Monday, July 22, 2013

Summer loving

My deepest apologizes for the failure to keep writing and updating this blog.  The truth is the daily grind of maintaining two and half acres takes its toll on my creative writing juices (believe me, being this cheeky takes a lot of effort).  Interesting content comes at a premium these long, glorious summer days unless you enjoy reading minutia.   Would you really care to know that I took out the fava beans and planted broccoli this weekend?  Probably not unless I added that I had the fava beans with some human liver and a nice chianti.

It is a rare for this part of the country to have a sun-filled consistently warm summer.  Our winter was relatively mild without much rain so the vegetable garden got an early rototilling which did wonders for our potato crop.  These Yukon Gold potatoes was planted April 20th and without irrigation the plants started dying necessitating harvest.  The problem with the fruit of your labor is all of the vegetables that you have to process.   Might be time to brew some vodka.

The summer has been filled with trellising cucumbers and peas; planting acorn, butternut and summer squash, cutting garlic scapes; caging tomatoes; watering fennel; culling leeks, thinning lettuce; sowing kale; harvesting strawberries and eating raspberries.

All of the yard waste goes into the newly constructed compost center which was made from cast-off lumber from the old garden fence.  The rub is that if you take down an old garden fence you have to put one up in its place lest you concede all of your hard work to the deer and chickens.
Serious composting.
Not all of the summer botany has been wasted.  What was formerly consigned to the compost pile or the chickens now gets fed to the pigs.  This year, we got five tiny piglets at the end of May.  The pigs were advertised as Berkshire/Duroc mixes but judging by some of the coloration there must also be some Hampshire too. Incidentally, whenever you buy piglets, try to get the biggest and smartest ones possible. 

Our pigs were barely weaned and so small that they easily escaped through the hog panel.  Lola, our Golden Retriever, did a decent job of corralling them before we could entice them back into the pen.  This happened many times and we were glad that two of the piglets belonged to our neighbor who bore the brunt of piglet roundups.
Escape artists.
In years past, the pigs were purchased in the late winter and slaughtered by June.  This year, we hope to do the slaughter ourselves which necessitates either a walk-in freezer or cold enough temperatures to hang an animal in the garage.  Round these parts, late October or early November is slaughter time.

The advantage to having pigs in the summer and fall is being able to feed them garden excess and scraps.  Pigs love watermelon, peas vines, egg shells, apples, raw potatoes, grass clipping and rose hips.  Pretty remarkable living composter.
Rose hips.
This years' pigs are from the same litter but they are of disparate sizes and dispositions.  The largest pig is almost twice as big as the runtiest.  The runt is a small female piebald-colored sweetheart.  She has the cutest eyelashes and is very patient at the tough which may explain why she is the smallest.  Her older brothers are predominantly black with some white markings.  They can be brutish and not very bright.  Just this evening one of the pigs got his snout caught in the fencing and then proceeded to scream like he had just been stuck.  See for yourself.
Einstein the pig.

No comments:

Post a Comment