The Wee ‘Un and I were planting out pea seedlings when he suddenly announced, “This would be a good photo on your blog, Pa.” He whizzed off to get the camera and was back in no time to capture the action.
Due to a timewaster, we have three birth-notified Berkshire gilts from this litter for sale again. They’re £50 each and will be available for collection from this Saturday, 17 May. Please note that we’re in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Full details on the litter here.
Steph in Roker was asking how our Scots Grey differed in appearance and flavour from that of a commercial broiler chicken. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the cooked cockerel, but I thought a photo of a leg of pork from one of our Berkshire pigs might prove enlightening in showing the differences between “shop” pork and home-produced pork. This is a leg of pork we ate a couple of weeks back. The meat is darker and has noticeable marbling within the muscle, which means it’s both juicier and more flavoursome than leaner commercial pork. At the same time, the flavour is much more “porky”—in other words, you know you’re eating pork just as when eating one of our cockerels we know we’re eating chicken. Commercially produced, shop-bought chicken and pork tends to be lean, watery to start with and then dry as the water cooks out, and lacking in clearly identifiable flavour. Some people like that. The boys and I don’t.
If you only keep a pair of weaners for fattening, then it’s easy to remember how much they need to be fed. If, like us, you keep a small herd of pigs that include weaners, growers, a working boar, sows with litters, dry sows and in-pig sows, then feeding becomes more complicated. It’s even more difficult if there’s more than one person doing the feeding or if the main swineherd/stockman is unexpectedly unavailable. Our solution is a simple one: a blackboard menu that lists which pigs are getting which feed mix. I painted an old sheet of plywood with blackboard paint, screwed it to the wall above the weighing bench and it means we can see at a glance how much of each type of feed to weigh into the buckets per feeding (we do two feeds a day, roughly 12 hours apart). At the moment, feed is mainly sow rolls (R) and rolled barley (B) but as the vegetable crops start being harvested we’ll add a third column (V) for those. Weights are in kilograms, so looking at this we’re currently using 18.9kg of rolls a day and 18.7kg of barley to feed the herd.
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