New Skills :)

Grandpa and Grandma F gave J a fishing rod for his birthday and we recently got it all figured out and Papa taught both J and L to cast on the lawn. Both boys picked it up amazingly fast.. and had a great time 'fishing' the lawn. I was just looking at the lawn in the picture and these were taken a while ago :) The lawn is now green and the cows are grazing it at the moment. Now that I'm thinking about it I believe these were taken on Mothers day!

The longest part of the 'teaching' was Papa trying to remember how to cast. If you know Papa at all you know that he DOES NOT FISH!! He hasn't caught a fish since grade school and has been known to keep an entire boat load of people from catching fish just because he went along :) Or so he says!! He's says he's jinxed and has actually proven this several times.. Once we didn't even MAKE it to the lake :)

But J, L and I love to fish. So Papa takes care of the ones on shore and we go fishing!! When we come off the boat Papa takes over and last time J and L both got to help clean and cook their own fish before eating them. Very good fish!! Grandpa F is looking forward to taking the boys fishing in his boat this summer and J and L ask regularly when they can go fishing!

Pictures of the Lease and Billy the Steer!

The lease is looking great!! This area was burnt this spring and the piles we burnt were just off to the left of the picture. Papa has been doing walk thru's every couple of days and is loving the length and amounts of grass that is coming up everywhere.. too bad we can't put the milk cows in it. It's too far away to come in to milk two times a day and there is too much stuff they could cut their bags up on!

Billy is Bindy's 2 year old steer. He has been out at my Aunt and Uncle's house with their cows for the last year or so but we brought him home last Friday and put him in the lease. We want to get him a bit fatter and then butcher him when he's ready, probably mid to late summer. He is 1/4 Holstein, 1/4 Jersey and 1/2 black Angus. The red tinge to his hair is just like his mothers! And that mulish look he gets from her too!! I guess he was some fun to load but calmed right down in the trailer and is doing well by himself in the lease.

SURPRISE!!!

Maggie turned out to be a great 'mother'- ing cow and unfortunately let Bindy's calf nurse this morning! EEK. So little Mr. Calf is no longer in with the milk cows but has his own buddy in a smaller pen. In the picture he is nursing Maggie (who's bag is much easier to get at) while Bindy licks him. Maggie would NOT leave him alone.

Papa got out of bed before me this morning and then came right back and told me I had to come see something. His voice was almost dull and so I got up right away and went and looked. He went to the kitchen window and I saw Chip in the sandbox and noted it.. nothing new there.. then he goes to the living room window.. and there is Bindy and Maggie.. and SURPRISE a little black calf. Maggie was licking him but I knew it was Bindys!! To back track a little bit Papa was not impressed for the same reason I was not. Bindy has a low bag, as you can see, and last week she stepped on her front left teat.. skinning the tip right off it. NASTY!! We've been quite worried that it would not heal in time for her calf.. and with her calf 3 weeks early (possibly our dates are off) it will really not be healed. In fact this morning it split open on the bottom and looks even worse! But it might be a better thing all in all as it can drain now.

Amazingly enough we think her teat will be fine for next year as the middle part where the milk ducts seems to be fine! But for now we will have a 3 teated cow to milk. Poor Papa has to milk her as I can NOT get that low.. he told me this morning that it made his belly sore to lean over that far to milk.. so there IS NO WAY I CAN!! Which means Papa will be getting up at 5ish to milk both cows until we get our milking buckets. They were suppose to be here 10 days ago but they sent the wrong ones so we are still waiting and still milking by hand. Papa says once we get them and he gets a mechanical milking system going I should be able to 'milk' mornings again which will be a great help to him.

SO now we are bucket feeding 2 calves, one we are babysitting for a neighbor who is going away for a month and our own little bull calf who as of yet has no name. He needs a B name and Bindy, Billy and Bobby are all taken.. any ideas??

Stubs Piglets!

Stub in her nest with her piglets and the kids and Papa looking on!

