A garden, piglet update

First the garden: I got the squash, pumpkins, some beans, corn, collards, peppers, watermelon, onion sets, half of the onion plants, and all of the flowers in.  I am nicely burnt.  The kids helped with quite of bit of this stuff.  I still have the rest of the onion plants, some herbs, the tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, celery, turnips, parsnips, radishes....and I think that is it, to get in.  I have help coming on Monday for all of that.  I have so much out there that I had to expand the garden. 
I also decided to try the 3 sisters thing.  I planted some beans with the corn and the buttercup squash on the edge of the corn so it will grow into the corn and shield the ground from the sun and reduce weeds.
I also have to begin mulching everything so the weeds stay under control.
Some of my potatoes are up already.  I love that. 

Now for the three little piggies:  Peanut, Butter and Jelly are all doing well.  they have adjusted to life in the outdoors and love munching the grass and "rooting" around.  They also are such wonderful little piggies that I give them their grain mixed with milk.  They are so happy to be here.  I think they forgot about the over crowded, stinky barn they came from.

I was not able to work on sorting any of the fleece.  I will have to reserve some time tomorrow to go through 2 of them.  I will finish the gardening on Monday.  School is done on the 3rd so I will be able to do a lot more work outside.  Phew....

Peanut, Butter, & Jelly

We normally raise about 10 hogs a year for selling and our own use.  This year, however, they were too expensive for us to buy feeders ($80+ versus $20).  We were fortunate enough to be given 3 runts.  So, her are Peanut, Butter, and Jelly:

Some Pigs

Since I posted last we have had a lot happen. Our sheep were sheared and we are in the process of skirting our last 2 fleece. We skirted and shipped out all of our white merino fleece. There was a lot of illness. I lost feeling in my pinky and ring finger for a few months, my pinky is still numb. My mom and her husband both had heart issues, one of them major, and the other somewhat serious. So, sorry I have not kept up here.

One Thing we did accomplish was a home for our pigs. We get rejects from the hog "factories" about once a year and this year we wanted to give them a better home. So we set to building an enclosure that we hoped would contain them.


We chose this location for a few reasons: it gets a lot of shade so the pigs will not get sunburned, it is shaded by oak trees and pigs love acorns, it does not get a lot of grass so it will not take valuable pasture from the sheep, and it is not going to stink up the house or yard (not that they are really al that stinky when they are outside.)

We had to dig a lot of holes for the posts and then tamp them in carefully. We also put a line of barbed wire about 1" from the ground to discourage them from digging under the fence. Dear liked to give them a large mud puddle (it is sunscrean for them and keeps the flies off of them).

But, a nice storm, like we had yesterday, turns the whole thing into a mud puddle. It will be dry in a day, so the pigs better have their fun now. They loved the storm.

We throw them apples, cabbages, tomatoes, weeds from the garden, and watermelons. They love it all. We only have 2 weeds that are dangerous for pigs and we all know what they look like. The pigs are pretty happy and dirty, but at least they are muddy dirty, not poopy dirty.