Everyone loves to scratch a piggy

One of our goals for Mount Gnomon Farm is to open it up for the public as much as we can.

This week we had a visit from a group of parents and children who home-school.

It was wonderful to watch the kids scratching a pig for the first time and laugh as they saw the piglets’ ears flop around while they chased each other.

It ‘s really important for children to learn where their food comes from, and that there are different ways of producing meat – some ethical, some not.

And when we talk to their parents we can explain why we need to protect rare breeds, and why free-range is the only humane system.

Hopefully we can sow seeds that will change people’s buying habits, in time.

Domino has a seat while Guy talks to the group, and Betty and Big Bertha line up for scratches.

Telling Tales

We've got three new arrivals on the farm! Guy's just been to Victoria on the boat and brought back two sows and a boar of different bloodlines. So we need to think of names....we like to keep the first letter the same as the name of the line, so for example we've got Bramble, Betty and Big Bertha who are from the Beatrice line. Our two new girls comes from the Lass and May lines, and our little boy is a Satellite. Any suggestions for L, M, and S names?

Our Lass girl has a strange tail. There's no denying it. But we celebrate difference on this farm, so all's well. She might just have to practice curling it up in the Mount Gnomon Farm way (see below).

Some pig farmers don't have the pleasure of watching pig's tails unfurl and wind-up. On intensive farms where the pigs are kept inside they cut off their tails when they're a week old so they don't chew them off each other when they get bored.

We're yet to try eating tail, but we've just bought a book from the UK, Nose to Tail Eating by acclaimed St. John Restaurant chef Fergus Henderson that has lots of offal recipes in it (Offal, not awful...). We're going to try this recipe and we'll let you know how it goes...

You need: 8 long pig's tails, 2 onions, 2 carrots and 2 celery sticks roughly chopped, bundle of fresh herbs, 3 bay leaves, 10 black peppercorns, 1 head of garlic, zest of 1 lemon, 1/2 bottle of red wine, 1.1 litres chicken stock, 2 tbsp English mustard, 4 eggs whisked together, 450g seasoned flour, 225g fine white breadcrumbs, a large knob of butter.

Fergus says to put the tails in a dish with the vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, garlic, lemon zest, wine and stock, and then cover and cook for three hours in a medium oven. Allow them to cool in the stock, then take them out before it turns to jelly.

When they're cold and firm, mix together the mustard and eggs, then dip them in flour, roll through the mustard and egg mixture and coat them in breadcrumbs. Get a large roasting tray hot, melt the butter, then add the tails and cook in a hot over for 10 minutes, turn them over and cook for another 10. Sounds yummy - we'll have to start collecting our tails.

Carrot-pulling pleasure

Why do shop carrots taste so much worse than homegrown carrots? The difference is astonishing. So it's a major relief to be pulling my own now they're starting to get a bit of size. The few months over winter when we had to buy vegetables - we'd only just come to the farm and it was too wet and cold to grow anything - was a good reminder of how important it is to grown your own. The shop veggies were droopy before I even got them in the car, their flavour was dreadful, and I would be surprised if they had any nutrients left in them by the time they got to the table. Guy complained we weren't eating enough veggies - well I wonder why?!

But now! I can go in to the patch each evening and select what we're having for tea and it goes straight from the soil to the pot or plate. The choices are still fairly limited because of the time of year...we've been eating a fair bit of silverbeet, bok choy and broccoli (Beet and broc au gratin is surprisingly yummy with lots of cracked pepper and good cheese). The salad veggies are also coming on and here's a selection of what we had last night.

The potatoes are poking through, the corn's going upwards, the garlic's almost ready to harvest, I've had my first handful or raspberries (don't tell Guy!), I've got the best germination of parsnips I've ever seen, and the pumpkins, squash melons etc are doing a terrific job at standing up in the ferocious winds that come across the garden. Hurry up and grow shelterbelts!

Had a bit of a disaster with my tomato seedlings...I started a different shift at work and forgot to open up the cold frame they were under. It wasn't a super hot day, but by the time I got home I had 58 dead seedling and two live ones. The soil was still moist, but they were fried. Am scrambling now to get a few left-over seedling from friends.

If you've got a couple of pumpkins that need using at the end of the season, I tried this recipe from Hobart cook and writer Sally Wise. Quite unusual and delicious.

3 tablespoons olive oil, 250g chopped onions, 1 cooking apple, cored and chopped, 500g diced pumpkin, 8 garlic cloves, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, 2 teaspoons mustard powder, 1 tablespoon salt, 125g sultanas, 375g brown sugar, 90g white sugar, 2 cups cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon ground allspice, 2 teaspoons curry powder, 1 teaspoon nutmeg.

