Greenstorm's Journal

Might as well update about the animal situation.

Solly and Thea are working great as a team all night. I put them in the front at night (the grain is all there) and Avallu in the back with the geese, Thea I put in the back during the day with Avallu so she can go in and eat and I can keep Solly mostly on her puppy food.

Avallu is getting more ok with Solly, but after two incidents where he was pretty sure she belonged only on the porch we need a little more than current levels of ok. In the evenings we often do cheese o clock, where they all see each other through the fence and get lots of cheese. I think they may have got too much cheese, so I may need a lower-fat alternative for some of these evenings. Avallu is doing well listening to commands even when Solly is in close proximity, but he's also very respectful of the fence. Solly is very wary of Avallu after the last couple incidents but has a seemingly limitless well of optimism and is coming around with enough cheese again.

I've definitely made some mistakes during this intro but I suspect everyone can be convinced to forgive me.

The geese are sleeping right up close to Avallu many nights and spending more time than usual up by the house. I can tell when there are no bears around because they go into the orchard. They've taken care of this spring's goslings well and those are now fully feathered. The orchard is pretty well mown at this point and the geese are starting to gorge on grain to fatten up for fall, they've gone from roughly a quarter bucket of grain per day for the 31 of them to closer to a whole bucket.

I have an ancona drake swap lined up for later this year, so he can cover this last two year's ducklings.

Incubator full of chicks should hatch while I'm gone. Things will be set up for mom to just plunk them into the quail shed under lights. These are mostly chanteclers but with a half dozen silkies. If I'm going to do silkies I might as well do seramas, which are the sweetest chickens on earth, but there are none to be had up here. Also Clyde the new rooster (his previous family got him as Bonnie and when he started to crow had to part with him) is doing well. He's a brahma, so he should get very big, but right now he's young and pigeon-sized with ENORMOUS FLUFFY feet. He's also smart, social, and I like him a great deal. I have not yet evicted the previous rooster from the bottom coop and put him in yet, I'm planning to do that when the chicks are a bit older, so right now he's sleeping under the truck canopy at night and hanging with the muscovies during the day. His crow is growing in adorably; I guess I have a thing for adolescent rooster crows.

The three boars have been shedding, I can scratch them with a rake and all the curly wool comes off and leaves growing-in guard hairs. I think they should move to the back to guard that entrance, though really Baby and Hooligan are the better defenders against bears. Did I mention Hooligan kinda bit me when I was stealing her babies? She didn't break skin or even bruise me, but she put her teeth on me in warning after I'd ignored her barking and other warnings. She is 100% a perfect temperament in this regard: she lets me play with her newborn babies if I'm not harassing them, catching them, and making them scream and she loves being scratched behind the ears but she can gauge situations in which it's appropriate to defend and does so with careful escalation. I'm just very impressed with Ossabaws in general, but also her in particular.

We do have at least two bears back there, one big and one small, that appear unrelated. The big one doesn't mind bear bangers, air horns, dogs, or yelling so I'm worried about what will happen come fall. Two bears in that territory is already a lot and it's only August. When bears go into their super calorie-seeking mode before winter they're less cautious and maybe it's not safe to have the pigs back there then? On the other hand the whole herd of pigs may actually be better defenders than the dogs, at least until the whole pack gels and maybe even after that.

The poor cats are withering away from lack of love and attention since I've been into the office several days the last few weeks. Also Demon is not a fan of a New Person in the house to farmsit and complains loudly when she's not around. I expect he'll come around. They continue to break down all doors into my bedroom to sleep on the bed, to my detriment.

Ducks are ducks. The anconas are in the covered area, and I want to make more covered areas for bear/lynx/raven/fox/coyote protection for the littles in future years. One broody ancona made a nest just inside the chicken house so I can barely squeak the door open and squeeze in and she will not be shifted. Everyone likes lamb's quarters weedings from the garden.

It's good? At least until the bears finish eating my neighbour's chickens and turn more attention on me.

This is the first time I'm doing a meme on here. amazon_syren asked me five questions; if you would like me to ask you five questions comment below. If you would like to just chat but would not like to be asked questions, also comment below. Ha.

