December 30, 2013 by neilatherton

November 2013 Facebook Farm Statuses

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

December 30, 2013 by neilatherton

November, it’s all about the maintenance, harvest, preserving… oh, and guns…

It seemed like all we did in November was tread water. We did a heap of work, but it was mostly maintenance without a lot of things that felt like progress. Looking back, however, we did okay.

The piglets grew a heap.

The piglets are getting huge!

They needed their own kind of maintenance though. We planted out the back paddock with a mixture of barley, peas, and rye, and we found that the rye seeds get stuck in little piglet eyes. One of the advantages of having super-tame pigs though, is that they stand still when you pick that stuff out.

That rye seed came out of that piglet’s eye.

There were a few days where I’d pick out 2 or 3 seeds from various piglets. The lesson here is to avoid rye next year.

We also had some good friends come out for a BBQ, and to meet their piglet in person. To me, that’s about the biggest win we could ever hope for.

Pete meeting Gianna, his piglet.

Probably our biggest pig progress was the fact that we put Honey back in with Boris. We had 11 piglets left, and didn’t need both mums in with them. We want to control how often we have piglets, mainly aimed at getting spit pigs at just the right time for birthday celebrations. 🙂 We want a spit pig for May, and so put Honey back with the big man. I think they may have been together for maybe 5 minutes before they were… consummating their undying love. By porking. Pun fully intended.

Boris and Honey having complete disregard to the fact that some of their kids are watching from the other side of the fence.

And just in case it wasn’t clear, here’s a close-up.

This is Boris’ post-coital mud bath. It’s the porky equivalent of having a cigarette, or rolling over to go to sleep.

Lastly in pig news, here is a gratuitous pig shot, because Boris doesn’t get enough attention.

This is why we can’t have clean water. Ever.

We did a heap of maintenance on the veggie patches, which takes a surprising amount of time.

We’re getting better at growing potatoes, but I think we still have a long way to go.

The zucchinis were coming on nicely.

We learned to pick the squash when they’re maybe palm-sized, rather than dinner plate sized like last year.

The pumpkins are loving life.

We were also able to harvest quite a bit. We had a big win, and also learned a valuable lesson.

Firstly, our beetroot harvest was amazing. We’ve found that we use beetroot in hot meals like roasts, but also cold meals in a couple of awesome salads. We also preserve it in the form of relish and pickled beetroot. I grew a heap more this year, wanting to see how much we could use, and we’ve ended up with a couple of dozen jars of relish and about four dozen jars of pickled beetroot.

Sometimes size really does matter…

We were harvesting this much pretty much whenever we wanted.

Bulk beetroot processing!

This has given us a good idea on exactly how much we should grow next year. We’ve also learned that we prefer the globe-shaped beetroot, and the Derwent Globes in particular.

This is one of our batches of pickled beetroot. Between the pickled and relish forms, we probably did this 6 or 7 times over the October to December period.

We had over an inch of rain over a couple of days in the middle of the month. Our garlic was done, in fact potentially a week past done, and I decided that would be a good time to harvest it. We planted 7 different varieties, and something like 150 plants. Linhda did her normal stellar job at plaiting it, but we found a week later that some had gone soft. It turns out that you need to harvest it in dry conditions, or at least let it dry before hanging it. We lost maybe 10% to 20% of the harvest, though we’re using it to make an organic insecticide and we’ll still have more than enough for the year. It’s a good lesson though.

I had some beeswax sitting in a jar for a while, and couldn’t quite find the right way to melt and use it. I did a heap of research and found a method that has you basically boil it in water, sieve, let a disc of wax form, and then repeat but sieve it through cloth. This was super-simple and gave us gorgeously pure wax. I think it’s slightly more dangerous than the other methods though, as the wax is apparently quite flammable. However, it worked like a champ, and I made a candle!

This is the first time around, when the bigger impurities have been filtered out.

This is the second time around, when the second filtering removes the rest of the impurities.

And I made a candle! Seriously, I am oddly proud of that candle, and show it to pretty much anybody who visits.

We also started to get eggs from the Australorps. By our calculations they were 17 weeks old, and maybe 19 weeks at the absolute outside, where we weren’t expecting eggs for another 5 to 10 weeks! The eggs are small, but they’ll get bigger.

We’ve been looking at aquaponics, the method where you grow fish and use a hydroponic set up to filter and recycle the water. We found a local-ish guy who has tertiary qualifications in that area, and who sells the equipment. We booked one of his tours, which took us to commercial aquaculture and hydroponic set ups, and then to his place for the aquaponics set ups. It’s fascinating, and is definitely something we’ll look at once I have a poly-tunnel organised. My aim is to grow our own barramundi and yabbies, though it might take a while to perfect the method.

I think the best way to get a sense of the progress we’re making is to look at the amount of food we eat that comes from our property. We have entire meals where the ingredients were grown by us. We have a heap of other meals where only one or two things (e.g. sweet potato or mushrooms) come from the supermarket. It really does give you a huge sense of achievement, especially in those months where it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much that leads you in a forward direction.

Everything on this plate came from my property…

… except the cheese sauce.

Lastly, we had some wild life in our sheds. One morning I found a blue tongue in our big shed. It was a cool night and he’d come in to get warm. He was beautiful, and I made sure he slipped away safely.

This guy was in the shed and a little cold one morning. I made sure he got safely away. I’ve got a soft spot for our scaled brothers and sisters…

Later in the month we had a rat in the little shed, which is only one of the few we’ve been able to catch. I actually really like the rats, but we need to control their numbers. It’s one of those uncomfortable necessities of farm life… 😦

At least Bruce is impressed with my masterful rat catching skills.

November 16, 2013 by neilatherton

October 2013 Facebook Farm Statuses

With a few piglets to sell I figured Gumtree.com was the way to go. I put together a beautiful advert, explaining our meat-raising philosophy and the benefits of the animals we raise, spanning several painstakingly written paragraphs. Nothing. I changed it a little to hit more selling points. Nothing. On Linhda’s advice, I dropped it to 20 words – pigs, age, breed, price, location. All sold inside of 24 hours.

