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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘pigs’

This Was Today

Pig Butchering 2011 - 1

We’ll be doing three more in November. And yep, this is the butcher from Coop. A pleasure to watch him work. Plus there was some shooting of the breeze.

Pig Butchering 2011 - 2

Hog Stew

So last winter your freezer conks and you find five whole chickens on the outer edge of thaw and you think they’d probably be fine but you just don’t have the gut-based gumption, so you refreeze and wait ’til windfall apple season and you make the following recipe:

5 whole chickens

3 5-gallon buckets of windfall apples

Some water

Boil in cauldron

Stir until repulsive

Let cool overnight

In morning, feed to joyful pigs.

 

Can’t Be Too Careful

In the three weeks since I shot this video, the pig have grown markedly larger and more aggressive. These days when Mills or I go in the pen to feed or move fence, the pigs nudge at our calves and take tentative nibbles at our boot toes. During such moments I am always reminded of Montaigne’s essay “That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die,” in which he lists all the many ways his contemporaries and their ancestors have died, including Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros who died “by jostle of a hog.”

A sentence or two later he writes of the men he has known who died “betwixt the very thighs of women,” so danger is everywhere.

Pigs and Anne Murray

 

Fed the pigs a mix of hog feed and curdled goat milk. In the background you can hear Anne Murray singing on the pickup truck radio. It was tuned to WCFW, where FM means Fine Music.

This Was Supposed To Be Last Night’s Post

But I couldn’t get it to upload.

This is when I really got rolling on the writing, finally. Just under three hours of sleep then it was up to fix the chicken coop (the original one, the one on the cover of this book), move the barred rock chicks out of the stock tank and into the repaired coop, clean the stock tank and move in the 50 fluffy yellow meat chicks that arrived today, then move the new coop and chicken fence, then put up pig fence. Never would have finished without the help of my pal Mills, a friend going way back to the “Silver Star” days. We spent the last 30 minutes fencing in a deluge, but got’er done. Yessir. Got’er done.

Now some more writing. And a heart-shaped thought for my wife, who is running the whole show in spite of my ridiculous hours, obsessions, and avocations.

Evolution of a Pig Hutch

Four years ago I scored a major scavenge: a giant plastic pig hutch made from an industrial chemical storage silo cut in half with a Sawzall by a man named Garth. Garth was using both halves to house heifers, but when he got out of the business he said I could have the hutch for free. The only catch was that I had to haul it home – an adventure I’ll describe some other time. Let’s just say that thing is impossibly heavy (the plastic is over a half-inch thick…you can’t budge it without a tractor and hydraulic loader) and was 11 feet, seven inches wide. If the DOT had been on patrol that evening, I’d still be filling out paperwork and they would be auctioning off my truck and trailer. I mean, this thing was big:

 

Rest of the story (and action photos!) after the page break. (more…)

Pigs Here

In the company of Mr. Mills, our four-year-old performs the initial inspection:

And here we are unloading the last one of five. She goes 18 pounds. How we came to have an 18-pound feeder pig is a whole ‘nother story. Workin’ on that for the next book…*

*I always get emails when I say that, so: sometime in the Spring of 2012.