- So there’s a pig farm for sale – 2 properties, stall-free breeding, 185 acres, the capacity for a couple of thousand pigs, both fulltime and part-time staff. Linhda thinks it’d be too much work for us. Spoil sport.
- Family pickling night done! And I didn’t burn myself once, though there were two near misses. Yay for no second-degree boiling water burns!
For the record, “family pickling night” doesn’t involve pickling the family. Just in case there was any grammatical confusion. - Farm Lesson #92: Don’t plant rye in your crop mix if piglets will be grazing on it. Rye seeds and little piggy eyes don’t mix.
This morning I’ve picked 4 rye seeds from 4 different piglets. They lay there as I rub their bellies, let me pick mud out of their eye, pry their eyelids open, and claw out buried seeds. There’s probably another Farm Lesson in there about tame piglets… - Time to make the place pretty for our BBQ with The Duregons! Any by that, I mean I’ll spend a few hours playing with the piglets while David drives the ride-on mower around.
In summary: Piglets! - Went on an aquaponics farm tour today – saw a fish farm with a horticultural aspect, a hydroponic farm, and then commercial aquaculture set ups. It doesn’t look that difficult. If I can get a poly-tunnel set up in the next month or three, we should be eating Atherton-bred fish by Christmas next year.
- Today, on top of their normal grain feed and greens from the veggie patch, the pigs have eaten prawn heads/tails, yabbie heads/tails, stale bread, egg shells, leftover stock full of garlic, onions, and chillies, and stale chocolate cake. Seriously, there is nothing they won’t eat, and eat with obvious gusto!
- Our little breeding flock of Astralorps range from 12/13 weeks to 17/18 weeks (two batches). The interweb, which has never let me down before, says they start laying somewhere around 24 to 26 weeks, but maybe as late as 30 weeks. That doesn’t explain why I picked up 7 tiny eggs from their coop this morning…
Miss November
The Atherton Farm Blog 