Pig Update

Lots of pictures to share!

 

Gibby, Giselle and Turbo have been living in the center field now for just over a month. Its been a big change for them going from their indoor barn to outdoor pasture, but they seem to be enjoying themselves.

 

They are eating about 10lbs of food combined daily in 2 meals, and are supplemented with whatever offcuts from the kitchen we generate. Its been exciting watching them display their taste buds with food. They certainly know they like bread and fruit. The part of the meal that is not in pellet form is competed for and eaten first!

  

Here is a before and after shot to see how much they have chained in size.  In the second shot Giselle is on the left, named after Bunchen for being so tall and good looking,  Turbo is on the right, named for being the athlete of the group, and Gibby is at the back. He is much smaller, which could be related to him suffering a nasty foot injury on the way home in the truck. Im not sure what happened exactly, but he got his foot caught somehow and gashed his foot open in the dog crate. It took a few weeks to heal completely, and he has been left with a bit of a wonky hoof, but overall it healed pretty nicely. I guess Gibby will be offered at a discount :(

 

What they say about pig cleanliness is at least partially true. Excluding one time when we first got them and they were learning their surroundings, they havent taken a poop at all in their house. The chickens, on the other hand, have no problem sleeping right on top of their poop.  At first the pigs designated a 'poo corner' but have taken to just dumping anywhere outside a 5m or so radius from the shelter.  I plan to paint and trim the pig house like the chicken coop, just havent got around to it yet.

In their pen they have really gone to work rooting. From what I have read they do not sweat or have any pigment in their skin, so they need to mud themselves both to cool down and to avoid sunburn.  When its a really sunny day I make sure to go spray some water in the holes for them, as well as keep the kiddie pool full. Turbo especially loves taking a dip and then rolling around in the dirt. It seems like not a bad life! 

I havent done so well with the plants in the back. Above is a picture of the cauliflower and broccoli plants. Where the pigs and chickens have a noticeable will to live and are resilient, plants seem to be a reflection of what kind of care you offer them. I do water them, but clearly the slugs and maybe some bugs have been attacking them. I try to pick up all the slugs I see and give them to the chickens or pigs, but its just not enough. I think I also over estimated the quality of our soil, and how much amendment I should have added. Hopefully we get at least some yield out of the plants. The raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb and tomatoes in the greenhouse have all done well, however.

When I sold my grandmas car, the very nice Greek man who bought it gave me 7 Greek tomato seedlings. I have made sure to water them, give them half strength fertilizer regularly, and keep them inside on rainy days, and what do you know... they are doing amazing! They look like they just might be starting to flower, so I will have to harden them off one the weather gets a bit nicer, and plant them outside. Unfortunately they have started to use the window as support, and will require a lot of help to stay upright, but Im hoping I can figure something out.

As a last note 3 of 7 chickens currently are laying eggs. They are a frustrating group!

Putting the Oink in "Oinks n' Clucks"!

Its been a very very busy work week around the place culminating in bringing home 3 little piggies tomorrow morning.  We are buying Landrace/Duroc mix pigs that weigh about 60 lbs from a reseller in Black Creek. As I mentioned before, its not my ideal breed, but the age is right and the time is right. I hope they live a happy life here on the property, as a lot of work has gone into trying to provide for them.  Their 4 x 8 ft home is built ready to be assmebled tomorrow:

The fence is done, except for attaching some wire to the bottom two rails and putting on the gate:

And the Xterra is loaded up and ready to go!

 

As Jess is away I had to shimmy up some sort of barrier so Lilian would be comfy in the back seat.

Of note, I wanted to mention on the blog that I have read the pigs will eat anywhere from 2-4kg of food per day depending on their weight. 20kg of food costs $15!!!  If we only fed them commercial food, which is not recommended as diversity in diet improves their life and quality of meat, it would cost around $2.50 on average for the duration of their life to feed each one per day. They have to reach about 230lbs before being slaughtered, which I think will take about 5 months.  That adds up to at least $400 in food per pig just to raise them. So, I am asking that if you live in Victoria, and feel like meeting our pigs, please bring some vegetable off cuts, or stale bread, or anything other than meat that you are going to throw away. Everybody wins! They get to meet people and enjoy the food you give them, and you get to see our presumably hilarious attempt at proper husbandry. Maybe you will even be so impressed you will want to buy some pork at the end! The sale price of each pig should be $5/lb, and each should weigh about 100lbs per side.  We plan to keep 1 side, and sell the other 5. I think we have 2 pre sold already.  The plan is to gross $450 in profit per pig, which wouldnt include any allowance for time or costs of fencing/shelter/equiptment. Wish us luck!

