Tag Archives: PIGS

GOOD MORNING MONDAYS #33

May 31, 2015 darling downs 32 Comments

Hey there, how’s it going. It is very cold as I am sitting here writing this. I think this day must be the coldest and dampest day so far and tomorrow is looking the same, but that’s okay because tomorrow is the first day of winter.

Again I wonder where the year is going .

I have had a good week although I have been tired, not too sure why, maybe a big weekend with family last week, has left me worn out, but it was so worth it.

I spent most of the week at home although we did go to our friends place for a sewing afternoon on Thursday. The girls probably only have another session left and they will be finished sewing their quilts. Then it will be the snipping of all the seams to come – they have made raggy quilts.

I managed to finish the dress for our daughter to wear to the Eisteddfod tomorrow and it looks great. I will post a photo next week with their results.

They are both excited, and I think a little nervous, but nerves are okay. We have had discussions about doing their best, and about how it isn’t all about winning and how they should react when they don’t win and that they should be happy when someone else wins and congratulate them. This is such a good character building exercise, and they have fun as well.

Our piglets have been weaned and we are in the process of selling them. We have sold 13 already and we have 11 left to go. Here is a picture of them in the wool shed enjoying a warm corner.

We still have a heap down the paddock to butcher and we are hoping to get this done in a couple of weeks.

Our oldest son turned 20 on Friday so Saturday night we had a special birthday tea with a couple of his friends.They seemed to have a good time and spent most of the night watching DVD’s in our lounge. It is so nice that our son has such lovely Christian young men as friends.

Okay enough about us again.

Our top three posts this week were…

Urgent Prayers Needed f or Jakob Cooper – Accident Victim by Cheryl at Homespun Devotions

4 Simple Ways to Add Scripture To Your Family’s Day by Kelsey at Kelsey M Ferguson

Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t by Glenys at Selah Christian Musings

and my personal favourite is

Cathy’s Corner Week 6 by Debbie at Bible Fun for Kids

Thank you to everyone who linked up. I had fun reading all your posts and as usual I laughed and I cried and I learnt some new things.

I hope you all had a chance to stop by and read something new and comment on someone else’s post. This is so encouraging for others.

Well as I have said the Eisteddfod is tomorrow so we will be out all day at that. Then on Tuesday night we have our Revelation Bible Study.

We might fit in another sewing afternoon as well this week as my friend is pretty busy for the rest of the month.

On Saturday afternoon we are going on a bus trip to visit sites in relation to a certain missionary who came to this area 150 years ago. Places we will visit are where he lived, his first churches, cemeteries. We thought that this would be interesting and part of our history studies.

Well I hope that you all have a good week and that you and your family will be blessed.

Numbers 6:24-26 “The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you;The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, And give you peace.”’

Love to you all xxxx

An InLinkz Link-up

Down on the Farm Diary

DOWN ON THE FARM UPDATE #4

March 8, 2015 darling downs 12 Comments

Well it has been a while since I have shared how things are going on our little farm. Summer is over and Autumn is here and it is a lovely time of the year.

We had a couple of fires this year within our brigade – one being a header that caught fire. This isn’t our header, it was working on one of our neighbours property. Below is a picture of the header after it was put out.

Our local fire brigade also burned along the sides of the road from our place to the next town, about 12 kms. This is to keep the grass down and hopefully stop the fire from jumping into the paddocks.

Here is one of the fire trucks out the front helping to keep the fire along the side of the road and not in our paddocks. Our Brigades are all run by volunteers and they do a great job.This is what it looked like out the front of our house. It looks black for a little bit and then the green starts to show through.

My husband is still milking two cows each morning and we are still making feta and cheddar cheese. Below is where he does the milking, it is good in the summer but can be a bit difficult in the winter. We are in the process of moving the milking area to the end of our wool shed and the power is waiting to be attached at the moment. Once that is done the men will concrete it out and move everything over. This will make milking more pleasant in the winter and also make it feasible to milk more cows.

Here are the two cows that we are milking at the moment. Both cows are a Fresian / Jersey Cross bought from a dairy farmer friend who uses a Jersey bull over his heifers as they deliver smaller calves and thus making it less likely to loose either cow or calf. Both are totally different looking one looking more Jersey and the other more Fresian.

The cow not facing us has been here for quite a while and her name is Cornetto (after an ice cream we can buy here). I think the other ones name is Daisy and that really suits her.

The piglets are still growing well and when it gets a bit cooler we will be butchering a few of them. The bigger ones will go first of course. We have really enjoyed the last lot of sausages that we made from our own pork so I think that will be first on the list to do.

My husband is keen to make some dried cured meat and we might do our bacon that way this year.

Here is Roses our little kitten. We have two kittens and a cat at the moment, so the younger children have one each and the cat – Smokey belongs to all of us. They really help keep the mouse and rat population down.

If you knew my husband well you would know that he has an aversion to cats, especially inside as he is allergic to them and if they are inside they give him asthma. Over the years he has really softened towards them and now I find out that he is feeding them milk each morning down at the shed.

