Piglets in the Sun (At Last!)

We've had three litters of American Guinea hog piglets born in the last two weeks, but I've been waiting (and waiting, and waiting!) to post about them until I could get some photos.

My camera does a terrible job at dimly lit indoor photos, so as long as the piglets stayed in their snug nests in the barn, all I could capture were photos of little black blurry things.  And with the weather featuring a lot of cold temperatures, chilling winds, and freezing rain in the past couple of weeks, the piglets and their moms seemed determined to stay inside until spring.

Now, with nicer weather and a little encouragement to the sows (namely, moving their food and water dishes outside, so they could no longer depend on me providing indoor room service), our pig families are finally starting to venture out into the sunshine.

Which means... PHOTO TIME!  :-)

They are mostly hanging out right next to the barn door because in addition to plentiful sunshine, there's a lovely soft, warm pile of waste wool leftover from sheep shearing.  I should have raked it up long before this, but the pigs enjoy napping on it so much, I decided to leave it until spring.  It's only going to be used to mulch the garden anyway, so there's no harm in waiting.

 

  

 

 

First Soap Giveaway Winners

Yesterday, we reached TWO of the four "milestones" I'd set for my latest soap giveaway, so today I'm giving away two sets of hand-rolled Sheep's Milk Soap balls.

The winners are... (drum roll, please!)

(1)  Justine---You didn't leave an email address Justine, so I hope you're reading this!  Email me at inglesidesheep@aol.com to tell me your shipping address so that I can send you your soap.

(2)  Yarnabees.  I've already sent you an email, all I need now is your shipping address

Congratulations to our two winners!

There are still 2 more giveaways waiting to happen, so don't forget to enter.  All you have to do is comment on the giveaway's blog post for your chance to win.

New Giveaway: Sheep's Milk Soap Balls

Time for a new giveaway, and this time it's something new:  handmade sheep's milk soap balls!

As many of you may know, thanks to the success of my Kickstarter soap making project, I've been able to start making all of our luscious sheep's milk soap right here on the farm instead of hiring an outside person to do it for me.  I'm currently in the process of building up inventory, which takes a while because after the soaps are made, they have to cure for a few weeks before they're ready to be sold.

I have a small amount of soap that is ready to go now (contact me directly if you'd like to buy some), and a much larger amount that will be ready in early February.

But meanwhile, I'm giving some away. 

I make all of my soap in small batches, and pour it into molds that hold about 6 lbs. of soap at a time.  Sometimes after filling the molds, I have a little bit of soap left over.  That soap gets made into old-fashioned, hand-rolled soap balls.

They are decorative as well as practical, and are made with the exact same natural ingredients as my regular bar soap:  olive oil, sheep's milk from my own flock of Icelandic sheep, water, lye, and essential oils.  They are very mild to your skin, and they smell great.

I'm going to give away four sets of three soap balls.  These giveaways will happen at four different "milestones":

1.  I'll give away one set of soap balls when our next batch of piglets are born.  That could take place any time in the next few days, so enter soon!  If you click the link above, you can also enter our "Guess A Piglet" contest for a chance to name one of the piglets when they are born.

2.  I'll give away another set of soap balls when the number of "Likers" for the farm's Facebook page reaches 1,100.  As I type this, we need only 12 new likers, so this could happen almost immediately.  Feel free to use the "Suggest to Friends" feature (right under the ram photo in the upper left corner of the page) to help speed things along!

3.  Getting 12 new likers for our fan page is too easy a goal.  Let's make you work for the next one!  I'll give away another set of soap balls if you can push our number all the way up to 1,200.  Recommend us to your friends, and don't forget to let them know that they can enter to win some soap balls too.

4.  See that column on the right hand side of this blog page?  The one with my photo and the blog archive and all that?  Right below the blog archive is a listing of this blog's followers, with an easy button to click to become a follower.  When the number of followers listed there reaches 100, I'll give away the last set of soap balls.  If you're not a follower, please consider becoming one.  And if you have friends who like to read about farming, nature, and hand crafting, encourage them to follow as well.  That way, you'll all be first in line to get the news when I announce my NEXT giveaway!  :-)

Okay, I've told you the "What" and the "When" of the giveaway.  Now you need to know the "How," as in "How do I enter to win these marvelous soap balls?"

It's easy as can be:  Just post a comment on this blog entry. 

Make sure to include some way of contacting you if you win---If you comment anonymously, I may not be able to reach you to tell you you're a winner.  Winners will be selected at random from among all the people to comment on this post.  I'll contact winners by email to get their shipping address, and the winning names will be announced on this blog.  One entry per person, please. 

Now, go win yourself some soap!  :-)

Guess the Piglets!

The waiting is killing me.  I have four pregnant Guinea hog sows, all supposedly due to farrow within the month, and no reliable due dates on any of them.  Clearly it's time for a game of "Guess the Piglets"!

Tell me in the comments to this post which sow you think will farrow first and what on what date.  Anyone who is correct will be allowed to name one of the piglets!

