Pigs Escape! or How I got my Pig Mojo Back

This past spring we decided to add to our managerie of useful animals that help feed us by bringing home two piglets to our forest garden homestead. The idea was to raise our own pigs for pork. We would give them a good life in a modest pen in the forest, next to our chickens. They've been eating scraps from our table and excess garden produce, but mostly standard corn and soybean mixture feed. I happened to be home in the afternoon and not at the office when I received a call from our son, "hey, [the neighbor boy] just called me and said he got off the school bus and he was greeted at his house by pigs in his yard." I thought this must be some kind of joke, because I had checked on OUR pigs just two hours previously and they were lounging in their pen without a care in the world. This certainly had to be someone else's pigs. Yeah, right! No one in several miles of our house has a pig. Isn't it strange how our brains go into denial when faced with known, but terrible facts.

I tried to keep my cool as I walked (in a marathon walking sort of way) down the hill from our house to the pig pen. No pigs. I carefully inspected the pen, as if I really expected the pigs to simply sprout back up out of the ground and reappear. The fence in one corner was mangled badly with deep rooted out areas beneath it. It seemed such a small opening for such large animals to fit through. Unbelievable! How did this happen! I began to feel a slight panic feeling. A strange horror film flitted through my mind's eye. The frames of the film blurred by...our almost fully grown pigs running pel-mel, but unknowingly, toward brutal death trying to cross the highway in front of our subdivision to reach the corn field on the other side. The film slowed down and I see my pigs colliding with a BMW. I zoom in. I see the BMW is driven by a vegan suit and tie wearing CEO who's brother happens to be the chair of the local zoning board. The film's trailer ends with "Man jailed for pig neglect, disturbing the peace, and maintaining a common nuisance of the farmyard variety". The short film fades with an interview clip of our most skeptical neighbor..."the chickens we eventually tolerated, but this! they should throw away the keys." Now fully in panic mode, I phoned my wife pleading for assistance if she wouldn't mind closing her shop to come and herd pigs. What better way to spend the lovely afternoon.

Now sweating and in full panic mode, I ran down to the neighbor's house where sure enough our pigs were casually inspecting a whole new world known as the neighbor's front yard (see photo above taken by neighbor boy). One problem is that this yard was a quarter of a mile from our house. I ran back home, jumped in the truck, hooked up a small trailer I had just bargain purchased a few weeks before and headed back down the road. "How will I get these pigs back" was all I could wonder. Two neighbor boys were gracious enough to help me try to herd these porcine escapees into the trailer. No way were they going near the trailer. At this juncture, let's put this into context. We live in a subdivision. A unique, old, very forested subdivision, but still a subdivision none-the-less. I have neighbors who do not appreciate our chickens...and the clock was reading about 4pm...pretty soon people would be arriving back home from work. It was hard not to feel panic at the prospect of these dignified professionals arriving home at the site of pigs running amok in their neighborhood. I thought, "what in holy hell am I going to do?"

Then the neighbor boys, who were meanwhile pulling out their phone cameras and snapping shots to text and send to friends, family, and the police, started herding the pigs down the road back to our place. I stared with some astonishment, and little by little we got the two pigs in a narrow strip of land, heavy with briers and poison ivy, that lay between the creek and the road. We gently urged them on, me whistling and cooing as they curiously rooted and sampled every species of plant as they went. Then at the half-way point back down the road to our house I got my pig mojo back (side story: I raised various breeds of pigs on my parents small farm from age 11 through age 18, winning many awards, including best showman....which involves a very high level of professional knack with steering a pig exactly where you want it to go with the grace normally given to the dance floor - you might think wow, when would that skill ever come in handy, but...) Here I was herding two escaped nearly fully grown porcines down a subdivision road. Carefully navigating the flight distance between me and the two pigs, at an angle which would slowly move them in the right trajectory back toward their pen, we were only 30 feet from the gate. Elizabeth arrived in the Rav...deftly swinging the car at an angle to the road to block any hasty retreat of these swine...for a split second the Toyota Rav was a black suburban with tinted windows. My wife an FBI agent dressed undercover in black leather, sliding the vehicle 180 degrees blocking any escape. A sting operation, making sure these pigs would serve out their days where they belonged...in the pen! Meanwhile back at the ranch, the neighbor boy opened the gate, stepped aside, and sweet jesus both pigs languidly found their way back in to their lovely mud and straw covered pen.