The moral? Know your target audience…

Had a HUGE farm weekend. Sold all of our excess weaner piglets in one go to a guy who didn’t even haggle. Got The Patch almost totally set up for our warm-weather crops, including wrestling our giant rotary hoe across half of it, setting up growing frames and irrigation, and getting lots of it planted out. Also got treated for a horrible spider bite, which included having a huge ulcerated blister cut out of my hand. I did manage to use that to prove that duct tape fixes everything, including trying to keep a dressing on a wound while gardening.

Yay for big farm weekends, and a double Yay! for duct tape!!!!

I have a couple of live-capture traps in the roof for rats. There’s a whole rat/roof story which would take too many words, even for me. Anyway, there was a noise in the roof and I check the traps. We had caught one AND she’d pulled insulation through the bottom to make a nest AND she’d given birth to 6 babies. Inside the closed trap.

I’ve always had mad respect for our little rodent brothers and sisters, and it just went up tenfold. Seriously, how tough is that?!

I discovered two things today. Number 1: I freaking LOVE daylight savings. Being able to get a full day in at work, and then still two or three hours in the garden afterwards makes farm life so much easier. Number 2: Using a tractor instead of a wheelbarrow is both easier and much, much more fun.
I needed a hammer to hang something on my wall this afternoon, but didn’t want to take the time to go to the shed. The solution? I used the hilt of a sword to drive the nail in.

I want to call that Farmgenuity, but I’m not sure that farmers normally have swords laying around their living room…

Dedication is watching a piglet spend 5 minutes rooting through a fresh cow pat to eat all the good things it could find, having it come over for some affection, and still loving up on it. Seriously though, it was gross.
Just found a freaking HUGE dead rat. He’d tried to get into one of the chook runs through the chook wire. His head and shoulder must have just made it through, but his giant butt got stuck. After that I imagine it all became quite unpleasant for him…

As cool as that all is, my quandary now is that I need to remove him. The only way I see that happening is in two parts. /shudder

Miss October

November 16, 2013 by neilatherton

The Cool to Warm Weather Change…

October was mostly about gearing up for the warmer weather. Before moving to the country, Summer was easily my favourite season. Now that we’re completely at the mercy of the elements, and especially South Australia’s harsh Summers, I’ve done a 180 and love Winter. I wasn’t at all ready to give up my amazing cool-weather veggie patch, but the seasons apparently march on…

We tore out our legume bed at the start of October. It probably had a week left in it, but we had a long weekend and I wanted to make the most of it. TI then spent a half-day with our amazing rotary hoe and prepared the beds.

The difference in soil quality in just one year is amazing!

The pumpkin/melon bed.

This area gets some grey water runoff, so I want it blocked off and we’ll grow mint there. Gemma went all arty on it to pretty it up.

We then set up some irrigation. I can see this being a continually evolving process, but this year we’re drip-irrigating as much as we can, and we increased the height of the risers on the beds that we’re over-head irrigating.

The new higher risers over some spuds.

Drip irrigation for the corn.

We also had a different idea about supporting the tomatoes. We used star droppers and old sheep panel to make long supports. We’ll be able to weave the tomatoes through them, and then recycle them next year for the legumes. We found that our legume supports this year weren’t adequate, and resulted in some wastage.

Our new tomato supports, which will double as legume supports over Winter.

We did a fair bit of harvesting too. The peas and beans all came up, and our beetroot is doing amazing things.

It’s beetroot pickling time!!!!!

We also have tried artichoke this year for the first time, and it’s also going great guns.

Our first artichoke. Exciting!

We’re trying some different things this year. I’ve doubled the space between both the corn rows and the corn plants, allowing us to better grow squash/zucchini between the rows, and beans or peas up the corn plants. That’ll give us a quarter of the plants we had last year (around 250 rather than 1000), but I’m confident we’ll get 3 or 4 times the number of ears per plant. It should result in close to the same amount of corn, but a lot less work and water.

The last veggie thing we did was plant out some seeds in our hothouse. Last year we had the timing down pretty well, but I think this year we’ve left it a bit late. We have some store-bought tomatoes in, and I’d like to have the other half of the bed in within a month or so. At this rate, however, we’ll be lucky to have it in properly by Christmas.

We really did a lot of work in The Patch over October, and this entry really doesn’t do it justice. I did again reinforce to myself the fact that having farm equipment often makes this amount of work just a little easier…

Real farmers don’t need no stinking wheelbarrows!

We also worked on Linhda’s patch. We had two veggie patches up near the house, and the small one over the septic was a little problematic. It really doesn’t get enough sun, and the rest of the veggie patches add up to something over 400 square metres, so that poor little one was a little neglected. Linhda wanted an ornamental productive bed, so we converted the little one. It’s turned out beautifully, and is actually where our artichoke is. Apart from that, she has a heap of herbs, plus things like rhubarb and turmeric. She even threw in a couple of tomato plants and a capsicum. Oh! And hops! I’m growing hops in there!

Linhda’s Patch! This picture shows tarragon, artichoke, lemon grass, parsley, fennel, nasturtiums, strawberries, and celeriac!

Lots of the normal little farm events also happened…

The ducklings grew a lot, and transferred outside towards the end of October.

We got these via some fertile eggs off of gumtree, and they were advertised as Muscovy eggs. These aren’t Muscovy ducks though…

The ducklings chilling while I clean out their home.

That’s a pretty duck, but it ‘aint no Muscovy!

We got a slicer for the bacon. I was expecting a small, family-type slicer, but dad ended up scoring this giant industrial thing!

The beast in action!

The bacon is even better when sliced like this, as it crisps up like a champ!

BACON!!!!!!

The mulberry tree started it’s short season, and the fruit was gorgeous. Linhda managed to make the best mulberry/citrus jelly I’ve ever tried. Apart from that, we ate our body weights in fresh mulberries straight from the tree.

