Dressed for action

What lovely present! 

Just before Christmas our lovely wives had sneaked off for a girlie moment and raided our favourite retail outlet at our local CountryWide store to purchase the ultimate in pig raisers gear, all-in-one overalls!

And here are our valiant pig raisers in all their rather snug fitting glory.  Unfortunately the outfits were a little too snug, even allowing for a little extra Xmas padding, fortunately those nice people at CountryWide are entirely used to people buying these suits on the snug side and allowed us to exchange them for ones that are TWO sizes larger than we would normally wear.

Since then they have had pretty much daily usage as they are great to don for those early morning pig feeding sessions in the dark of the early new year.

Green & Black Pigs

Dealing with grass cuttings used to be a real chore. Now it is all part of the fun with our pigs. 

Deprived of grass much of the year they seem only too pleased to get a bit of green thrown over the fence at them.

They love rooting around even more than usual and if we hide their food under it that seems to make it even more fun!

Making Bacon

In short, after much hard work, ringing contacts then ringing contacts of contacts we eventually found a Berkshire boar that was not too far away in Burford.

One morning Neil cycled over like some proper farmer to view the prospective suitor for his gilts, known as Alphie  He met the family who owned him who were raising Alphie in an idylic location adjacent to the old Mill House in Burford.

A few weeks later her was introduced to our ladies and as it turns out it didn't take long at all before he had done the business and we were well on our way to Piglies.

Berkshire weaners for sale

We are now at the stage of letting the outside world know that we have some Berkshire weaners for sale.  We have posted a couple of notices

http://www.berkshirepigs.org.uk/tradeboard

http://www.thepigsite.com/forums

With pigs this cute, I'm sure we'll be innundated with enquiries.

Teeny weeny weaners - Berkshire Weaners for sale

Teeny weeny weaners

After the mythical "3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days" and quite a surprise one morning our piglets arrived, all 16 of them!  They were beautiful.


Our ladies took to being Mum so well completely unprompted by us, we just helped them along but by and large left them to it.


Soon we had the piglies running around the place meeting up with their cousins and just generally being cute.  Our kids loved it and have been very active in helping out and enjoying mucking in, quite literally as we will tell you about in a future entry.

Pregnant Pigs

Pig up the Duff??

It had always been one of our major ambitions as smallholder pig keepers to keep a couple of our gilts and find a suitable boar to get to the next stage and make piglets.  For various reasons we had been a little slow in getting round to it this year, partly because it proved just as hard finding a boar in the vicinity much as it had when we tried to re-stock our herd the previous year with rare breed weaners.

We eventually found a boar in not too far away Burford and I cycled over there one day to meet up with Alphie (short for Alpha Male) and his owners.  I felt like a classic old style farmer, meeting up with prospective business partners and checking them out along with their livestock. I needn't have worried, the couple who had the pig were lovely and things worked out very well.  We quickly came to an arrangement and Paul and I drove over one morning to usher Alphie into the horse box and take him away for his special summer holiday.

Now, being novices at breeding we had expected it would take a long time for Alphie to come up with the goods, but no sooner had we left him to get acquainted with our young ladies than he was spotted doing the business.  Despite this we ended up needing to get Richard Pearson from The George Veterinary Group to confirm whether they were pregnant or not and he was very kind and patient with us and all our questions, offering great advice with a lovely manner. 

See Alphie and the ladies in action here http://youtu.be/jtX9Rqdvqmc

Going back a while

Bacon Tasting

We have come a long way in the three years we have been keeping pigs.

I'm still not quite sure how it happened, but on dark February Saturday morning three of us ended up at one of the legendary Tony York Pigs Paradise "Pig Keeping in a day".  It was fascinating and he made it all sound so do-able.  

We spent a good few weeks pondering about how to go about it, planning things quite seriously as we knew it would be a major undertaking but so far, it has been hard work but brilliant fun on so many levels.  We have learnt so much about working the land, working with animals, understanding how to handle and cook meat.

One of the best experiences we have had so far was our very first Bacon tasting, pictured above.  We had managed to take our second batch of pigs to bacon and when we got the meat back I spent most of a blissful weekend eating bacon at every single meal.  We then organized a Bacon Testing Evening with our co-raisers, Alison and Paul Beadle and a couple of our close friends.  

We bought three different bacon rashers from a very well known local butcher, one from a local Lidl and had two of our own bacons.  I knocked up a little questionnaire / feedback form and cooked all the bacon the same.  In short, everybody spotted the least tasty bacon, placed the others according to individual taste, but the outstanding bacon of the night was our Smoked Berkshire.  It was a fantastic result and a GREAT evening.  

Right now as I write this my mouth is watering thinking about how good the meat was, especially after months of wading through waves of mud looking after our animals.  We will try to capture the ethos of how we go about things over our next few entries to try to capture the fun and enjoyment we get from doing this.