Time Flies

I hadn't realised how long it was since I had added to my blog until I sat down and struggled to remember the password.  Once in, I then looked and could see my last blog sitting there, dated March 2012.  So - there is a lot to catch up on.  Lambing, piglet-ing, kidding and hatching ducks (I thought duckling-ing was pushing it too far) and that is just the births.  There have also been deaths - but not very many but, not surprisingly, no marriages.  But all of this has been covered in the News section of the website.
The main problem this year seems to have been space.  In the past, every year we have bred Kune Kune piglets and every year there has been a waiting list.  But last year was a disaster - nobody wanted to buy them.  Given that we always sell them as pets - partly because they are such characters and partly because they are so slow growing it is not commercially viable to feed them until they are big enough to eat, because it takes too long.  I am sure it is a sign of the economic times we live in that people are cutting back on the non-essentials and pets certainly fit into that category.  And so we find ourselves with rather a lot of young pigs needing space.  This would be a little challenging in a normal year but this is not a normal year.  This is the year Farmer Neil decided to re-form all the pig pens - mainly because the fencing was in such bad shape.  So the area that previously would have housed eight pig arcs and paddocks is now one big mass - no fences, no arcs just cordoned off from the public.  It is also the year that started with the driest winter on record and seems to be moving into the wettest summer.  So for months Neil was not able to get the old posts out of the ground or the new fencing posts in.  Although things have moved on a little since then - it has not been in a good way.  We are now struggling to keep the grass down in the areas where visitors can walk because on the days when it is not raining, the grass is often still too soggy to mow and strimming when mowing becomes impossible.  Tied up with vegetation control, Neil has had no time to get on with re-fencing.
So with lots of piglets and no paddocks Neil had to start getting creative.  First he moved a number of the piglets into goat paddocks - which was an inspired decision.  The pigs had so much to eat (as goats are, despite their reputation, picky eaters) and a wilderness to explore.  The goats, on the other hand, were re-shuffled and met up with goats they hadn't seen for years (as they lived on a different part of the farm) or, in the case of Peter the Golden Guernsey, learnt how to live with sheep.  Which also worked well - perhaps the fact that they are French sheep helped - as he was half-way there.
But there were still a number of piglets that needed housing.  So Neil came up with the not so inspired idea of putting them on the lawn.  At times the lawn has housed a small group of sheep, a convalescent ram or a single goat awaiting collection.  But none of these occupants could have prepared us for the devastating effect that 7 piglets, who have not yet settled down into their "grazing pig" trait, could create.     
I am not going to pretend the lawn was ever suitable for bowls but it was fairly smooth - just the odd mole hill.  Now it is like a war zone.  The area under the trampoline is particularly bad.  It is like the whole lot has just been rotavated.  And of course,  after rotavating you would expect to roll the ground and then lay it with turf. But something tells me that that isn't going to happen for a while.  Perhaps after the fencing has been finished!