I’d be surprised if we scored a tenth of what was on this tree. So. Many. Mulberries!

We caught a rat in the roof. I put live capture traps up there a long time ago, but without ever catching anything. Dad heard something up there, I checked, and we’d caught a rat! The truly weird thing was that she’d been pregnant, she’d dragged some insulation into the trap as a nest, and she’d given birth! It was like catching 7 rats at once, mainly because it was actually catching 7 rats at once.

Rat mother gave birth inside the trap. That was a little surreal.

We organised a heap of hay from Farmer John next door. We got 2 bails originally, and he’s storing 12 more at his farm for us. These bails come from one or two kilometres away, which means the carbon footprint is hugely decreased. That’s a big win in our eyes. We’re also organising 7 or 8 tonnes of barley, but that won’t be until November. We’ll keep a tonne at our place in our handy dandy blue barrels, and will fill a 7 tonne silo John has at his farm. He’s done all of this out of the kindness of his heart, without us ever asking. I plan on giving him half a pig in return. He’s certainly earned it.

We got a new chainsaw! My big Farm Boss is amazing, and I love, love, love using it. However, it weighs a tonne, and using it for an hour or three means sore arms, shoulders, back, ego the next day. I wanted something a bit smaller, and a bit more agile. The big one has a 20 inch bar, while much of the wood we cut is between 2 and 10 inches. Our mate Pete hooked us up with a Mini Farm Boss, which has a 14 inch bar. We cut the rest of our wood with it – somewhere between 2 and 3 tonnes. Some of the big stuff needed the big chainsaw, but a majority of it was done with the little fella. It was awesome!

Mini Boss!

Light enough that even a skinny teenager can use it.

The result! Overseen by Bruce.

I got a spider bite sometime in the middle of October. I had a red mark on the forefinger knuckle on my left hand, which at first I took for sunburn. It blistered over a couple of days while I was travelling for work, and soon turned into a full-blown mess.

I’d actually drained the blister myself once at this stage.

I bit the bullet and went to the doctor (i.e. Linhda made me). The doctor decided to cut out the blister and put me on antibiotics. They wanted me to go back every couple of days, but I asked if I could just dress it myself. They put this sticky, medicated gauze stuff on it, which I had to keep on the wound as it would apparently eat into unprotected skin. It lasted a day, after which I ripped it off and just let it heal.

Blister cut out!

Ridiculous dressing. That lasted all of a day.

I took the skin-eating dressing off and just let it heal on its own.

Linhda scratched herself too. It was nothing, but I like to stroke her ego.

I “treated” Linhda’s cut. She wasn’t impressed that there was no picture of a human on the bottle that I “treated” her with.

And of course, there are pig things to talk about!

Boris managed to move his house so the opening was facing the electric fence, which means he was trapped. That’s not exactly news worthy, but it was pretty funny.

He’s not the smartest of pigs…

We split out 5 of the babies and put them in the spare duck run (before the ducklings occupied it). We were planning on keeping 11 to feed on – 1 for us, and 10 for friends. We had Lumpy, the little one with the abscess on his butt, and I was going to keep him until he healed at least. That left 3 excess to sell as weaners. I split out those 3, Lumpy, and Dopey, the runty piglet. Dopey was just not big enough to compete for food with 14 siblings and I thought he’d have a better chance against 4. It worked too, and he was able to get enough food.

I put an advert on gumtree, explaining exactly what our meat philosophy was, how these pigs were raised with love, all outlined in a half-dozen painstakingly crafted paragraphs. The only response I got was somebody wanting to come see the place, somebody wanting me to grow them pork, and somebody calling me horrible names because I’d dare sell meat animals.

I had a think about it, and added to the advert. I changed a few things around, and thought the result even better than the first advert. This time there were no responses. This puzzled me, as every time we’ve seen piglets on gumtree they’ve sold quickly, and the people we’ve spoken to have said they could sell their piglets three times over.

Linhda came up with a solution. She suggested I changed the add to be: piglets, location, price. I was sceptical, but did it. I was away for work and had a heap of phone calls. They all sold to the first guy to come see them. He actually wanted all 3 of our excess pigs, but when he turned up I told him that we had a fourth, as Lumpy’s butt was better. He didn’t hesitate and took all 4.

The really encouraging thing about this is that we had a few people, including the guy who bought these 4, who have asked to be informed the next time we have a litter. There seems to be a real demand for good weaner piglets, which means our meat should continue to pay for itself for the foreseeable future.

They didn’t really like being moved, but got over it pretty quickly.

Our four excess weaners gone in one shot!

We ended up putting both mums together with all of the remaining piglets. We’d heard that sows don’t always get on when they’ve got babies. However, our two girls really are sweeties, they’ve lived their entire lives together, and the babies were slipping between the two runs anyway and getting milk from whoever would give it. I opened the runs up, and the two mums have been cohabitating ever since.

Nothing quite says sisterhood like nursing 11 piglets between 2 of you at the same time.

We also free-ranged the babies for the first time. We had to split the cows and goats from them, as Clarisse has horns that she likes to throw around when it comes to competing for food, and I didn’t want a baby getting in their way. The babies love being in the back paddock, which I think is a combination of being able to run around like mad things and the fact that there is zero competition for a whole heap of food.

The piglets first foray into the back paddock.

It took them about a nanosecond before they were completely comfortable with their new digs.

Apart from that, the piglets grew like weeds and continue to impress with their cuteness. Almost everyone will come up without hesitation for a love, and several of them like to roll on their sides for belly rubs.

Curious piglets are curious.

Ahhhhh, that’s the business!

Smoked pig doing her thing…

… and Bruce checking out her thing…

This is pretty much a milk coma.

I love it when they bliss out so hard they fall over. 🙂

Seriously, these babies cannot get enough affection.

