Dear Mom,
I’m having a great time at camp! I love it when we get to have mud puddle bathes and play in the hose! All my camp friends are so cool, they’re just like me! The counselors are swell, they come and visit all the time and we get treats and belly rubbies, it’s just the best place ever! I can’t wait for you to come and pick me up on Sunday, I’ll miss camp, but I miss you guys too at the farm!
Love, Ebony.
PS. I met the cutest guy here and he says we’re going to get married and live in a red barn and have lots of little piglets! I can’t wait to tell you all about him!
We went and picked up Ebony today from Love Camp. She’s been there for the last nine weeks! Kristina is pretty sure she’s bred, she’s hanging a little low in the belly and she’s been in with Harry, her beau, for the whole time and he’s pretty good at not letting anyone get by his advances when those 21 day heat cycles come around. We are going to take a guess that it was probably about 4 weeks ago, so we’ll use that as our starting point. Of course, it could be earlier and could be later. Pigs have the coolest gestation rate…. it’s 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days. It’s between 112 and 115 days. Using 114 as the base, and assuming that she was bred the very first day she was there (highly unlikely) the absolute soonest that she could farrow would be September 29th, 2013. If you add 21 days to that… You get October 20th. (21 days being a heat cycle.) I guess is that from about the first of October, we’ll be on piglet watch. That being said, we’ll probably take Oscar and Meyer in for freezer camp that last week of September or so. I will move Ebony to her own stall about middle of September, just to be safe and to keep her from fighting with the meat boys or being too rowdy playing, etc. Sooner if we feel the need to. Right now, she’s about the size of them, perhaps in the middle, since Meyer is a bit younger than Oscar.
She was a little hard to catch at Love Camp… she was in with several others and just pretty much knew we were going to do something to her when the dog crate was lowered into the paddock and she was singled out for capture. Pigs are incredibly fast and agile creatures. But soon she was in the slightly cramped carrier and homeward bound.
It was apparent that she has grown in the last two months, she was considerably heavier and this is the last time she’ll be traveling in a dog crate! Poor thing, she was a little cramped. Not so badly that she couldn’t turn around, but it was a tight squeeze to do that. We could have probably just put her in the back of the wagon, and then driven her back to the barn and the pig pen, but the act of getting her out and into the barn safely is more of a risk in open space. Having her safely inside the crate meant that we could get her into the barn, close the doors and then get her into the pen. If anyone escaped, it would just be in the barn, not the yard. Much more desirable! Runaway pigs are just hard hard to catch!
I’m so excited to have her back and to look forward to a litter of piglets before the snow flies. It will be wonderful to watch her little babies grow up in the nice warm barn, under heat lamps and with sweet straw. We’ll probably make a little creep stall next to the big stall so the piglets can come in and eat without Momma hogging it all as they get bigger through the winter. They will be nearly 6 months old before they get to go outside!!! Though I suppose once they are old enough, if it’s not too cold, they could go out here and there. Guess we’ll just have to play that by ear.
They will be purebred American Guinea Hogs, registered and helping to bring back this wonderful heritage hog. Oscar and Meyer will be the last of our planned feeder pigs… perhaps by next winter, we’ll have a few of Ebony’s first litter ready for freezer camp. Just depends I guess. Can’t count your piglets until they’ve farrowed. Our plan is to keep a daughter and sell a few, hopefully to acquire our own boar through trade. And hopefully raise a few for our own needs. Guinea hogs can have anywhere from 3 or 4 to 8 or more, with the average litter size of 6 piglets. I just read about a first timer having 10 piglets, but that is rather unusual. Guess we just get to wait and see!
When brought her home and got her in the big pig pen with the lure of some day old bread outlet goodies. She greeted her two new inmate pals with hog disinterest, just a grunt and a sniff and then she was eating their food while Oscar and Meyer just sort of watched her in amazement. Everyone seemed fine, so Jessy and I went on to do a few other chores, checking in and listening for any difficulties. About 15 minutes or so had gone on without a single call or squeal. I thought it was all good. But then we heard a little scuffling and some piggy squeals so I went to check and see what might be up. Worried that the two slightly bigger hogs were picking on my little dainty flower girl.
Nope.
Ebony had both the boys in separate corners, cowering and grunting worried grunts as she happily ate the best of the goodies… stale blueberry muffins. If either boy even took a step forward, she would turn and give them this dreadful stare and a mean grunt and they would slink back and turn around to protect their heads in the corner. She went right away, happily munching her treats.
I guess I shouldn’t worry about my little sweet girl. She’s a big experienced queen hog and I think that we will have two slightly underweight meat hogs in there with her! haha… she must be pregnant. She wasn’t going to share her treats with no men. After a wee bit, she let them out of their corners, but they were walking around her ever so carefully, watching her every move. She pretty much walked around, checked the place out, pooped in the poop corner and then started to make herself a comfy bed in the straw corner to take a nap. It had been a long day and she seemed happy to be back in her nice big pen.
Oscar and Meyer decided to sleep on the opposite side of the barn. Probably with one eye open.
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