sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your photo

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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your photo “The boar, PB, with the farm kid. I kept him from busting through the…”

That size difference is STAGGERING. Also I think my daughter has that skirt.

I’m intimidated by him, but he really is a big sweetie, when he’s not being disgusting. He loves scritches and is sweet to his babies. And humps anything that holds still long enough, so.

I’ll be sad when it’s his time, he does make beautiful and friendly little pigs, too. He’s got a nice personality.

His bristles are really cool, I can’t get a good image of them. You understand why they make boar bristle brushes– he’s not hairy, at all, it’s thick bristles that stand straight out from his eerily human-like skin. 

But Jesus, he’s huge. And he’s got tusks. Farmkid and I were in there only because my sister was also there, and I trust her instincts– she’d’ve told us not to be where we were, if there were any danger. But there wasn’t any food and there weren’t any baby pigs squealing, which are the two main things hogs get het up about, and there was plenty of open space for us to get out of his way if he decided to move, so. He’s never hurt anyone yet; one of the sows is a bit of a biter, and hog bites can need stitches, but he doesn’t seem to have it in him.

Yes, Farmbaby picked her outfit today and wanted a Halloween skirt, and chose little jack-o-lantern socks to match. I approved, and told her it’s always good to keep in practice for Halloween. She said she just felt like a floofy skirt was called for, and she wasn’t wrong. She really wanted to wear pretty maryjane shoes but I told her they were not mud puddle and pig pasture compatible.
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walburgablack replied to your photo “The boar,

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walburgablack replied to your photo “The boar, PB, with the farm kid. I kept him from busting through the…”

god, I… I mean I knew boars got huge but that’s *something* with the scale

The sows would get that big too! He’s bigger than them because he’s older. I know castrated young male pigs grow significantly faster than young female pigs, and both grow faster than young male intact pigs, but I can’t tell you whether intact male pigs catch up with and surpass females in size eventually, or not. We don’t know how old PB was, we got him as an adult, though he was significantly smaller then– he was still big, don’t get me wrong. But he’s older than the sows, so he’s bigger. I don’t seem to have a recent photo of Farmkid next to the sows. 

I have Insta Stories of the farm in a Highlight, so there’s some recent ones that show my sister, who is five feet nine, next to the hogs for scale.

Farmbaby has been recently promoted to Farmkid because she’ll be four and a half next week and can read a little and is nearly fifty pounds, so. Not really a baby. 
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lcn71 replied to your photo “The boar, PB, with

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lcn71 replied to your photo “The boar, PB, with the farm kid. I kept him from busting through the…”

He is adorable!

He *is* adorable. And yet.

Today we went out to feed them and their water tank, a 100-gallon black plastic stock tank, was sitting upright on the wrong side of the fence. We contemplated it for a moment. Clearly, it had gotten messed with, and shoved. But… how? Why? It’s not like they’d flipped it, which is more usually what happens, or they were scratching itches on it and dumped it over. Oh well, we had to go feed them before they freaked out.

But when Farmsister went to set the waterer back up, she noticed what had happened. I won’t discuss the specific and gross details, but she looked down at the two wooden shipping pallets the waterer had been set on (so the pigs could get at the spout at the bottom; they’re too short to drink from the top of the tank like horses and cattle do), and said:

“Oh, he fucked it.”

Yes, it was disgustingly, abundantly clear that PB had actually fucked the water tank off the pallets and straight over the fence.

It’s a good sign, it means he’s done his job and the sows are pregnant and thus no longer standing for him. But it’s incredibly gross. 
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Veg Manager has been taking the busy season so seriously that he has been out on tractors basically.

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Veg Manager has been taking the busy season so seriously that he has been out on tractors basically every night well after the rest of us have knocked off. We’ve invited him for dinner several times, last night Sister ran out as he was fueling up a tractor and gave him a piece of pizza from our dinner to tide him over until he was done working. We just invited him over tonight too, partly because we had too many potatoes cut up and partly because he’s going to be going back out to work later anyway. 

I discovered today that the apprentices invited him in one night because he was tractoring in the field next to their cabin. They were like… dude it’s 8pm. Get off that thing.

He came in just now and said he thinks we’re on the downward slope, though, of the planting season– the greenhouse emptied mostly out a bit back, and now the cold frame is dwindling, and the major stuff is mostly in the ground. Which means now we can get on to the busy part of the harvesting season, which kicks into high gear and doesn’t let up for months. 

Anyway.

I!!! Spent like 4 hours!!! outside in the sun!!! today– and I did eventually get a rash but it was a contact rash from weeding sunflowers, and Sister got the same thing, and it went away after a couple of hours. 

I sunscreened myself to fuck, and wore a hat and elbow-length sleeves all day, but still! I actually kind of have what passes for a tan, on my pasty-ass body!!

So, big progress, and I’m delighted about it. 

(what i did today, behind the cut)

First thing this morning I went on chores with my sister, and fed the big hogs, then swung over to the broiler chicken pasture where B-I-L and one of the part-time employees were. We had to take one set of three pasture pens (the low cage-like things, ten feet by twenty or so, open at the bottom and mesh on three sides with a tarp roof over half of them, that the chickens live in so that they can be outdoors and eat grass but not get completely destroyed by predators in thirty seconds) from one end of the pasture to the other, to re-set for the next group of chickens. This batch had been emptied last time we processed chickens, and there was a group in the chick brooder ready to go outside. So we picked up each pen, one person at each corner, and plunked it on top of the chore truck, one side resting on the hood and the other on the bed, and then the two people inside held onto the frame and the other two of us followed them up the hill, and unloaded it into its new resting spot. The last step was to put up a barrier of electro-mesh fence around them, and hook up the hoses for the waterers (the water is all kept in a big stock tank at the top of the hill, and flows down into little bell waterers that hang from the roof of the pasture pen). 

Sister and I continued onward to feed the young pigs, who were delighted to see us. They’d broken their feeder, of course, so while Sister fixed it, I kept them distracted by throwing them hard-boiled eggs. The price of eggs is so low that we can’t sell all ours, so instead of lowering our price and undercutting ourselves, we’re just feeding eggs to the pigs. Pigs can digest the protein in eggs if the eggs have been hard-boiled, so we’ve been boiling all the super-jumbos, the cracked eggs, the cosmetically imperfect, and the so-dirty-they’d-be-a-pain-to-clean eggs. 

Then a couple of people loaded the young chickens into crates and brought them up. I didn’t help with that, but my sister did, and said the chickens were so excited about the pasture they were eating the clover through the bars of the coops. Once in the pens they were basically losing their mind over how great the whole thing was, which was gratifying. They’re so stupid and ugly by the time we process them, but it’s nice to know that they really do enjoy the portion of their lives they spend outdoors. They can’t really look up, but one likes to think they appreciate the glorious view of the Catskills they get from their pasture hill.

Meanwhile, I harvested all the things that can be used in dried arrangements– statice, ammobium, delphinium, yarrow, lavender– and hung them all up in the attic of the granary that I spent so many hours clearing out yesterday. I tried to organize them– statice all together on one side, yarrow on the other, herbs toward the front, and so on– but it’s probably a futile effort. 

Then it was lunch, and after lunch I helped weed the flower patch, in full sun, and still was fine! But I took a break and went in and washed the eggs after the sunflowers gave me a rash, because it hurt and because it was making Sister nervous that I’d break out in hives again. (I tried to Power Of Denial my way through it when it first started happening and she still is sort of upset about it.)

Anyway, a busy day. In the sun! I have freckles! It was okay!
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