Poor Stub! Pig Update.

Here is the piglets 1st taste of grass.. This is 6 pigger and her babies with Stub in the background.
Poor Mrs. Stub still has not had her piglets yet. Her ground clearance is lower and lower every day and she looks super uncomfortable. Poor thing. She likes the other 2 Mommas piglets and she seems less content to eat and sleep these days. When ever we go in the pen she follows us around demanding attention.. I think she is lonely as she can't sleep with the other two anymore and so she's alone most of the time, which has never happened to her before.

Long tail 6 pigger (what we're calling the one who had 6 piglets) and long tailed 8 pigger are both doing really well. 6 pigger's piglets are 5 days older then 8 pigger's and we see them out and about quite a bit. She has moved them under Papa's IHC flatbed and seems very happy with the arrangements. She goes out and calls them to her and they all come running. They are SO CUTE!! Piglets play very much like puppies, running around, wrestling, jumping and tugging on ears. The other day I saw a piglet on top of his mom's head while she lay there. She lifted her head to smell him and off he flipped! Landed on his side and got up to go again!!

8 pigger's piglets are still in the pig hut she had them in but she does take them out for walks several times a day. The 2 batches of piglets have met several times and they seem to get sorted out on their own. The 1st time it happened Papa went out to referee but he thankfully wasn't needed. 6 pigger just walked away and called hers and they all came running leaving 8 pigger to count hers. Yes I'm convinced pigs can count. Since then they have met several times a day and manage to figure out who's is who's.

So far we have 7 males and 7 females and only one has lost it's tail. When we got our wieners last spring the people who bred them didn't know why some had tails and some did not. They thought it might be genetic, we'll have to see if Stubs babies have tails, but so far all of ours were born with tails. The only little one who lost a tail has half it it left and we think Momma may have stepped on the tail cutting it in half.

Oh and another interesting thing about pigs is that some are born whiners.. Really. 8 pigger has one little piglet, not even the smallest one, that is a true blue whiner.. and was born that way. The 1st day she had them we noticed him whining and he's still out there whining now. When she got up to eat one day Papa went to take a look at the piglets and count males and females for me and as he was in the hut petting them and making friends whiner started in and 8 pigger came RUNNING over. She stayed outside the hut and sniffed him thru the pallet then grunted at Papa as if to say.. 'yeah he's my whiner' and left!!

So far our experiment farrowing out pigs has been a HUGE success!! We never did separate the mothers and they have done wonderfully together. In fact I think it would have been more stressful for them to be apart as they would miss each other like Stub is missing the other two now. We did not clip their milk teeth and aren't going to. We have such a nice trusting relationship with the sows now that we don't want to jeopardise it in anyway. And only half of what we've read supports the cutting of milk teeth. In fact from what we've found people who farrow on acreages don't have problems with milk teeth or farrowing the way confinement farrowers do!!

Anyway IF Stub fallows the pattern she should have piglets tomorrow. That will be 10 days from 6 pigger and 5 days from 8 pigger! I'll keep you posted :)

Moving the Raspberry Plants...

What a chore!! LOL. But it's DONE!! Here is the line of holes for the raspberry plants. This is our west side fence line. The building you see is our neighbors shop. :) The line of raspberries goes about 200 feet down this fence line. There is a gap where the 'hill' is. SO the raspberries go from the end of the building here down the property line to the hill, skip the hill, and on the other side about 60 feet. Hopefully we will soon have a LOT of raspberries :) The last few years we've had to keep the kids out on days we want berries but now they'll probably have free range :)

Yes we know the line is not straight. The roots of trees long since gone got in the way of a straight line and we are ok with that.

The post hole digger we used to dig the holes on this side of the hill. The other side Papa dug by hand with a post hole clam shell digger.. this thing is MUCH faster and nicer!! And yes I held on to the other two handles.. 34 weeks pg and all. I was A BIT sore the next day and I'm not planning on doing it anytime again soon :)

Here they are all planted and fenced in. The black hose is a soaker hose so that we don't have to worry about getting a sprinkler there.

Here is the other side. Looking at the hill. We moved the raspberries out of the garden area so that we could convert the old garden to grass as the roof shades it too much for a garden spot. Besides that it makes a great hedge on the fence line :)

Gap tooth :)

J, who is 6, just lost his 5th tooth! I pulled it out as it was VERY ready to come out. It hardly bled and we can already see his adult tooth coming in where it was. He's lost 3 on the bottom and 2 on the top now and his mouth looks a little mismatched :)