The Three Little Piggies - Week 1

Basically, so far, so good. Everybody seems to be in good health and good spirits, and no one has tried to make a break for it yet, which is maybe the best news of all. The hotwire that Bill ran around the pen - maybe 6 inches off of the ground - seems to be more than enough to stem their curiosity of what lies beyond. The piglets aren't the only ones figuring out what hotwire is about, our puppy Penny seems to have learned the hard way that the pig pen is no place for a 7-pound morsel such as she. She's fine, but let out quite a yip upon encountering the wire.

As for feeding the pigs - that has been going well so far too. We went spelunking in the depths of our chest freezer for the freezer burned, forgotten and out-of-date items that have a way of accumulating in there. In just 7 days, the little porkers have cleaned us out of old bread, last years frozen goat milk, 3 1/2 year-old fruit (apparently `09 was a bumper year for blueberries) and some incredibly freezer burned fish. All mixed with a generous scoop or two of the leftover kid milk replacer powder that was leftover from this rocky kidding season that we've just come through. The pigs relish this mish-mash of half-frozen leftovers, and clean their trough of every last speck, every single time.

     

We do have a bag of Pig Chow that we've been mixing in with their slops now and then. At $13.99 per 50 pound bag though, we probably won't be feeding much if any more of it once that first bag is gone. Our goat milk and bakery outlet haul will make up the larger part of the piggies' diet, which will also be supplemented with garden gleanings and rejects, kitchen scraps, odd or elderly hard-boiled chicken eggs, and, if we get lucky, more imperfect produce generously given by our local grocery store.

We're really trying to keep the costs of our grass-to-bacon experiment as low as possible, so far, we've fed the pigs - our freezer gleanings (free), half a bag of kid milk replacer, which would have been wasted after having been opened to feed a baby buckling who didn't make it (about $8.00 worth), kitchen scraps (free), and about 1/2 of a 50-lb bag of pig chow ($7.00 worth), which brings our total feed cost so far, to $15.00, or roughly seventy-five cents per day, per pig.

Billy is picking up a new load of critter bread from the bakery outlet as we speak ($25.00), and we're presently trying to make a plan for starting to wean the goat kids, freeing the mamas' milk supply for our use in the kitchen and in soapmaking, and for sharing generously with our porcine pals. I'll be keeping a close watch on every penny spent on this piggy project, in order to determine just how much a pound of non-antibiotic saturated, happily wallowing, well-fed pork really costs.

We anticipate that our portly Three will be ready for harvest around late August/early September, but their size and weight will be the final deciding factor on just when Bacon Makin' happens, exactly. I look forward to the final crunching of numbers and cost/value analysis almost as much as I look forward to that first rack of ribs hitting the barbecue. This is food nerd nirvana. :)

Setting Goals for Farm Income - Phase 1

In the past few years I've read dozens of books about how to sustainably, efficiently and effectively make money from your backyard garden/small urban farm. I always walk away from those books all charged up about how we're going to run our farmstand, and what all we can offer up for sale there. Then crazy things like last May's car accident happen, and we suffer a big ol' setback. Not this year - I'm determined.

Someday, it'd be lovely if this farm alone provided us with enough income so that Bill could retire from his real job and work here at home instead, side by side with the new and improved me, milking goats, weeding the garden and picking apples. I'm not really sure exactly what it would take to make that happen though.

If you're a fan of the show The Fabulous Beekman Boys, then you'll know that they have been working toward a similar goal as us. Somehow or other, they arrived at the conclusion that they'd have to sell a million dollars worth of food/soaps/farm tchotchkes in order to offset Josh's nine-to-five income and allow him to work on the farm full time. I'd love to know how they came up with that number, and I'd like to figure out exactly what our magic number is, but I don't have the faintest idea how to work that out.

Instead, because I really need to set an attainable goal for myself after this past year of missed opportunities and failure, I'm starting low - $5 per day.

Even before we get our farmstand up and running, I figure that I can produce at least $5 worth of salable product each day with my knitting. A single dishcloth goes for $4, and I can easily turn one out per day. A pair of bike helmet earmuffs can also be done in about a day, and sells for $15, covering me for three days if I should somehow fall behind. It is an extremely small goal, but, when regarded in the context of a full calender year, gives me over $1800 worth of knitted inventory to offer at my bazaars and online. Assuming that 50% of that is profit, I can make us $900 doing something that I thoroughly enjoy and that relaxes me. Pretty cool!

And so, that is what I've committed myself to so far. When I have a clearer idea of how much honey and wax that our beehives will give us, how much produce we can grow and sell, and how much soap we can produce with our goats milk and homegrown botanicals, I will set production and income goals for those areas as well. But for now - small, teensy, microscopic potatoes are all that I can honestly commit to. Every successful business has to start somewhere, right?