They seemed relieved. I was overjoyed, but in shock. Pig mojo back. Ham and bacon preserved for future meals. Perhaps at least a couple neighbors none the aware. My wife said, "You are a pig whisperer," but wondered if the expense of the feed and the trouble to keep these pigs was worth it. I'll let you know in two weeks when we have pork chops covered with baked apples.

The Harvest

As summer tilts toward autumn, our small gardens have done well, with little work on our part, providing us with respectable harvests of beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, squash, carrots, and several meals of sweet corn and broccoli. We will soon harvest potatoes from the "tator tires".

We have really enjoyed simply walking up to the garden and gathering what is there. I thank the soil, the rain, the sun that energizes it all. We put a fairly hasty (due to my looming surgery), but somewhat planned effort, into two small gardens this spring. One at the Purdue Village Gardens and the other at our home of one small raised bed, a small patch of experimental sweet corn, several tator tires and hills, and two summer squash plants.

The sweet corn was a trial and error plot at our home site. The plot only receives about 6 or so hours of sunlight a day. Not really enough to have healthy corn production. But, we did get a number of decent and delectable ears. Our garden at Purdue also grew sweet corn, slightly better than at our forest garden, but not much better. Corn needs a lot of nutrients to produce well. But the buttery, sugary taste of sweet corn is worth the wait and the effort. Fresh picked is the best there is!

After good soil and proper water amounts, the keys are plant spacing and mulching...with early weeding as needed. After the first several weeks of work, we've really not spent much time at all on maintenance. Most of it has been in harvesting, cooking, preserving, and enjoying! This photo shows my bias toward "natural gardening"...but I've actually gone to a more balanced approach with less chaotic wild growth of native plants and more space for sun and garden plants. Hey, it only took me 8 years to lighten up a bit.

Tomato-Cucumber Salad. Add dill, vinegar, salt. Simply Cooling and Tasty.

Canning beans and dilly beans! A taste of the summer will be hidden away for a winter's day.

Earthy Beets....and the pigs loved the tops...Brent did too. We pickled these.

And what to do with the squash after too many stir fry dishes and zucchini bread? Make squash brownies and cookies. Ok, they do taste like a "healthy" cookie. But, they were fun to try out. Actually, most all the cookies were consumed by our kids and me.

Brent sampling squash cookie.
Beth with grated summer squash for brownies.

Apocalyptic Hail

There are so many cool things we could be blogging about. To whit:

Our trip to French Lick wherein a bird flew in the room of our B&B
Installing a new Queen Bee in our hive
Getting two little pigs
Attending Brent's permaculture course at Purdue
Looking for dandelions to make wine but finding only a few...

But June 1st we were pummeled with hail like I have never seen before. It lasted at least 10 minutes, maybe 15. When it was over this was what the steps to our house looked like:


The upshot of it all is that our camper is totaled, our car was close to being totaled (and thank goodness we had full coverage on both!), and our roof is shot. We're in the process of negotiating with two different insurance companies for the home & the vehicles and it is taking all of our time. Maybe in the end we'll have a new roof but it hasn't been a lot of fun.

AND the carpet we chose to have installed before Brent's surgery is back ordered and they want to subsitute with something we haven't even seen yet. I guess anything would be better than "Essence of Dog Barf" that we have now...trust me, you don't WANT a picture of that.

So hopefully we'll pop back in after Brent's surgery when we have lots of time to tell you about our adventures.

Bees leave home

Back in mid-March we inspected our bees. We knew that one of our two hives we started last year did not make it through the winter. We believe it lacked the population of bees necessary to stay warm. The surviving hive, however, was teaming with bees. Our daughter Rhianna helped me find the queen....without her quick, sharp eyes, I never would have found the queen! Our dilemma was whether to split the hive and make two colonies, or to add hive space and attempt to grow the hive. We opted for growing the hive population in an attempt to get lots of honey this year....