1) Based on this year's harvest, are you wanted to try any new varieties of corn next year? Or planning to cross-breed any varieties you've already grown?

The first year, the test year, was about figuring out my foundations and what was realistic, but also about doing my first crosses. Realistically, corn grown anywhere on my property will cross with corn anywhere else on my property if it pollinates at the right time, so many of my saved seeds will be crossed. Specifically I'm interested in most of the crosses I did with my best-performing varieties, gaspe and Saskatchewan Rainbow. There are definitely varieties I'd like to get my hands on, and I am hoping to get a wildly mixed set of seeds to keep a slow drip of genes coming into the projects.

So: new varieties, the landrace grex from my group. Crosses: gaspe x montana morado, gaspe x a little bit of everything, saskatchewan rainbow x a little bit of everything, morden x a little bit of everything, morden x either magic manna and/or painted mountain (to make an earlier flour mix), gaspe x cascade ruby gold, gaspe x atomic orange, and a three-way saskatchewan rainbow x atomic orange x montana morado.

2) How do you sew stretchy knits for waist-bands? Do you use a serger or is there a trick to it? (I've never managed to do well on stretchy fabrics, so I'm looking for tips and tricks, if you've got them).

I'm a waist-band minimalist in a lot of ways. I don't have a serger, and I also wear long enough tops that my waistbands are covered. Last iteration of sewing, I just took elastic that I thought was pretty and that was wide enough, gave it a good stretch before I sewed it to break it in, cut off a piece that sat around my waist comfortably, and sewed it into a ring. I put that ring, pretty side out, on the outside top of my pants waist and did two strips of zigzag stitch to hold it in place, on along the top edge of both the elastic and the pants, and the other through the bottom edge of the elastic and also through the pants. It's held up.

For knit long underwear and outer pants I'm planning to do yoga waistbands with a different fabric than the main pants this year, basically a folded and slightly shaped band 3-4" wide in a stretchy and more snugly-cut fabric than the rest of the pants that replaces the top couple inches of whatever was going to be going on there. But basically the trick to not popping the thread is to use a zigzag or lightning stitch for the initial seam (my machine has a really nice zigzag stitch for this) and if you want reinforcement do a zigzag or decorative stretch stitch over the seam in a visible way, that also captures the raw edges somehow ("overstitch").

For the arenite pants they do an elastic casing, will report back.

3) Pigs: How are they?

Oh my, this is a lot.

Pigs are an amazing survival tool. American colonization happened on the backs of pigs, dropped off in river bottoms on the coast and left for years to multiply. They foraged their own food and in turn became a very low-difficulty, high-calorie supply for the invading armies/colonists. They also were an amazing weapon in a land with no fences, rooting up and destroying indigenous plantations. So ecologically on my farm pigs are calorie batteries, calorie recyclers, and disturbance agents. They're great for turning and piece of land into a garden: happy to dig up stumps, turn over sod, eat down many annual weeds, all the while fertilizing as they go. I have to be careful because I do not always want disturbance on my farm, but they let me make great use of so many things I couldn't otherwise make useful. My breed is also fatty and furry and well-insulated, they're fantastic in the cold and it's easy to put together a shelter for them, it doesn't have to be fancy, though as living crowbars they'll tear it right down again so I'm glad they're easy to put up. They'd do better on a bigger farm where I wanted more disturbance more often, or maybe I just have too many pigs.

On a more social level they're great at driving home social relativity. Pigs and humans have a very different sense of personal space: pigs communicate through touch both with their super sensitive noses and through just shoving each other. I've had to learn to speak the shoving language and get comfortable with that. It would take a lot of cruelty to get them to not touch me at all, though by shoving back hard and fast they treat me as a fairly high-ranking pig and therefore don't throw me out of the way as they do the young piglets. They are curious, friendly, and they show when they're cared for well by frolicking and playing. Really they love playing, and any tarp that strays into the enclosure turns into a tug-o-war game. Like any varied population they have individual personalities; some get particularly attached to me (can be annoying, they follow me around and squeal) and some keep their distance. Mamas are happy for me to watch them birth, for the most part. Except for the noise they make, which really does set off my sensitivities sometimes (think continuous loud rusty gate when they're excited), they have excellent temperaments to partner with humans as long as the human is willing to go halfway and speak their language of physical touch.

