them. Wrangling them this time required the horse whip and a fair bit of running about.

Now we have the “tomb of the pigs”. The spool must be rolled aside to get access to the gate. I’ve seen plenty of testing of our new fortress but as of yet, no escapes.

It looks trashy at the gate now as everything that was once nicely stored in the barn is now outside the gate as the pigs were DESTROYING EVERYTHING!

To keep from getting bowled over at the gate I throw the scraps over the fence away from the gate before opening it and heading inside.

The duck pond extension fence isn’t quite as well fortified. Since i want them to gley the duck pond I’m letting them have run of the lot but….they’re pushing the corner out of it. I’ve stacked some rip rap around the base now and they haven’t escaped…yet. We’ll see.

If all else fails the electric fence is always available for routing around the base of the fence.

Now on to a few other animals.

The turkey is like this the ENTIRE time he sees me. He’s a real pain in my neck.

The ducks are glorious. I’m a real fan of ducks. I just think they’re adorable.

The pigs are good with the kids. Not great since personal boundaries aren’t their thing and they’ll bowl them over. However, the kids are smart and they wait until the pigs have been fed before going in to collect eggs (the pigs are fed near the nest boxes). They can pet them no problems. No biting problems. Hopefully this continues but if they start biting the kids will be sad as they do love their pig pets.

I like that the pigs can be trusted with all of the birds as well. Not a single incident aside from the day we brought the turkeys home. The male turkey made so much fuss that the pigs were chasing him about just for fun.

Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

My kids are so adorable!

I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.

An unexpected opportunity

Even with my No Freeze, No Fuss, Automatic poultry waterer I was not looking forward to watering 22 ducks over the winter. Ducks are messy. I’m sure you are all shocked to learn that. So we decided we would keep 7 ducks, 6 hens and our welsh harlequin drake. I placed a Craigslist ad for the remaining 15 and was flooded with responses. I was iffy about promising the ducks to any one person. Husband and I decided a first come, first serve mentality was the best, as we’d been stood up by buyers before. However, I was contacted by a very persistent man who wanted all 15 immediately. When discussing the price he casually mentioned he’d like to do a trade. He had pigs, goats and donkeys available. Pigs, oh yes oh yes!

Now, to convince Husband that instead of getting money to help feed the other birds over the winter we should take on 2 more mouths. That went smoothly and it was arranged. While our kids were enjoying themselves at a Halloween party we loaded 15 ducks up in boxes and set off to meet up with our pigs.

This duck was a real PITA. I’d cut slits out of an abundance of caution. We did not want anyone suffocating. There were 2-3 ducks in each box, plenty of space. This duck though, she just had to make a fuss the ENTIRE trip. She annoyed her box mate so much that she jumped ship to another box half way through the journey. I kept crawling back to shove her head down and she’d just pop right back up quacking like a lunatic. Luckily she never figured out how to escape, or we’d have had a loose crazy duck running about the vehicle. Husband would have been thrilled!

At our destination we got to pick between 3 pigs. A larger pig and 2 cute small ones. I went with the two small ones. We loaded them up in the back and set off. They were calm during the journey. Unloading them was a bit of a trick as they didn’t want to be touched. I managed it and they are happily tucked in now.

I originally intended to keep the pigs separate from the poultry. I have 2 connecting runs, one was intended for the ducks, and had a pond, but the pond leaked and the ducks always stayed in the barn with everyone else anyway. I never bothered putting a gate up between the two runs though and so I had a pallet temporarily blocking the entrance.

The pond needed removed, it was cement. I did not want the pigs to slip down and be unable to get back up. So we spent an afternoon removing the cement. The kids helped pick up the small bits, for a price, while we broke the cement into large chunks. We were under constant turkey supervision.

It is now a giant dirt hole that the pigs have no problem navigating. I’m really hoping they gley this pond for us and will be watering them in the bottom of it.

While I was slipping into the barn to turn on the electric fence (dogs kept trying to get at the pigs) a pig followed and…I figured that was fine. They show no interest in the birds and the man we got them from said his chickens go in with his pigs all the time. The pigs are happy to graze on all of the grasses and such in the poultry runs. The birds never did scratch down their runs as they were far too busy begging at the doorstep. I’m not sure how long the grasses will hold out before we have dirt runs, but I’m hoping they can last until spring.

The pigs prefer the duck area. It’s extra muddy!

I am free feeding the pigs, as directed, but this brings about the challenge of keeping everyone else from eating the pig food. I’m mostly just waiting until butcher time when 80% of our birds will be removed.

The kids named the pigs. Son named the bigger pink one Rocker and Daughter named the small black and white pig BLT. Well she said B.L.E. but I suggested we change that to a T and she said that was good. She is desperate to pet them but the pigs are desperate to stay away from her. I hope they adjust in time to each other.

I put 2 feet of hay in the duck hut turned pig shed and the pigs happily slept there their first night, buried in the hay. In fact I couldn’t find them the next morning and was freaking out about it. Thank goodness Rocker snores!

So that is the amazing story of how I turned 15 ducks into 2 pigs. I love my man!