With the shorter days and colder nights we are reminded that we don’t have long before the ground will freeze.

We’ve decided a date for slaughtering the big pig (who is not that big in the grand scheme of things — estimated 60kg right now — but the bigger one of our two). And a friend with a gun has agreed to come and help.

And around the same time (end of November) we want to move the little pig into the orchard.

The orchard is rather overgrown. We’ve recovered half of it and planted 5 new trees, 4 apples and a plum to complement the 3 pears and few apples that are there. One half has a lot of other stuff in it including conifers, birches, and an oak. There is lots of shelter which we think will be good for the winter. And maybe some acorns which the pig will be very happy about.

However, it is only fenced on 3 sides so we need to do something about that.

Gradually, we’ve been figuring out what needs to be done. Chopping down trees that are in the fence line (a couple of those are dead). And finding wood to use for fence-posts.

Frustrations

One of the chopped down trees was about the right diameter but after some experimentation we’ve decided that spruce does not make good fence posts. After you’ve whacked the top of the post with a sledgehammer several times (but not enough times to get it as far into the ground as you need it to be), the wood starts splitting and breaking apart at the top.

Plan B involved chopping down a small cedar from a clump in the corner. Cedar does make good fence posts.

Other frustrations include the fact that the truck has decided not to start. The bed of the pickup makes a great platform from which to whack fence posts with a sledgehammer. If it won’t start, we can’t move it to where we need it.

In the meantime

While we were being frustrated with that, we diverted our attention to building the pig shelter that needs to go in a sheltered corner of the orchard.

There is a partial wooden fence (more of a wall, actually because it hasn’t got spaces between rails but flat boards) that forms the back wall so we needed to drive a couple of shorter posts for the front and then use some recovered ceder siding (from a friend’s garage; she had a carpenter ant problem that required one wall of her garage to be totally rebuilt) for sides and a roof. We stapled heavy plastic sheet on the top before laying the roofing.

The soil in that corner was really nice, too nice to be under a pig bed, probably from all the falling leaves over the years. So we dug out a couple of wheel-barrowsful of soil to put in the cold frame before the roof went on. And I put a couple of barrowsful of spruce boughs in there, too, for bedding though I might supplement it will old hay we have from a friend’s place.

There front of the shelter is quite sheltered and it looks very cosy over there.

Back to the fence

Today we decided on an alternate platform for the whacking — a board across a couple of trestles. This enabled us to drive several posts before Mat had to take Freya to her choir workshop. We have one more bracing post to drive (the one that involved cutting down that extra tree) and then we can figure out how to put the wire-net fence on.

We’re learning from a pamphlet (Storey Publishing has a great series called Country Wisdom) and other books as well as just looking at some of the existing fence.

It’s hard to get useful advice. Most folks tell us that you must have electric for pigs, but we aren’t ready for that yet, and the various existing fences seem to be doing okay (helped by them not really wanting to go anywhere).

I am going to take the advice of a friend from church who said to dig a 1-foot trench and bury the fence to make sure they can’t dig under it. And to use fence with holes small enough they can’t get their snouts in to bend a hole big enough to get through. That seemed sensible.

We bought a gate at the feed store, too. Unfortunately it has the kind of hinges the pigs know how to lift the gate off. I don’t think Mat was with me when we fixed that problem earlier in the summer. But I think I can come up with a fix.

Next steps

While Freya has her choir workshop Mat is running errands. Those include a trip to the feed store to buy hog grower mash and fencing.

I’ve limbed the tree/post and cut it to length but I’m not very good at making the end pointy with the bow saw (and I don’t use the chain saw) so Mat’ll have to do that when he gets back.

Then we drive one more post and dig the trench along the fence line (I suppose I could start on the trench this afternoon).

Maybe we’ll even get one part of the fence done (i.e. from the gate to one end) tomorrow.

I get some odd questions about this. The oddest of which is probably “Are you keeping them as pets?”

Since I didn’t know how big adult pigs get until I started looking into getting some I’m going to forgive people that one. But a full grown pig weighs about 500-600 pounds (200-250 kg). So, no, we are not keeping them as pets.

Dinner

I guess I should get this out of the way. Yes, we are going to slaughter them and eat them. Christmas dinner is a pork roast this year.

