Having reached the 5th anniversary of our move from suburbia to a North Pennines smallholding, it’s clearly a good time to review the current situation and take stock of our progress so far. Not least of which is where did all those years go! The first task for me was to look back at my …
Continue reading ‘Looking back over our first 5 years as smallholders’ »
Despite getting up bright and early last Saturday morning, I was still caught out by the slightly early arrival of Sissy’s litter. According to my calculations she wasn’t due until that night at the earliest but apparently she had other plans and had done most of the hard work by the time I checked on …
After the big snow fall a couple of weeks ago we thought we’d probably had the last of it. However as is often the case, there is generally a late burst here which catches people out. Even though the current snow isn’t as bad this time around, it would certainly qualify as a significant amount …
About a week ago we brought Esther and her litter of 9 piglets into the pig shed to start the weaning process and in preparation for collection. At this stage they were just over 7 weeks old and had been on hard feed for a while so it was a good time to start. This …
A little later than planned but eventually Esther and her litter were moved out to their new pen in the woods last weekend. Originally I had planned to do this when the litter were about 3 weeks old – by this time they’ve usually started showing a good interest in hard food and are drinking …
I was a little over-confident on Saturday but I learned my lesson (yet again) after staying up most of the night waiting in vain the first litter for this year to arrive. Over the last few weeks I had been convinced that Saturday would be farrowing day mostly because her last litter came after just …
With the Christmas and New Year period very quickly becoming a distant memory, it seemed a good time to post a quick update as a stock check for the coming year. Things have a habit of creeping up on me and getting out of hand if I’m not careful so it’s probably best if I …
There’s no escaping the fact that winter is here with the short days and cold temperatures but it’s even more obvious this evening because the snow is falling. The waterproof trousers are always at the ready just in case and I’ve already found out which pairs of wellies have holes in. The cattle are happily …
Somehow time has just shot by in recent weeks and I realised (yet again) that it’s been far too long since the last blog update was posted. However, even though the updates have been few and far between, that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. The biggest topic over recent weeks has been the pigs with …
Continue reading ‘Autumn 2017 – Tamworth pigs and pork boxes’ »
It’s been quite a journey from carrying out the AI on Sissy back in September 2016 right through to selling the pork produced. This wasn’t the first time I’d done AI on our Tamworth sows and the previous attempts had all been successful so the pressure was on to maintain the 100% success rate. There …
Continue reading ‘Rare breed Tamworth pigs – from AI to pork’ »