So pigs are good ecologically, great socially, and good for getting me outside a human-only perspective.

4) What is a favourite Traditional Food Of Your People? Why do you love it, and how do you make it your own?

This is a hard one! I don't really have a people. Maybe I should start with a story about my mom's mom. She lived in a small town in Iowa and had a ton of kids but she was still what my mom describes as adventurous with food. For instance, as early as the 50s she experimented with chow mein: canned bean sprouts, canned mushrooms, spaghetti noodles. It made an impression on my mom and I grew up with my mom as, honestly, not always the best cook but always adventurous: together we made feijouada and wonton soup and sticky rice in lotus leaves and a million things I don't remember, stepping our way through recipes in, among other things, a time-life "cooking of the world" series. She utility-cooked the standard midwestern noodles + tomatoes + ground beef type foods, and we ate a lot of rice, and she did a lot of 90s-era stir-fries, but I'd say the thing that got passed down on that side of the family was primarily a sense of play and adventure. Anything I wanted to make with reasonable indgredients, I was supported in that. So pretty much all my cooking now, from charcuterie to whatever I'm going to do with the duck fat on my counter when I get home to the duck-tonkatso-miso-with-spaetzle I'll probably have for dinner tonight builds on that legacy of play.

However. I memorized my grandma's pancake recipe and have been making it since I was 7. I eat the pancakes off a plate with my fingers, sometimes spreading with jam or dipping in syrup.

My grandma-in-law is jewish and I picked up a love for kugel and for a pseudo-matzo cream-of-wheat-and-egg dumpling in lipton's dried chicken soup packets from her. I make those straight up these days, no spin needed.

Mom always used to make muffins on the weekend for us. They were chocolate chip muffins; sometimes she made a particular coffee cake. Those feel like love to me, though I make pandan muffins with hemp seeds rather than chocolate chip half the time now. I still make that coffee cake.

And I still do the midwestern brown-some-hamburger (pork nowadays, or goose confit), add a can of tomatoes, some pasta, and some garlic powder and cook a minute thing that is probably the biggest Food Of My People, when I'm feeling up to it.

5) Favourite book(s) of 2022?

The new Hardy Apples book by Robert Osborne is probably the only thing I read cover to cover this year. I really, really enjoyed the Noma cookbook though. No fiction this year, and I think Braiding Sweetgrass was last year? Very little book-form reading, I'm afraid.

A dream where I was living or staying in a big, rambling, multi-person house on the sea/lakeside, I had a herd of pigs, the pigs split into two herds one of which kept going inside and the other of which kept being in the wrong part of the yard. People in the house informed me ("some pigs are in the downstairs rec room") but were all good with it.

Field day at work today. That is, I was working out in the bush. It was a pretty nice block topographically - right by a big lake, but they'd left a good big protective reserve on the lake. Lots of chunks of granite cleaving off hillsides and little plunging ravines everywhere.

Also A LOT of bugs, mosquitoes and blackflies predominantly, and a ton of slide alder and blowdown. This will be a somewhat challenging block. Time to get out the veil and headscarf. I probably do need someone with me for some of those plots, too, it just is safer to have a second person if it's really physically challenging to get in and out of any particular spot. Luckily lots of it is near edges and so will be fine though.

Even with all that, and with a slow tire leak and of course this outfit doesn't stock its vehicles with little battery-powered compressors (easily my favourite piece of car equipment that can exist), it was nice to get out. Out again tomorrow, and then I take a summer student out a couple days next week. Hopefully I decompress by then, I am not in the mood to share a truck with a stranger right now.

Before that, though, I need to go home and handle some piglets that may not have been fed enough. Hopefully the sow's milk has come in by now. Also something about hanging my door and making dinner for mom.

Mmm. My fingers smell like balsam (or, like school calls it, subalpine fir).