Green shoots!

Its been a good week here on 'The Ranch'. The dogs are running freely inside the new deer fence, and things in the garden are starting to take shape.  Our seedlings are germinating nicely, and the ground which I am going to place them has basically been completed.  It was a lot of work to destroy years of perennials to get to usable fluffy clean soil, but hopefully its worth it.  Things are still a bit clumpy and muddy, but I am hoping that will fix itself as the ground dries out and the weather warms up.

Step 1: Last fall I thought I destroyed most of the stuff... wrong!!

Step 2: This week I pulled out all the roots and crap  (back hurts now 6 hours wtf!!!)

We also have been working on the fence for the center field to raise our pigs!

Slow going as we can only work on it on sunny days after Jess gets home from work, but I think its going really well! Probably 25% done at this point.

One disappointing thing though has been how difficult it is to find good pigs.  After reading a few books on different types of pigs, and the eating, breeding, and personality traits of each, I went searching for Berkshire pigs. Sadly it seems like its basically impossible to get weaner pigs from a farm that has purebred Berkshires for a person to raise on their own. I found one in Metchosin that sells to my beloved Whole Beast in Oak bay, but they dont sell live pigs. You can rarely find some sort of cross bred mut on Used Victoria, but I really didnt want to settle on a Duroc mix. I even called around in the Fraser Valley but they just refer to the pigs as 'pigs' as if a dog is just a 'dog'. Seems very odd to me that real breeds arent represented. Like why can't I go to a breeder and buy a purebred Tamworth, Yorkshire or Large Black if I want one?!?! Something tells me that might change over time.  I dont know what we well end up with, but hopefully something comes along soon.

Also last week I sold my Grandma's car for her, and the people who bought it just happen to be gardening extraordinaires!  When I dropped off the 2nd key this week they gave me 7 Greek tomato plants, a huge bag of kale, and a bunch of lettuce plants! Our greenhouse doesn't have a dirt floor, so I tried to make a bit of a pseudo greenhouse outside. If its sunny I'll pull the tops off, and then try to remember to cover them back at night. I brought the tomatoes into the office window and moved them into bigger pots. I am nervous about everything surviving, but I think I moved them gently and gave them a good soil mix... Hoping for the best!!

U P D A T E

Not really sure what my excuse can even be... things take time?

I am going to skip the long and poorly written digression into why I can't write blog posts regularly or how missing 3 months of posting really puts holes in the story of "can we sell $2500 worth of farm goods", and just pick up where I left off. I do want this to document the progress made around the house, and lots has been made, so... behold!

First things first. Last August we had this garden. It was crazy overgrown and all the plants were perennial stuff that only had to be cut back. I saved certain areas so it would look nice, others I destroyed. Obviously I am not a flower person, but I can imagine how some people would think what I did was questionable.

Before

And then now:

 

All in all this process probably took about 15 hours, which of course  seems completely crazy. "Things take time", is the reoccurring theme though. Have you ever tried to destroy decorative grasses? Its almost impossible. Have you ever dug out 500 tulips that magically appear out of no where? The bulbs grow so deep! Other things took time too, like trimming the Raspberries. Did you know Raspberries and Blackberries have a two year cycle? One year they grow up leafy bits, which all fall off without fruiting, and the next year the lifeless, leafless stalks grow fruit! At the same time new leafy shoots spring out of the ground! Its amazing, but figuring that out and them trimming out years of dead wood takes time. Then there was adding and spreading some horse manure to try to build up the organic matter, removing the roots and junk from the old plants (still in progress), and yet to come is redoing the in ground irrigation. The soaker tubes had been left in the same spot for so many years the perennial plants had grown right through them, trapping them in their root systems. I broke many digging them out and will have to get some new ones in the next few months. I think in the end I have achieved a nice balance between easy to maintain bushes and flowers that look nice, and adequate growing space for compact vegetables. The big ones will have to go outside the fence.

Because of the picture max, in the next post I will outline the chickens!
 

Chickens!

One of the easiest ways to get consistent income seemed to be selling eggs.  Way back in October, we had already started fencing off a part of the dog run into our chicken pen.   On October 12, after Jess's Stepfather helped us finish the fencing, this arrived:

I had posted on Facebook at the time, "How hard can it be?"  In the end, I guess the answer was "Not that hard", but again things take time. Not to mention I have literally never built anything in my entire life.  This is supposed to be gentleman farming, not Owen on Homes. With our crap weather by the time it was built I had to wait a few days here and there for sunshine to stain it, and even longer to get the motivation and idea to build boxes. By January (lol) I had built it and it was ready for chickens.