Turning Grass into Bacon - A Work in Progress

Step one - Find a little piece of land that is very green, to call your own.

Step two - Procure Goats that will happily eat your grass

'Sup?

Step three - Milk Goats 

Step four - Share your goat milk (upcycled grass) and bakery outlet bounty (wheat = grass) with your three little piggies.

What $20 will get you at the bakery outlet.

Three little pigs, Baykin, Porkchop (Choppy) and Prosciutto (Shootie)

With a lot of nutritious slops, some hiney scratchin' and a few months time, these little 30 pound "weaners" will end up as 250 pound "finishers". At which point I'll be switching their diet from primarily protein-intensive goat milk, bread and kitchen scraps to a diet that is comprised mainly of windfall and foraged apples and pears. At least, that's the game plan as it stands now.

By the time the girls head back to school in the Fall, the verdict should be in on whether or not all of this pig wranglin' and raisin' was worth the trouble. Stay tuned... 

Early Spring Farm Checklist - Western Washington Edition

Technically, it's still winter for another eight days, but I've always thought of mid-March as Spring. Maybe it's because I've been seeing Easter stuff for sale in the stores since February 15th, or maybe it's just my boundless optimism? Either way, bring it on!

This list applies to my particular area (Zone 7B per the USDA's Hardiness Zone index), in this particular  year. The duration and severity of seasons never seem to be the same any two years in a row anymore. Luckily, this year seems to be bringing an early (or at least not late!) Spring. Temperatures have been fairly mild, and we haven't had hard frosts or monsoon-type rains for the past month, give or take, which makes this rain belt farm chick pretty optimistic that Spring will arrive on time this year.

And so, the Spring to-do list must be made, then tackled, one item at a time. We're trying our hands at a LOT of new and exciting projects this Spring, including honeybees, pigs and a brand new kitchen garden, so our list is rather mighty. Between the fair weather and my new knee, I have high hopes that we'll be able to pull this ambitious list off and have a super productive year. This will be our first year in which our little farm will be more than a hobby, but an honest to goodness, money-making business. I'm a big bundle of jangled, eager, excited nerves. It's a good kind of crazy. ;)

March To Do's

*Forage - Stinging nettles & dandelions
*Plant - Start lettuces, cruciferous veggies and hardy herbs indoors. Plant peas out as soon as a raised bed is available.
*Buy - Lumber and other building materials for building two Kenyan Top Bar beehives, a shelter for the pig pen, and at least half a dozen raised beds. Buy 3 weaner pigs.
*Sell - List our buck and 2-3 does with kids for sale, eggs
*Fix - Replace hoses that Rex destroyed, touch up paint job on the big coop, paint east-facing side of the coop with chalkboard paint so that eggs and other farmstand offerings can be advertised for sale.
*Clean- Pick up storm-downed tree limbs that have accumulated over the Winter (feed to goats), tidy up yard and porch. Pull weeds if time permits. Muck out goat houses and chicken coops.
*Build - Finish pig pen and shelter.  At least start beehives. Work on getting a few raised beds in for early veggies.


I know that I must be forgetting some stuff here, because this list looks way too manageable. Uhg. I need to be back up to speed, like, yesterday. Oy...

Bottle Feeding a Weak Kid - The Story of Cookie

Cookie was the second born of triplets to Hop, a two year old mini-Lamancha and first time freshener. The buckling that preceded him presented breech, and was stillborn after having been stuck for sometime. Cookie weighed maybe 3 pounds at birth - a petite little thing from the outset. We gave him some colostrum gel, as we do all of our newborns just in case, followed by a couple squirts of nutri-drench straight down the gullet. He seemed small but steady, so we figured that in spite of his rough entry into this world, that his Mama would take care of him and that, eventually, he'd thrive.

Maybe it was because of his extended wait to be born, or because Mama played favorites with her third born buckling, but Cookie simply failed to thrive and grew weaker by inches every day. Hop didn't pay special attention to her weak boy but old maid Auntie Blue would cuddle up to him, and Sidney, our Alpha Alpine, would let any hungry kid nurse whenever, wherever, so we struggled initially with the idea of taking him away from his herd who were clearly doing their level best to foster him, and hedging our bets and bringing him in to be bottle fed. Yesterday afternoon, we finally decided that he needed our intervention, and brought him in from the goat yard in a Tagalongs Girl Scout cookie box. Hence his name.