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

Mom and brother showed up Friday night. Saturday we went into town and picked up my new (to me) truck, spent a long time doing the transfer papers and insurance since there's definitely a staffing bottleneck in the city, at least on Saturdays, and drove her home. She's lovely. Driving her is also going to take some getting used to, this is a very long pickup (double cab longbox) with a big canopy that doesn't as yet have a backup cam. Also she takes very little throttle with that engine; I still have not floored her.

Sunday was a power outage and I haven't yet had the generator panel put in, so we messed around outside mostly. Pigs are moved to their winter field and have t-post-based electric. Hopefully, unlike the plastic electric posts, these won't snap or break when snow becomes too great an insulator and I need to take the wire down for the winter.

Last night I had both Tucker to snuggle and earplugs so I slept well for the first time in a week or something. My brother is a very loud sleeper and although he's in the livingroom and I'm upstairs in the loft there's a lot of sound transfer. I'd slept in my shooting earmuffs the two nights before; it seems the way I sleep when I'm wearing those leads to a pretty intense bruise/abrasion where I tuck my fingers under my head as I sleep. I'd been beginning to think I had a very deep infected rose thorn in that knuckle.

I need to remember to get my homework done for tomorrow's class; last week was branding (I didn't come up with a satisfactory value proposition, but I'm kind of into the tagline "because (thriving) ecosystems are the best apocalypse insurance") and this week is marketing, and it's hard hard hard for me to do it both emotionally and just come up with the actual work (figure out who you're marketing to-- I mean, I'm not good at lumping people into some sort of group and making assumptions about them). Anyhow, it's the not fun part and so it's challenging me as I knew it would.

I also need to get the 4runner cleaned up and ready for sale. I'm very sad about this.

I -want- to start looking for very early season corns to grow next year, and talking on seed saving/seed exchange groups. I want to go observe the pigs in their winter field: I planted turnips and rutabaga and clover for them in there and they love it.

But in the meantime I need to get some work-work done.

I've been immersing into the farm lately. This is good for me and for the farm in a lot of ways.

Anyhow, I've been spending time thinking about systems and about the animals. Part of this is the business class, writing about these things, and part of it is having some of my interpersonal met in quality-vs-quantity ways so more time gets freed up.

One of these systems is moving animals. The guy took Oak and Nox the other day. This involved three pig movements.

First I had to separate Nox and Oak from the main herd. This can be hard since pigs like to herd together. I'd observed that after I put food into the first bowl Oak usually followed the bucket (since Baby would usually chase him away from the first bowl). The pigs are in two fields right now with an open gate between them. The food bowls are usually in one field but I moved one of the bowls into the other field a couple days in advance so they'd all get used to it being there. Then I had Tucker come help. At feeding time we closed the gate most of the way between the two pastures and he manned the gate. With the help of some cheese, careful food bucketing, and his ability to selectively let pigs back through the gate we got them separated. When there's enough food to eat they're usually pretty pliable so a little bit of a nudge to stay or go is fairly easy. Once they were in that half of the field we lured them through the fence down into the garden. The hardest part is keeping a set separated when they can see the herd, so I ran extra electric all along the fence on the herd side and the garden had nice sleeping spots and fields of corn and clover so Nox and Oak didn't push too too hard to get back. I also put double hogpanels up where Nox and Oak came through into the garden so they'd be less inclined to push. That was day 1, maybe 2 hours.

Next day I had to get them into the woodshed. Tucker was gone so it was just me, it was important to think extra carefully and go with the pigs' instincts. Pigs won't generally go somewhere they can't see: if there's light coming under a wall or through a fence they're more likely to push at it and try to go there. Likewise they can't see well at a distance, so they won't know a wire fence exists until they're up close. There were two areas between the garden and the woodshed: the narrow apple field and my yard. I used plywood to close off the apple field in the two directions I didn't want them to go, so from far away they could see it was impassable and wouldn't even try. In my yard I maneuvered two trailers and my car to block off the road direction and lined them with a combination of plywood and hog panels depending on what looked more passable. The house blocked one direction, the apple field the pigs would be coming out of was a third direction. The fourth direction was driveway/woodshed, which I blocked very strongly with plywood except for a bit of hog panel/wire fence next to the woodshed opening. The woodshed opening itself is made poorly, it requires turning a couple corners and pigs do not like that. So I wanted to at least get them as close as possible.