In a saucepan saute onions, apple, pumpkin and garlic for five minutes. Add the water and cook until pumkin is tender. Add everything else, bring to boil, then simmer for about 40 mins till it becomes like chutney. Put in sterilised jars, keep for two weeks in the pantry then eat!

Growing up

The warm weather of the past couple of weeks has had the pigs looking for mud baths to cool down. And don't they love rubbing against you when they've just had a bath.

It might be hot, but it's good growing weather for our Wessex Saddlebacks.

And some of the babies are growing so much they're not so interested in mum's milk and are sneaking off to find the big bags of grain. Sprung.













Some, however, are quite happy hanging around with Mum and using her to get a bit of shade.













The ducks are spending a lot of time swimming and diving. These are our youngest ones who were hatched in the incubator. We can't quite tell yet if they're boys or girls.

There's also lots happening in the vegetable garden. I made a silverbeet pie from my first bunch of this coloured heirloom variety. It's so good cooking with my own veggies again.

There are also lots of tiny seeds poking through my no-dig garden bed. I became thoroughly sick of digging up the lawn to plant my onions and garlic, so I'm experimenting with layering cardboard, bedding from the pigs, ducks, chooks, guinea pigs and rabbit, grass clippings, compost and sheep manure right on top of the grass. I've then put a thin layer of mushroom compost where I'm sowing seeds to make a nice moist bed for them to germinate. Seeds of rocket, radish, carrots, beetroot and spring onions are so far coming up well.

Just a tip though, if you try this method, remind other family members to keep the veggie garden gate shut. He and the chooks are only slowly coming out of the badbooks after I found mulch and seeds on the wrong part of the lawn.

But things are recovering.

Reaching double figures

The thing about piglets is you never know how many you’re going to get. That’s much more exciting than human babies, according to Guy.

And what a litter arrived on Saturday!

The bets were on that Mary would produce double figures. Last time she had nine.

Wessex Saddlebacks used to be known for their big litters, but as numbers declined – along with their genetics, the litter sizes got smaller and smaller.

When the breed was at its most critical you’d be lucky to get four or five. But now, as the breed is nurtured, production is improving.

Mary had 13 piglets this time. We thought she’d finished after 12. I’d already put the afterbirth in the vegetable garden, but in a couple of hours time number 13 popped out.

Piglets literally come out running. Their eyes are wide open, and once they’ve got their umbilical cords untangled, and their birthing goo out of their mouths, they’re headed straight for a teat.

We’ve got two more sows expected to give birth in the next couple of days, what’s your bet?

Is there anyone in there?

While we’re talking babies, Victorian Wessex Saddleback breeder Fiona Chambers from Fernleigh Farms brought her pregnancy testing kit when she visited us earlier in the week.

You can actually hear the blood pumping through the uterus and the galloping hearts of the piglets.

A pig’s gestation is three months, three weeks, and three days. Wasn’t that well planned by nature?

Remember the duck eggs in the incubator that had all the power troubles?

Well, despite the cold eggs, exploding thermometer, and trip to band practice, we’ve had 28 ducklings hatch out.

A few of them needed a bit of help out of their shells, but they’re all fluffed up and growing madly now.

We can’t tell what colours they’ll be yet, so we’re going to keep them for a couple of months until their grown-up feathers grow, and pick out which ones we’re going to keep.

There’s good demand for coloured Indian Runners by backyard poultry keepers, and we’ve already got orders.

Apparently Indian Runners are good eating ducks too, but we won’t go there – yet.

To end a week full of piglets and ducklings, we had a herd of humans visit the farm. A group of local farmers, who mostly keep cattle and are interested in alternative farming, came to see what we’re doing.

There are so many closet pig fanciers around. I’m always amazed that when you mention you’ve got pigs to anyone, they’ll straight away say, “Oh I love pigs…we used to have one called…and she got turned in to…”.

The ham was a real hit with the farmers, with many saying they hadn’t tasted anything like it for a long time.

And that’s why we’re bringing the breed back.

Who's my mummy?

I imagine these Indian Runner ducklings will have turbulent teenage years.

It won’t be easy coming to terms with being a duck whose mum was a chook. But I hope they’ll be tough, and survive the taunts.

We put the duck eggs under a broody Rhode Island Red, and she sat very patiently for 28 days, until the babies pushed their way out of the thick, white shells.

To reduce the psychological strain on the ducklings we took them away from the chook, and now they’re in a cosy pen with a light and lots of crumble and water.

