Hot Off The Haywire

Farm Fodder - Page 21

Nothing was as needed as the two and a half inches of rain we got this past week, well, besides a new spine, but that's another story. The rain has really set the clover to sprouting, and if we get a few more showers periodically we should have some excellent fall grazing coming up.

Not a whole lot got accomplished at the farm this past week, as my back has pretty much limited me to feeding and waterering. It's doing much better now, and my feel meter in years has dropped me down to somewhere in the 70's. Hopefully I'll be back to 49 years in a day or two. I didn't go to the doctor, but did call and he said to watch as much football as possible to ease the pain. (at least that's what I told my wife he said) Hahaha!

Geez and Myfoot are doing an excellent job nursing their litters, and we plan on turning them out of the ark over the weekend. Everytime I see them in the ark they're facing the openings, like they're on guard duty or something, so I'm thinking they may have had a nocturnal encounter with a raccoon or coyote:

 

Weaning time is coming up for Dottie's pigs, and I'll be glad to get those rascals off of her so she'll quit being so ornery. We're going to humane ring her pigs and move them onto the winter rye field that was underseeded with our clover mix. They should be in tall cotton with all that fall grazing coming up:

 

It's the time of year for the markets to start slowing down, and I'm not too terribly sad about that. It's been a long, hot, and humid season, and a little down time is looked forward to. We're taking the pigs to the butcher on Monday for everyone that ordered a half or whole pig, and we'll have details e-mailed to you guys later in the week. We should be fairly stocked for tomorrow, so come see us and thanks for reading!

Pork & Greens

What's Your Frequency Myfoot?

Earth to Myfoot. You had a snug, bedded ark to have your piglets in, but you choose the middle of the pasture, with no cover in sight?

Man, when I got to the farm this morning I knew that Myfoot must have pigged last night because she wasn't at the fence squawking for her feed. So there I got to peek in her side of the ark and what, neither her or any piglets were anywhere in site. So I start calling her and see her stand up in the pasture, way down on the other end. I'm thinking maybe she was just out grazing, but noticed she wouldn't move more than 10 or 20 feet before she turned back. I knew what she'd done then, so I went down expecting to find piglets scattered everywhere, but she'd built a grass nest and had 12 fat piglets just a snoozing in the warm air.

Of course that wouldn't do, especially with an 80 percent chance of rain, so I got the tractor and fought her off while loading the pigs in the tractor bucket. Myfoot didn't care for that one bit, but she'll get over it. I got all the piglets in the ark, and after searching her nest for an hour, she finally settled in with her new litter, and so far, all's well that ends well!

Here's a short video of her and Geez in their ark:

Sorry about the blur, but I've got to get a new lense for the flip. Thanks for reading and watching!

Pork & Greens

Farm Fodder - Page 20 - Better Late Than Never Edition

Fitting that on Labor Day one of the girls went in labor and farrowed 9 large piglets. Geez was just finishing up having her piglets when I arrived at the farm this morning. While only having 9 would put most girls on the waiver wire, Geez get's a pass because we didn't skip her first heat after weaning her litter.

Our plan is always to skip that first breeding cycle on sows that farrow their first litters because they get milked down so heavily, especially with our longer lactation period, and skipping the first cycle gives them an additional 21 days to recondition their bodies. However, due to the demand for our pork we didn't have that luxury, and needed to get more pigs on the ground as soon as possible. Here's a photo I took of her piglets while she was out eating this morning:

 

I'll get some video of her tomorrow and post it up on the blog.

This is the "Better Late Than Never Edition" because of throwing my back out last Wednesday, and I'm just now getting back to some semblance of normal. Nothing is so unfunny as not being able to put on long pants because your range of motion is about 3 degrees from vertical.

We moved the remaining growing pigs to one of the sacrifice lots so the field they were roaming can be tilled and reseeded with our clover mix. Hopefully my back will be healed enough to get this done latter in the week. Here's a shot of the pigs chilling in the shade of the sacrifice lot:

 

Our butcher pigs sold out lickity split at the farmers' market Saturday, and we'll be e-mailing out details shortly. We had a great sign-up for the farm tour, and you may have noticed at the market that we changed the date to Sept 26th due to some scheduling issues. We're looking forward to having everyone come see the hows and whys of pasture pig production.

That's going to do it for now, but check back in a day or two and we should have some video up of Geez' litter, and Myfoot is due any day, so maybe her litter as well. Thanks for reading!

Pork & Greens

Farm Fodder - Page 19

Man, has the weather the last few days been fabulous, or what? It's almost long pants weather, especially early in the morning, and now all we need is a good soaking rain to cool the soil temps so the clover can start to put on it's fall growth.

We're getting set for our first fall litters, with Geez and Myfoot due sometime around the 2nd week of September, and Perk and Twiggs about 3 weeks later. We're really excited about the products our boar Jethro is putting out, so we're anxious to get more of his piglets on the ground.