All-in-all, October was quite productive. We’re harvesting from The Patch, despite the change from cold to warm weather crops. Our carrots and parsnips are producing nicely, and our beetroot is the best I’ve ever seen. October was still good for leafy greens even, as the truly warm weather hadn’t started yet. We still have freezers mostly full of our meat too, which means a lot of big family meals that come entirely from our property. There really is nothing more satisfying…

Everything on this plate came from my property. Okay, the gravy and Yorkshire pudding didn’t grow in my yard, but at least they were made from scratch! 🙂

October 15, 2013 by neilatherton

Birthday Spit-Pig!

Both Gemma and Linhda share a birthday near the start of September, and we decided to have a combined party with a spit-pig. We expanded that plan to include some home-made, home-grown sausages, just for variety. I think we ended up with about 40 people, and the entire night was a complete success.

We’d raised the real guest of honour, George, since he was a weaner. He was a white breed, but not a large white, and was right around 4 months old when he went to “The Other Farm”. We were laying bets on what he’d dress out to, based on our first spit-pig, also George, who dressed out to 28kg. It’s really quite deceptive seeing them alive and then seeing them processed. I was sure this George was a little smaller than the first George, but he ended up dressing out to 29kg!

George dressed out to 29kg. I won the bet on how big he’d be. Not that I like to brag.

Scoring, oiling, and salting him turned into a family affair.

George getting started.

We have the spit-pig process down to a fine art now too. The first one saw us moving the spit a few times, moving the pig up and down on the racks, and having to re-tie it maybe 3 or 4 times. This time we had to re-tie him once after about an hour, as he’d shrank and his legs were dangling too close to the flames. After we averted that potential disaster, however, he peacefully turned for about another 7 hours without incident.

George crackling like a champ!

The results were amazing. You don’t have to cut this meat at all, it literally pulls apart with your hands and falls off the bone. The night was a huge success and everybody loved the porky goodness.

George all done.

October 5, 2013 by neilatherton

September 2013 Facebook Farm Statuses

WE HAVE PIGLETS!!!!!!!

There have been a couple of accidents (giant mums getting comfortable, little piglet bodies getting in the way), but right now we have 15 babies on two mums nursing away like little champs. YAY!!!!!!

Don’t you hate it when you’re worried all night about your cold day-old piglets, and then wake up at 5:30 with a brainstorm on how to keep them warm? And then you get up and engineer said brainstormed idea before the sun is up? Yeah, me too.
Fun Farm Fact #124: Three-day old piglets have teeth. Top and bottom. The result is that, while it may seem cute to let them suckle your fingers, the little buggers will bite the shit out of you!
I spent probably 7 hours this afternoon butchering a 93kg pig, making bacon, and making sausages. This has taught me a couple of things. Firstly, my dreams of being a butcher when I grow up may be a bridge too far. Also, I should probably use the chainmail glove Linhda made me buy.
In related news, if any of our visitors tomorrow eat a sausage, there’s a *very* good chance that it’ll have a special part of me in it…

It’s official, we make the best bacon EVER! The new method recommended by the guy at MBL worked a treat, and is actually quite quick when you’re doing smaller (1 to 2 kg) chunks. I can see how the free-ranged, properly cured and smoked, artisan-type bacon is $30+ a kilo though – there’s a lot of work involved!

Of course, when you’re talking about bacon, any amount of work is worth it…

Cheese making class was awesome! My favourite part? Eating the cheese at the end.

Had a total country night at the local pub tonight. Won the meat tray, because apparently we don’t have enough meat in our house. Linhda ordered a shandy. Watched footy. Rubbed shoulders with lots of dudes wearing jeans and thongs.

It was freaking awesome!

Today we spread, by hand, a tonne to a tonne-and-a-half of hay in the pig’s runs, after shovelling out a whole lot of poop. Now their runs are nice and neat, which will last about 3 minutes. Then I watched a couple of ducklings hatch, much to their mum’s disgust. We rounded the day out by catching a piglet who had developed an abscess on its butt, and syringing out over 80ml of blood and fluid, some of which ended up all over me.

All-in-all, it’s been pretty Farmtastic!

I discovered that the best time to pat the piglets is when they’re peeing and/or pooping. They either concentrate really hard, or they zone out, but either way they don’t try and run away from me. Piglet win!

Clarisse, sporting her trendy new halter, and meeting Bruce. They are not friends yet.

October 5, 2013 by neilatherton

WE HAVE PIGLETS!!!!!!!

September was pretty much ALL about pigs!

It was Linhda and Gemma’s birthday on the 8^th, and we had planned a pig-on-a-spit for the weekend of the 14^th. We knew that Smoked Pig was due to drop right around their birthday. We’d done the math, and assuming she’d gotten pregnant pretty much as soon as Boris was put in with them, she’d be dropping the week of the 9^th.

At the same time, we knew that Honey Pig was pregnant, but guessed she was a month or so behind Smoked because she was so much smaller. The month before I’d begun to suspect they might be due around the same time, judging by their teat development (the vet explained that to me), but we still weren’t sure.

We had Smoked set up in the vet-approved farrowing shed, but Honey was in the less salubrious stock crate in the pen next door. Our plan was to have Smoked drop, wean her babies over the following month, move them out, and then have Honey move in. Boy were we naïve.

We were in QLD visiting my brother the weekend of the 7^th and 8^th, and I was just glad no piglets had appeared before we got home the morning of the 9^th. I went out early on the morning of Tuesday the 10^th and started my normal routine. I was walking through the larger poultry run, and looked in on Honey to see how she was. It took me a minute to work out that the little, spindly-legged things wobbling around her prone form were piglets. I quickly checked Smoked and saw she had piglets too. They’d both dropped on the same night!

WE HAVE PIGLETS!!!!

Wobbly cuteness.

6 piglets, 14 teats, and they still end up fighting…

It’s hard to believe they were so little, even only a month on.

Snug under their heat lamp.

Yes, I had to lean on a quarter-tonne of nursing mother to take this picture

Smoked had 8, but lost 2, while Honey had 10, but lost 1. We’re not sure if they lay on them or they were still-births. I checked the little bodies over when I took them from the runs, and they were significantly larger than the others. Smoked also had some blood spray a good 2 feet up the wall in her farrowing shed, and so may have had a bad time of it. Still, they both did it all on their own, and we ended up with 15 piglets on their first try. Pigs are freaking awesome!!!!!

