The Three Little Pigs (And Some Chickens and Sheep)

Last weekend my landlords went away on a short camping trip leaving me in charge of their livestock - three pigs, four chickens and about fifteen sheep. Ideally they would all still be alive on their return. Detailed instructions were left on an A4 piece of paper with timings, quantities of feed, and an invitation to eat the eggs.

The sheep were the easiest, as they are just given some feed each morning, poured into their two troughs. Given that they live on a grassy field and it is midsummer, they would not keel over and die if this breakfast was forgotten - it's a kind of daily treat. They have two breeds in the same field, both fairly rare - Balwens, which look a bit like big fluffy bears with dark brown coats and white noses; and Soays, that can be easily mistaken for goats with their short horns. The Soays self-shed their fleeces, so some of them are looking a little raggedy as they are mid-shed.

With the chickens it's a case of letting them out of their “Eglu” hutch in the morning with a breakfast of scattered grain on the ground (and chasing the importunate pheasant cock away who would invite himself to the breakfast otherwise), snatching the couple of eggs from the hutch when they're not looking, and at dusk checking they've climbed back into their Eglu and shutting them in to protect them from foxes and any other hungry quadruped with a taste for chicken. During the day they just roam about the property as if they own it.

The three pigs are the noisiest and most troublesome, but still a lot of fun. They're quite small, being about three months old, but growing fast and are fed twice daily. Their breed is 'Oxford Sandy and Black', another semi-rare variety. They live in a big enclosure with high fencing that is sunk well below the ground to prevent them from making a great escape. When they first arrived last month they were kept in another enclosure with slightly less secure fencing, to allow the grass to grow more in the main pen. They certainly did prove themselves effective escape artists - I was driving along the lane at the end of a salad-bag delivery round and found all three on the road ahead of me! Shauna was with me, and between us and the landlord we managed to grab them by the hind legs, hoik them up with their snouts dangling and heft them back home. This technique keeps them quiet - Shauna tried lifting one around its belly and it screamed to high heaven.

The wide circular feeding bucket and the water trough have both been tethered to the gate, inside the pen, to prevent them from being flipped over by naughty snouts so it's simply a case of pouring the feed (a locally-grown mix rather than the ubiquitous soy-based stuff) over the gate into the trough, and water into the other. Sounds easy. Try doing it with three pigs in the way, bouncing over each other, shrieking with anticipation and trampling in both troughs. I'm sure there's an art to doing it so that half the feed doesn't land on their backs and ears, but I guess I need more than a weekend's feeding to figure out how.

At least I can relax afterwards with a freshly-laid egg on toast.

Speaking of eggs, marvel at this geometrically arranged set of eggs I found on a kale leaf!

p.s. The nematodes seem to have had zero effect on my garden slugs. :-(