Speaking of piglets, we're planning on having a farm tour on September 26th, from around 1:00 to 4:00 pm. We want to give you guys a chance to see where and how we raise the premium pork products you feed to your families. We need to limit the number to around 50, and it will be a floating event, meaning you can show up anytime in the designated hours and stay for as long or little as you like. We'll have a sign up sheet for our Cherry Street customers starting Labor Day weekend, and if you're not a shopper there you can e-mail us at [email protected] to reserve a spot.

Things are about the same at the farm, but I've got a few photos for you to see. This first one is of Dottie nursing, and you can see by the size of the piglets why we keep her, despite her cantankerous ways:

 

and this one is of her piglets by the fenceline that seperates them from the growing pigs. We're moving the remaining grower pigs into a sacrifice lot next week so we can reseed the field they're on to our clover mix:

 

and finally the purebred Large Black pigs in the area we need cleared. You can see they've got a good head start on the undergrowth, and once they clear that they'll start on the larger stuff:

 

At the market tomorrow we'll have most everything except boneless chops, tenderloin, and hot dawgs. Jackie, our booth operator, had a prior obligation scheduled so we won't have the brat cart, but we'll have it one last time on Labor Day weekend. Thanks for reading, and stop by and see us tomorrow!

Pork & Greens

Reservations Anyone?

A quick note to let everyone know that we're back listing with the Tulsa Clean Food Market that we participated in over the winter months last year. We wanted to go ahead and start back listing so you guys that may not be able to get to Cherry Street early in the morning can reserve our products so you won't arrive and find them already sold out.

All you need to do is sign up with your e-mail address on the website and you'll receive notification of when the shopping period opens and closes. The market will run weekly until Cherry Street closes, and then it will run every other week with a 9:00 - 11:00 am drop of at 6th & Peoria in front of Central Park.

You'll be able to shop on-line for lots of sustainably produced products like Various meats and poultry, eggs, cheese, bread, spices, prepared products, soaps, mushrooms, etc, all winter long!

Here is the link to our products and here's the link to set an account up.

On the market page, our products are listed under "pork" - just click and you'll see the various producers.

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you Saturday and all winter long!

Pork & Greens  

Farm Fodder - Page 18

Oh, that mother nature is quite the tease. Giving us a foretaste of cooler days ahead and then cranking the heat back up so that it feels even hotter, making the desire for fall weather all that much stronger.

I've always said that you learn something new everyday on the farm, and I saw something that still amazes me a couple of days later. Let me explain. The other day I was finishing up feeding and saw Dottie nursing her litter, and when she finished and stood up I noticed a piglet laying under her, obviously trapped by the feeder Dottie was laying against.

 Dottie had started to walk away, but she saw motion as I stepped across the electric fence, and then she noticed the piglet laying motionless on the ground. She gave me the "stay away" grunting, so I knew I wouldn't be able to get near the piglet so I just waited for Dottie to sniff around for a minute and then head to the wallow. She didn't do that. She went to the piglet and gently grabbed his snout in her mouth and moved him back and forth, and then she'd let go and roll the piglet over, back and forth, and then repeat the process. She did this for several minutes, and to my astonishment the piglet sucked in a breath of air and coughed.

 Dottie continued her sow CPR and kept all the curious siblings away with a quick swing of her snout. She kept guard over him until he was able to roll on his stomach, and eventually stand, albiet the legs were a little wobbly. Today that piglet is running around with all the rest as if nothing had happened. I have never, ever seen anything like this, and wish I had run to the truck to get my flip camera, but I was too enthralled just watching. Not too often you get squashed by a 400 plus pound sow and live to squeal about it.

In New Pork City, we put out bids to clear a tangly, weed infested portion of the farm with room and board, all you can eat fresh grain, and fresh water as the compensation, and 9 Large Black pigs were low bidders. Here's a shot of them getting right to work:

Here's a closer view, and you can see how thick the vegetation is (they almost look like a patrol in a Vietnamese jungle):

We expect the job to last one to two months, and we'll have some after photos to show how efficient pigs are at clearing underbrush.

Our butcher is having the usual mechanical problems, and informed us today that our dawgs for the brat cart won't be ready until next Tuesday, along with the deli shaved ham. Everything else will be ready to pick up this evening, so we'll have lots of product at the market tomorrow, just no cooked dawgs.

We're getting flyers printed up this coming week for the Clean Food market, so you can pick one up next Saturday or the following Wed, and get all the details on the winter market. That's it for now, thanks for reading, and come see us tomorrow!

Pork & Greens

Farm Fodder - Page 17

I got to the farm this morning around 5:00 am, and it was still too dark to get started so I sat on my tailgate looking up at the stars, and I saw a few meteors flash across the sky. I thought to myself, "man, that's exactly what it's like to be a farmer, you flash across the sky bright and hot in early spring, but as you cross the season you slowly start to fade."

I'm at that fading point, like a pat of butter dropped in a 350 degree skillet and then left too long, sizzle turning to smoke, nothing left to do but stick to the pan and see if somebody can scrape you out. We do have some good weather (and rain) on the horizon, and I'm thinking that's just what the doctor ordered to get a little charge back in the batteries.