Finally having picked him up, we saw the he was almost literally skin and bones. If he'd been nursing at all, clearly it hadn't been enough. We mixed up small batches of milk replacer with a shot of nutri-drench in it, and trickled it down his throat. When he pooped twice, we were encouraged that his gut was working, and that the milk was landing in his stomach rather than his lungs, which can happen when a very weak kid is essentially force fed. I toyed with the idea of "tubing" him, since my goat emergency kit came with a weak kid feeding tube set up. I didn't end up doing it, because if you don't know what you're doing (and I don't), you can thread the tube into the trachea rather than the esophagus, and drown the baby with milk.

So we kept him warm and continued to feed him as much as he'd take - usually not more than a half an ounce - and he'd swallow the majority of it by sheer reflex. Every once in a while, he'd muster up enough strength to be slightly combative with me. We also took that as a good sign. He slept fitfully, nestled inside his cookie box, waking at random intervals to utter a few pathetic moans before drifting back into sleep.

He made it through the night. We thought we'd turned a corner.

Come morning, his breathing remained fast and shallow, and he wouldn't take milk like he had the night before. Most of it was just dribbling right back out of his mouth. I called my goat-wise cousin to see if she thought it was time to tube him. She came over within the hour and ran through a checklist of symptoms and potential cures. We'd warmed him up, fed him and kept his bum-bum from pasting up, but it wasn't enough. Before we could try anything else, our little guy just stopped breathing and slipped away. We don't know if he had a congenital issue that rendered him unable to thrive, if he'd caught a bug of some sort that slowly drained his very limited resources, or if he'd just been rejected by his dam, and hadn't ever had a good feeding, and burned through his reserves. We don't know, which is one of the worst things that can happen when you lose livestock. It shatters your peace of mind. I don't know if whatever took him was contagious, and the rest of our herd is in danger of sharing the same fate, or if he would have survived if I would have plucked up the courage to tube him last night.

Live and learn, I guess. The trouble is that I'm not sure that I've learned anything from Cookie's illness and passing. I don't know what I could or should have done differently or better. Maybe there wasn't anything I could do, and that is the lesson?

The New Kids of Goatlandia

Hop's babies -

 Little Girl

 Baby Boy

Hop's little buckling. He's a spirited little dude!

Hop's boy, Hop, Chardonnay & Valentina. We think that Teeny may have 3 or 4 babies on board!

Liberty's Babies -

Baby Boy (in back), Baby Girl (in front)

Little Man (in the foreground), Little Girl (in back)

Sidney's Kids-

 Sidney and her buckling

Sid being hounded by her twins and one of Liberty's kids.

"Helllppp Meeeeee!"

Sophie's Kids -

Soph's boy

Sophie's big girl with Hop's little girl

A Heap o' napping Kids :)

Spring has Sprung and the Babies are Booming!

All signs seem to point to an early Spring this year -

The Forsythia has just started blooming, and the Snowdrops have been up for a few weeks.

Scarlet has personally tended this impromptu clump of snowdrops for a few years now, calling them her "fairy forest". 

The years first kidding went off without a hitch by first-time freshener, Valentina. She delivered twins, a boy and a girl, on the sly. Scarlet and her Grammy discovered the babies yesterday upon a visit to the back forty.  We think that they were delivered the day before.

Lunch!

Our newest blue-eyed babies, little girl (in the back) and baby buckling (in front)

I was relieved to have a lactating doe and a pair of healthy babies join our herd, but also a little bummed that this year will be the first time that I haven't been able to attend the births. Being a goat midwife is one of the sweetest gigs on this farm, and we may have as many as seven more does due to deliver any day. Heal fast, bionic knee! My girls need me!

For all that I'm missing out on, I should be able to manage at least a few early Spring farm chores, like starting seedlings on the heat mats and under grow lights, in anticipation of the new raised-bed garden that Bill is firing himself up to build.

I'll also hit up some of my usual, easy-to-reach spots to see if the stinging nettles have started to pop up yet. Nettles are some of the first greens of Spring, and we're all in need of a little spring green tonic to chase away the months of grey. With the hens now laying well again, I anticipate that we'll have some nettle egg noodles for dinner soon.  

Another sure sign that Spring is near? The frogs o' the bog, singing their little green heads off. The collective sound of a thousand or so frogs singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? in unison is pretty intense, though they blend together to make a sort of wall of white noise (This is a wav file of somebody else's frogs. Ours sound like this times about fifty.) It's one of those sounds that might make for a great track on a nature cd, along with waves crashing and rain falling on a tin roof. One of the previous owners of this house once told me that someone associated with some tv or movie production came out and recorded our frogs for use on some soundtrack. I have famous frogs!

I've been chipping away at this post for long enough now that an additional FIVE kids have arrived since I started. HOLY GOAT FERTILITY, BATMAN!

Gotta go pace a hole in the rug over these babies that I can't see. :\ More pics forthcoming asap!