Yes, it will be hard to kill animals that we know. And it should be hard.

If you eat meat, animals died to be your dinner. If you have a fundamental problem with this, I suggest that you become a vegetarian.

Animal welfare

We do not have a problem with the idea of killing animals for our food.

We do have a problem with confining large numbers of animals in barns for their whole lives, feeding foraging animals on grain out of a bucket, and doing all the things you need to do to keep those animals reasonably healthy in those conditions (routine antibiotics, etc).

Hog farming has become very industrialized in North America. We think this is wrong.

We raise pigs because the animal welfare gain over pork bought from the store is huge.

Labour

Pigs dig. They eat roots and bugs and other stuff that is in the soil.

We want to expand our vegetable garden considerably.

Pigs can help dig the new vegetable garden.

That isn’t happening yet because pigs also love vegetables. But we have built them a shelter in the field the vegetable garden is in, and once we’ve harvested the tomatoes, they are moving in there to start digging it up.

Now that they are bigger, you should see the state of my farmyard. And the big chunks of rock you find in the ground here (I’m on the Canadian Shield if you remember your geography class) are no obstacle. They have strong snouts.

This was one of the reasons I started to look into raising pigs. They are pretty easy to look after (except for their basic position that fencing is a suggestion). And getting someone else to dig the garden, someone who fertilizes while they go, seemed like a cool idea.

Tasty dinner

To get back to the dinner, I actually like the taste of meat. And most commercial meat these days is bred to be lean and not to have a strong flavour.

I don’t need to be eating the fat, but fat is what adds flavour. I want the fat and the bone in my roast so it tastes good.

And I want meat to have a strong flavour. If I didn’t like the taste of meat, I’d be vegetarian. We were vegetarian for many years and my partner is an excellent vegetarian cook.

But hanging meat takes time and space. Which cost money. So supermarkets don’t do it any more (nor do most butchers, I think). And that means most consumers are used to their meat not tasting like much of anything.

Also the taste of meat is affected by what the animals eat. Most commercial hogs are fed on mixed grain with a high protein content (so they grow fast).

My pigs eat all kinds of stuff, including kitchen scraps and apples. I plan to feed them lots of apples in the weeks before they are slaughtered to see what kind of difference that makes. (A friend told me about a friend of his in Georgia who fed his pigs peaches. Yummy pork resulted.)

Raising our own pigs means that we can control much more of this process. And yes, we are currently planning to slaughter and butcher them ourselves. And our to do list has “build a smokehouse” on it.

Waste

The other thing about consumer tastes in meat is that they tend towards the better cuts. Chickens are being bred to have huge breasts because that is what consumers want to buy, for example.

But we believe that if you are going to kill animals to eat them, you should make good use of the whole animal. Killing an animal and then only using a fraction of the meat seems unethical as well as wasteful.

So sausages are also on the agenda. And making those ourselves gives us a bit more control of what’s in them. I don’t object to ears, it’s all the other crap I want to know about. And we can season them ourselves.

Luckily my parents really like things like pork hocks and pigtails. And I bet if I tried them now, I might, too. I’ve even made homemade sauerkraut to go with them. (My dad grew up in Kitchener. He likes German food.)

The politics of food

Although we fully expect the food to taste better and be healthier, our main motivation for raising pigs, as for other food producing activities we do, is political/ethical.

We are generally opposed to the increasing control big business has over our food supply. We are opposed to the transportation costs that engenders. We are opposed to the consequences for animal welfare. We believe that concentrated control of the food supply is risky for everyone in terms of food security.

Right now we are mostly focused on our own food needs. We recognize that this is not sufficient. That with this land we could be supplying food for more than 3 people. But supplying our own food needs is where we are starting. That said, I think my parents are getting pork chops and sausages along with their hocks and tails for Christmas this year.

Yes we are a bunch of socialist hippies. Yes we are idealists. No neither of us comes from a farming background (though only city people ever ask that; farmers can tell). And yes, we are both academics so we learn a lot from books and then go out and try stuff.

And we are having fun. Pigs are really nice animals though when a 150 pound pig decides he wants to do something, it is not easy to persuade him otherwise. They are friendly, even when you don’t have a bucket in your hand. And they love having their bellies scratched. It’ll be hard to kill them. But that just reminds us to respect where our food comes from.