This put us in a bit of a quandary though. The nights were cold, and we weren’t sure how the mums would go trying to share the farrowing shed. Pigs are protective mums, and the two sows may not mix well. I was super-worried about Honey’s babies that first night, and mulled over how to fix up the stock crate while trying to sleep. I came up with an idea in the early hours of the morning, and rushed out right at dawn to implement it.

I used some recycled beams and tube we have to run through the stock crate and give the babies a place to get away from mum. The stuff I’ve read about this calls them “creep” areas, or “creep boxes”. I have no idea why.

The babies would still be cold though, more so being away from mum. With that in mind, I called past a pet store and grabbed another heat reptile heat lamp. I used an old wooden crate as a creep box, set up the heat lamp so it shone straight in, and the babies loved it!

Setting up the babies with some warmth.

Yeah, they were pretty happy with that.

This is what happens when you let your daughters loose on the piglets. Lots of squealing. The piglets made some noise too.

I modified that set up a few times, and used a bigger crate in the end to give the growing babies more room. We’ll get another proper, larger, farrowing shed before we have more babies, but this set up really helped in the meantime.

Take two. This has pretty much been our set up since.

We took both George and Prosciutto to “The Other Farm” in preparation for the birthday party. We really didn’t need to get Prosciutto done for the party, as George was always going to be big enough. However, she was around 12 months old, and needed to go. It only made sense to take them both at the same time.

Prosciutto dressed out to 93kg!!!! She was a smaller white breed, and I’d guess our large whites would dress out to twice that at the same age. Still, 93kg of pork is a lot to contend with. Our plan was to make bacon out of pretty much everything from the back to front legs, and mince the rest of sausages. However, I did cut some chops after somebody sent me a link explaining how best to do that, and we kept the back legs as roasts. We cut those legs in half, and each roast is still well over 4kg. In hindsight, we don’t need roasts that big… J

This is half of Prosciutto boned out and ready to be made into bacon and sausages.

I tried my hand at some chops. In hindsight, they were a little thick.

I don’t mind the odd snag off of a BBQ, but otherwise wouldn’t give you five cents for a sausage normally. Our home-made pork sausages, on the other hand, are freaking amazing! Gemma got involved with this lot, which was cool, and together we pumped out around 20kg of sausages.

Gemma getting her hands dirty. Literally.

The shirt says it all really.

That’s a lot of sausages!

The bacon was our biggest win here I think. I’d found a guy at MBL who was a bit of an expert and I picked his brain. I even went back the next day to talk to him again. Finding that kind of person in South Australia was gold to us, as much of what we’d been learning came from people in the UK, or colder Aussie climates like Canberra or Tasmania. The method this guy gave us was:

Use 24g of salt per kg of pork.
Vac Pac it.
Leave it for a day per kg.
Hot smoke it to an internal temperature of 50 degrees for a long time.
Vac Pac it again.

The differences here when compared to our first try was the very measured amount of salt, and only getting the internal temperature to 50 degrees. We went to 70 degrees last time, which meant you could eat it “raw”, but our guru told us that was way too hot.

The only thing we did differently was use a bit more salt. We measured out 24g/kg and it just wasn’t enough to cover the meat. That may be because I did it in smaller slabs – 1 or 2 kg. That gave more surface area when compared to one big slab, and so needed more salt to cover it.

I did it in smaller slabs so they’d be ready quicker. We were able to do about 30kg of bacon in the one weekend – the smaller slabs cured for one day, while the larger went for two. That meant we could smoke it all in two batches.

Smoking our first batch of bacon.

So. Very. Tasty!

Home-made, home-grown breakfast BBQ. Yum!

The results were amazing! Seriously, the best bacon I’ve ever tried. Our challenge now is to make that bacon last until we can get another baconer fed up, which will take maybe 9 months.

The MBL man said you don’t have to freeze it. If it’s cured corrected and Vac Pac’d, it’ll keep in the fridge for months. While I trust him, I still froze ours. I’ll keep it in the fridge for a while (not that it lasts in this house) once it’s opened, but any longer-term storage will be the freezer for us.

We also had to do a bit of impromptu vet work on one of the babies. He had an abscess on his hind quarter. I’m guessing that a spider bit him. We kept an eye on it for a few days, but it wasn’t going down. I grabbed him, took him to the shed away from the mums, iodined his butt, and used a syringe to draw out the fluid. It was gross and yet awesome!

The before picture of the abscess.

We pulled out 3-and-a-bit syringes, each of 25ml.

And unhappy piglet and me covered in blood and abscess juice. Good times.

I wanted to tidy up the pig runs a little. Pigs seem to have a scorched-earth policy when it comes to how they live, and the runs can get a bit muddy. Then, when the sun comes out, they end up bumpy and horrible. We had a few spare half-tonne rolls of hay from last season, and used two of them to deep litter the runs. It worked really well, and makes the yards a bit nicer for the piglets to run around in.

Deep littering the babies’ yards.

The piglets like running around in the straw.

The straw makes the yards a little nicer.

Chooks free-ranged into the pig runs. They are either very brave or very stupid, and by that, I mean they’re very stupid.

Pigs eating their veggies!

We had a small poultry win too. After losing our ducklings last month, we had 4 hatch this month. One didn’t make it, but 3 powered through. After the problems with the owl chowing down on our babies, I didn’t want to take any chances and so moved them into the heat-box we use for day old chickens.

Ducklings!!!!

We did some stuff in the veggie stuff too, but let’s face it, it’s all secondary to the piglets. 🙂

The spuds are coming up nicely.

I’d like to sign off for September with some gratuitous piglet pictures…

The babies love their greens!

So. Much. Cuteness!!!!

They do love a scratch. Sometimes they bliss out so hard they fall over.

