an apple a day

We've got two hungry pigs. (Practically starving if you believed them by the amount they squeal at dinner time!). We also have 7 or 8 apple trees with a bumper crop of apples this year.

A perfect match! Pigs and apples. Only our boys aren't very keen on getting one portion of fruit and veg a day, let alone 5.

For the first few days, when everything was new and exciting, they did eat a few bits of chopped up apples and they chewed around the stones of some plums and damsons too. But since they've got used to a twice daily delivery of pig pellets and acorns, they've gone off the fruit. We didn't understand this, as our pig book says to 'give your pig a treat, like a nice apple'. They wouldn't eat them, let alone see it as a treat!

So our collection of windfalls was set to sit in the shed, ready to be made into yet more apple sauce. (Which we will be needing lots of, once the pigs become pork joints!). Until we found a solution to our pig-apple problem!

Thanks to the lovely people at our favourite piggy online forums - River Cottage and Its not easy being green, we came across the idea of apple-mush. Its basically like making babyfood, for pigs.

Take a small box load of apples, or damsons, pears or any other free fruit you have lying around in your (or your neighbours) gardens.
Take a food mixer and pulp fruit into a surprisingly appetising and sweet smelling mush.
Add a handfull of mixed grain - chicken food is ideal, pig pellets work too - to give it a little substance.
Add mixture to food trough attended by two hungry pigs.
Watch as snouts get covered in apple goo and the rest of the mixture disappears!

An apple a day ..... keeps the pigs happy and healthy (and makes pork nice and sweet tasting!).

Tags:

• pig
• pigs
• food
• apples

more land, more moss, more digging!

Our boys have done a great job digging up their run. Too good a job, and the clay soil mixed with a good lashing of Cumbrian rain has made a really good mud bath, complete with slippery slopes for skidding on in wellies.

So, we decided that expansion was the only plan. We are very lucky that the garden next to ours is large, overgrown with scrub and brambles and in need of rotavating. And our boys are the best rotavators ever.

Sam and Ben spent a day fencing off part of the new area and laying logs around the bottom of the fence to ward off any more escape attempts.



Then we opened up a gate from their run into the new undug area. They were a bit hesitant at first, and surprisingly it was little Gary who made the first moves to explore.



They are now enjoying their new 'day centre' - we feed them back in their run every evening and then shut the gate, just to minimise escape risks! - and are doing really well with their rotavating task. They seem to be concentrating on the mossy areas first, I'm not sure what they find or eat down there, but they will quite happily stick their whole head under a carpet of moss, before jerking upwards to send moss, roots, leaves etc flying.



On their first evening in 'pig dig heaven' I went down after work to see how they were getting on, and was rather disappointed when I was greeting only briefly by Gary and pretty much completely ignored by Minty. But the low level grunting noises and the continuous digging gives an impression of very happy pigs, I'm sure they'll get back to biting my wellies and snout-butting me for food once they've got over the excitment.

bedding - and why farmers have landrovers

We needed to get the boys more bedding which meant a few bales of straw were in order. We could have gone to a pet shop or farm supply shop to buy bags of the stuff, but thats really meant for people who keep tiny guinea pigs or a few rabbits, not two cheeky piglets, so we figured we'd be better going direct to a farmer and buying in bulk. Even though pigs only need their bedding changing every 3 to 4 weeks, they're still going to get through it.

Using our local contacts we got the name of a farmer who's just outside our village and pitched up on a saturday afternooon with some cash in hand having no idea what the going rate for straw is these days.

Our farmer was so friendly and helpful! He was interested to hear about our home pig experiment and showed us his shed full of young calves who licked our hands and generally looked very cute. He explained that the modern havesters don't produce the small straw bales anymore, they produce really big ones - like about 4m long! But he was more than happy to saw off a small piece from the end for us, and only charge us £5 for it.

It looked pretty small as this pile of straw fell to the ground amongst the towering bales in the barn - with the farmers young daughter climbing all over them! Didn't look so small when it came to stuffing it into the back of our rather small hatchback. We just manged to get the boot shut but the car still has bits of straw dangling from the roof and covering the floor a week later.



This is why proper farmers and smallholders have proper vehicals, like landrovers, which look like they are meant to be covered in straw. Here's Sam with the biggest bit of the straw ready to go down to the shed, we also filled up a large crate with all the straggly bits that had come loose!

the great escape - pig style

Well so much for our digging day on Friday... Sunday 9am, Val goes down the garden to feed the chickens and the two piglies are the wrong side of the chicken / pig dividing line!

They had opened the gate and were happily digging about in chickenville and snuffling up acorns. Unfortunatly there were no witnesses with video cameras around, but Val says she had a fun old time trying to get them back in. I think it went something like: One pig in through gate, chase other pig, get second pig in as first pig comes out again through fence. First pig runs to be with second pig but gets confused by the fence in between them. Much oinking and squealing later (yes, and that was just Val) two pigs safely back in pig run.

When we first made the pig run, by putting up a wire fence across the chicken area, we didn't realise it had a 'right way up'. The holes at the bottom are smaller than the holes at the top, more by luck than judgement Sam and Ben got it the right way up for most of it.... but not the bit to the right-hand side of the gate. The holes aren't big but just big enough for a small wriggly piglet to get through.

So, this morning was spent putting small chicken wire all along the big holed wire fence and putting a wooden baton across the gate with a bit metal bolt. I still think it will need more reinforcement as the pigs get bigger, and heavier, and more adventurous and I'm sure this won't be the last post with the word 'escape' in the title!

Digging - them and us

The pigs have started digging. A lot. Very near the fence. We're slightly worried about calls from the neighbours reporting two strippy runaways devastating a prize-winning turnip patch at 6 in the morning.