I was aware that I hadn’t been blogging lately but hadn’t realized it had been over 2 months. Sorry about that. About to write a real post right now.

My friend Susan-Marie Swanson, who wrote the text for the 2009 Caldecott prize-winning book, has informed me that the Art Institute of Chicago has an exhibition of art from Caldecott winning books on until November 2010.

The American Library Association conference is there this weekend, so if you want your books signed, now is the time to go see if you can nab authors. But the exhibition looks pretty cool and if you want to miss the hordes of librarians you might wait until next week when they go home.

Okay, I really shouldn’t be quote Monty Python but the Englishman with the chainsaw kind of brings it to mind.

That is a dead pine that is in front of the house. Very dead.

Mat did the fancy Pythagorean theorem stuff with a ruler and arm and so on to figure how tall it was and where it might fall. Moved the car and then got to work.

It was harder to get it to actually fall over than we thought. Wedges needed. More than we thought.

But it fell exactly where he wanted it to, which is a good thing.

As I write this he is chopping it up so there is a space to park the car.

I admit that I spent most of today sitting here in front of the computer. My big accomplishment was my quarterly GST return, a job made more difficult by the recent breakdown of my bookkeeping system. And one that made me realize that I owed my graphic designer quite a bit of money. Oops. All sorted now. Phew.

But at the end of the day I decided to tackle the other end of the room again. One of the first things I found was a box of Freya’s stuff. Including her elusive clock/radio. So I set that up and moved the boom box in here. Went and got me some Robbie Williams CDs from downstairs and a cold beer…

Here is the result (do click for bigger; it gets cropped oddly for the thumbnail):

you can almost imagine sewing here…

that’s the corner of the “look there’s floor” photo from yesterday. Lots more floor. A bunch of boxes that were there didn’t even belong in this room. 2 small boxes of Freya’s books and another large box of her stuff.

I had been contemplating putting the sewing machine behind the door next to the closet. And then I thought about putting it in that corner you see in the photo. But when it was in the space it occured to me that looking out the window is at least as important for sewing as it is for working (my computer faces a window).

Those boxes stacked up next to the sewing machine table all contain related supplies. Fabric, a really cool thing with lots of spools of thread on it (wrapped in paper for moving), that sort of thing. There are more boxes of fabric in the closet. Sorting the fabric will be a whole other project.

I figure that if the cubic foot issue really is problematic, I could get some low trofast for that corner and still have space for a quilt design wall above it. Maybe the spool holder thingamy will go on the wall between the window and closet. It doesn’t stick out very far so wouldn’t impede access to the closet.

As you can see, along the wall there are a lot of plastic boxes. Mostly yarn and fibre. Two contain stuff for junk modelling, building miniatures etc. I’m not sure F does enough of that to justify the space taken up with boxes of toilet roll tubes, plastic caps, etc.

There are now only 3 carboard boxes remaining and they are the smaller ones used for books. On top of that, they are almost empty.

Those have bits of stuff I’m not sure what to do with. I’m going to have to take Jen’s advice and just do it one piece at a time. (That pile of stuff to the left is for the recycling.)

There is still an orphan pile of jigsaw puzzles in the middle of the floor. Not idea where those want to live nor if they really need to live in here. And some random craft supplies. And all the knitting and spinning stuff.

BUT the important thing is that I can now imagine actually moving this table I’m using as a temporary desk over to that side of the room to be a worktable for crafts and homeschooling.

Which is what feels like real progress.

As always I have been remiss with the photos so there isn’t really a “before” shot of this. Too depressing to contemplate anyway.

This is the view from my desk after todays contribution to the effort.

The craft room 2 July 09

When we moved in, those boxes were at least 2 high. You couldn’t really see the windows. And there wasn’t anywhere near as much visible floor.

Those bookshelves on the left were bought in an earlier phase of getting unpacked. I decided we needed to have bookshelves that left wall space to hang art on. IKEA afficionadoes will recognize that they are Billy. I’m seriously considering whether to squeeze another narrow one in at the end there.

Look, there is more floor today…

newly cleared floor

I know, it doesn’t look like much. But it is. Believe me.

Today, I did a couple of things to move this project along. I took a bunch of stuff the movers put in this room down to the basement or to other rooms.