By the time I'd moved all the trailers etc etc setup took 3 hours. I took a couple breaks to go into the pen with Nox and Oak and call and give them some cheese to get them to follow me back and forth across the pen. I hadn't given them breakfast yet. Several times, when they came to the gate to meet me, I thought I could just let them out and maybe they would follow me into the woodshed... but I didn't, I finished setup. Buy the time I let them out they followed me right out. I closed the gate behind them. With a little cheese Nox followed me right near to the woodshed. I'd put a food bowl just visible in the door of the woodshed and she paused by the corner, walking back into the yard and then back to me a couple times. I gave her cheese whenever she came towards me and ignored her when she went away. After maybe six minutes she started eating the food near the woodshed door; I pulled it slowly into the woodshed and she ate and moved forward without seeming to notice. Suddenly she put her head up, once she was mostly into the woodshed, and went over to the back corner and started to eat the nest of duck eggs (some rotten) back there.

Oak took a few more minutes but eventually he, too, was coaxed. It's much easier to get a pig to follow another pig than it is to get them to move independently so once I got him into line of sight of Nox he wandered back in and I could lock them in.

That was the second move: 3 hours prep, 20 mins moving.

Then the guy buying them showed up with a box on the back of a pickup. A dark box a couple feet in the air.

Well, luckily the pigs were in the woodshed which has a lot of restriction around the door (that's why it's hard to get pigs in there). I dragged some bins etc up to form a chute. We packed under the truck's box with straw bales, then built a stairway up into the truck with straw. I put a bale of straw and a ton of slightly rotten goose meat into the truck and made sure everything between the woodshed and the truck was walled off with plywood. We then let the pigs out of the back of the woodshed. They came out, we closed the door behind. They came out into the chute, we closed the door behind. The woodshed wall has a space between the bottom of the wall and the top of the ground; they were really pushing to get back into the woodshed there and I put some plywood along the wall to block that. They seemed interested in the truck, Nox especially, and Oak was pretty interested in Nox (I expect she's going into heat now that she's been taken away from her piglets). We slowly walked another piece of plywood forward and Nox put her hooves up on the step, stepped down, stepped back up. It went like this for awhile, then we started inching forward with the plywood to reduce the amount of space in the chute-- it was full of rich soil and worms and they liked digging it up. Eventually Nox climbed into the pickup after maybe 20 minutes of cheese being thrown just a little bit further and a little bit further.

Then it was just Oak and he was a bit cranky about it. He stood with his hind legs on the ground and his forefeet on the hay bale, watching Nox and hanging out, backed away and tried to push the walls to get out, and then climbed back up and hung out with just his forefeet out. By this time we'd moved plywood right up behind him in the chute and waited. Eventually I started being just a little annoying behind him: tapping his legs, rubbing the plywood against his butt. He tried to come down again and push all possible ways out: the board behind him, the corners of the chute, the plywood along the tops of the bins, and then finally just scrambled up beside Nox. We moved in pretty quick and tossed hay bales aside and got the tailgate closed and that was that.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it went. No one was super stressed. There weren't a lot of emergencies. A lot of time was sunk into prep and less was sunk into trying to maneuver very strong 350lb self-willed animals into doing my will. and I GOT PIGS TO CLIMB INTO A PICKUP TRUCK how amazing is that?

Baby knew there were pigs out of his herd and spent the couple days foaming at the mouth a lot but seems more chill now, and Oak is off with Nox to be a herd sire.

Phew.

So after pickup tomorrow I'll have:

Baby Driver, the boar

Penny, an original sow
Black Chunk, out of Sparky
Apricot, out of Rapunzel
Hooligan, out of Rapunzel
Banana, likely out of UV (Penny x Baby)

3 med-large barrows

1 3-month boarlet
1 3-month barrow
2 3-month gilts, one out of Nox

7 boarlets, one with a testicular hernia
3 gilts

So a lot of my energy/money goes to my farm, which is primarily dedicated to breed preservation. That is, I keep my freezer full but I'm maximized neither for feeding myself nor making money. I'm maximized for being able to have as many people keep Ossabaw hogs as breeding stock as possible.