So we're digging back.

Sam started by reinforcing the fence by hammering in more stakes (made of bent wire that's a bit thicker than coathangers)...


...and then we decided to tackle the back fence where the pigs have been getting pretty close to digging under. We live in a old Edwardian house, and lying in the garden scrub were some old cast iron pipes. We dug out a trench all along the fence line to get the wire in as deep as possible. It took two of us to lift the pipes and lay them on top of the fence wire, but we're hoping the weight of them will keep the wire down and stop the pigs being able to dig out underneth them.



Then we did some digging to keep the pigs happy. We found a great old log with quite rough bark about 1m long which we thought would make a great scratching post. We dug a big hole - little Gary came along to see what we were doing, tried to help with the digging, fell in the hole. After removing the pig from the hole, we put the log in and firmed it down. A perfectly scratchy log just at pig height for hours of happy scratching.

Have the pigs scratched since we put it in? Oh yes, on the fence, the gate, inside their ark, against my wellies - on the post . . . . not a chance.

Here they are being completely underwhelmed by it.

food - likes and dislikes

"Oh the pigs'll eat that". They will, will they? Not quite.

We thought that our pigs would straight away be munching on anything that came out of the kitchin prep area. But they seem to have definite likes and dislikes, though this may change as they get older. So far we have:

Likes:
plums
damsons
apples
pears
pig pellets (favourite!)
acorns (they live under a large oak tree)
roots they dig up
(All the fruit is windfall from the garden and they can only manage the apples if chopped up, they also prefer the soft fruit cut up a little bit.)

Dislikes:
potato peelings
carrot peelings
raw brocoli

We'll add more food-fad updates as we try them on more things and their appetites change!

A Very Wet Day

It has poured with rain for the whole day, quite torrentially! Although Gary and Minty have seen rain, it has been intermittent and they have still been able to have lots of play time. Today they have been awash, even their water bowl is overflowing. They clearly don't like wet weather as they have spent practically all day snuggled up in the straw in their cosy house. The path down to the pig enclosure is a river of mud, caused by our wellies and numerous forays by ducks and chickens. Of course the ducks love the rain but the dozy chickens hate it but still go out in it! Tigger was so wet, he looked like a punk with his feathers sticking out all over.

pig meets cat

I had a great time with the boys last night. I spent about an hour with them after work, giving them their second feeding and generally playing. They love comming over to sniff my hands, rub against and chew at my wellies, pull at my trousers with their mouths, try and push me over with their snouts - all of which I think is to try and get me to give them a good scratching on their heads, necks and shoulders - piggy bliss.

They were happily snuffling up their pig pellets when our cat, Tisa, climbed through the wire fence to come and investigate what the strange noises were.
Minty was the first to spot her, head up, he eyed her up and then went trotting over to say hello, after all the dogs had been friendly so why not make another pal?

He stopped about 50cm away from her, at which point I've never seen the cat look so scared! She lowered herself on all fours and stared at Minty, in a typical 'fight or flee' pose. I'm sure Minty sensed that she wasn't going to sign up to the pig fan club, and after a couple of seconds of this stalemate, he turned 180 degrees and ran, full pelt, back to my side. He looked up at me with what I'm sure was a confused look. I couldn't explain to him why the cat didn't want to be friends.

She meanwhile had pegged it back out of the run into the garden. I don't she'll be back anytime soon.

lost tags... first one and now two!

Slightly alarming discovery yesterday, Gary our littlest of the piglets has a hole and a rip in his ear where his ear tag used to be. There was a bit of blood splattered on the roof of the pig house and his little ear did look a bit sore. We'd sprayed it with some iodine, which he didn't seem to mind at all and puzzled over what could have wrenched the tag out with such force.

Take two - now Minty's lost his ear tag as well. Great going guys, you've been here two days and your already tagless. Although Minty just has a clean hole where the tag was, no rip. Minty also did a great demonstration today of potential ear-tag removing behaviour - a lot of scratching! He leans himself up against whatever he can find, (the fence, the edge of his house, Bryan's wellies...) and scratches his back like mad. So we're guessing they both caught their ears against a fence whilst doing some serious back scratching.
More iodine, no more tags left to loose, we think they'll be ok.

the great pig naming debate!

Today is a big step forward - our two pigs finally have names! Everyone has been putting down suggestions of what to call our pair of oinkers for a few days, but there were no clear favourites. After canvassing opinions (its family so we have no compuction in telling each other our suggestions are rubbish!) we managed to get a short list of ten pairs of names. Sam, Val, Bryan, Abi, Ben and I all had to vote by giving points to each suggested pair. My favourite was Bert and Ernie, but that came second.
The winning names are: Gary and Minty.
What can I say - we're a strange lot who watch too much Eastenders! Anyway, Gary is the smaller chap and Minty is his bigger brother. We did inform the pigs of their new names, but they seemed more interested in the windfall apples.

First get your pig home

We are lucky enough to have Ben and Abi's landrover, which unlike the cardboard box we took, is big enough to put pigs in. The floor was covered in a good layer of sawdust and hay. The pigs took full advantage of this to poo, wee and throw up on it. They ignored the apples we'd put in for them, but did have a nice munch on Abi's jeans.


Once back home we needed a method of transporting the pigs from the landrover to their new home at the end of the garden. Sam started trying to lead the pig with a dog lead, but the high pitched squealing and non-movement of pig made him give up and instead go for the 'most uncomfortable way to hold a pig' technique you see here. by the look on his face, it was more upsetting for sam than the pig!


I went for the much easier 'cuddle your pig' carrying technique. Ok, so he still squealed and wriggled a lot, but we did manage to pose for a piccie!