However, the bees had other plans. They had been planning an exit for some time. They completely ignored the upper room addition I made for them in the form of a plush honey super. Yesterday they packed their bags and did something amazingly unique in the insect world...they swarmed. Swarming is where the queen ups and leaves her home with roughly half of the worker bees, who gorge themselves on honey first. They leave the other half of the colony to raise a new queen and carry on in the old home. You can see in the photo, that the swarm of probably 20,000 bees or more left the hive and ended up in a tree...unfortunately the branch was about 40 feet above us and out of reach. We feebly put out an empty hive with frames and wax, and dribbled honey around to try to coax them into one of our empty hive bodies...but alas they flew away. A cool thing was that the next day as I was finishing the raised bed in the previous post I heard a loud swarming sound about 100 feet away....it was our bees! I followed the swarm down the road. The sound was very loud and it was one of those ancient phenomena of nature that you don't witness very often. Despite my attempts to tell them to come back and reside in a nice cozy wooden hive, they sped on over the western ridge and toward the next wooded valley. Hope they make it and pollinate many a flower and tree.

Gardens Everywhere

We've been working on a variety of gardens and ideas for this year. We began by sprucing up the hillside area behind our home with wave petunia's to spread out and co-mingle with the native flowers and shade perennials we've planted the past few years.

A Village Garden

Based on previous years' experience, we just don't seem to get enough direct sunlight into our small quarter acre clearing in the creek valley below our home. Since we tend to travel through Pudue University area to and from work, we decided to rent a garden space at the Purdue Village. This is an incredibly awesome place, with probably 100 families from all over the world planting many varieties of plants using diverse techniques. We rented a 12 x 25 plot and went to work. We use a lot of peppers in our cooking, and knew we wanted to grow a lot of these for freezing for year round use. Peppers in the store are usually pricey. We also like fresh salsa and the grocery store price is usually salty. So, our village garden is being nicknamed, Salsa Garden, and we added plenty of tomato plants, onions, and even a small patch of sweet corn. We planted climbing beans to utilize the fence and vertical space. It was fun to plant, and we are excited about its potential.

Zero $ Raised Bed

Just because we are very stubborn people (at least I am when it comes to growing plants that want sunshine in an area with a dearth of sunlight), I wanted to try out several new ideas this year. I wanted to build a raised bed with very fertile ingredients on the most southern exposed spot to see what will happen. I started by removing topsoil from an 3 x 12 area where I had established native prairie perennials the previous 4 years. I then used a pitch fork to gently open up and aerate the subsoil. I then placed partially rotted sticks, then a layer of partially composted chicken manure from our hens, then a layer of partially composted wood chips from the electric company had dumped the year before, then a layer of nicely composted dead wood that had turned to soil from a large pile of dead branches and wood I piled next to the forest four years ago. I did another layer of each of these items, then Beth and I used some old shelving boards and some redwood 2x4 from a dismantled deck that were here when we moved in for the sides of the bed. We shoveled on the topsoil, an wow....our first ever raised bed. Now we need to plant it with a variety of garden veges and see what happens!

Container Gardens (almost zero $)

Something I had come across in a fun book titled the Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen is a functional porch garden idea known as a self-watering container. The concept is based on the commercially sold Earthbox...commonly sold for $40 or more each. It basically is made of an 18 gallon rubbermaid storage container (that we had on hand and were not using) and a few short sections of pvc pipe. The concept tries to mimic the topsoil, subsoil, and water table found in a natural garden, but contructed into a minaturized version for shallow rooted plants. The advantage over basic containers is that the water is wicked up by the plant roots whenever they need the water....and watering is done only infrequently, because the bottom reservoir is like 6-8 gallons of water. We decided to plant herbs in ours.

We came across something called TatorTires, where by cutting away the side walls of discarded tires you use them for containing potato plants...as potato plants grow upward, you need to pile on more soil, straw, etc. The tires are nice because you can utilize vertical space, contain the potato plants, and add old tires to the stack as they grow. The black rubber heats up and creates a warm zone for the plants to get a good start. At harvest time you simply start removing the tires one layer at a time to gather up the spuds! This idea could be used for a number of food plants.

