After Pigs Fly

Yesterday, the two week mark for the asparagus, showed pretty much an epic fail. Maybe 100 seeds have actually sprouted; of those, maybe 40 are actually sending up stalks. I suspect that they were doing better while still covered with a layer of soil (scrupulously cleared off by me last week, when I read that I shouldn't cover seeds in soil blocks), so I spent time rearranging the seeds and recovered them.

I made myself irritated: it's sort of a waste of time, and I have other things I need to be doing, like dishes or work, or even reading to my boys. But there's a stubborn bit of me that wants to see: will more of these little guys emerge? What is the right way to grow them? And I've spent two weeks trying to coax them out of their safe shells: can I get them to grow, in the end?

In the future: I'll buy starts.

I planted a few broccoli and cabbage for our own use, and a few more lettuce seeds. The ones planted last week have not emerged, and neither seed catalog I perused could tell me what the standard emergence time is for lettuce seeds. Are those ones dead, too? It's enough to shake this writer's confidence!

The ten jalapeno seeds I planted last week, though, have all germinated. I don't think jalapenos with caesar dressing would whet my appetite quite like a salad, but I do like salsa, and I suppose there will be other fantastic uses for jalapenos, and I am pleased to have 100% emerge.

Today I planted about 350 pepper seeds: sweet, jalapeno, spicy. Peppers are so expensive in the stores (especially organic!): the hope of fresh pepper plants appeals to me.

Phil has been hard at work on a variety of tasks.

With the gusty winds recently, he put a latch on the greenhouse so it will stay closed overnight.

Since I have so many seeds growing, and so many more to start, he made me the other half of my growing set up.

We went to get whey to feed our pigs, and he managed to carry 15 gallon buckets of whey (weighing somewhere around 120 pound each), AND hoist them into the back of the TRUCK. (An intern had filled those containers, to the owner's dismay: who is going to be able to move them? It took a couple years, but Phil is able to move them.)

Phil worked yesterday on building a sturdy chute to load Buttercup into the truck. The heavy pallet he used last time we figured was a bit too strange looking, and a solid-bottomed ramp would be more reassuring.

And so began the dance of "load the Buttercup." First, Phil tried to keep four piglets from running up to the ramp to get the slops placed temptingly in sight and smell, only allowing enormous Buttercup up. She went partially up, but when I reached over to move the pot higher, she turned skittish and backed up. Since her body had been blocking the fence, Phil hadn't been able to push her higher up.

After some interminable time of this, he went to get two 16' sections of cattle panel. He carried them into the pen (thankfully not touching the electric fence with them), and somehow managed smoothly to corral the four piglets in one bent panel and Buttercup in the second.

She wasn't too motivated to move forward. He got in and tried to push her. Nothing doing. Since she weighs twice what he does, and has a MUCH lower center of gravity, if she doesn't want to go somewhere, she doesn't.

After another time of waiting, Phil wired all the fencing in place, and left Buttercup alone. If she was uncomfortable enough in the little pen, she would move. Joe had even been tripping up and down the chute and knocked over the slop pot, so it wasn't like she had no olfactory temptations.

She did move. She broke free into the pen with the other piglets, who Phil had let go.

Maybe she needed some leading. So he let the little piglets go to the ramp.

Happily, we know that a solid-bottomed ramp is much less stressful. The piglets led the way without any difficulty. Buttercup warily kept four on the floor.

At one point, three of the piglets were crammed on Phil's ramp.

One escaped over the top: the larger boar. I watched Phil grab the pig and hold on, pig squealing. Phil finally laid on top of the sturdy fellow, to no avail, so let him go. Incredibly, the piglet let Phil walk right up to him and grab him again. The piglet is loosely corralled for the night.

Buttercup remains unloaded. The beautiful ramp, now permanently stained with beet juice and pig trotters, stands idle. Phil plans to try once more tomorrow morning to load Buttercup, and if she won't load (and I don't REALLY blame her), we will regretfully say, "So long!" to our Berkshire raising hopes, and turn her into very expensive sausage. A bummer from where I'm sitting now, but the Lord knows. Maybe two breeds is too much to play with. Tomorrow morning will tell.

We are trying to think through the big picture of how we want the animals to move through the farm. We don't want pigs always in the same place, and we want to keep the cows moving, but so far we've felt like the closest to home was the most expedient, and haven't done much more. Global thoughts can be a bit difficult, so I wouldn't say we've really reached good conclusions.

One conclusion that thrills me to my toes is our feed. On January 4, I wrote the following, then deleted it because it depressed me too much:

We've run the numbers every way we can, and are ready to shift to soy-based feed. There simply isn't the 100% or 200% premium needed to make it worthwhile. Our feed will still be GM-free, which is a hill I'm willing to die on, but soy, well, not so much.

I had no doubt that the taste would change for our eggs and meat. Maybe not much, but it would. I really don't want to support the soy industry, and I DO want to support the local feed company that I think does so much well.

But we need to cut our feed costs in half. And here is where a stray comment from this last weekend helped us. Mark had mentioned that he doesn't feed his animals (much), and so he doesn't get enough fat on his animals to make good sausage, while a normal pig should produce about three quarts of lard. I laughed at this, because our two pigs had given us three gallons of lard, not counting the fat ground into the sausage directly. So we had twice the lard we should have had. No wonder the pigs go through over 200 pounds of feed a week.

Our chickens, too, are "eating" about twice the supposed need of 4-6 ounces of feed per bird per day. "Eating," because they certainly pick at what they prefer and leave what doesn't strike their fancy.

So that's our solution: cut our feeds in half, but still feed them what we love.

Makes me happy.

And, a photo of a tired Joe, who dozed off yesterday at 5pm. Horrified, I woke him when I returned from making dinner ("I tried to wake him!" said Abraham, but Joe can be quite hard to waken if you can't pick him up). He didn't fall asleep until after 11pm. Always a Daddy's boy, I haven't quite seen this sleeping arrangement, though, with Daddy's legs as the cradle, complete with an, um, unusual pillow.