Shelves we aren’t going to put up in here. Games that we play downstairs so they need to be downstairs. That sort of thing.

But mostly, I just plodded on with unpacking and organizing the craft supplies.

When we first moved I got stuck on the best “storage solution”. And I know that sometimes the urge to go out and buy a solution is just displacement from other things. But in this case, I knew we needed something.

In the old house, the craft supplies were stored on regular shelves. Yes, there were plastic bins but somehow it didn’t really work. No one could get at anything. When something got taken off the shelf, the stuff next to it shuffled over so it was never clear where it needed to go back to. Ick.

I had some idea in my head of what might work, but I was really struggling to find it in a real shop. And I didn’t want to build it myself.

Then, when I was in IKEA buying all that Billy, I noticed that they did tall Trofast units. I bought one for inside Freya’s closet so she could have drawers for her underwear and socks and shelves for t-shirts, sweaters and things. And no chest of drawers in the main part of the room. And I started to think ….

So I went back and got 2 more tall ones. And lots of shallow tubs and shelves. The closet in this room will fit 4 but I only have 2. I want to make sure this is right before spending even more money. Here’s how it’s working:

craft supply storage

Some of the old plastic bins have just been put on a shelf. The beading stuff on the left there, for example. And some things are more organized. The two bins at the top right contain drawing and painting supplies, with 2 shelves of sketchbooks, pastel paper, etc. underneath. I need to figure out what to do with the large pads of newsprint but that’s a minor detail (and the major thing still in the box nearest the closet in the first photo).

There is a lot of fabric, yarn, and fibre in the remaining boxes. And I have no clue what I’m going to do with them. There are several plastic boxes of fabric in the other side of that closet already. And half a dozen boxes of yarn stacked up under the window. Oy vey.

It is slowly coming together. I think the next priority is to get the sewing machine (that white piece of furniture under the end window in the first photo) into a useable place.

But now, I have to stop procrastinating about organizing by blogging about organizing and go eat my dinner.

It seems that sometimes I need to be bullied to do things. Especially on line things.

I started blogging when MamaCate bullied me into it (and set me up a guest blog on her account).

And now I’ve joined Ravelry. Blame M-H.

These two are some of the nicest bullies on the planet.

And my Ravelry bio is competing for most crap bio ever.

I started searching for people I know and gave up when there were 163 Stephs and the one I wanted wasn’t on the first 2 pages.

I’m JoVE (still can’t believe that wasn’t taken. Thanks for saving it for me folks.) so if you are my friend from some other online thing, like this blog, go ahead and friend me and maybe I’ll even start hanging out over there.

Now, I’m off to have a beer and maybe talk to my pigs.

Despite the fact that I am not super keen on how I look in this photo (what’s with the double chin thing going on?), I’m going to post it anyway. Because it has my new tool in it:

JoVE & her new scythe

I give you my scythe.

I’ve been figuring out how to make hay using the tools I have available. Which was mostly a pair of long handled garden shears (the kind you use for cutting the edges on your lawn if you hate weed whackers) and a lawn rake.

Now I have a scythe and a 3 prong pitch fork. Of course now it is raining every day so no hay will be made, though what I cut using the old method is drying in our big machine shed (which is very open and airy but doesn’t get rained in).

Mat has new tools, too.

Chainsaw & paraphenalia

That’s a chainsaw, steel-toed boots, Kevlar chaps, and (not in the photo) a hard hat with ear protection and a visor.

We have a wood-burning furnace and 15 acres of woods. And a lot of learning to do. As well as a lot of hard physical labour.

You asked for it…

Two of their favourite activities: munching on the grass (and digging it up to find goodness knows what under there) and having a snooze in their pen.

The pen was the dog pen for the previous people but we don’t have dogs. The door into the inside bit (where they sleep at night) is probably too small for it to be a permanent solution but it is working well now.

And to keep this from becoming  just another cat pig blog…

  This is Willow. (I let children name animals we don’t plan to eat someday.)

You can see that she is scratching in the deep leaf litter along the fence. She’s in that area alot. I can only assume there are were lots of grubs.

On today’s list of things to do: check out the feed store in Packenham. They stock organic chicken feed.

But first, getting the COG newsletter into envelopes and mailed. And then the Carp Farmer’s Market.