Diary

Pig preparationRSS feed

Posted: Sunday 18 January, 2004

by Dan at 9:43pm in Pigs 2 comments Comments closed

On Friday we returned from a short break in the Lake District to find an email from a farm in Dumfries which has Tamworth weaners available. As previously mentioned our source of last year's weaners had told us before Christmas that they would have no litters this year, and we were struggling to find another source close enough to be practical. So Rosemary placed a wanted ad in the Smallholders Online newsletter and lo and behold it looks to have done the job. Dumfries isn't exactly local, but the 3 hour journey each way in our old Land Rover will be well worth it.

This morning we reassembled the pig ark in preparation for our spring arrivals. It needs to dry out a bit before we can recoat it with a water-based wood preservative. We're creating 2 more pens the same size as the one we used last year for our first pair of Tamworths (about 40x30 feet), and plan to implement a 3 year rotation. So this year (2004) the original pen will be cultivated with vegetables (mostly potatoes), next year (2005) we'll sow some sort of ground cover / fodder and the year after (2006) it will be back to pigs again who will clear the ground cover / fodder.

Pig ark and planned new fencing

The photo above shows the corner of the existing pig pen in the bottom right hand corner, the reassembled ark and the planned new fencing. Since the ark has a door at either end we've located it on the fence line so we only have to move it every other year. The fencing will begin in earnest in a couple of weeks...

Comments

louie

Friday 19 August, 2005 at 12:35am

hi im getting 3 female tamworth weaners they will have 170 square meters is this big enough there house to sleep at night is a shed thats 20 foot long by 8 foot wide?

bob

Tuesday 4 October, 2005 at 3:36pm

Hi:

thanks a lot for your website. I am retired and anxiously thinking about living on small acreage in texas. I am pondering all sorts of farm animals to deal with. the pig has come to mind. you pig ark and three pens plan has helped me immensely. It looks like something that I could do. I plan to add poultry. I am not sure of anything at this point but your sharing has helped a lot.

bob

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