September 23, 2013 by neilatherton

August 2013 Facebook Farm Statuses

WE HAVE DUCKLINGS!!!!

Actually, so far there’s one. Therefore…

WE HAVE DUCKLING!!!!!.

We had another be swarm go over our place yesterday, and it may even be our own hive splitting off (they were at critical mass). We watched the giant, scary-sounding mass drift across our place and settle onto a bush in my neighbour’s front yard. He’s given me the okay to try and catch them, so I’ll be off to get another hive tomorrow or the next day. With a little luck, and some terror on my part, we might have two hives happily pollinating our little world within the next few days. Wish me luck…
There’s a pregnant pure-bred Jersey Heiffer on gumtree! Her name is Bianca, which is ridiculous, but I might go meet her tomorrow!!!!

Don’t tell Linhda…

Going to get my firearms license today, which includes having my photo taken for the ID. I’m purposely unshaven, unshowered, and unkempt. I’ve also been working on my dead-eyed, slack-jawed look. This is going to be the best ID ever!

Isn’t she gorgeous?!?!

September 23, 2013 by neilatherton

Back To Work For A Rest!

I had some time off in August, “time off” being a subjective term. Seriously, we got SO much done!

Half the month was taken up by getting The Patch all squared away. This involved:

Weeding. Lots, and lots of weeding.
Setting up some more rigid frames for the peas. We used droppers and spare sheep panel, and they’ll work just as well for tomatoes or maybe even cucumbers or pumpkins.
Used our fertilizer teas. You know? To fertilize veggies.
Harvested and tried to keep up with the broccoli and cauliflower. That was a losing battle, right from the start.
Sorted out the onions. They needed a heap of thinning, and we had a fallow/overflow bed. We ended up taking half of that up with just some of our thinned onions. I estimate that we have about 1500 onions planted out now. We fell short last year with maybe a quarter that number. If these all work, we should be good for onions for the next year.
Rotary hoed in the green manure. That gutless, gravelly bed is now looking much better.
Planted some spuds.

Our fertilizer teas – nettles in water, and poop in water. Yum!

Our carrots and leafy greens.

Our first carrots for the season!

Spuds, both in the ground and in tyres.

Across The Patch

Healthy cauliflower.

Gorgeous broccoli!

I also set up a new worm farm. My old, relatively small one, didn’t make it through the hottest January in recorded history. This time I wanted to go bigger, both because that means more wormy goodness, but it also makes it more resistant to adverse weather.

I bought a bath tub from a salvage yard, bought some fittings to allow me to tap out the worm juice, and made a frame out of some of our recycled timber. I then found an awesome worm guy (yes, that’s a thing) who lives close-by and bought 2,000 worms. I still don’t think I have it right, mostly because I’m lacking the time to give them a lot of attention. However, I’m confident we’ll be worm-filled in no time.

All the fixings for a big worm farm.

All assembled.

This is where the wormy goodness comes out.

All set up!

This bag contains…

…2000 wormy soldiers!

We got a milking cow! She’s a jersey and is potentially 2 months pregnant via artificial insemination. The new plan is:

Set up a milking shed just inside the back yard against the western fence.
Get a milking machine. They’re expensive, but totally worth it.
Get her pregnant yearly – the AI is $50.
Sell girl babies and eat boy babies.
Dedicate the back paddock entirely to the milking cow – plant things specific to her. She’ll have to share with the pigs, but so far our pigs and cows get on famously.
Buy in the odd goat or sheep to keep Linhda happy.

Oh, and her name is Clarisse. Her breeders named her Bianca, which is clearly not her name. What were they thinking?!

Our new milking cow, Clarisse!

Clarisse meeting some of the rest of the menagerie.

August was a good and bad month for poultry. First of all, we now have the makings of our breeding flock. In the past we bought and raised Cobbs. They are amazing and when raised with the right food, exercise, and enough time we ended up with birds dressing out to well over 4kg. However, they’re also a little sad, with messed up legs and a propensity to just sit there and get fat. We wanted to change how we raise the chooks for a few reasons:

Breeding them ourselves is much more self-sufficient, and gives us more control.
We want to use a heritage breed.
We want to use a dual-purpose breed, so we can have the one flock for eggs and meat.
We want smaller birds, though the ones we chose can still dress out to around 3kg.
We want to process them ourselves. Again, this is more self-sufficient. It also means we get to keep every single by-product (e.g. blood and feathers for the compost etc.).

The breed we chose is the Australorp, which has the added benefit of having an Aussie origin. American Cobbs vs. Aussie Australorps. No context really…

We found a breeder who lives close-ish and went to speak to him and his wife. As always, poultry breeders are pleasantly unusual, and they were super welcoming and informative. The dad of our birds was second-in-show in last year’s Royal Adelaide Show, and is freaking gorgeous. We ended up getting two batches, which are 3 or 4 weeks apart. Most are pure-bred Australorp, but there are a few half-breed ring-ins in there. We’ll choose the best girls, maybe 10 or so, as our breeders and buy in a rooster in 4 or 5 months time. Any boys will be eaten, and any excess girls kept as egg birds. Eventually, after all of the egg ladies have passed, we’ll just keep the one flock of Australorps for both meat and eggs.

The dad of our new chooks. He was freaking gorgeous!

Our first batch of new chooks. Half will be breeders, and the rest meat or egg birds.

We also made some changes to “The Ladies” (our egg birds). We’d moved them into our citrus area so they could free-range and have full access to green feed. However, the chook house in there was a crappy octagonal aviary that had been left behind on the property. I bought a purpose-built, pre-fabricated poultry house, and dad made them a laying box. I’d tried various laying box options before but they always shunned them. Dad made them the Rolls Royce of laying boxes though, and they love it!

Our new chook shed. Fancy!

Dad’s laying box. This thing worked miracles.

All set up with the chicken Ritz.

Our 4 egg ladies used to give us a couple of eggs a day, and in good times sometimes we’d get 3. For a while we half-suspected our big girl was a boy, as we’d never had all of them lay. However, we got 4 eggs the first day the new laying box was installed, and we’ve been getting 4 eggs every day since.

