Teal realization
Wednesday was the kind of
rain day I remember from my visits to various jungles --- a steady,
endless shower. Mark and I were able to stay busy indoors, but
the wild birds were less lucky. This is the middle of spring
migration (wood thrushes arrived Tuesday!), and one confused teal
clearly figured the weather was too bad to keep flying. I can
just imagine the duck looking down and thinking it saw a pond, then
coming in for a landing...only to end up on our pile of cattle
panels.
Except for their role as
a duck decoy, our cattle panels haven't seen any use yet. Spring
is heating up in the garden and chicken world, and we've been spending
most of our energies there, which makes it less and less likely we'll
get the new
pasture done in time
to trial pigs this year. However, all is not lost --- I'm hopeful
we'll have the fencing and shelter ready for spillover chicken pasture
during the usual summer lull, and it'll definitely be ready for pigs
next spring. Slow but steady definitely wins the homesteading
race.
(If you're dying to see
pigs this year, I can't recommend the Sugar Mountain Farm Blog highly
enough. Plus, our friend Sarah is trying pigs this year and her
piglets have already arrived! Hopefully those two
sources will tide you over until we get our act together.)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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You'll have to forgive me if you've mentioned this in another post, sometimes things slip out my brain, even though I do read here every night. Why pigs? Why not another medium/large meat animal?
I raise the pigs every year and I now have enough goats to officially say I have a herd. (4 with the birth of my little doe this month, 5-7 the end of may if the having a girl, luck holds) The point is, if I had to remove one, the goats would stay. For various reasons but the main being that the goats can be fed for so much less, not having to bring in feed. I'm just curious on your choice and reckoning behind pigs.