Six Baby Piglets!

Phil whispered this morning, "Come see the piglets!" before the boys woke up. Buttercup hadn't come up to eat her breakfast this morning, so Phil went searching, and found her, hiding away in the farthest part of the pen, safely hidden behind downed trees. She had six little spotted babies, crawling all over her and each other.

Although we didn't get close enough to pick them up, I would guess they each weigh about four pounds. They were cute enough to tempt me to want to keep breeding pigs, so it's probably a good thing that the stud is scheduled for processing.

Phil and I both mentioned how delightful it is to have six. We could sell some, or keep them all. And because this isn't our income stream, instead of being extremely disappointed that she didn't give twelve (after all, these are some expensive piglets, since I had originally hoped for babies in April!), we can just be thankful for an uncomplicated delivery, and for the adorable antics of the six cuties. My favorite trick is when the piglets get stuck on Buttercup's nose: they try to walk over it and get a bit hung up. Her snout is on the ground: their underbellies can hardly get over. Amazing the size difference.

Isaiah, always the most eager, crawled out on the thin branch directly over Buttercup, so he could get a better view. Sort of like Superman: pigs look up as little as people, and he had a safe and happy time up there.

I spent several hours picking onions. The largest of them is the size of a plum, and most are more like golf balls. Some I should have harvested weeks ago, I think: the onions hidden by tall weeds are much more squishy than the perfectly hard globes found in the sunshine. I even found one clump of three leeks. They weren't huge, but they were tasty.

I found a couple dozen eggs as I was picking onions. The free-ranging hens liked the tall, uninterrupted grass, and took up laying. I gathered the eggs, though I am concerned to crack them open. It's always a bit risky.

While in one onion patch, I noticed that the peaches were beautifully red. And mostly crawling with bugs. I picked one and ate it, odd blemishes and all. It was delicious. I decided to summon the boys later (and ate a second one).

The boys came out to harvest a bit reluctantly. But I took photos of them all, picking their first fruit on the farm.

The total came to a little more than seven pounds of fruit. I probably had the boys pick them a bit early, since the two I had earlier today were great, but the ones picked with the boys were mixed.

This taste of summer won't last longer than a few days, but since we just planted the trees last year, to have fruit on all four of the Contender variety is a little gift, and I am grateful.

The older boys have also been picking raspberries almost every day. They walk the swale lines, finding the bushes, and enjoy their little red rewards.

For Phil, the day was again a story of petty irritations. He ran errands, and got everything on the list, except to pick up the bag of ice he paid for. He finished clearing a path for the tractor, but when he went to knock down the sides of the little run off creek a bit, to make a ford, the tractor got stuck. Very stuck in the mud.

After trying to put downed trees under the wheels and still getting no traction, he managed to pull the tractor out with the truck.

Later, he forgot that the cigarette lighter on the truck runs down the battery. He had left his iPod plugged in, and the truck battery was dead, with 200 gallons of water in the back that he needed to water the cows. So he drove the tractor around to try to pull it out, but the tractor wasn't strong enough. He tried the jumper cables, but the tractor battery is small enough that it didn't help the truck at all. Finally, he reformed the cow pen so he could water them with the truck in place, and took the truck battery home to let it charge overnight, plugged in.

He's also researching how to get the orchard ever more healthy and how to construct stone buildings without metal reinforcement.

We have been delighted with the weather the last several days: in the mid-80s, sunny and overcast by turns. It feels like a perfect spring, not the middle of July. Virginia is a great place to live.