Our last poultry story is the ducks, which was a success at first, but then kind of went awry. We’re still learning the best way to breed the ducks. Muscovies are amazing, and will do all of the work themselves, however, we’ve found that we need to be careful with their housing. We had them all in together, and the super-clucky mum (Marge) started to sit on eggs. Eventually, all 3 Muscovy mums were clucky, but they were getting in each other’s way and fighting a little. Add in the giant drake and the Indian Runners tramping over everything, and we ended up with some cracked eggs.

Eventually, we split Marge out on her own, and put the rest of the ducks in with the new chooks. Marge ended up hatching out a few ducklings.

Our new duckling, who…

The problem was that we ended up losing them over a few days. One morning, I found out why…

…became dinner for this beauty.

We had an owl hanging around, which is awesome. Owls are gorgeous, and having birds of prey illustrates the changes in the property over the past 18 months. However, it’s not so good for the ducklings. With that in mind, and because I refuse to do anything to hurt/discourage the owl, I got some fertile eggs to put under Marge. We also got an incubator, so we can hatch them in a controlled environment from now on.

We had some bee progress too. Kind of. January was hard on the hive, and all of the frames kind of slumped. We weren’t sure how to fix it, and it was a little further down our list of priorities. However, something happened to make it more urgent. I was working in the pig runs, and Linhda was chatting to me, when we heard a giant buzzing. We looked over the orchard area, right near the hive, and saw a giant swarm making its way across our property. There’s a chance it came from our hive, but I can’t be sure.

We followed the swarm over to Farmer John’s front yard, and watch it settle into a bush only 20 or 30 feet from our fence. I spoke to John and he was cool with me grabbing the hive, so I rang an apiarist for advice, both on the old hive and the new swarm. For the old hive, the advice was to:

Get a new super (the box thing with frames in it).
Clean out the old super, including scrapping all of the excess comb from the lid.
Put the new super on top.
Wait 2 or 3 weeks for the queen to migrate to the top.
Swap the two supers and put a queen excluder in between.
Wait another 2 or 3 weeks and take off the top super, with all of the slumped frames, and harvest a metric shit-load of honey.

The new swarm was a little easier. They suggested that I use a bag to catch them. I went over, sussed it out, and had a firm plan-of-attack in place. It was a big swarm on a thick-ish branch, but I was confident I could take them. I took some pictures one morning, after the swarm had been there for a couple of days, and then Linhda and I went to get the new supers. A couple of hours later I was set up to get the new swarm, but it had left. I suspect they were laughing at me the entire time.

The new swarm settled in. They flew away only a couple of hours after I took the bloody picture though!

I followed the apiarist’s advice with the old hive, and it worked relatively well. During my conversations with the apiarist I mentioned that I hadn’t been stung yet, which surprised him. Of course, I got a little cocky about it, to the point where I only wore shorts while handling the bees. Dad suggested jeans, but I obviously didn’t need them… until I brushed the bee-laden lid across my leg and dumped dozens of them on me. I got about 20 stings, all in the same smallish area. That was when I put jeans on.

It took a bit of work, but I got it all cleaned up, and we ended up with 3 or 4 kilos of honey just from the excess comb in the lid. And it is out-freaking-standing!

Setting up the new supers.

One done!

This is just what is stuck in the lid!

The lid had three large groups of bees, one of which dumped onto my leg. 😦

Thankfully the smoker worked…

Scraping away… pissing off thousands of bees…

All clean.

All set up!

My first sting. And then I got 20 at one time on the other leg.

I can’t describe just how good that tastes.

The biggest bonus here was that I finally worked out how to get the smoker working. This would have sucked otherwise.

Finally, of course there was pig stuff happening. There’s always pig stuff happening…

We finished setting up the farrowing shed. Dad ran a cable from the big shed to the farrowing shed, ran an extension cord along it, and set up a wall plug. I bought a guccie heat lamp, designed for reptiles, and set it up in the baby area (this is apparently called the “creep area”). It works really well, and the babies will be toasty!

Prosciutto, our baconer, got a little sick. She was listless and off her food, both being things that are unusual in our pigs. I got a vet out for her, and he diagnosed her with a common cold. Being a production vet, I thought he might know a thing or two about raising pigs. As it turns out, back in his native Macedonia, he used to work on a pig farm that collectively has more pigs than all of Australia. That’s 70,000 pigs!!!!! He was a wealth of information, and had worked a lot in the piglet area. He went over the farrowing shed, the yards, and things like the food. He was complimentary about almost everything, and only had us tweak a couple of small things (e.g. more the heat lamp a little lower). Having somebody like him give us that kind of advice was absolutely invaluable.

We weren’t sure when the babies were due. Smoked Pig was plainly larger than Honey, and we thought she was a full month ahead. Our math said that Smoked would be due in the first week of September at the earliest, and the vet confirmed that by saying her teats had dropped and were filling with milk. When we looked at Honey, her teats didn’t look too different, but she was way smaller. I began to suspect that they were both due at the same time, and are just simply different sizes.

Smoked Pig looking all kinds of pregnant.

Sometimes you just need to take the weight off of that enormous stomach.

The new heat lamp. The vet had us reposition it a little – both so that mum can’t snap at it while in pain during birthing, and lower so it’ll give more heat to the babies.

Seriously, she was huge.

Boris spent some time free-ranging out the back. He deserved it after all his good work.

Happy as a pig in…

Loving life.

After having some “time off”, I really had to go back to work for a rest…

Spoiler Alert – we end up with two litters of piglets in September!!!! Both on the same night!!!!!

PIGLETS!!!!!

August 7, 2013 by neilatherton

Loving Winter!

Linhda and I spent half the month in Canberra, so July was sadly light-on for farm work. We did, however, manage to get a few things done, one of which was a fairly major meat win.

