Piglets - sunny side up

The piglets had a great day on Saturday. Out in the sun, laying back and taking in the rays - It's a pigs life here in Bredbo. They have all put on good amounts of weight and I'm happy that they should all get to about 15kgs by week eight.

No rain again.

This is the view to the South where a storm looked like it would blow in from on Sunday - not a drop fell, looked good though.

I'm Back!

We apologize for this break in transmission - we’ll return to our normal program as soon as possible. Sorry everybody I was a little sick over the past few days, damned flu got the better of me, but I’m OK now and it doesn’t look like I’ve given it to the cook. Well, a lot has happened and not happened over the past few days.

Firstly – it didn’t rain like they said it would. Sunday morning looked really promising – all we managed by the afternoon was 4mm. That was supposed to be two days worth of rain – nothing!

I placed an advertisement in the Allclassifieds free web site about our piglets – for sale $80 each at eight weeks old. I’ve sold eight up to now, out of the seventeen we have from the last two litters.

350 spuds in and planted – I don’t think we thought they would be that hard to plant. I can’t take much of the credit, the Head Gardener did most of the hard work. It took two days to get them all in the ground – I hope they work. I tried to use an old set of harrows on the ploughed area to break it up, it seemed to work OK, towed around the paddock on the back of the Jeep. With no tractor I couldn’t see another way, I thought of asking the cook to drag them around – but even in a delusionary state I thought better of that. We’ll see later how well it worked.

The cooks mate Jane rang on Saturday – she has found us another goat – great, where is that hole in the head I put down around here somewhere??? I was supposed to go and pick up feed on the weekend as well, but the lurgy put a stop to that – need to fix that up tonight.

We have a new boarder – a three week old Black Angus Heifer named Beccy. She was a twin, the smaller one, and has been rejected by her mother – so the cook is feeding it from a bottle. She came from the guys down at Ingelara. I hope she does alright she’s got really bad scours which isn’t healthy at her age.

Pigs R'sss

I hate having the flu!!! I don’t like Council or ACT Elections either – do politicians listen to themselves? What about Scientists who say “trust me – our particle accelerator won’t end the world” – why play with things that they really don’t understand? I hate the fact that Politicians turn yellow once they are elected – I thought we elected these guy’s to be tough on the environmental vandals (big polluting business) and do what it takes to reduce the effects of climate change – but that ball appears it’s about to be dropped there as well. If cities use over 90 percent of the worlds available resources, why not reduce the size of them? Do we really need Merchant Bankers, Share Markets, Commodity Markets, Fashion Designers, Life Coaches, Dog Walkers, a million coffee shops, hundreds of styles of jeans or a thousand different mobile phones???? I wonder what the carbon footprint of the two wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan is. Sorry - that’s my rant for the week.

Looking back at some of the photos I can see that we’ve had a rather harsh winter this year. With too many pigs and not enough feed in the paddocks. A couple of the girls still haven’t picked up enough to go back to the boar yet. Both Star and Daisy are still running around every feed time instead of eating, I try to keep them some extra food but they just won’t stay in one spot. Maybe this weekend I’ll separate those two and try feeding them alone – only problem is getting them water.

By now I would have thought the barley grass would be coming back, I can see it emerging in the sheltered spots, but not as prolific as previously. I may have solved the over population problem as well, I advertised some piglets for sale and I think they are now all sold. Some are going to new homes which will be great, some are going too be fattened for other things – a bit of mixed feelings about that, but that’s farming. If I can turn over a couple of litters every other month then I can start extending the pigopylus and make the rest a lot more comfortable.

A lot of this pig stuff has been learning on the run, I’m not sure if we would have done things too much differently - except planned our breeding cycle a little better. Feeding is the big issue – a little more thought and preparation needs to be done on that this year and with little rain this year it’s going to be important. But, nothing we can’t over come. I think one of our big lessons this year is to have extra stored for the end of winter, like the acorns, and not use them too early.

Lost water

So, I wander out to feed the pigs this morning and what is waiting there to greet me?? Not water, that's for sure! Appears somebody left a tap on last night and ran the tank dry. Problem is that we had a frost and I can't pump until the pipes aren't frozen anymore - @*&^%$#@@(@)&%#!!!!

Higgledy piggeldy

Free Ranging allows the pigs to do whatever comes naturally. We’ve noticed that the mother pigs tend to keep their piglets in separate nests for the first few days, after that, they just all bundle in on top of each other. I suppose they do this to conserve body heat and feel secure. But it makes you wonder about what is important to the pigs and being able to have close contact with each other, when they are small does appear to be important. We noticed this even with the runts when we had them inside, they always slept right ontop of each other.

On Sunday they spent most of the day out side their shed sunning themselves, sprawled higgledy piggledy across the yard. The two runts from the previous litter participate in the group huddles as well and don’t seem to worry the mothers at all.

So – we’re still learning the best way to do this, but I think we are starting to get somewhere at last.

EDIT: I just noticed how much these guys have grown when you look back at Snappys' photo from last week.

Wattle it be next!

We just recieved the following email form Matt Appelby, an Ecologist at Bush Heritage. He found a plant amoungst the rocks at the back of the property a few months ago. Here's what he said;

The plant on the rocky outcrop has been looked at by one of the experts on that plant family. Marco Duretto is confident that it IS Phebalium squamulosum subspecies ozothamnoides (Alpine Phebalium… think this is an old common name?). This is the species that I selected using the plant identification key, but the description didn’t match too well. Marco agrees that it doesn’t fit some of the usual characters such as leaf width and length, but when we looked at other examples of that sub-species it is pretty obvious that it is a highly variable beast!

Nonetheless, Marco is sending the sample to the Phebalium specialist in Perth for him to examine. At the very least it will help them to fix the key so that your plants fit better and increases the known distribution of the species.

I’d certainly look at propagation if you are interested. It has a number of good attributes that would make it a great garden plant, and it might be one that you use for regen on the hills. I’ve worked on a similar species in N-E Tas which is critically endangered (less than 50 adult plants were left in the wild) called Phebalium daviesii or Davies’ wax-flower. While your plant isn’t endangered, it is the only place I’ve seen it and maybe this unusual variety is only found in Bredbo. Maybe you/we should look at it as a sort of emblem for the region? It probably was more widespread and is now restricted to the last(?) place where the sheep, cattle, roos can’t easily get to it.

We've also had the first wattles bloom on the place - we didn't have any last year and as far as we know this is the first time they bloomed for years. Usually the sheep would have grazed these to the ground.

Staurday we had the Soccer Gala, the North Cooma Strikers came fourth from the eight teams, drawing three and winning one game. Well done guys!!!!! Ben recieved a Distingtion in his Maths competion coming in the top 6% in ACT/NSW which was marvelous. We also recieved a letter from Harrys' Principal congradulating him on his enthusiasm and conduct in Home Economics and Technology.

So that's it for today - I've got the flu and had to go to the dentist this morning so things are a bit slow today. Todays photo isn't brilliant, but it shows the wattles in bloom - I'll do better tomorrow.