No more chickens

Some sad news. For the first time almost since we’ve been here, we have no chickens on our property.

We had a pen and coop that we closed them into at night, but they free-ranged during the day. And something took advantage of that. The first time three disappeared, then one by one the rest. We’re not too sure what took them (hopefully not the pigs!), but something that evaded the dogs’ scrutiny, which is actually pretty good.

We will be getting more at some point, but we will probably stop free-ranging them. We have lost too many over the years here. In Terlingua we never lost chickens to predators, but here there is a lot of cover for the predators, just looking for a snack. It's really a shame, as free range chickens seem healthier, get a wider diet and help keep flies down. But if we want to keep chickens, we’ll have to find an alternative.

We have been eating out of the garden for a little while now, both the inside garden (photos) and the wicking beds (photos) outside, which are both very efficient on space and water.

However, now that the rains have started, we have planted the big outside garden. Corn, greens, beans, sunflowers, squash, potatoes and a few other bits and pieces.

We have had some of our young trees produce fruit this year, not a lot but enough to give us a taster of what's to come.

We will also be making hay from our property. We cut the old grass on our top pasture, so that we can collect the new green grass that grows. It is a fruitful time of year.

For more photos, click here.

Pig Update

Well, we sold all the piglets we wanted to, and now we are left with Wanda and Gloria (the two sows), Macho and Amigo (the two boars), and two piglets that we’ll be fattening up. They’re all growing like weeds, but the three adults are especially huge. Luckily they are all very tame, otherwise they would be scary (as is, we keep the baby away from them until they’ve been fed!).

Sad to say that we will be getting rid of Macho soon. It looks like the girls are definitely bred, so we no longer need to keep him. We will be using Amigo as our main boar and he will be old enough by the next time they need to be bred. In the meantime Macho is just eating food. It’s a shame in a way, as he is such an intelligent and calm pig. Hopefully we’ll find him a good home - good boars are in short supply around here.

Abe and a couple of lads from the village have spent the past couple of days making a new pasture for them all. Abe cut a bunch of limbs off the Juniper trees, so that the pigs can get under their shade without being cut by low branches. The boys then trimmed them up, so that we can use them as posts in some upcoming projects. We now have a BUNCH of beautiful posts (which the rabbits are cleaning off for us, as they like to chew the bark off) and the pasture looks awesome. Now that the rains have come and the grass is growing, the pasture should provide a little more of their food.

For more photos, click here.

Gathering

We have spent several days over the last month gathering food for the animals. We collected a couple of truckloads of Mesquite, which is high in protein and both the pigs and the rabbits love it (we ferment it for the pigs). We will also be grinding some of it up into flour for our own use.

Plus we cut and dried a truckload of alfalfa. A friend of ours has a patch that we can cut in exchange for some rabbit meat. Abe uses the scythe to cut it, I pile it up and load it into the truck, Leo chases frogs, and Nico sleeps (that little one of ours is very lazy!). At home we lay it out in our old driveway to dry and then make little bales by compressing it in our ice chest and tying it up. We will be going and cutting another load this week. We hope to store enough over the summer to last us through winter and dry season.

We give the rabbits and pigs a bucketload of grass and weeds each day from the garden. Even though the pigs can get it for themselves, they still like us to give them some - I guess it makes them feel special.

Rain Season

We have now entered rain season for real. This past month we received 6 inches, which is the lowest rainfall for July since we’ve been here, but is still better than the big nothing we had in the nine previous months. Everything is now greening up. I love the transformation we can see at this time of the year. Our view is so beautiful and every day we see it getting greener.

And more important than our view is the fact that our tanks have some water in them. We came close to running out (mainly due to the quantity that the pigs consume, especially when it was so hot), but now we have more than 3000 gallons (about half). We will be increasing our storage capacity this year to accommodate our increasing livestock.

We are still waiting for a bulldozer to come and fix our pond, which blew out last year. It is due next week. Maybe that’s the reason that it has held off on raining hard - it’s waiting for our pond to be fixed!

Two months old

Nico is now two months old and is changing with each passing day.

He weighs almost 13 lbs (5.75kg) and is 22 1/2 " (56cm) long. Friends and family keep calling him fat and the poor little guy has developed bolemia - he'll eat and then puke it back up. I remember Leo as a baby never let a drop of milk, and later food, go to waste, but Nico is a very messy eater. He'll suck and then open his mouth to smile, letting half the milk dribble down his chin and me. I have learned to feed him with a rag under us, so we don't get too wet.

