If you've ever had pigs, you know how hard it can be to keep their water trough clean. Heck, even if you've never had pigs I'm sure you know how much they love mud. Pigs + water = mud! I started out with a few shallow water pans for the pigs, and I'd have to fill them several times a day. As soon as I'd fill them, the pigs would flop over on them.
I got tired of having to refill them all the time, so we made a pig waterer. It cost us $5, since all it took was a barrel and a nipple. We already had the barrel (it was our chicken cooling barrel when we raised meat chickens). It was simple to make, we just cut a hole in the barrel and used Q-Bond (a heavy duty super-glue like material) to glue the nipple in place. It has held up beautifully.
Then we set the waterer outside of the pig pen and put the nipple through the fence. We elevated it so the nipple is almost a foot off the ground.
It took them a while to use it, so I left the old water pans in there
for a few weeks. They weren't figuring out how to use it, so when I was
home all day one weekend I took their water pans out and used
marshmallows to entice them to bite the nipple.
After about 20 minutes and 10 marshmallows (stuck on the end of the nipple), they finally figured it out. Actually, it was the littlest piglet who figured it out first. Once he got it, the others copied him. Now they always have fresh clean water, and I don't have to refill it multiple times a day!
I do still give them a mud hole though. You can't have pigs in these hot summers without giving them a wallow!
This is an order of soap going out to a local produce market, Mason's Heritage. Stop by and see what other local produce and goods they have!
And here's the new business card! They're should be at my door this afternoon, hot off the press!
And if you're local (or want to travel), Purl & June will be at the Art of the Deals craft show in Centreville, MD this Saturday June 16th from 9-1pm. Come one out and see us, and support other local artists!
Here is an updated picture of the big pig. She probably weighs around 150ish pounds by now. We're planning on having a whole-hog BBQ at the end of the month. I'll be a little sad to see her go, but I think I'll be ready. We'll keep the 2 smaller pigs to raise up for the freezer. Hopefully they'll be ready come fall.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Buford is some sort of terrier mix, and his shaggy hair tends to pick up ticks. Now that we don't have guineas anymore, I've definitely noticed more ticks. I'm not sure I'm ready to get more guineas again, so I decided to give Buford a trim so he hopefully won't be such a tick magnet. You can click on this post to see his "before" look.
And here's his after. I really like it!
I left a his shaggy eyebrows and beard though, since he's so cute with those. I think he looks better this way, and this will be his new summer haircut from now on!
While I was taking photos, I decided to get one of both dogs. Elmer likes to look for birds.
I love this pic below. I asked the dogs "Who is it?!" and they both snapped to attention.
Now that winter is over and things are growing, I've been doing lots of foraging for food for the animals. I spend a few minutes twice a day gathering plants from our property for feeding the rabbits. Mostly I pull grass, clover, plantain, dandelion, lambs quarters, and paper mulberry leaves. I give each rabbit a good bit of vegetation twice a day, and they love it. Well, most of them do. Then I supplement with hay and rabbit pellets. It's so neat learning which rabbits prefer which foods.
This rabbit below is my small buck (for sale, if you're looking for a nice bunny). He gets a few greens, but he doesn't really care for them much. He prefers his pellets, and sometimes he'll eat hay.
This is Radish, my American Chinchilla/Silver Fox buck. He loves, loves, loves anything I pick for him. His favorite is paper mulberry, but he also loves the other stuff too. He doesn't care for hay as much.
This is Parsnip, my female who has not yet been bred. She enjoys her greens too, but she adores hay. I can put a big handful in for her breakfast and it'll be gone by afternoon. She likes pellets too of course. They all love pellets.
This is Turnip and her 12 babies. They devour everything I put in front of them. They LOVE greens and pellets. They'll eat hay, but they save it for last. I give them as many greens as I think they can eat, plus hay, plus pellets. The other rabbits only get pellets as a supplement, and usually only once a day or every other day. Turnip and her babies get lots of feed since she's lactating and they're growing. That's a lot of hungry mouths to feed!
If you've noticed, there are some veggie scraps in their cages too. I've been getting food scraps from a local restaurant for the pigs, and the rabbits get treats out of that bucket too. Usually it'll be carrots, but sometimes it's celery or romaine lettuce.
I love feeding time because it's like an army of miniature bunnies chewing. Cute!
Here's a video of them eating:
Here's a close-up of the food bowl. It's got a lot of plantain in it, because the rabbits seem to really like it and it's a good food source for them.
The chickens forage too. They spend the day in their yard, but I let them out in the evenings to forage. They used to be totally free-range until they started pooping all over the deck and destroying my garden!
And even though the pigs are in a pen, they still get foraged feed. Several times a week I go to the local restaurant to pick up the scraps. I have 2 buckets, and leave one with them. Then I just swap out the full bucket for the empty one. Usually it's a lot of vegetables, but sometimes there will be french fries or other things. The pigs didn't like fries until just recently. I guess they've decided they're pretty tasty. They are good, too. Sometimes I order fries from there since I work right nextdoor! They're actually real fries, which you don't find very often at restaurants.
I was also offered the "seconds" veggies from a local veggie farm, so I'll be picking those up starting soon. I also contacted a local bakery and a local donut shop for scraps. I picked up a bag of donuts this morning that were going to get thrown out last night, but they saved them for me. I know donuts aren't the healthiest thing to eat, but it'll fatten up pigs and it's a small part of their otherwise healthy diet. In addition to the scraps, the pigs also get a hefty amount of goat milk and some pig feed. Goat milk is their favorite, followed by romaine lettuce.
The sheep and goats also forage for their food, in a more traditional way...grazing. Since I have more sheep and goats than my acreage can support, I have to be careful that the sheep don't destroy the pasture. I do this by using a sacrifice lot (a small area of their pasture I fence them in to keep them off the main pasture), and I often have to supplement with hay and sometimes grain. Right now, our grass is growing pretty well since we haven't hit drought season yet. I've been moving the sheep around the pasture and yard to take advantage of the free feed. They're not eating any grain, and very minimal hay (mainly for the goats), which is ideal.
The electric netting fence is essential to the rotational grazing for me. I got mine from Premier, and I'm very happy with it.
And since they graze a large portion of the lawn, it's less grass we have to mow! (Those are the lambs in the picture above.)
Feeding the animals like this takes a lot more time and effort than just giving them feed out of a bag, but it's healtheir for them and also healtheir for our budget! Not a single bit of our food goes to waste either. Between the pigs, chickens, goats, and rabbits, everything is eaten! I'm not against using bagged feeds, because I still use bagged feed. I'd just rather feed free food if I can! So many "weeds" are actually wonderful feeds for animals. I mentioned paper mulberry earlier in the post. We have a HUGE hedgerow of it one one side of our property, and we used to think it was a nuisance. It's an invasive weed, and it took us a while to figure out what it was. We read that it is native to Asia, and is used to make paper and also feed deer. The animals love it, all of them. It's so prolific that I could feed armfuls of it every day and it would still persist. It's now fed to the animals and cut back to keep it in check, but I don't want to totally eradicate it. Lemons into lemonade, and all that. :-)
Oh, and I forgot. Sometimes we forage for food on our property too! Last night I picked a bowl full of sour cherries from the tree in the pasture, and made a cherry crisp that was so delicious! I love free food!
We went out on the boat yesterday and did a little fishing. We mainly caught small stuff, but this catfish wasn't too terribly tiny. We ended up throwing him back though, since we didn't want to have to clean just one smallish fish. It was a fun day though!!
