At the moment, I am working (as in paid work!) 4 or 5 days a week. It’s a shock to the system, but as there is no veg to sell (see the flexibility tab!) I need to take the extra cash.As a result of working so much, I don’t have time to take our 2 Berkshire pigs to the abattoir. The could have gone this coming week had I the time to take them.

Yesterday, we moved them out of the woods and onto the area that our (drowned) potatoes were. They make short work of rooting out the marble sized spuds which if left to thier own devices, will sprout in the spring and ruin my crop rotation.

Moving pigs when you have electric fencing is fairly simple. No posts to bash in to the ground and no wire staples to fiddle with. You unclip the electric wire from the plastic posts, wind the wire onto a reel, move the plastic stakes to their new position and reel out the wire.

The hardest part is actually getting the pigs to leave their old domain. They won’t cross the old fence line voluntarily, so there’s no rush in erecting the new fencing. I had to spend quite a while coaxing them over the old fence line with a bucket of feed. Once moving though, they happilly ran at my heel across the field to thier new site.

At about 7:30 last night, something told me inside to go and check the pigs. Just as well! Once I got up to the field, I was surprised to see one of the pigs standing in the new run. I could also hear the tell tale ‘click………click………click’ of the electric wire shorting out on the ground. I was very surprised to see that most of the wire was lying on the surface of the soil! The best theory I could come up with is that a deer was crossing the field and got snagged in the fence. The wire had been pulled from most of the plastic posts so there must have been a bit of a struggle! This must have unnerved the pigs – hence one being up and about in the dark.

It only took a moment to re-fence, but I am glad something made go and check – it would have certainly given the pigs the chance to escape from thier new run as the boundary of the wire would not have been established with them. If it had happened on the old run, I am certain they would have stayed put, possibly for days!

They are at the correct weight to go to slaughter, but I won’t get a chance to take them for another couple of weeks. By then, they will have rootled up all the tatties, mucked the field for us and put on a few more pounds!

A photo will follow!

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