Thursday 9 February 2012

Piggies!


Trev, is she pregnant or just grossly fat?
We've been pondering the gestational state of our two fat pigs ever since Christmas Day. The date we had thought them to be due to drop. But nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen until three days ago when Browny who had been increasingly grumpy and failed to come down for breakfast.
Pigs dig a hollow nest in the ground and supposedly line it with material. We'd even provided a bale or so of hay for that purpose. But Browny was too fat to cart it up and down the hill and instead chewed off a few low bushes, and appears to have given up and had them in the dirt hollow. There are five of them. One pale brown, the rest pink and black spotted or splashed.




I've never really trusted Browny, apart from being a collosal size she's a collosal bitch. Poor Pinky bears the brunt whenever Browny comes in contact with the electric fence. She's chased Pinky around the paddock and punishs her for her own stupidity. I made the mistake of checking on the dam level without taking food with me and she chased me down the hill putting her nose under my knees and pushing. I figured if I stumbled and hit the ground there was a good chance I'd become lunch. Trev might love the pigs, but I've grown a little more circumspect about their longterm status on the block.
Especially since Pinky decided to bulldoze through a fence recently and take a cavalcade of goats sheep and chooks with her, Between them they did a pretty good job of decimating the raspberries, ring barking the sugar maples, skeletonising the blackcurrants, chomping tomato bushes to the ground, massacring the sunflowers, rooting up the potatoes, and munging down on the strawberry plants. Probably all in the space of half an undetected hour. We're both becoming a little more circumspect about animals longterm status on the block. I keep mentioning the possibility of becoming vegetarian, but Trev will never come at that.
So now we're on a countdown with Pinky to see what issue she will issue. I'm going to take a chance for a close up encounter with her progeny - hopefully soon.

4 comments:

Kristy said...

so very, very cute.

destructive when older with attitude perhaps... but very very cute :)

Daffodil said...

I have forgotten how cute piglets can be! Hve owned pigs and freezere them once, never again. Almost one year down the track and their big paddock is still yet to recover from piggy rototilling.

Linda Cockburn said...

Our paddocks have been somewhat devastated. We've been careful to not let them get too pig sick. They've done us a great favour in pulling up and destroying the bracken fern, which we had a problem with. And the goats have knocked the blackberries on the head. Peg loves eating scotch thistle flowers, a delicacy. But this morning I woke up thinking about getting rid of all the animals and just keeping a few chooks and using the land area to grow compost material for the garden. The latest Organic Gardener Mag has a great article about a couple who import 250 cubic metres of compost onto their property every two years. Not sustainable practice. But maybe we can make our own insitu?
Kind of put a lie to my new header bar though wouldn't it :-)

Darren (Green Change) said...

Cute little things! I loved working with the pigs I raised last year - hopefully we'll be able to get some this year as well.

I'd be putting the grumpy one into sausages, and keeping one of the piglets to replace her!