We dropped Fillet, the largest of our cows, off at the end of June. Being a dairy breed, and a few months younger than we’d really wanted, we didn’t have huge hopes, but he ended up dressing out to 148kg. You don’t realise just how much meat that is until you have it laid out on your dining room table…

Boxes o’ Meat!

148kg of grass-fed, free-ranged, awesome!

One of my favourite steak cuts.

Giant roats.

Because he was a little young and lean, we were also worried that the meat may be tough. However, it’s amazing. Seriously, seriously, amazing. We cut most of the steaks ourselves, and you could actually smell the grass he ate. This was an animal who was free-ranged, treated with affection, given nothing but clean food, transported only a short distance and done so with care, and processed humanely. Not only does that satisfy my ethical needs, it also satisfies my taste buds. 🙂

In line with our recycling, no-waste ethos, I was keen to have a go at preserving the skin. I spoke to the butcher and organised to go pick it up the day Fillet was processed. I bought a heap of salt in. I researched how to easily preserve a hide on the Internet – you have to scrape the fat and gunk off the inside, and then salt it. It seemed pretty easy on paper. Of course, the reality was nothing like that.

For one, the skin is messier than you’d think. Seriously, it’s gross. Secondly, I couldn’t scrape anything from the inside. I tried our sharpest butcher’s knife, but couldn’t get through the membrane. I ended up just salting the crap out of it to see what would happen.

Fillet’s skin. I tried to scrape it. It did not go well…

… so I poured salt all over it.

I still want to try to preserve the skins on the animals we have done. I’ll either have to work out where I went wrong, or use a different method. Fillet’s skin is still on the floor of my shed, and may turn out okay. It won’t ever be house-worthy, but might be okay to hang on the shed wall.

We did a fair bit in the veggie patch too. Winter is my new favourite season, but the extra rain means a heap of weeds. We managed to mostly stay on top of the weeds. Mostly.

The chenopod bed looking over to the legume bed.

Mustard greens, kale, and some spinach.

Looking over some leafy greens.

Our main brassica bed.

In addition to that, we harvested the pumpkins. My original plan had them finishing around February or March, but they were still there in July. Parts of the plants looked like they were dying back, while others had new growth and flowers on them. I’m not sure if it’s the way the weather is changing or something about where we grow them, but it was weird. I ended up getting impatient and harvesting them.

A big part of our pumpkin harvest.

I also started preparing the two non-planted beds. The rotary hoe did an amazing job on the pumpkin bed.

This rotary hoe is a beast!

And I cut down the green manure ready to be turned in.

A before shot of the green manure.

And after shot of the green manure.

I’ll let the green manure sit for a week or three and turn it over. I also plan to plant some potatoes in the old pumpkin bed, and maybe plant them a little earlier than last year, just as an experiment.

Another experiment I’m trying is fertilizer tea. Well, kind of tea. I set up two 200 litre barrels, one with nettles and the other with a mixture of cow and pig poop. I’ll let them steep for a couple of weeks, and use the water as organic fertilizer. The resultant sludge will go on the compost, and then I’ll makes two more teas. This way I should have 400 litres of organic fertilizer every fortnight, a well fed veggie patch, and I get to drown the nettles that keep stinging me.

Fertilizer tea!

We did have some problems with Tink, the goat we bought as a milker. Firstly, the fence along the new “track” went in. It looks great, but turns out to be a little low. I also specifically asked for no barbed wire.

The new fence going up.

The new fence looks awesome.

The downside of that was that Tink could pretty much jump out at will. One paddock over has a small flock of a few sheep and a couple of goats, and Tink spent most of our Canberra trip with them. I brought her home the day we got back, but she was out again the next day. We ended up taking her to Brett, our goat friend, who lives a couple of kilometres away. He has a large flock/herd of goats, and Tink is living with them. Now my plan is to get a milking cow…

After a couple of weeks away, we could really see the difference in Smoked Pig – she is definitely pregnant. Honey may also be pregnant, but if so, she’s a month or so less pregnant. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as we currently only have the one shed that’ll work well as a farrowing shed. Along those lines, we put some work into making it a proper farrowing shed.

This is what happens when a collective half-tonne of pigs sleeps against the shed wall.

We straightened the shed up, and reinforced the inside with corner posts and sleepers. Then we put a barrier in that will allow Smoked’s babies to slip away from her if she lies down. Large Whites are great mums, but sometimes squash their babies on accident. Having a barrier that the babies can get under means they can get away if necessary.

This barrier will give the babies a chance to get away from mum.

We’ll put a heap of straw in here and put up a heat lamp.

Reinforcing with uprights and sleepers. In stables these are called “kick boards”. In a pig shed, they’re “lean boards”.

The next step is to run electricity out to the shed and put in a heat lamp. We have most of the material we need, but still need to source a couple of things. If Smoked got pregnant as soon as Boris was put in with her, then she’s not due until the start of September. Judging by her size, and the fact that she’s obviously struggling to get up from lying down, that’s a little tough to believe. She’s freaking huge!

The weather approved of our work.

The Babies checking out the new farrowing shed.

The month ended with us attending a fresh produce swap session in Gawler. It’s set up by a group called Transition Gawler who have their own FaceBook chat page. It was only their 3^rd swap session, and maybe 20 people were there. Apparently it had grown significantly, and it was interestingly. People bring their excess, lay it out, and then grab what they want. It’s a great idea and I hope it takes off.

This is what we took to the produce swap. Bruce approved.

The Gawler Produce Swap. It went well.

July ended up being fairly productive, especially considering the fact that we spent two weeks of it interstate. Still, there are things that are lagging, the biggest of which is the veggie patch. For the most part it’s coming along well; however, a couple of things need more work. The legume bed needs trellises set up, the allium bed needs the onions thinned in places and filled in elsewhere, and the carrots need thinning. Some of that will mean rejigging the plan some more too. Roll on August…

Apparently Bruce finds this comfortable. Dad does not.

Healthy crop!

The Atherton Farm Blog

The story of the Atherton family's attempt at self-sufficiency.

Author: neilatherton