Summer's Old News

This is a blog post I wrote months ago and never hit 'publish' on. Oh summer. How you overwhelm me. Here is the updated version of yesterday's news.

Edmund and Garth devoted a lot of time this summer to prepping the North half of our flat land for a fence. They spent weeks thinning this tree line and dealing with the abundance of wood and roughage that resulted.

The Soil and Water folks in our county have a post pounder they rent out at a price well below all of their competitors that we took advantage of. The engine stopped 5 minutes into the project, but two guys from their office came out and fixed it within an hour of our call. What service!

Aside from fencing the flats, we have taken on a new species - pigs! I heard Edmund and Garth remarking about how relieved they were to finally have enough experience under their belts to take on a new animal and not encounter too many surprises in the process of managing them. They are doing what we planned, and so far it's working. Well, for the most part. Heritage Tamworths, we now know, like to root a little more than they like to graze, so we have inadvertently begun using them to renovate our pasture in areas thick with thistles and burdock. In the future we plan to find a breed that will graze like a cow. We have our sights set on Old Spot and Large Black. We'll see. Right now the pigs are gaining well on a diet of whey and pasture. Edmund has been grinding burdock and mixing it with a little grain to give them a taste for it, as well as dipping thistles into fat to sweeten them up. I've seen them nibbling at the lower leaves.

And the heritage turkeys are coming up in the world. The toms are just beginning to fan out and strut. Watching something the size of soccer ball strut is very endearing.

There is so much more to tell, but I will save it for another day. 

- Alanna