He is letting us sleep a lot better at night. His colicky stage is now almost totally over, so he doesn't wake to pain. He'll go between 4 and 5 hours between when we put him to bed and when he first wakes up to nurse, and those uninterrupted hours of sleep have done the world of good to the sleepy parents of a newborn. He's also going longer between feeds during the day than he did at first.

We have now entered the wonderful world of smiles and giggles. He is overall a very happy and calm baby. He's content to sit on his own for a long time watching the world go by without ever fussing. He laughs at Leo's constant attention, and doesn't flinch when his big brother runs around screaming and jumping. He coos and chatters, laughs and grins.

He has two types of cries - one signals pain, the other signals that he wants something. The first is generally linked to his stomach and is getting less frequent. Fortunately we have a secret weapon for his pain - we put him in a bath and all crying stops instantly. He LOVES the water, and I mean "he should have been a fish" loves the water (just like his mama). The second type of cry starts as a little on/off complaint, nothing very intrusive. He often gets picked up at this point (to nurse, to change his diaper or to be with the family, depending on the tone of his cry), but if he isn't, the cry gets a little more insistent, the final warning. And then he GETS MAD! He doesn't have the throbbing vein in his neck that Leo, and his uncle Augie, have, but that doesn't lessen the effect.

We haven't done too much diaper free with Nico. With Leo he used about one diaper a day for the first year (we then starting building and someone came up to play with him and Leo stopped asking to go to the toilet). Nico has done several pees in the potty, and even a couple of poops, but he struggles so much to poop that diaper free has been impractical. He'll start signals that he needs to go, but won't get it out for another half hour or more. We'll get more serious about that soon, now that his digestive system is maturing.

He is also getting a lot stronger. He loves to stand and even jump, and pushes up vigorously when he wants you to hold him upright. He locks his legs and can hold his weight for a little while. His head is also getting a lot stronger and he'll hold it upright for the most part. He likes to sit on the sofa like the rest of us and can stay there for a while, but if he starts to fall he can't yet correct himself.

He completely recognizes all three of us and has different associations for each. He grabs onto your T-Shirt and strokes you when you hold him. He seems extremely affectionate, just like his big brother.

All in all, a beautiful baby and the perfect completion to our family.

For photos of this month, click here.

Boars

Well, I guess we are now officially in the pig business...

It is getting time to wean Wanda's first litter, and thus time to breed her again. So we started looking for a boar. We found a couple of people who will rent their boars out in exchange for a piglet born of each sow bred. However neither of the boars were that great. Seeing as we have two sows that we will be breeding twice a year, we figured we should buy a boar and keep him permanently. We started looking around.

There was very little locally, but we eventually found one for sale. He looks like a Spotted Poland China and Tamworth mix and his name is now Macho. He is not very big - 10 months old and only 80 kilos - but he is beautiful, calm, and very hardy. He has been free-ranging over the mountains here and obviously knows what he is doing, as he is very healthy. We put him in a pen on his own until he and the girls get used to each other, but he already escaped and went to find them in their pasture. Luckily, they all seem to get on well and he is very gentle with the babies. But the girls did not appreciate him trying to mount them, so we separated him again (with a few amendments to his pen). Once the babies are weaned and the girls go into heat, they will all be able to run together, although we haven't decided yet if we will keep him for very long.

In the city, Abe also found a beautiful little boar, but he is only two months old and thus not able to do the job yet. He is a Landrace and Blue Butt mix. He is very intelligent and long in body. He will make the kind of babies that will sell well locally (while our older boar will make better pasture pigs). He is Leo's pig and Leo named him Amigo. He feeds and plays with him each day (several times a day!) and the little guy is getting real tame and tolerant.

[Please note that Macho is the only one of our pigs that looks clean. That is only because he is not yet hooked up to the water system, as we only brought him home yesterday (Abe is hooking him up as I write). As soon as the pigs have water, they make themselves a mud pool and roll around in it!]

We have also been looking into buying a milk cow, to give us and the pigs milk and cheese. We've found a couple of options so far, but haven't settled on anything. Will keep you posted.

Next major project on the property is a proper barn (with its own water catchment and tank of course).

For photos of our boys, click here.