We knew we wanted to have happy, real breed chickens. I had read a lot of books and articles about raising chickens, and we decided to pay for some Rhode Island Reds. They were purebred birds from a guy up the road. They STILL have not laid a single egg. Its so disappointing.  I guess they take longer to mature than we thought they did, and they were a bit younger than the seller told us they were. After I called back the seller and complained he gave us another chicken for free, and she has laid an egg both days so far! We did, however, get two Barred Rock chickens for free off UsedVic and they lay an egg everyday. It can't be much longer till the RIR start laying, so hopefully we are well on our way to a happy blended family.

The two Barred Rocks are Fake and Bake, the RIR's are the Sister Wives (Janelle, Robyn, Meri, Christine), and the new Bovan is Sprite. They eat 16% Organic lay mash, get almost daily scratch treats, as well as #1 Grit and Oyster Shell. Plus whatever they can find in their pen. We will see how the pen holds up to them over time. If it gets too decimated, we might section off another area and have them go back and forth so they always get fresh grass. The coop is on sturdy posts so we can drag it around if need be.  We are very lucky that there is an irrigation line that runs up the property, so its easy to give them fresh water everyday.

I supposed the biggest thing we learned was that chickens are real bitches. Fake and Bake pecked the RIR's endlessly for days and days, even making two of them bleed. They have established their pecking order now, and don't leave marks in each other like they used to, but holy cow. I wouldn't be surprised if we had had more chickens in that space if one of them was murdered. Now poor little Sprite is taking a bit of a beating by all six of them, but we are out their pretty regularly to protect her and yell at the other ones (cause that helps right? haha).

Our fridge is up to two dozen eggs now, and we just had our first three egg day today. We have sold three dozen so far, which is the 'farms' entire sales to date.

$12

 

The rest of the place...

The big project right now is a perimeter fence. We are paying to have that put in. We figured out our property line was a few metres over from where the original owners had ever bothered to clear, so we had an excavator come in and clean things up so we could get the fence right at the edges.  Unfortunately it was too muddy for him to continue, so we are waiting for some sunshine eventually and then will have the fence installed.  At the same time, we are going to fence the middle field, and raise two or three pigs there. More to come on that in the future. At the bottom we are still on track to either grow hay this year, or fence that as well and raise a few 'lawnmower' sheep, with perhaps one of them getting axed for meat (If Jess will let me!)  Here is what the place looks like these days.

Middle Field for pigs and maybe some of the veggies that need more space (0.33 acres). It has a winter cover crop on it planted by last years farmer who found a great oppourtunity assuming a farm lease on Mount Newton X (go Paula!):

 

 

Bottom Field, two views (1.25 acres):

 

 

 

 

And finally, this is what we have planted so far. 18 tomatoes, 6 broccoli of 2 types each, 6 cauliflower, 6 thyme, 6 basil, 6 parsley, some lettuces, and waiting in the wings are carrots, zucchini, beans, peas and 2nd direct sow of the above. Veggies are basically just for our consumption, so we didn't go crazy on them.

 

I will hopefully take some pictures our our 8 apple trees I pruned and sprayed and be able to see them blossoming soon! Stay tuned! We are also going to be looking for egg customers once our lazy RIR's start laying.

2013 New Years resolution?

I have always enjoyed hearing stories and reading blogs about peoples goals and the journeys to get there. Whether its abstaining from alcohol, not buying things from China (or not buying anything at all), food related, weight related, or anything else, I find them entertaining and sometimes insightful.  I finally have a challenge of my own I am going to blog about.  As the house Jess and I recently bought is in the ALR, in order to qualify for farm status (and the very valuable tax break associated with it) we have to produce $2500 worth of farm gate sales from an area over 2 acres. It can be any primary agricultural product. Eggs, meat, horses, vegetables, flowers, syrup... pretty much anything. The value is only counted as the raw product, as in the value of the live weight animal minus purchase costs, not the proceeds of say, salami or sausages.  My hope is by blogging about the progress and products that come out of the place I can do two things: create a bit of a scrapbook, and generate interest about our extremely modest attempt at farming in order to shift the goods.

The plan at this point is to sell eggs, maybe some roasting chickens, attempt to raise 2 or 3 pigs, and farm some vegetables.  If it all goes to hell we can probably flog a lot of the naturally growing blackberries at the end of summer 2013.

In the blog I will try to post about the structures and systems we have to purchase and implement, the process and progress of the goods we grow, and the final product we will then rely on the public to buy. The hope is to break even on the costs of production, and the tax break will be the wages.

Can we do it? I hope so!