Like the pigs, the ducklings had an exciting windy weekend. Their light went out with the electricity, but they did a good job of keeping each other warm for a few hours.

Inside the house, where we’ve got an electric incubator set with 40 eggs, the power cut caused a little more stress.

The temperature dropped incredibly quickly, a duck-expert relative was called, and then a doona was wrapped around the incubator. We warmed some water on the metho burner and filled a hotwater bottle and tucked that in too.

But the temperature continued to fall…

The chamber got moved to the lounge room in front of the fire, and slowly the thermometer started moving upwards.

But then it got too hot and exploded, spreading purple alcohol over the eggs!

I had band practice in town in the afternoon, so along with the tenor horn on the back seat we sat the incubator.

After a couple of hours being plugged-in at the band rooms, with the eggs turning to the music of Edward Gregson’s The Plantagenets, the power came back on at home.

We shone a torch into the eggs last night, and actually saw a duckling move inside its shell, so hopefully they’ll be alright.

What a weekend!

If there was a chance pigs might fly, it would have happened last Sunday.

The most spectacular southerly winds came through the farm, ripping out trees and shifting a pig shed from one paddock into the next (breaking four fence wires in the process).

The pigs weren’t worried at all, and continued rooting around, and even climbed into the broken shed as it balanced, twisted, on its end.

The bush in the south-west corner of the farm looks like a patch of carrots that have been thinned, with the rejects left between the rows.

Old eucalypts have been completely uprooted and there are tens of trees being cradled by their neighbours, holding on till they're let go.

The winds continued for a good 12 hours, and when they had finished the farm and the bush was completely still, and the sun set an eerie warm yellow.

Snuggly shelterbelts

Look who got into the shelterbelt yesterday...I think she was looking for grubs, but in the process of digging them up she disrupted a couple of our newly-planted natives!

They might be small at the moment, but in a few years these trees will provide valuable shelter for the pigs (and us).

Shelterbelts keep animals warm and protect crops. Our pigs will be able to use all their energy for growing, rather than shivering in the cold winds.

More on the science of native shelterbelts coming soon to the blog...

What’s special about Wessex Saddlebacks?

The Wessex Saddleback is critically endangered – there are less than 30 new registrations of sows each year. They’re extinct in England, and purebreds exist only in Australia and New Zealand.

There’s a bit of argument about where they came from, but most people say the New Forest area in England. The reason the numbers dropped in the UK was because intensive pig farming became trendy in the mid 1900s, and the Wessex Saddlebacks were more suited to being free-range. They’re a hardy lot who are into rooting – the ground, that is.

When the numbers got dangerously low in England the Wessex Saddlebacks were crossed with the Essex breed – which look a bit the same, but are different genetically. The result was the British Saddleback.

Fortunately before this “blending” 17 Wessex Saddlebacks were brought to Australia between 1931 and 1953.

The Wessex Saddleback is one of the most un-altered breeds around, and is probably the closest to the Landrace pigs that foraged for centuries in the woods of England.

We’ve got a particularly rare line on our farm, called the Mary line.

We find the Wessex Saddlebacks have got beautiful temperaments…they’d be no good for the rumoured destroying of evidence, they seem to have more of a taste for green grass and the chocolate in their feed mix.

And there’s a particular spot on their back that they love having rubbed. Our boar Domino will almost knock you over when he gets excited having his back scratched.

Juicy, juicy roast pork

We had roast pork for lunch today, with crunchy crackling and homemade gravy. The sow who contributed to the meal was one of our first piglets on the farm. The meat was juicy and quite dark, and certainly not like the dry, white pork too many of us have had before.

I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s suggestions for cooking roasts in his Meat Book: salt, pepper, oil and thyme rubbed into the skin; a half-hour sizzle at high heat; and then a couple of hours at 160 degrees c.

Two nights ago we sampled the first cuts from the sow. Fresh from the abattoir, we had loin chops marinated in garlic, honey, lemon juice and black pepper. I sealed the chops in a fry pan on moderate heat, and then cooked them for a couple more minutes. They were served on mash with stir-fried carrots, broccoli, capsicum and ginger. The marinade was subtle enough for the flavour of the pork to come through.

Winter’s wet weather continues into Spring. Just when the puddles have evaporated to a squishy mud hole, they fill again. The pigs seem to be enjoying the soft soil for digging, but it’s putting the vegetable garden very much behind. So far I’ve been able to dig enough ground for garlic, onions, a row of carrots, a few different brassicas and a good patch of rhubarb. Let’s just hope the broad beans, peas and potatoes can catch up.

We can’t complain though when the dams are overflowing and everything is green and freshly-washed.