Here are the contestants (all photos taken today):

Circe:  She was supposed to be due on December 31, but she seems to have gotten pregnant on the following cycle, not the one when I saw her bred.  Which would mean that her new due date should be about 3 weeks later, or sometime around January 21.  This will be her first litter.  She is fat and uncomfortable, and has some udder development.  She declined to get up for her photo shoot, opting instead for the "I'm so uncomfortable, look at my belly" angle.

Thyme:  One of the new sows.  We have no expected due date for her, but with the amount of udder development she has (almost dragging on the ground), she's clearly due fairly soon.  Her previous litter was born 7/28/10, and she was with the boar the entire time since then, so it would make sense that she would be due sometime this month.

Rosemary:  One of the new sows.  We have no expected due date for her.  Her udder development is almost as far along as Thyme's, so she's also likely to be due fairly soon.  Her previous litter was born 7/11/10, and she was with the boar the entire time since then, so it would make sense that she would be due sometime this month.

Cerridwen:  She is supposed to be due about February 1, but now that the date is nearly here she doesn't look far enough along to be due that soon.  She's the only one of the sows who is not fat and sluggish, but is instead quite active.  She has a little bit of a belly, but not really any noticeable udder development.  Maybe she's due on the next cycle, 3 weeks later?

Let's hear yours guesses!

New Soaps

I made about 50 lbs. of soap in the past few days, starting to build up inventory as I complete my transition into making my own soaps instead of hiring someone to do it for me.

I made 25 lbs. of my regular Amber-scented sheep's milk soap.  Then for a little variety, I made some unscented sheep's milk soap, and some pure castille soap.  All of my soaps are technically castille soap, since they are made with 100% olive oil, with sheep's milk and essential oils added.  But pure castille soap has only 3 ingredients:  olive oil, water, and lye.  All olive-oil based soaps are known to be exceptionally mild and gentle to the skin, although they don't make lots of lather.  Personally, I love how much softer and smoother my skin feels after using my sheep's milk soap.

Anyway, I was interested to see how the new varieties turned out.  I had suspected---but didn't know for sure---that without the dark-colored essential oils added, my sheep's milk soap would be an entirely different color.  And I was right.  The scented sheep's milk soap is a rich brown color, while the unscented version is a beautiful pale cream that is barely distinguishable from the one-shade-lighter pure castille.

Here's what they look like.  On the left is the amber-scented sheep's milk soap.  In the center is the unscented sheep's milk soap.  And on the right is the pure, unscented castille soap.

All these new soaps need at least a couple of weeks to cure, then they will be available for sale on my website and Etsy.

Happy New... Pigs!

We had not planned to increase our herd of Guinea hogs beyond the two breeding pair we already had.  But our waiting list of people wanting to buy piglets had grown to about a year and a half long.  So we decided to shop around and see if we could find a couple more adult sows to buy, to try to keep up with the demand.

We ended up getting lucky:  We found someone only an hour away from here who had two adult sows and an adult boar she was willing to sell to us for a very reasonable price.  None of the new pigs were too closely related to the bloodlines we already had.  And better yet, the two sows were already pregnant---and due to farrow probably within the month!

So, the coming of the new year brought three new Guinea hogs to the farm, and before another month is out we should have lots of new piglets.

Now to meet the newcomers.  This is the new boar, Basil.

 
This is Thyme:

And this is Rosemary:

We kept all the newcomers isolated for a while, but yesterday we rearranged everyone so that all the sows are together and all the boars are together.  This meant that all the pigs spent the afternoon squabbling, shoving, screeching, and biting, trying to determine who was going to be boss hog in each pen.

Our boar Magick was peaceful to start with, but once the others brought the battle to him, he established himself as king of the boar pen, after giving the new boar Basil several painful looking slashes along his sides.  I put some ointment on the cuts, and today poor Basil is acting very sore and submissive, but I think he's going to be just fine.

Here's Magick, looking very fierce:

In the sow pen, Cerridwen quickly established dominance by fighting dirty:  she went straight for the ear-biting.  After chomping on each of the other sows' ears until they screeched, she was undisputed queen of the sows.

Meanwhile:  Despite all of Circe's theatrics last week about how VERY pregnant and uncomfortable she was and how she was going to farrow ANY DAY NOW, she has still not had her piglets.  Apparently she got pregnant on the following cycle, not the time that I saw her bred.  The young boar Jack was still only just barely tall enough to do the job at that point, and I guess he needed another few weeks of growth to be able to get it right.  Which means that Circe should instead be due to farrow in about 2 weeks.

The two new sows look like they're due quite soon as well.  Cerridwen, who is supposedly due about February 1, does not look sufficiently far along to be due that soon.  So she may also end up farrowing later than I expected.

Either way, before much longer we're going to have a population explosion of piglets.  Just doing our part to help preserve this very rare, endangered breed!