Well I wrote that last post in the morning and that early afternoon Stub started making a nest. She worked on it for hours and when Papa got home she had a large area sprinkled with straw and twigs so Papa brought her a load of straw and she made an even better nest. That night before bed I headed out to see if anything was happening yet and found her in labor with 2 piglets already born. I watched for a bit but nothing was happening so I went inside for 20 minutes and sure enough when I got back out there she'd had 2 more! So I found a semi comfortable place to sit and watched her give birth to the last 4!! Very cool. I'm totally amazed at how vigorous piglets are at birth! She would push one out and it would get up and start looking for a teat... and find it and drink and crawl all over her in the process. She didn't get up once the whole time. After watching for over an hour I realized there was something wrong with one of the piglets. He couldn't get up, wouldn't drink (I tried to get him too) and kept making a funny GAK GAK noise. The other piglets all had mini pig noises; grunts and squeals. I had not brought a flashlight or anything so I headed to the house and woke up Papa and he came out, with a flashlight, to take a look. Well we still don't know what was wrong with him but the flashlight showed a raw spot on his forehead that took up about half of it and was raw and bleeding. I think he got that after he was born from Stubs back feet.. Anyway Papa and I decided he was 'not quite right in the head' for whatever reason and so Papa took him away and took 'care' of him. It was really too bad as he was a nice sized piglet and it seemed a shame after all Stubs hard work. I found it very interesting that the other two Momma pigs came to 'talk' to Stub several times each while I was there. They didn't come close but came and grunted at her for a bit and then went back to their own babies. Sort of an encouragement party. The other 7 piglets are doing wonderful and she hasn't even noticed that the 8th is gone. She is VERY happy now and no longer lonely. Yesterday she left her nest only once and that was for a quick drink of water.

So to sum up. We bred 3 Berkshire gilts to a Berkshire boar, got 7, 8, and 8 piglets born. One piglet was born dead 24 hours after the rest which gave 6 pigger her 6, she had them early in the am (before 5:30). 8 pigger had 8 and they all lived and she had them at noon 5 days after 6 pigger. Stub had 8, lost 1, and had them between 9:30 and 10:30 pm 5 days after 8 pigger!! So we got 21 piglets total, 11 are females and 10 are males. If that last one would have lived we would have had even numbers males to females. I find it fascinating to see the patterns..

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 :)

Blueberries!!

Papa brought home a couple of blueberry bushes the other day and he planted them on the hill that surrounds the lagoon. One is Chippewa (top) and a Patriot (bottom pic) They will be right beside the lagoon fence when it is finished. We thought we'd start with 2 and see how they do before getting more. Both had flowers or berries or both on them when we got them and we are really looking forward to eating our own blueberries this year!!

More Pig Pictures :)

Grandma Griggs wanted to know if a pig looked pregnant.. Well does she?? The biggest thing we've found is they get a bag and their ground clearance gets lower and lower. This is Stub, the biggest of the 3 and the only pig left to farrow as Long Tail #2 farrowed today at noon.

Here is a picture of the 8 newest piglets on the farm!! They all look great and she is also a super good Momma!! She let Papa put more straw under the piglets then dug a hole with her nose and made them a nest right by her head. If anyone of them makes a peep she's checking them out to make sure she's not laying on them!! One had a really long cord and she let Papa pick him up and cut it short. The maternal instinct in these pigs is AMAZING!!!

Piglet and Kid Pictures!!

Momma Pig went to eat and have a mud wallow while we took some pictures of her babies and mine! She is a GREAT mother and we are so thankful. She is really careful with them and trusts us like piglet sitters whenever we go in there. The piglets were about 8 hours old here and she took off for the mud wallow just as soon as she could. We probably spent 30 or more minutes with them as she wallowed in the mud and ate! She only came back after we'd been gone for a while and then she gave them a little sniff and was satisfied we'd taken good care of them.

R petting a baby pig!

4 of the new born piglets. They are around 8 hours old in this picture.

E petting a piglet!

Jed petting a piglet.. probably the best shot of the bunch. The piglets seemed to enjoy all the petting and didn't even squeak.

L and a piglet eye to eye!!

L petting a piglet while the others look on.. he was the 1st one to pet one and they were all in awe! The straw area is the communal pig bed where she had them. The wood pile was stacked up and they shoved it over the 1st day in the pen and seem to like that area the best anyway!

Just watching them. They wandered here and there and the kids enjoyed watching them try and walk together.

Some faces :) Their ears are still pinned back from being crowded in the womb. It was supposed to rain that evening and so we moved them into a pig hut. They were nursing when we did it and she calmly accepted Papa taking two at a time until he'd taken the last two and then she looked a little heart broken but still didn't get up until I started to call her over to them. Thankfully Momma pig accepted the move and moved in as well as it rained almost half the night. This morning they all looked great, healthy and bright eyed!! :) Praise the Lord!!