We have been offered an alpaca, and I hope that it will be delivered shortly. I don’t have too many details as yet but I feel very blessed that it isn’t costing us anything as they can be quite expensive. Maybe we will get it a mate when we find out what type it needs.

Well that’s all for now, stay tuned for the next episode.

What’s happening on your farm or homestead at the moment?

Psalm 24:1 The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

Down on the Farm Diary

DOWN ON THE FARM UPDATE #3

January 15, 2015 darling downs 8 Comments

I thought it was about time I did another Down on the Farm Update, as it has been quite a while since the last one.

It is summer here and the land has really browned off. We have had some rain this past week (over an inch) and there is some green pick starting to show up in the paddocks.

We have our piglets in a feed lot in our cattle yards, and they are growing really well. There are some with names such as “sausage”, “prosciutto”, “smokey” and our favourite “spit”.

We have sold a few and another couple are sold awaiting collection, but there will be plenty left to butcher for us. The last sausages we made were such a success we will probably do these again.

We keep our big pigs, 3 sows and a boar out in the crop paddock and they are enjoying being out there. When they are big they don’t crawl through fences, so they are content where they are. Two of the sows are due to have piglets any day now.

Here is my husband with one of our milking cows. We are feeding them a mixture of oaten and wheat hay and this really keeps them milking well. We milk once a day and each cow is averaging about 10 litres a milking. We then let them out for the day for them to feed their calves and then lock them up again at night with the calf still in the paddock.

My husband really enjoys milking them and he always gets more milk when he does it. Most of the milk goes to the piglets, we use some for our cheese making and for use in the house and the cats get a little bit as well.

We are wanting to put in more fruit trees this Autumn and the picture below shows the area where they are going to go. The pigs and dairy cows have been in there and have eaten it right down so it is almost time to plough it up before the green growth starts coming back.

We had planted fruit trees the first year we moved in but didn’t realize how wet it was, so we did lose a few. This new area is right next to the old area and we will join them up and hopefully have nice mowed grass between the rows. We want to put in berries as well this year and will have them in this area so they will be fenced off and protected from wandering stock.

We have a couple of different plum trees and they are both laden with fruit. I am looking forward to them being my next preserving project.

That’s my update for now – more to come later.

We have lots of plans and ideas and we are excited to see how it all plays out.

Hope your farm/homestead is going well and you are enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Blessings

Livestock Diary

BUTCHERY 101

December 19, 2014 darling downs 7 Comments

Well the time had finally come to butcher one of our bulls and a couple of pigs.

Now we have a friend who normally helps us cut them up and he has all the butchery equipment, but unfortunately (only for us) he had to go away with the family, so we had to do it ourselves.

Now we butcher a steer/bull calf at least twice a year, you would think that we would remember how it’s done – yeh right!!! It always almost takes us the whole process before we get the hang of it as we don’t do it often enough.

My husband and No 1 son killed and hung up the beast last Saturday evening, when it was cooler. He was a big bull, about 18 months old. Once he was dead they hung him on the jib crane on the tractor so they could skin him.

My son is an expert at skinning and between him and my husband they did a great job. After they’ve skun the bull they lay out the skin and drop the inards onto it so that it’s easier to cart away. They then cut the bull into 4 pieces – 2 front and 2 back halves. It then gets hung in the cool room that we hired.

This is the same way that they do the pigs.

IMG_0636[1] — Here is my husband finishing off skinning the first pig.

We did another pig as well the same way. We skin our pigs because we mince most of the meat and make sausages or just keep it plain mince. We will be putting a pig on the spit for Christmas dinner and we leave the skin on then, for lovely crackling.

IMG_0647[1] — Here’s some of the sausages, these ones are curry.

We hired a mincer from the local equipment hire place in town as we only have a really small mincer and it would have taken ages to get it all done. We first minced all the pork and then I added seasoning etc to the mince and we let it sit overnight. We did curry and sultana sausages, apple and orange liquor sausages, italian herbs and port sausages, and plain ones as well.

Here is the labelled buckets full of mince in the cool room. We then got it out the next day and mixed it all together and put it through the mincer again and then made it into sausages.

I must admit I am really happy with the sausages, and was really enjoying making them especially when I got the hang of tying them..

Here is 2 halves of beef and the back end of a pig hanging in the cool room.

Here is my wonderful husband getting ready to bone out the back quarter of beef.

We found a You tube clip that showed us how to bone out the back quarter and we followed that as we did it. My husband did a great job of this and we now have a freezer full of beef steak, mince and roasts.

I also have 3 big bags of fat in the freezer ready to render to make soap again in the new year.

It is so wonderful to have this meat again as our freezer was getting quite empty. This should see us through the summer months – hopefully, I suppose it will depend on how many visitors we have.

We are so thankful that we are able to grow and butcher our own meat, and we thank God for this, He has really blessed us.

How do you butcher your meat, do you do it yourselves???