Waiting for Circe's Piglets

Circe is due to have her piglets in 2 days. 

Since these will be our first piglets born in winter, I'm not sure what to expect as far as how much help they will need staying warm. 

Piglets are born without the ability to regulate their own temperatures for a few days, and while they can get warm by snuggling next to mom, that does leave them more at risk to being squashed if mom rolls over on them in the bedding.  Commercial pig farms solve the problem by locking the sows in tiny farrowing crates and keeping the piglets in a separate heated place of their own.  But I prefer to let my pigs live a more natural life than that, so my sows never get locked up in crates.

I did want to give the newborns a little extra shelter and warmth, though, so I moved Circe out of her hoop house that she's been sharing with Jack out behind the barn, and built her a snug nest inside the barn.  The nest is a backwards "G" shaped enclosure made of hay bales to give insulation from drafts, then bedded with a generous pile of loose hay that Circe can push around and adjust as she likes.

Above the nest area, we've hung two heat lamps to provide extra warmth when the piglets are born.  As a safety precaution, we placed a metal fence panel as a "roof" between the nest and the heat lamps.  That way if by some chance the heat lamps should happen to fall (and believe me, we fastened them securely!), they would not fall into the bedding and start a fire.

I've been feeding Circe in her nest for the past few days so that she gets used to it and associates it with being a pleasant place to go.  She's not shut in the barn---she can still go out and wander around in the paddock for fresh air and sunshine whenever she likes.  But she seems to like her nest and loves to sleep in there, luxuriating in the comfy, private spot.

Now all we have to do is wait a couple more days for the piglets to arrive!

Merry Pig-mas!

HO HO HO!

Magick the pig wishes you a "Magickal" Christmas

And a Happy New Year

From all of us at Ingleside Farm.

Sheep in a Dunce Cap

That's it.  I finally couldn't take it anymore.

I have a sheep named Wheat who---alone out of the entire flock---has developed a bad habit of getting her head stuck in the hay feeder.  Oh sure, a rare few times I've had to rescue another sheep or two who have gotten their heads stuck somewhere.  But those sheep have done it ONCE, learned their lesson, and never done it again.

Wheat, on the other hand, does it daily.  Not just daily, but two, three, four times a day.  Every time I go outside, there she is, stuck again. 

There's another feeder she could eat at where it would be impossible to get stuck, but she rarely uses it.  There are other ways to eat from the feeder she likes without getting stuck (all the other sheep do it!).  But she won't learn them.

As a result, she spends most of her time trapped in one position---all night, all weather, any time when I'm not right there to rescue her instantly.  After all, I DO have a few other responsibilities on the farm besides extracting learning-disabled sheep from the same stupid predicament over and over and over again.

So I finally said enough was enough.  I came up with a solution to the problem.  For the rest of the winter, Wheat will have to wear a dunce cap.  A special dunce cap, invented just for her, to prevent her from sticking her head into places it doesn't belong, so instead of getting stuck all the time, she can move around freely like a normal sheep.

Well, maybe not quite normal.

 Wheat's dunce cap is a spare piece of light PVC pipe fastened to her horns with duct tape.  It makes her head too wide to go through the small holes where she likes to stick it.  If the head can't go IN, then there won't be any issue with it not being able to come back OUT.  With any luck, by next winter, Wheat's own horns will have grown enough that they will naturally prevent her from getting her head stuck.

But for now, it's the dunce cap for her.  And after all the hassle she's put me through over the past month, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a certain perverse satisfaction in making her wear that embarrassing looking contraption on her head.

The other sheep are looking at her like she's an alien.  They'll get used to it soon, but meanwhile they're not sure whether they want to run away, beat her up, or follow her around staring at her new fashion accessory.

At least she can run around wherever she wants to now!

Duct tape really DOES fix all problems!  :-)

Our First Egg

We've been waiting for months, and at last the day has arrived.  Yesterday we got our first egg from our chickens!  The hens are approximately 7.5 - 8 months old now, so I guess that's right about on schedule.  I'm not sure if we should expect very many eggs in the near future, since it's mid-November and the days are just going to keep getting shorter.  But I've read that Orpingtons do sometimes keep laying through the winter, so I guess we'll see!

Our egg is on the right, with a store-bought size "Large" egg and a penny in the photo for size comparison.

I've read that a pullet's first eggs are often tiny and misshapen, but this egg is lovely and perfect.  It's a bit smaller than the store-bought egg, but it's still a respectable size.  It's lighter-colored than the store-bought egg too.  It's exactly the beautiful pale porcelain-pink flesh tone that you'd see on the face of an expensive porcelain doll.

Next came the taste test.  I hard boiled both the eggs, and we shared them for breakfast.

 As you can see, our egg (top) has a much richer color, presumably because our chickens have access to grass and bugs and occasional scraps of fruit, instead of just chicken feed.  Our egg also had slightly more flavor and a less dry and crumbly texture to the yolk.  It also had a noticeably stronger shell.