Bad Pigs! and Free Pumpkins!

I spent all day today with the pigs, feeding them and working on their lot. Simon was my partner and ran back to the house several times for me on errands. I wasn't exactly prepared to work on the pig lot today, and I kept thinking of more things we needed. He was a big help!

I wasn't planning on spending this nice Saturday with hogs, but it really needed to be done. You see, I have been negligent in our hog housing and we have been letting the pigs free-range for several weeks now, due to the fact that their lot had fallen into disrepair. It is amazing how rough hogs can be on fencing and on the ground beneath the fencing!

There is no problem, as long as the pigs stay in our hollow and away from our home area. It is really good for them to be able to eat all the mast that is so abundant this time of year as well as whatever roots and other things they can forage. Of course we have also been feeding them plenty of corn up there.

It does become a problem, however, when they come down to where they don't belong. Here are a couple of them with the chickens on the school house hill, where they are not supposed to be:




And here is Boris, our 650 pound boar, where he is not supposed to be:


It finally reached the "enough is enough" point this morning when we saw a herd of our pigs over in the neighbors yard and also upon discovering that they have been rooting in our garden destroying many flower bulbs and herbs! They have also gotten into the chicken lot, destroying some of that fence! Lisa worked on analyzing the damage and repairing what she could while Simon and I worked on re-containing the pigs.

The other factor contributing to our chaos is the high number of pigs that are currently on our property. We have 7 for butchering that are each approaching 200 pounds, Boris that I already mentioned, 2 mama sows, and 16 piglets that are from the two litters. They were born on October 7th and 10th.

They have not yet been in trouble, although they have ventured down to the chicken coop with the naughty feeder pigs. Here they are sleeping:


5 of the 7 market pigs are going to a friend when they get to be butchering size in exchange for some work he is doing on our bathroom. We are keeping the other 2 for our own freezer. The piglets are big enough to sell now, so maybe we will get with it after Thanksgiving. I may take them to the stock sales to get rid of them all at once.

In the meantime, we were blessed Thursday with some supplemental feed for them! This will help now that we are going to try to keep them contained again. Wal-Mart's produce department donated a truck load of pumpkins, mini-pumpkins, and gourds to our farm. Two years ago we had purchased a couple truck-fulls of their old pumpkins at a highly reduced price, but this year they asked us if we wanted some for free! It didn't take us long to give our answer!

Here they are, loaded in Matt's truck:



Lisa really liked the looks of some of them:



Timothy liked them all, especially the pumpkins:





Matthew was going to take his truck to KMBC for a college weekend and he had to leave very shortly after we got the pumpkins home! We had to unload them in a hurry so he wouldn't be late and Simon was a big help with transferring the pumpkins to our dump truck. In this picture I think he is happy that he is going to get to do some work:



Simon separated and categorized them:



So the pigs have been bad piggies. Is it sending them mixed messages to now reward them with tasty pumpkins and gourds? Maybe they won't put the two things together, even though they are intelligent animals. I know they are not happy campers right now after they realized they were trapped again in their old lot!