Who needs a plough?

With the pigs moved out, it’s time to start turning over the field ready to take the bean seedlings. The only problem is that while the pigs have moved the top couple of inches of soil, they failed to break through the hard pan underneath. In fact, in some areas they’ve actually contributed to the hard pan. So, it was out with the heavy hoe for a day of seriously hard work…

One job done

We’ve spent a few days creating a fresh grazing area for the pigs behind the existing pens. That’s involved putting in a new gateway from the boar pen into the main field, enclosing a 40m by 40m section of the field with semi-permanent fencing and closing off a large part of the pig pen to regenerate.

Bye, bye mum

We removed Doris’s 10 piglets from her today as she was losing condition fast and they’re now old enough to live entirely on a diet of solids. Usually, we’d take the sow away from the piglets but as we hadn’t quite finished the fencing it was easy to catch a couple of piglets at a time and move them into a pen in the byre.

Trapping rats more effectively

As we keep livestock, we also store large amounts of grain and compound feeds and, while they’re kept in steel bins, it does mean rats.

We poison them with baits, shoot them with an air rifle, whack them with sticks and catch them with nipper traps.

To increase the efficiency of nipper traps and keep them safe for small boys and other animals, we put individual traps in a wooden box with a lift-off lid.