I'd been maintaining two boars for the genetic diversity, knowing I needed to downsize to one but really waffling on who to keep. I'd also been starting to cut down my original sows and keep offspring.

The other day I got a call from someone who was looking for an adult breeding pair, just two, to keep as homestead pigs. It sounds like his situation is perfect to keep Oak, from the Ontario line, and Nox, one of my original sows. They're both very friendly animals, they're a little on the smaller side, and I think they'll be a good fit. That's a substantial relief since it means none of those boars will go for sausage, they'll be in a breeding home, and Ossabaws will be introduced to a new town.

If I actually successfully get a deposit from them this will be very good.

Counseling yesterday, with some epiphanies:

( I think I figured out what's happening when Tucker is gone and I have a rough time. )

This makes sense, and it's a relief to begin to understand the mechanisms at work here.

Anyhow, today I went to the bush alone and hung out measuring small trees and listening to a podcast on sour beer on my phone. It was sunny and warm-but-not-too-warm and I got a bunch of work done (though it turns out maybe the work didn't need to be done?). I got a picture of the little hills in the Inzana I had lunch on the other day, from a different little hill. I will do similar work tomorrow. It was really nice, and I snagged the little Chevy Colorado from work through pure good fortune so I didn't have to drive the enormous and annoying 2021 F250 with a front grille taller than I am. I do not enjoy the big trucks.

Last night I hung out with Tucker sorta spontaneously and that was really nice too. It was a connecty thing, not a relationship figuring-out thing, and if we're going to figure anything out we need that connection. I was reminded that the good part is when we're together in person. I was in town and just stopped by to pick stuff up and ended up staying the night, which meant when I stopped by home in the morning to get work stuff I'd left the porch door open overnight and the heat on and it was very cold and likely also very expensive.

Oh well. I had put the pork primals in the fridge at least.

Today will be a little butchering, a little picking tomatoes, and potentially receiving some vanilla. I joined a group called the vanilla bean co-op on facebook, which is what it says on the cover. I can get vanilla for roughly $11/oz US, and they have a bunch of different kinds. I've been getting a little of different ones and have found the Ugandan are DEFINITELY the best -- like brownie batter. Very fun. Now I need to figure out how to extract the flavour into mead.

I'm also giving some thought to taking a truckload of meat down to the city and selling it to my friends. The logistics of travelling 12-15 hours with a bunch of frozen meat seem a little steep, but less steep than meeting folks piecemeal from surrounding towns to sell them ducks. Plus I know my city friends would appreciate them. I'd feel a little better connected and I'd get some money back and empty some freezers. I'd primarily thought to sell ducks but people are very intrigued by my dark red pork. I'm considering taking a pig to the... well, you can get it slaughtered on farm and bring it in to the abattoir and they'll butcher it and that's a little more legal than me home butchering and distributing. I don't think the butchers will know how to handle the fatty pork though.

While I'm talking about borderline-to-very-illegal meat processing, I smoked my first lardo (cured pork backfat) the other day. It's traditionally eaten thinly sliced on toast, basically in place of butter or cream cheese. This one is rosemary and bay leaf scented too. Home curing is completely beyond the pale for sales, but it seems like a pretty good way to handle the backfat on these older sows.

I suspect I didn't mention that Black Chunk had her babies two weeks ago, Penny did about five days ago, and Hooligan (daughter of Rapunzel, I just put Rapunzel into the freezer) did about three days ago. Chunk had three that I found, she made her nest in a slightly odd spot. Penny had at least 5, but at least 2 got crushed because she had insufficient bedding and it was a cold night. Once I loaded her up with bedding she shacked up with black Chunk to co-parent; both have 2 males and 3 females. Hooligan nested where I wanted her to, far from everyone, and she's got three males and two females. I don't know if I'm up for castrating that many myself, my willpower is not where it should be, so I may try and take them into the vet. I should call the vet. All the piglets are great and frolicking and happy looking.

Anyhow, a day in the field has definitely been good for me. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.