In New Pork City, Dottie's doing a beautiful job raising the pigs in this heat. She's now down to 12 piglets, as she had 3 little runts that have gone to the great Hasty Bake in the sky. Here's a photo of them at breakfast:

and here's a little video action:

 

 

The bright spot on the video isn't a ghost in the machine. It's where I accidentally cracked the lens this morning. It is Friday the 13th you know!

The rest of the porkers requested that I quite playing anymore Doors tunes, as they think there really is a "need to wallow in the mire." Here's a photo of one looking all crhogadile like:

Some news and note: We'll be putting out some info shortly on fall butcher pigs. It's looking like we're going to have 5 to 10 available this year, and you can select a whole or 1/2 pig. We'll have all the details up on the blog around labor day.

 We're planning on having a farm tour towards the end of Sept, and we'll have a sign up sheet at the market a week or so in advance, and if you don't attend the market but would like to come you can send us an e-mail. We'll take the brat cart down and have brats and hot dawgs for the kids, and drinks and such.

We've been looking at ways to incorporate a breakfasty item for the market and think we've come up with a winner - Crepe Dawgs. These are our breakfast sausage links wrapped in a crepe, sprinkled with confectious sugar, and then dipped in syrup. We'll be giving samples tomorrow to see what you think, and if y'all like them we'll start offering them up for the first hour or so of the market.

Lastly, we'll start listing product with the Clean Food Tulsa market that we participated in over the winter. if you're not familiar with this market, it was started by my good friend Wes Downing as a way for shoppers to still get locally produced products over the winter months, but some vendors have used it right through the summer. The advantage to it is you can pre-order online and it will be waiting for you at the market. Once the season is over it will go to an every other week drop-off at 6th & Peoria. We hope to have some flyers printed up about it soon.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see you tomorrow!

Pork & Greens

Meet Dottie!

For those of you that might be new to our blog, we'd like you to meet Dottie. Built like a battleship, ornery as a cross eyed mule, milk producer that Jersey cows would be envious of, Dottie is a 600 pound piglet producing factory. I was telling some folks at the market that I thought she was going to have piglets, and she shucked out 15 robust purebred Spot porkers in a 100 degree heat, and then let me know in no uncertain terms that she'd chew my legs down to stumps if I handled any of her piglets without her permission. Here they are:

 

 

We normally don't like to farrow this time of year, but our boar Rocoe failed to get her in pig after 2 attempts, so we rebred her to Jethro and she's consequently farrowing a month and a half later than we anticipated.

Dottie's on her third consecutive litter of 13 or more piglets born alive, and she's weaned every single one of them. We're not sure she'll continue that record in this extreme heat we're experiencing, since sows can get restless and less careful around their piglets when they're hot, although she might be part camel as well because she only ventured out of the hut once this morning to roll on each side in the wallow. She didn't even take a drink of water, just rushed back to her piglets right away.

You can get a sense of her size by looking at the width of the nest she made. I could drive my truck through there:

Anyway, we just wanted you to see the latest piglets on the ground, and thanks for reading!

Pork & Greens

 

 

Update

Yesterday we said that we'd be bringing the dawg cart tomorrow, but after the harvest today there's no room for all the watermelons, melons, and cart in the trailer. We apologize to all of our breakfast brat friends, but this is the last big harvest, so we guarantee we'll have the cart back out next weekend!

Thanks for reading!

Pork & Greens

Farm Fodder - Page 16

Actually, this should be page 17, because we skipped last week. The continuous onslaught of high humidity and heat are taking their toll. Not so much on the pigs, but mostly on the garden and me.

 I accidentally ran over the one inch main water line that feeds the irrigation sytem with the brushhog. With so little time left in the growing season, I decided not to spend the money to replace it, and as a result the garden has basically burnt up - what wasn't already consumed by the hordes of insects this season, which has been the worst by far for us. There's still some melons, watermelons, peppers, and okra coming off, but most everything else is toast.

The heat will certainly wear you down over time. I try and get as much done by noon as possible, because after that it's almost unbearable. After so much time in the heat, sluggishness and lethargy start to take over, and you just want to get everything finished so you can get out of the sun. All that being said, I still prefer the heat to the bone chilling cold and gloominess of winter.  Now fall's a different story - I loves me some fall, especially since football season kicks back in.

In Porklahoma, the pigs are actually fairing rather well, despite the heat. We need some rain desperately for the grazing pastures, as the clover has just about dissappeared. I got a shot of Perk, Twigg, Geez, and Myfoot's pigs out grazing early this morning. This shot is looking back north towards the garden:

Due to the demand for the pork, we're looking at expanding the herd, but in order to do that we'll have to cut back on the gardening since we have limited space to work with. We're already in the process of putting a plan together for next year, and it looks like we'll decrease the number of vegetables we grow, and concentrate on our favorites like tomatoes, melons, watermelons, and maybe lettuce.

We're getting our pasture that was in a winter rye cover crop ready for the pigs when fall arrives. Here's a shot of the field after the rye was cut, and you can see the underseeded clover starting to emerge:

We're picking pork up at the butcher Friday afternoon, so we should be loaded for the market, and we'll have the dawg cart back out on Saturday as well.

Thanks for reading!

Pork & Greens