Vegetable Planting Diary

IT’S VEGETABLE PLANTING TIME PART 1

October 5, 2014 darling downs Leave a comment

It’s vegetable planting time in our place of the world. Spring came on the 1^st September and the weather has really warmed up quickly.

We don’t usually plant tomatoes here until after the Melbourne Cup Race on the 1^st Tuesday in November because we can still get frosts, but this year we are trying something different.

We planted 60 tomato plants today and plan to put them under plastic.

The paddock that we are planting these vegetables in was sown with peas last year and after we harvested them we left it for the winter. In late winter we moved the pigs into the paddock and let them eat the grass and work over the root matter, which then fertilizes and aerates. Graeme then ploughed the whole paddock with the tractor.

He then prepared the bed by rotary hoeing it and making raised beds, so that we can get a deeper top soil. We then found drench drums and placed them between every second tomato plant and filled them with water.

We will run hothouse plastic over the top and make a sort of poly tunnel which is held up by the drench drums. The theory is that the water will heat up in the drums during the day and then at night when the temperature drops the drums cool off a lot slower than the atmosphere does thus stopping a freeze happening around the drum (It is a cold framing idea that my husband found on u tube).

After they planted the tomatoes they planted about 40 kg of white potatoes. My husband once again prepared the bed and raised it. He then spread sheep manure down it and rotary hoed it in, then the children planted the potatoes – two rows per bed. Finally everything was watered in.

Graeme spreading sheep manure on the potato bed

This is just the beginning of our plantings. In a month, once the chance of frosts has gone we will plant another 300 tomatoes. At the moment we planted Grosse Lisse tomatoes but we will probably put in some Romas as well. Next week we will finish planting the potatoes, another 10 kg of whites and then 50 kg of reds. We haven’t really grown potatoes before with much success so we thought we’d give it another try this year.

We will also be planting zucchinis, corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, beetroot and carrots in another week or so.

I will keep you updated with more photos and information as we go.

What are you planting at this time of the year in your place in the world???

Livestock Diary, Pig Diary

WHY WE KEEP PIGS

October 2, 2014 darling downs 5 Comments

Why do we keep pigs???? Apart from the fact that when they are piglets they are extremely cute – but not as cute as our granddaughters!!!! (sorry couldn’t help putting in a photo of them).

We keep pigs for a variety of reasons and are listed as follows: (in no particular order)

They are another source of protein for our family;
They are great to dig up the paddocks before planting;
We sell them to help pay our bills.

No 1 expanded: We have our own cattle that we butcher for ourselves, and they are a Highland/Jersey cross. We also endeavour to have meat rabbits and chickens for variety. But another source is pork. There is such a variety of things that you can do with pork and we especially like bacon. We have just made our own bacon and it’s in the freezer. I want to can it shortly. I especially like pork spareribs done in my multicooker and will post a recipe on that later.

No 2 expanded: My husband uses the pigs to dig up certain areas in our paddocks before planting vegetables or crops. Last year they dug up our pumpkin patch for us and our other vegetable patches. We don’t keep our pigs in small pig pens as we like them to graze naturally on pasture, we do supplement their feeding with wheat or whatever grain or hay that we have on hand. Pigs actually eat woody weeds that no other stock will and when you have them digging up they are aerating and fertilising the ground for your next crop. Minimal soil preparation is needed then to create a good seed bed (information compliments of my husband). At the moment the piglets get milk every day (from our dairy cow) mixed with wheat. So not only are they doing us a favour but they are getting fed at the same time.

No 3 expanded: At the moment we have 23 piglets running around and when they escape their fenced off area my husband calls them the tribe of Israel. When they are little, getting out isn’t really a problem but as they get older they escape the confines of their yard and dig holes in our nice lawn. We usually keep them in a roadside paddock and as we live on quite a major highway, we get people just dropping in wanting to buy them. Of course this is great and we have never advertised in any papers to get rid of them. We will put an A-frame out the front this year as we have quite a few to sell off.

So pigs are very versatile and actually really quite fascinating to watch. Last year one of our sows was due to farrow and the boar was pulling tufts of grass out and placing them behind her as she lay down. We aren’t quite sure what this was all about because she eventually got up and walked off and didn’t farrow for a couple more days. Maybe the boar had the nesting thing happening instead???!!!

So if you are thinking of keeping pigs (we have heaps and could sell you 1 or 23) we would really recommend it. We have a mixture of Large Blacks and Berkshire and we do find that the heritage breeds have a better mothering temperament and handle the free range lifestyle better than the commercial breeds, and they also taste better.

One point to note when keeping pigs is that you need quite good fencing. My husband keeps them in with electric fencing tape and we hardly ever have them on our nice lawn. He is my hero!!! I no longer have to run outside in my slippers with the kids to chase piglets. Sometimes when you let the children chase them by themselves they can end up on the road, and I am sure you can image this to be a bit of a circus.

If you have pigs and have any advice or just humorous stories please let me know, I love a good laugh and we can always learn new ideas and way of doing things.

This post is linked to….

Darling Downs Diaries