Road Trip

We decided to take a day and drive to covered bridge country earlier this spring. Parke County has always been a favorite destination for us, and we wanted to seriously consider if this might be a place to call home sometime in the future. The picturesque countryside, rolling hills, timbered ravines, and many pastures and creeks seem like the perfect match for our tastes. We drove around and looked at several places for sale. However, the more we looked at what is in our price range, it seemed there were dilapidated buildings, and meth-lab looking neighbors, and/or rebel flag waving strongholds and the fundamentalist religious right. We read the local newspapers, and started to get the feeling that we just don't seem to fit in anywhere very well....not the redneck Indiana and not the intelligentsia city areas either. Yes, we are Hoosiers and can identify with most Hoosiers. We want a sense of community, yet community that both respects the land and values open inquiry, creativity, the arts, and a spritual connection to earth and each other. Is there such a place? We are beginning to think that we must cultivate these qualities in and around us where we are now....but we still look forward to visiting Parke County, and many other Hoosier places.

Frugal Food

It seems to be a sign of the times; everywhere you look someone has an idea for "frugal" this or "budget" that. I've always thought of myself as frugal; I'm wearing a watch I received as a school band award in high school, I have Birkenstocks older than my firstborn son and I just threw away a laundry basket that was my stepfather's before he married my mom sometime in the 1970's. (The cracks that had developed in it were finally pinching the fingers way too much.)

While I have been drawn to books on saving money, cutting costs, and living simply, I often find that there's just not so much I can learn. I can't cut out my Starbucks habit because I don't drink coffee. But I have been drawn to those kinds of books & websites because I have been in search of some magical way to attain nirvana - The Land. Mortgage-free lifestyle. Time.... the list goes on.

Just like everyone else we are starting to feel the pinch of this economy. Friends are losing jobs and we may not be far behind. As the reality of the situation that we are all in starts to be felt closer to home, I'm really glad that we have been working on ways of saving money every month. If our income remains the same, it will allow us to put a little money in the bank; if it goes down, well then maybe it will help us get by while keeping our house or at helping us avoid digging ourselves a very deep hole.

Over the last few months we have drastically changed our food buying habits. I thought we were frugal before; and sometimes we were. We ate good food, often seasonal food, and often from scratch. Except when we didn't. Like when we got home late and found it all too easy to call Papa John's. Or when it was easier to stop for Chinese carryout on the way home. Or when we looked in the cabinet and saw lots of good food but were too tired and hungry to figure out what to do with it.

In the course of my usual quest for money-saving, simple living resources I rediscovered the website whose name scares my children, the Hillbilly Housewife. I promise there's nothing shocking there even if the name is a little scary. The site has two meal plans for either a low cost week of meals or an extremely low cost week of meals. Being brave but only a little bit, we decided to try the $70 meal plan and see if we could learn anything about living a little lower on the hog.

I started by rediscovering Aldi, the no frills, bag your own groceries store that has the bad rap as being just for poor people. In spite of the fact that a lot more of us might BE poor people soon, I found that for basic ingredients, Aldi was full of many money saving items.

When I tried the $70 menu I also rediscovered another concept that I had gotten away from--sticking to the list! It was really hard that first time to walk by the chips, snacks, and packaged things like granola bars. My mind said, "But they're so inexpensive, I could just get a few anway." But I stuck to my guns & stuck to the list. My total was more like $80-something with the increased prices over the last year but all in all I thought it was pretty good. Our family had been spending close to $200/week on groceries and that's not even counting eating out. But could we really stick to it and do it?

What I discovered was that there is a LOT more food in that menu than we usually use. Since most of us are gone during the day I rarely cooked the lunches. Brent and I took leftovers to work with us and we ate well and heartily. I even discovered that the salmon patties were pretty tasty. For someone who doesn't like fish this was a revelation. About a week into this experiment my son said, "We've been eating some REALLY good food lately!" Yes, he really said that!

Since that first week on the $70 menu I have continued to make the Perfect Iced Tea every few days. I rarely bought soda before but I just don't buy it at all now. I didn't know I liked iced tea until I tried this. And I have made her Biscuits with amazing succes more than once! I have never ever been satisfied with any home made biscuits of my creation before; but these seem to work every time.

What I learned that week was that I already knew how to be a wise cook; but I had forgotten the art of menu planning and sticking to the list. Next time I'll share more about our specific "system" and how it's going for us. Also news about another money saving food find and how we are fitting it into the "system" and eating well while saving money!