The last of the piggies headed off for harvest today. It is always a sad day on the farm when most of the pigs leave. We know it’s their destiny, but it never does make it any easier. I miss their spirit, their spunkiness, and their enduring curiosity.
These last few weeks have been especially interesting since we moved them to the orchard in Stow. We’ve developed a set of portable systems which allow us to keep pigs in pretty much any environment with minimal daily management. But this definitely does not mean things always go according to plan! We had a few mishaps these last few weeks but overall the “pigs in the orchard” experiment seems to be a success. The pigs successfully rooted up lots of brambles and weeds in the canopy understory and all the apple drops were completely cleared. We won’t know for sure until next season the full impact of the heavy rooting, but we all have our fingers crossed that there will be some improvement. I’ll be spreading white clover seed this weekend in the hopes that the clover will get established and flourish in the early spring.
And for the mishaps. Hmm. We will be addressing this soon once I get the newspaper articles scanned. I’ll leave it at that for now!
Some of the piggies we sent in for harvest today were born here on the farm in May. Nutmeg, daughter of Fern, farrowed on May 18th in a field of rye. Some photos below are of Nutmeg with her litter, the same pigs yesterday on a dry run loading them into the trailer, and some other pig pics from the orchard.
Look for tasty cuts of pork in our mini-store by late next week. Also, in the coming weeks we’ll have more of our amazing nitrite-free bacon, smoked hocks, ham steaks, beer brats, chorizo, smoked kielbasa and more!
-
- Nutmeg with piglets
-
- four days, six pigs
-
- water tank in orchard and fence line
-
- trailer in orchard, note impact on either side of trailer
