Pinky's piglets

Pinky has been doing a very good job with her first litter. I'm hopeful we'll wean all of them, but time will tell. Right now the piglets are spending quite a bit of time messing with each other, burrowing in the hay, and sleeping.

Pinky is a solid pink pig like the one on the left, the boar is a seriously spotted pig. Makes for interesting combinations.

The piglet facing us is colored like his/her dad, but is mostly pink.

Red n blacks piglets are a completely different color scheme. Same dad.

Here's dad, patrolling the perimeter fence for tasty grass.

The pigs are sinking!

The river bottom land that I farm is rock-free. It's a joy to till, and to grow things, but the pigs are showing one of its drawbacks. With a little water, and a lot of pigs, it turns into chocolate mousse. Right here the actual soil is about 70% peat moss.

I didn't put this feeder down into a mudpit. When it was placed, two or so weeks ago, this was a nice grassy area. It's in a pasture that I want to rehab, so I put the pigs into it to root it out and dig up most of the metal debris. Over time, with a little bit of rooting and a lot of rain, the ground has gradually turned into this boot-grabbing mud that's about 18" deep at this point.

To eat, the pigs actually "surf" in to the feeder, counting on the mud to support their bodies and "swimming" up to the feeder. It's pretty funny to watch.

I moved the feeder to another place a little farther down the pasture right after this picture was taken. In a week it'll look a lot like this spot.

Hay, wind, tarps

A blustery, sunny springlike day today. This is my 2nd hay stack, and the tarp has broken loose and really wants to fly away.

I put down pallets,and then put plywood down to cover the pallets, and stacked the hay on top of it, and then tarped the whole thing. But the tarp hasn't worked very well, so I figure I've lost about 30% of this pile of bales. Not as big as a disaster as it might seem, this is local grass hay that I bought for $2/bale, but annoying none the less. I'll probably sort through the pile, cut the bales open and spread them on the field and then till them in for compost. Lots of straw mushrooms in this pile.

my main hay stack is in my hay barn and I've only lost about 5% of that, mostly on the bottom edges, but I didn't get the barn completed until october, and by then it wasn't possible to get to this pile of hay with the truck, so I take my losses and chalk it up to education.