The piggies came home this week. 2 mixed breeds, unlike last year's Berkshire. We'll see how the meat compares, but honestly I don't know that we will be able to tell the difference, especially knowing the vast difference between store-bought pork to home-grown pork! These 2 are named Copper (the brown coppery colored one), and either Patpat (the second), or Stripey - Little M hasn't yet decided. I'm betting she goes with patpat like last year though.
She is just enthralled with them, which is really cute to see. She'll ask to go in with them, and then just sit down and watch them sleep, or eat, or whatever they happen to be doing. She'll 'help' put greens in for them, tag along to check on them in the mornings, and help feed them.
For now we just have them in the hog panel enclosure like we did with Pat last year, although we moved it to beside the new side garden. After the baby comes we'll spend the time to get the electric fence all set up, and let them out into that, but with them being so small, and us busy with other things for the next couple weeks, we felt that the simplest quickest solution for their enclosure for the short term would be the hog panels. Of course, they've already escaped via the accidentally left open gate into my garden, luckily not for long enough to do anything more than root around in the chicken manure pile! Oops!
Little M is certainly the good helper, isn't she? The piglets are adorable. How will Little M deal with them being food? Just wondering how you handle that...
ReplyDeleteWhen we brought Pat home last year, she had a momentary meltdown when I first told her we were going to raise him and then he was going to die just like the deer and the ducks and the grouse we hunt, and then we were going to eat him. But after that, she was fine. This year, she is already asking when are the piggies going to die. And all winter, when she wanted sausage and eggs for breakfast, it was patpat and eggs she asked for... I know for myself growing up with chickens and geese, I understood where my food came from from an early age - she's doing just the same :)
DeleteOh little piggies! Do you guys feed your pigs table scraps? We use to feed our pigs all sorts of things like moldy bread, stale chips, watermelon rimes, parts of the fruit and vegetables humans don't eat, I know it sounds gross but they loved it and we didn't feel as bad when something went to waste. Oh and our pigs loved marshmallows..no joke on that.
ReplyDeleteYup, we feed the pigs (or the chickens when we don't have pigs) pretty much everything edible that comes out of the kitchen and the garden weeds too. When I visit other people's homes, it always is a shock to throw that sort of thing in the garbage, especially if they don't even have a compost!
DeleteI was also wondering about the names - I am imagining a conversation that includes "Have another bite of PitPat."
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I don't remember ever being bothered by eating my grandparents' stock, and I had names (some nasty) for many of them. Watched chicken slaughter from the hatchet to the table, being tasked with pinfeathering along the way. No problem.
We definitely referred to the pork (especially the breakfast sausage) as patpat all winter! I think because we all knew exactly what he was from the get-go, eating him is just like eating other things we grow or hunt. And honestly, we know exactly what sort of life he had and what he ate - not something you can say about grocery store meat - I think that makes it feel almost better eating him than eating pork from the grocery store, at least for me!
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